Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/363

Rh d'Enghien, the enemy of every crowned head in Europe, the author of the treachery at Bayonne, the persecutor of the Pope, the excommunicated sovereign.

Finally there was the great, and, as we would have thought, the insuperable obstacle that Napoleon was the child and embodiment of the French Revolution, and the French Revolution had guillotined Marie Antoinette, the aunt of Marie Louise, but fifteen or sixteen years before.

the rearing of Marie Louise had been of a kind that made her accept pliantly whatever her father thought it her duty to do. I don't know a picture much more repulsive than that of the girlhood of this woman. The French author tells it with the plainness of speech characteristic of his race, and though the passage leaves much to be desired in point of delicacy, it is so true, so life-like, and so instructive a picture, that I cannot refrain from giving it:

"She was taught a number of languages, German, English, Turkish, Bohemian, Spanish, Italian, French, even Latin, for she is ignorant of where destiny will take her. The more her vocabulary is extended, the more words she has to express the same idea. That is all she wants.