towards the window, and, giving me a
touching look, said in a low tone, "Monsieur Meva, tell him (Napoleon)
that I always love him dearly." We say "motherless," because Maria
Louisa seems to have yielded up her child at the dictates of policy to be
closely guarded as easily as she gave up her husband. "If," wrote Madame
de Montesquiou, his governess, "the child had a mother, I would leave him
in her hands, and be happy, but she is nothing like a mother, she is more
indifferent to his fate than the most utter stranger in her service."
His grandfather, the Emperor Francis, to do him justice, seems to have
been really kind to the lad, and while, in 1814, 1816, and in 1830,
taking care to deprive him of all chance of, his glorious inheritance,
still seems to have cared for him personally, and to have been always
kind to him. There is no truth in the story that the Austrians neglected
his education and connived at the ruin of his faculties. Both his tutor,
the Count Maurice Dietrichstein, and Marshal Marmont, who conversed with
him in 1831, agree in speaking highly of him as full of promise:
Marmont's evidence being especially valuable as showing that the
Austrians did not object to the Duke of Reichstadt (as he had been
created by his grandfather in 1818), learning all he could of his
father's life from one of the Marshals. In 1831 Marment describes him:
"I recognised his father's look in him, and in that he most resembled
Napoleon. His eyes, not so large as those of Napoleon, and sunk deeper
in their sockets, had the same expression, the same fire, the same
energy. His forehead was like that of his father, and so was the lower
part of his face and his chin. Then his complexion was that of Napoleon
in his youth, with the same pallor and the same colour of the skin, but
all the rest of his face recalled his mother and the House of Austria.
He was taller than Napoleon by about three inches."

As long as the Duke lived his name was naturally the rallying-point of
the Bonapartes, and was mentioned in some of the many conspiracies
against the Bourbons. In 1830 Joseph Bonaparte tried to get the sanction
of the Austrians to his nephew being put forward as a claimant to the
throne of France, vacant by the flight of Charles X., but they held their
captive firmly. A very interesting passage is given in the 'Memoirs of
Charles Greville', who says that Prince Esterhazy told him a great deal
about the Duke of Reichstadt, who, if he had l