Louis was the least interesting of the family, and it is difficult to excuse his absence from France in 1815. After all, the present of a kingdom is not such an unpardonable offence as to separate brothers for ever, and Napoleon seems to have felt deeply the way in which he was treated by a brother to whom he had acted as a father; still ill-health and the natural selfishness of invalids may account for much. While his son Louis Napoleon was flying about making his attempts on France, Louis remained in the Roman Palace of the French Academy, sunk in anxiety about his religious state. He disclaimed his son's proceedings, but this may have been due to the Pope, who sheltered him. Anyhow, it is strange to mark the difference between the father and his two sons who came of age, and who took to revolution so kindly.
In 1846 Louis was ill at Leghorn when his son escaped from Ham, where he had been imprisoned after his Boulogne attempt. Passports were refused to the son to go from Italy to his father, and Louis died alone on the 25th of July 1846. He was buried at Santa Croce, Florence, but the body was afterwards removed to the village church of St. Leu Taverny, rebuilt by his son Napoleon III.
Jerome, the youngest of the whole family, the "middy," as Napoleon liked to call him, had been placed in the navy, in which profession he passed as having distinguished himself, after leaving his admiral in rather a peculiar manner, by attacking an English convoy, and eventually escaping the English by running into the port of Concarneau, believed to be inaccessible. At that time it was an event for a French man-of-war to reach home.
Jerome had incurred the anger of Napoleon by marrying a beautiful young lady of Baltimore, a Mica Paterson, but, more obedient than Lucien, he submitted to have this marriage annulled by his all-powerful brother, and in reward he received the brand-new Kingdom of Westphalia, and the hand of a daughter of the King of Wartemberg, "the cleverest King in Europe," according to Napoleon. Jerome is said to have ruled rather more as a Heliogabalus than a Solomon, but the new Kingdom had the advantage of starting with good administrators, and with the example of "the Code."
In 1812 Jerome was given the command of the right wing of the Grand Army in its advance against Russia, but he did not fulfil the expectations of his brother, and Davoust took the command instead. Every king feels himself a born general: whatever else they cannot do, war is an art which comes with the crown, and Jerome, unwilling to serve under a mere Marshal, withdrew in disgust. In 1813 he had the good feeling and the good sense to refuse the treacherous offer of the Allies to allow him to retain his kingdom if he joined them against his brother, a snare his sister Caroline fell into at Naples.
On the downfall of Napoleon, Jerome, as the Count of Gratz, went to Switzerland, and then to Gratz and Trieste.
His wife, the ex-Queen Catherine, fell into the hands of Maubreuil, the officer sent on a mysterious mission, believed to be intended for the murder of Napoleon, but which only resulted in the robbery of the Queen's jewels and of some 80,000 francs. The jewels were for the most part recovered, being fished up from the bed of the Seine, but not the cash.
In 1815 Jerome joined his brother, and appeared at the Champ de Mai. A true Bonaparte, his vanity was much hurt, however, by having—he, a real king—to sit on the back seat of the carriage, while his elder brother Lucien; a mere Roman-prince, occupied a seat of honour by the side of Napoleon. In the Waterloo campaign he was given the 6th division, forming part of Reille's corps, General Guilleminot being sent with him to prevent any of the awkwardnesses of 1812. His division was engaged with the Prussians on the 15th of June, and at Quatre Bras he was severely wounded. At Waterloo his division formed the extreme left of the French infantry, opposite Hougomont, and was engaged in the struggle for that post. Whatever his failings may have been, he is acknowledged to have fought gallantly. After the battle he was given the command of the army by his brother, and was told to cover the retreat to Laon, which he reached on the 21st of June, with 18,000 infantry, 3000 cavalry and two batteries which he had rallied. This, be it observed, is a larger force than Ney told the Chambers even Grouchy (none of whose men are included) could have, and Jerome's strength had swollen to 25,000 infantry and 6000 cavalry when he handed over the army to Soult at Laon. Napoleon had intended to leave Jerome with the command of the army, but he eventually took him to Paris.
When Napoleon left the country Jerome was assured by the ambassador of Wurtemberg that he would find a refuge in the dominions of his father-in- law; but when he arrived there he was informed that if he did not wish to be, according to the original intentions of the Allies, handed over to the Prussians, and separated from his wife, he must sign an engagement to remain in Wurtemberg under strict surveillance. He was then imprisoned at Guppingen, and afterwards at Ellwangen, where he was not even allowed to write or receive letters except through the captain of the chateau.
