ungrateful, or openly his foes.
But his three sisters were no less remarkable in the relations which
they bore to him. They have been styled "the three crowned courtesans,"
and they have been condemned together as being utterly void of
principle and monsters of ingratitude.

Much of this censure was well deserved by all of them--by Caroline and
Elise and Pauline. But when we look at the facts impartially we shall
find something which makes Pauline stand out alone as infinitely
superior to her sisters. Of all the Bonapartes she was the only one who
showed fidelity and gratitude to the great emperor, her brother. Even
Mme. Mere, Napoleon's mother, who beyond all question transmitted to
him his great mental and physical power, did nothing for him. At the
height of his splendor she hoarded sous and francs and grumblingly
remarked:

"All this is for a time. It isn't going to last!"

Pauline, however, was in one respect different from all her kindred.
Napoleon made Elise a princess in her own right and gave her the Grand
Duchy of Tuscany. He married Caroline to Marshal Murat, and they became
respectively King and Queen of Naples. For Pauline he did very
little--less, in fact, than for any other member of his family--and yet
she alone stood by him to the end.

This feather-headed, languishing, beautiful, distracting morsel of
frivolity, who had the manners of a kitten and the morals of a cat,
nevertheless was not wholly unworthy to be Napoleon's sister. One has
to tell many hard things of her; and yet one almost pardons her because
of her underlying devotion to the man who made the name of Bonaparte
illustrious for ever. Caroline, Queen of Naples, urged her husband to
turn against his former chief. Elise, sour and greedy, threw in her
fortunes with the Murats. Pauline, as we shall see, had the one
redeeming trait of gratitude.

To those who knew her she was from girlhood an incarnation of what used
to be called "femininity." We have to-day another and a higher
definition of womanhood, but to her contemporaries, and to many modern
writers, she has seemed to be first of all woman--"woman to the tips of
her rosy finger-nails," says Levy. Those who saw her were distracted by
her loveliness. They say that no one can form any idea of her beauty
from her pictures. "A veritable masterpiece of creation," she had been
called. Frederic Masson declares:

She was so much more the typical woman that with her the defects common
to w