But at midnight she was aroused from her repose to a sad awakening. Her
husband, with whom she had held no kind of intercourse since his return,
had now, in the hour of danger, determined to assert his marital
authority over his wife and children. He wrote the queen a letter,
requiring her to leave Paris with her children, and follow the empress.

Hortense replied with a decided refusal. A second categoric message from
her husband was the response. He declared that if she should not at once
conform to his will, and follow the empress with her children, he would
immediately take his children into his own custody, by virtue of his
authority as husband and father.

At this threat, the queen sprang up like an enraged lioness from her
lair. With glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes she commanded that her
children should be at once brought to her, and then, pressing her two
boys to her heart with passionate tenderness, she exclaimed: "Tell the
king that I shall leave the city within the hour!"

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ALLIES IN PARIS.

The anxiety of motherly love had effected what neither the departure of
the empress nor the news of the approach of the Cossacks could do.
Hortense had taken her departure. She had quitted Paris, with her
children and suite, which had already begun to grow sensibly smaller,
and arrived, after a hurried flight, endangered by bands of marauding
Cossacks, in Novara, where the Empress Josephine, with tears of sorrow
and of joy alike, pressed her daughter to her heart. Although her own
happiness and grandeur were gone, and although the misfortunes of the
Emperor Napoleon--whom she still dearly loved--oppressed her heart,
Josephine now had her daughter and dearest friend at her side, and that
was a sweet consolation in the midst of all these misfortunes and cares.

At Novara, Hortense received the intelligence of the fall of the empire,
of the capitulation of Paris, of the entrance of the allies, and of the
abdication of Napoleon.

When the courier sent by the Duke of Bassano with this intelligence
further informed the Empress Josephine that the island of Elba had been
assigned Napoleon as a domicile, and that he was on the point of leaving
France to go into exile, Josephine fell, amid tears of anguish, into her
daughter's arms, crying: "Hortense, he is unhappy, and I am not with
him! He is banished to Elba! Alas! but for his wife, I would hasten to
his side, to share his exile!"

While the