Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/366

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Napoleon.

have received, and we have seen Marie Antoinette at work at Versailles, Marie Caroline at Naples, and Marie Amélie at Palma. Doubtless! But Napoleon imagined that the husbands had not set 'the right way to work, and he has his plans. The schoolgirl whom he has received will simply pass out of the convent at Schönbrunn into the convent of the Tuileries or Saint-Cloud. There will only be added the husband. There will be the same inflexible regulations, the same rigorous surveillance; no liberty of action, no literature which has not been chosen; no visits will be allowed to male friends, the ayah will be replaced by a duenna, and four feminine guards will be perpetually on the watch, two at the door, two in the apartment, night and day, like sentinels before the enemy."

III.

IPHIGENIA.

Under such circumstances, and with such a training, how could poor Marie Louise regard the marriage to Napoleon as anything but an act of self-sacrifice? And her own people so fully shared this view that they rather shrank from mentioning the subject to her. Her father excused himself from even hinting at it on the ground of not desiring to even seem to influence her decision; her young stepmother "utterly declined to have anything to do with it,' and when Metternich