Part of Jerome's troubles came from the conduct of his wife Catherine, who had the idea that, as she had been given in marriage by her father to Jerome, as she had lived for seven years as his wife, and as she had borne a child to him, she was really his wife, and bound to remain with him in his misfortunes! The royal family of Wurtemberg, however, following the illustrious example of that of Austria, looked on her past life as a mere state of concubinage, useful to the family, and to be respected while her husband could retain his kingdom, but which should end the moment there was nothing more to be gained from Napoleon or his brother. It was all proper and decorous to retain the title of King of Wurtemberg, which the former Duke and then Elector had owed to the exile of St. Helena, but King Frederick, and still less his son William, who succeeded him in 1816, could not comprehend Catherine's clinging to her husband when he had lost his kingdom. "I was a Queen; I am still a wife and mother," wrote the Princess to her disgusted father. Another complaint against this extraordinary Princess was that she actually saw Las Cases on his return from St. Helena, and thus obtained news of the exile.
After constant ill treatment Jerome and his wife, as the Count and Countess of Montfort, a rank the King of Wurtemberg afterwards raised to Prince, were allowed to proceed to Hainburg near Vienna, then to Florence, and, later to Trieste, where Jerome was when his sister Elisa died. In 1823 they were permitted to go to Rome, and in 1835 they went to Lausanne, where his true-hearted wife died the same year. Jerome went to Florence, and lived to see the revival of the Empire, and to once mare enjoy the rank of a French Prince. He died in 1860 at the chateau of Villegenis in France, and was buried in the Invalides.
The mother of the Emperor, Letitia, in 1814, had retained her title of Imperatrice Mere, and had retired to Rome. She then went to Elba in June, and stayed there with her daughter Pauline until Napoleon had sailed for France. On 2d March 1814 she went from Elba to San Vicenzo near Leghorn, and then to Rome. Her son sent a frigate for her, the 'Melpomene', which was captured by the English 'Rivoli'; another vessel, the 'Dryade', brought her to France, and she joined Napoleon in Paris. We must have a regard for this simple old lady, who was always careful and saving, only half believing in the stability of the Empire; and, like a true mother, always most attentive to the most unfortunate of her children. Her life had been full of startling changes; and it must have been strange for the woman who had been hunted out of Corsica, flying from her house just in time to save her life from the adherents of Paoli, to find herself in grandeur in Paris. She saw her son just before he left, as she thought, for America, and then retired to the Rinuccini—now the Bonaparte-Palace at Rome, where she died in 1836. She had been anxious to join Napoleon at St. Helena, and had refused, as long as Napoleon was alive, to forgive her daughter Caroline, the wife of Murat, for her abandonment of her brother. She was buried at Albano.
Letitia's youngest daughter, the beautiful but frail Pauline, Duchess of Guastalla, married first to General Leclerc, and then to Prince Camille Borglle, was at Nice when her brother abdicated in 1814. She retired with her mother to Rome, and in October 1814 went to Elba, staying there till Napoleon left, except when she was sent to Naples with a message of forgiveness for Murat There was a characteristic scene between her and Colonel Campbell when the English Commissioner arrived to find Napoleon gone. Pauline professed ignorance till the last of her brother's intentions, and pressed the Colonel's hand to her heart that lie might feel how agitated she was. "She did not appear to be so," says the battered old Colonel, who seems to have been proof against her charms. She then went to Rome, and later to Pisa. Her health was failing, and, unable to join her brother in France, she sent him her only means of assistance, her jewels, which were captured at Waterloo. Her offer to go to St. Helena, repeated several times, was never accepted by Napoleon. She died in 1825 at Florence, from consumption, reconciled to her husband, from whom she had been separated since 1807. She was buried at Sta Maria Maggiore, Rome.
Elisa, the eldest sister of Napoleon, the former Grand Duchess of Tuscany, which Duchy she had ruled well, being a woman of considerable talent, was the first of all to die. In 1814 she had been forced to fly from her Government, and, accompanied by her husband, she had attempted to reach France. Finding herself cut off by the Austrians; she took shelter with Augereau's army, and then returned to Italy. She took the title of Comtesse de Campignana, and retired to Trieste, near which town, at the Chateau of Sant Andrea, under a wearisome surveillance, she expired in 1820, watched by her husband, Felix Baeciocchi, and her sister Caroline. Her monument is in the Bacciocchi Chapel in San Petronio, Bologna.
