Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/310

 302 THE FLIGHT OF EUGENIE. " I hare no need," he says, " to recommend to my mother to neglect nothing in order to defend the memory of my great-uncle and of my father. I beg her to remem- ber that as long as there shall be Bonapartists, the impe- rial cause will have representatives. The duties of our house toward the country will not cease with my life." To defend the memory of either Napoleon, after the light thrown of late years upon their career, might perhaps be difficult. Eugenie's willingness to marry the usurper and share the plunder of France, can be forgiven only because it is so plain that she Understood nothing of the situation. She enjoyed the fruits of a crime, but she was not herself depraved. Looking back upon her career we can say that, if she never rose to be anything better, she was never anything worse than a woman of fashion with her hand in the treasury of a nation. There was seldom a day in what is called "the reign" of Louis Napoleon when either he or she felt secure in their position. Both did what they could to make themselves less unsafe. He penned histrionic papers ; she changed her dress four times a day. To whom shall this shadow of a kingly crown descend? Napoleon III. had not been long on the throne when the French Senate declared his cousin, the son of Jerome, King of Westphalia, his heir, and though the subsequent birth of the Prince Imperial deferred this claim, it did not in the feelings of the Bonapartists destroy it. But that Prince Napoleon, who by way of distinction is generally called Prince Jerome, from his father's name, afterwards grievously offended the Emperor by some republican speeches. He was in fact an excellent orator, but very indolent, a man of talk and not of deeds, as the witty Parisians indicated by his nickname Plon-Plon. The Emperor, who was in Algeria when the Prince made some bold utterances in Corsica,