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At every station groups of people assembled about her carriage and gazed at her sorrowfully; everywhere she heard them murmur: "Napoleon is dead! Poor mother! Napoleon is dead!" Hortense heard, but did not believe it! These words had not been spoken by men, but were the utterances of her anxious heart! Her son was not dead, he could not be dead. Napoleon lived, yes, he still lived!
General Duroc doubtless repented immediately of his precipitate refusal when crowns began to rain in the august family to which he had had it in his power to ally himself; when he saw Naples, Spain, Westphalia, Upper Italy, the duchies of Parma, Lucca, etc., become the appendages of the new imperial dynasty; when the beautiful and graceful Hortense herself, who had loved him so devotedly, mounted in her turn a throne that she would have been only too happy to have shared with the object of her young affections.
The salary? No, the salary would count for nothing in the face of such a prejudice as I had seen glitter from his eye! A strong, clever youth of twenty-three, with the world before him, and no one to support stop! Hortense Rieppe!
It seemed as though Hortense were destined to drain the cup of sorrow to its dregs. Aix was the scene of the dreadful death of Madame Broc, which we have above described. Every thing around her reminded her of that terrible calamity, and oppressed her spirits with the deepest gloom.
From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted. "If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!
Some of them went up stairs to the first floor, while the sergeant arrived with a young man of whom Renine and Hortense were able to distinguish only the tall figure: "Jerome Vignal," said she. "Yes," said Renine. "They are examining Madame de Gorne first, upstairs, in her bedroom." A quarter of an hour passed. Then the persons on the first floor came downstairs and went in.
The Prince, seeing his great desire to visit the neighbourhood of Jan Mayen, offered to take his schooner in tow of the 'Reine Hortense. It was a fortunate accident for a seeker of maritime adventures; and an hour afterwards, the proposition having been eagerly accepted, the Englishman was attached by two long cables to the stern of our corvette.
And when, after an interval, I had rowed my boat back, and got into the carriage, and started on my long drive from Udolpho to Kings Port, I found that there was almost nothing about all this which I did not know now. Hortense, like most riddles when you are told the answer, was clear: "I think I want him for his innocence."
If Monsieur Crevel has a finger in it, he will tell me about it if I ask him. I shall know by to-morrow if there is any hope." "Leave the seal with me," said Hortense; "I will not show it mamma's birthday is not for a month yet; I will give it to you that morning." "No, no. Give it back to me; it must have a case."
After curtseying prettily to the captain, Mademoiselle Hortense went out by a glass door, taking with her a withered-looking spinster, who looked older than the Baroness, though she was five years younger. "They are settling your marriage," said Cousin Betty in the girl's ear, without seeming at all offended at the way in which the Baroness had dismissed them, counting her almost as zero.
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