Caroline, the wife of Murat, was the only one of the family untrue to Napoleon. Very ambitious, and forgetting how completely she owed her Kingdom of Naples to her brother, she had urged Murat in 1814 to separate from Napoleon, and, still worse, to attack Eugene, who held the north of Italy against the Austrians. She relied on the formal treaty with Austria that Murat should retain his Kingdom of Naples, and she may also have trusted to the good offices of her former admirer Metternich. When the Congress of Vienna met, the French Minister, Talleyrand, at once began to press for the removal of Murat. A trifling treaty was not considered an obstacle to the Heaven-sent deliverers of Europe, and Murat, believing his fate sealed, hearing of Napoleon's landing, and urged on by a misleading letter from Joseph Bonaparte, at once marched to attack the Austrians. He was easily routed by the Austrians under Neipperg, the future husband of Maria Louisa. Murat fled to France, and Caroline first took refuge in an English man-of-war, the 'Tremendous', being, promised a free passage to England. She was, however, handed over to the Austrians; who kept her in confinement at Hainburg near Vienna. In October 1815 Murat landed in Calabria in a last wild attempt to recover his throne. He was arrested and immediately shot. After his murder Caroline, taking the title of Countess of Lipona (an anagram of Napoli), was permitted to retire to Trieste with Elisa, Jerome, and his wife. Caroline was almost without means of existence, the Neapolitan Bourbons refusing even to give up the property she had brought there. She married a General Macdonald. When Hortense was buried at Rueil Caroline obtained permission to attend the sad ceremony. In 1838 she went to France to try to obtain a pension, and succeeded in getting one of 100,000 francs. She died from cancer in the stomach in 1839, and was buried in the Campo Santo, Bologna.
Cardinal Fesch, the half-uncle of Napoleon, the Archbishop of Lyons, who had fallen into disgrace with Napoleon for taking the side of the Pope and refusing to accept the see of Paris, to which he was nominated by Napoleon, had retired to Rome in 1814, where he remained till the return of Napoleon, when he went to Paris, and accepted a peerage. After Waterloo he again sought the protection of the Pope, and he remained at Rome till his death in 1839, a few days before Caroline Bonaparte's. He was buried in S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome. He had for years been a great collector of pictures, of which he left a large number (1200) to the town of Ajaccio. The Cardinal, buying at the right time when few men had either enough leisure or money to think of pictures, got together a most valuable collection. This was sold in 1843-44 at Rome. Its contents now form some of the greatest treasures in the galleries of Dudley House and of the Marquis of Hertford, now Sir Richard Wallace's. In a large collection there are generally some daubs, but it is an amusing instance of party spirit to find the value of his pictures run down by men who are unwilling to allow any one connected with Napoleon to have even taste in art. He always refused the demands of the Restoration that he should resign his see of Lyons, though under Louis Philippe he offered to do so, and leave his pictures to France, if the Bonaparte family were allowed to enter France: this was refused.
It can hardly be denied that the fate of the Bonapartes was a hard one. Napoleon had been undisputed sovereign of France for fourteen years, Louis had been King of Holland for four years, Jerome was King of Westphalia for six years, Caroline was Queen of Naples for seven years. If Napoleon had forfeited all his rights by leaving Elba after the conditions of his abdication had been broken by the Allies, still there was no reason why the terms stipulated for the other members of the family should not have been carried out, or at least an ordinary income insured to them. With all Napoleon's faults he was always ready to shower wealth on the victims of his policy:—The sovereigns of the Continent had courted and intermarried with the Bonapartes in the tame of that family's grandeur: there was neither generosity nor wisdom in treating them as so many criminals the moment fortune had declared against them. The conduct of the Allies was not influenced simply by the principle of legitimacy, for the King of Saxony only kept his throne by the monarchs falling out over the spoil. If sovereigns were to be respected as of divine appointment, it was not well to make their existence only depend on the fate of war.
Nothing in the history of the Cent Jours is more strange than the small part played in it by the Marshals, the very men who are so identified in our minds with the Emperor, that we might have expected to find that brilliant band playing a most prominent part in his last great struggle, no longer for mere victory, but for very existence. In recording how the Guard came up the fatal hill at Waterloo for their last combat, it would seem but natural to have to give a long roll of the old historic names as leading or at least accompanying them; and the reader is apt to ask, where were the men whose very titles recalled such glorious battle- fields, such achievements, and such rewards showered down by the man who, almost alone at the end of the day, rode forward to invite that death from which it was such cruel kindness to save him?
