aparte brought back
with him from his famous Italian campaign--the only gift which the
general had not refused to accept.

It is true that the six grays could not be very conveniently hitched to
a simple private carriage, but they had an imposing look attached to the
gilded coach of state in which, a year later, the first consul made his
solemn entry into the Tuileries.

CHAPTER VI.

BONAPARTE IN ITALY.

Josephine, now the wife of General Bonaparte, had but a few weeks in
which to enjoy her new happiness, and then remained alone in Paris,
doubly desolate, because she had to be separated, not only from her
husband, but from her children. Eugene accompanied his young step-father
to Italy, and Hortense went as a pupil to Madame Campan's
boarding-school. The former, lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Antoinette,
had, at that time, opened an establishment for the education of young
ladies, at St. Germain, and the greatest and most eminent families of
newly-republicanized France liked to send their daughters to it, so that
they might learn from the former court-lady the refined style and
manners of old royalist times.

Hortense was, therefore, sent to that boarding-school, and there, in the
society of her new Aunt Caroline--the sister of Bonaparte, and afterward
Queen of Naples--and the young Countess Stephanie Beauharnais, her
cousin, passed a few happy years of work, of varied study, and of
youthful maiden-dreams.

Hortense devoted herself with iron diligence, and untiring enthusiasm,
to her studies, which consisted, not only in the acquisition of
languages, in music, and drawing, history and geography, but still more
in the mastering the so-called _bon ton_ and that aristocratic _savoir
vivre_ of which Madame Campan was a very model. While Hortense was thus
receiving instruction on the harp from the celebrated Alvimara, in
painting from Isabey, dancing from Coulon, and singing from Lambert, and
was playing on the stage of the amateur theatre at the boarding-school
the parts of heroines and lady-loves; while she was participating in the
balls and concerts that Madame Campan gave in order to show off the
talent of her pupils to the friends she invited; while, in a word,
Hortense was thus being trained up to the accomplishments of a
distinguished woman of the world, she did not dream how useful all these
little details, so trivial, apparently, at the time, would one day be to
her, and how good a thing it was that she