Queen Hortense | Page 3

the strength and energy requisite to
restrain the wild impulses of their fiery temperaments within the cool
and tranquil bounds of quiet married life. The viscount was too young
to be not merely a lover and tender husband, but also a sober counsellor
and cautious instructor in the difficult after-day of life; and Josephine
was too innocent, too artless, too sportive and genial, to avoid all those
things that might give to the watchful and hostile family of her husband
an opportunity for ill-natured suspicions, which were whispered in the
viscount's ear as cruel certainties. It may readily be conceived, then,
that such a state of things soon led to violent scenes and bitter grief.
Josephine was too beautiful and amiable not to attract attention and

admiration wherever she went, and she was not yet blasée and
hackneyed enough to take no pleasure in the court thus paid to her, and
the admiration so universally shown her, nor even to omit doing her
part to win them. But, while she was naive and innocent at heart, she
required of her husband that these trifling outside coquetries should not
disquiet him nor render him distrustful, and that he should repose the
most unshaken confidence in her. Her pride revolted against his
suspicions, as did his jealousy against her seeming frivolity; and both
became quite willing, at last, to separate, notwithstanding the love they
really bore each other at the bottom of their hearts, had not their
children rendered such a separation impossible. These children were a
son, Eugene, and a daughter, Hortense, four years younger than the boy.
Both parents loved these children with passionate tenderness; and often
when one of the stormy scenes at which we have hinted took place in
the presence of the young people, an imploring word from Eugene or a
caress from little Hortense would suffice to reconcile their father and
mother, whose anger, after all, was but the result of excessive
attachment.
But these domestic broils became more violent with time, and the
moment arrived when Eugene was no longer there to stand by his little
sister in her efforts to soothe the irritation of her parents. The viscount
had sent Eugene, who was now seven years of age, to a
boarding-school; and little Hortense, quite disheartened by the absence
of her brother, had no longer the means or the courage to allay the
quarrels that raged between her parents, but would escape in terror and
dismay, when they broke out, to some lonely corner, and there weep
bitterly over a misfortune, the extent of which her poor little childish
heart could not yet estimate.
In the midst of this gloomy and stormy period, the young viscountess
received a letter from Martinique. It was from her mother, Madame
Tascher de la Pagerie, who vividly depicted to her daughter the terrors
of her lonely situation in her huge, silent residence, where there was no
one around her but servants and slaves, whose singularly altered and
insubordinate manner had, of late, alarmed the old lady, and filled her
with secret apprehensions for the future. She, therefore, besought her

daughter to come to her, and live with her, so that she might cheer the
last few years of her mother's existence with the bright presence of her
dazzling youth.
Josephine accepted this appealing letter from her mother as a hint from
destiny; and, weary of her domestic wrangles, and resolved to end them
forever, she took her little daughter, Hortense, then scarcely four years
old, and with her sailed away from France, to seek beyond the ocean
and in her mother's arms the new happiness of undisturbed tranquillity.
But, at that juncture, tranquillity had fled the world. The mutterings and
moanings of the impending tempest could be heard on all sides. A
subterranean rumbling was audible throughout all lands; a dull
thundering and outcry, as though the solid earth were about to change
into one vast volcano--one measureless crater--that would dash to
atoms, and entomb, with its blazing lava-streams and fiery
cinder-showers, the happiness and peace of all humanity. And, finally,
this terrific crater did, indeed, open and hurl destruction and death on
all sides, over the whole world, uprooting, with demoniac fury, entire
races and nations, and silencing the merry laugh and harmless jest with
the overpowering echoes of its awful voice!
This volcano was the revolution. In France, the first and most fearful
explosion of this terrific crater occurred, but the whole world shook and
heaved with it, and, on all sides, the furious masses from beneath
overflowed on the surface, seeking to reverse the order of things and
place the lowest where the highest had been. Even away in Martinique
this social earthquake was felt, which had already, in France, flung out
the bloody guillotine from its