Only three Marshals were in Belgium in 1815, and even of them one did but count his promotion from that very year, so it is but natural for French writers to dream of what might have been the course of the battle if Murat's plume had waved with the cavalry, if Mortier had been with the Guard, and if Davoust or one of his tried brethren had taken the place of Grouchy. There is, however, little real ground for surprise at this absence of the Marshals. Death, time, and hardships had all done their work amongst that grand array of commanders. Some were old men, veterans of the Revolutionary wars, when first created Marshals in 1804; others, such as Massena, were now but the wreck of themselves; and even before 1812 Napoleon had been struck with the failing energy of some of his original companions: indeed, it might have been better for him if he had in 1813, as he half resolved, cast away his dislike to new faces, and fought his last desperate campaigns with younger men who still had fortunes to win, leaving "Berthier to hunt at Grosbois," and the other Marshals to enjoy their well-deserved rest in their splendid hotels at Paris.
Davoust, Duke of Auerstadt, Prince of Eckmuhl, whose name should be properly spelt Davout, was one of the principal personages at the end of the Cent Jours. Strict and severe, having his corps always in good order, and displaying more character than most of the military men under Napoleon, one is apt to believe that the conqueror at Auerstadt bade fair to be the most prominent of all the Marshals. In 1814 he had returned from defending Hamburg to find himself under a cloud of accusations, and the Bourbons ungenerously and unwisely left him undefended for acts which they must have known were part of his duty as governor of a besieged place. At the time he was attacked as if his first duty was not to hold the place for France, but to organise a system of outdoor relief for the neighbouring population, and to surrender as soon as he had exhausted the money in the Government chest and the provisions in the Government stores. Sore and discontented, practically proscribed, still Davoust would not join in the too hasty enterprise of the brothers Lallemand, who wished him to lead the military rising on the approach of Napoleon; but he was with the Emperor on the day after his arrival in Paris.
Davoust might have expected high command in the army, but, to his annoyance, Napoleon fixed on him as War Minister. For several years the War Minister had been little more than a clerk, and neither had nor was expected to have much influence with the army. Napoleon now wanted a man of tried devotion, and of stern enough character to overawe the capital and the restless spirits in the army. Much against his will Davoust was therefore forced to content himself with the organisation of the forces being hastily raised, but he chafed in his position; and it is characteristic of him that Napoleon was eventually forced to send him the most formal orders before the surly Minister would carry out the Emperor's unlucky intention of giving a command to Bourmont, whom Davoust strongly and rightly suspected of treachery. When Napoleon left the capital Davoust became its governor, and held his post unmoved by the intrigues of the Republicans and the Royalists. When Napoleon returned from the great disaster Davoust gave his voice for the only wise policy, —resistance and the prorogation of the factious Chambers. On the abdication of Napoleon the Provisional Government necessarily gave Davoust the command of the army which was concentrated round Paris.
If Davoust had restricted himself less closely to his duty as a soldier, if he had taken more on himself, with the 100,000 men he soon had under him, he might have saved France from much of her subsequent humiliation, or at least he might have preserved the lives of Ney and of the brave men whom the Bourbons afterwards butchered. Outwitted by Fouche, and unwilling to face the hostility of the Chambers, Davoust at last consented to the capitulation of Paris, though he first gave the Prussian cavalry a sharp lesson. While many of his comrades were engaged in the great struggle for favour or safety, the stern Marshal gave up his Ministry, and, doing the last service in his power to France, stopped all further useless bloodshed by withdrawing the army, no easy task in their then humour, behind the Loire, where he kept what the Royalists called the "Brigands of the Loire" in subjection till relieved by Macdonald. He was the only one of the younger Marshals who had not been tried in Spain, and so far he was fortunate; but, though he was not popular with the army, his character and services seem to point him out as the most fit of all the Marshals for an independent command. Had Napoleon been successful in 1812, Davoust was to have received the Viceroyalty of Poland; and he would probably have left a higher name in history than the other men placed by Napoleon to rule over his outlying kingdoms. In any case it was fortunate for France and for the Allies that a man of his character ruled the army after Napoleon abdicated; there would otherwise have been wild work round Paris, as it was only with the greatest difficulty and by the force of his authority and example that Davoust succeeded in getting the army to withdraw from the capital, and to gradually adopt the white cockade. When superseded by Macdonald he had done a work no other man could have accomplished. He protested against the proscription, but it was too late; his power had departed. In 1819 he was forgiven for his services to France, and was made a peer, but he died in 1823, only fifty-three years old.