the tears of the departed one, glisten like rarest gems,
and seem to look forth lovingly and listen to this ditty, which now for
France has won so holy a significance--holy because it is the
master-chant of a religion which all men and all nations should
revere--the "religion of our memories." Thus, this "_Va t'en,
Guerrier_," which France now sings, resounds over the grave of the
queen, like a salute of honor over the last resting-place of some
brave soldier.

She had much to contend with--this hapless and amiable queen--but she
ever proved firm, and ever retained one kind of courage that belongs to
woman--the courage to smile through her tears. Her father perished on
the scaffold; her mother, the doubly-dethroned empress, died of a broken
heart; her step-father, the Emperor Napoleon, pined away, liked a caged
lion, on a lone rock in the sea! Her whole family--all the dethroned
kings and queens--went wandering about as fugitives and pariahs,
banished from their country, and scarcely wringing from the clemency of
those to whom _they_ had been clement, a little spot of earth, where,
far from the bustle and intercourse of the world, they might live in
quiet obscurity, with their great recollections and their mighty
sorrows. Their past lay behind them, like a glittering fairy tale,
which no one now believed; and only the present seemed, to men and
nations, a welcome reality, which they, with envenomed stings, were
eager to brand upon the foreheads of the dethroned Napoleon race.

Yet, despite all these sorrows and discouragements, Hortensia had the
mental strength not to hate her fellow-beings, but, on the contrary, to
teach her children to love them and do good to them. The heart of the
dethroned queen bled from a thousand wounds, but she did not allow these
wounds to stiffen into callousness, nor her heart to harden under the
broad scars of sorrow that had ceased to bleed. She cherished her
bereavements and her wounds, and kept them open with her tears; but,
even while she suffered measureless woes, it solaced her heart to
relieve the woes and dry the tears of others. Thus was her life a
constant charity; and when she died she could, like the Empress
Josephine, say of herself, "I have wept much, but never have I made
others weep."

Hortense was the daughter of the Viscount de Beauharnais, who, against
the wishes of his relatives, married the beautiful Josephine Tascher de
la Pagerie, a young Creole lady of Martinique