Domestic Life of Napoleon.

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The history of this ill-fated youth is brief, like his life. In 1818, he received the title of Duke of Reichstadt, with rank immediately after the princes of the Austrian imperial family. He was much beloved by the old emperor his grandfather; and his mother, who had been put in possession of the Duchies of Parma, Placentia, and Guastalla, provided liberally for his maintenance and education, though she treated him in other respects with heartless neglect: her affections, by this time, being engrossed by a new object. His talents, which were above the common, were highly cultivated by an excellent education. But he was kept in a kind of splendid captivity. It was the Austrian policy to render him politically insignificant; to withdraw, as much as possible, the son of their great emperor from the thoughts and recollections of the people of France; and, on the other hand, to efface from his mind the memory of what he had been, and what he had been born to. Neither object was accomplished: the attempt was fatal. The sense of his condition preyed on a naturally ardent mind; and the source of his habitual melancholy showed itself in the warmth with which he received such Frenchmen as visited the imperial court, and the interest he took in their conversation. His health gradually declined, and he died, we think in 1833, at the age of about two-and-twenty.

As to Maria Louisa, she took possession of her new sovereignties, and was attended by Count Neipperg in the capacity of her minister. There are circumstances in her connexion with this personage, on which M. Meneval either cannot throw light, or is not disposed to do so. He talks of calumny and scandal respecting her private life; but he leaves it unrefuted. Indeed from what he himself says, we cannot think the lady's reputation unquestionable. She was united, he says, to Count Neipperg, by a left-handed marriage, and has had three children by him. The eldest married the son of Count San-Vitale, the grand chamberlain of Malta, and resides at his mother's court. The second, Count de Montenuovo, is an officer in an Austrian regiment and the third, a girl, died in her childhood.

"The fact of this union," says M. Meneval, "being established, I shall not examine whether a regular act had intervened to legitimize the birth of the children, or whether the union of Maria Louisa with Count Neipperg preceded the death of Napoleon. In Italy, where sins are so easily compounded for, the sanctification of an union is the simplest thing in the world, Two persons who wish to marry declare their intention before a priest; he confesses them, gives them absolution, says mass, and marries them; and the whole passes without the intervention of witnesses. There is every reason to believe, however, that the Emperor was dead, when Maria Louisa contracted this second marriage. At Vienna, as well as Parma, she always declared her firm

determination never to seek a divorce, or to listen to any such proposition. Malignity has gratified itself in spreading injurious reports as to the pretended irregularities of Maria Louisa's private life. I believe that they have no foundation. The moderation of her character, and her unimpassioned nature, must have preserved her from excess of any kind.”

The argument from presumption is but a feeble one, when weighed against opposite presumptions to which her advocate himself gives countenance. Why has he not told us the date of the marriage between Maria Louisa and Count Neipperg, and the ages of the children? Even the left-handed marriage of a sove reign is solemnised in such a manner as to be matter of evidence and record: but M. Meneval leaves it doubtful whether there was any marriage. Napoleon died in April 1821, two-andtwenty years ago; so that if his widow's children are the legiti mate issue of a marriage contracted after his death, it is hardly credible that the two elder should be now, the one a married woman, and the other an officer in the army. M. Meneval ought to have made the inquiries necessary to enable him to clear up these points. If he did so ineffectually, then the obscurity which hangs over the marriage of a personage of sovereign rank, and over the birth of her children, leads, we think, to only one conclusion. Indeed M. Meneval, in the passage just quoted, seems to admit that the children were born before the death of Napoleon. He says he will not examine whether a regular act had intervened to legitimize the children, or whether the union of Maria Louisa with Neipperg, preceded Napoleon's death. The alternative here stated, is either that the children, at first illigitimate, had been ligitimized by a subsequent marriage ;* or, that there had been a mock-marriage between them before Napoleon's death: a way of compounding with conscience which M. Meneval describes to be so easy in Italy. So much mystery, in such a case, is not easily reconcileable with the idea of innocence.

Count Neipperg died in December last, and Maria Louisa is inconsolable for his loss. "To fill the void," says M. Meneval, "which this bereavement has made in her heart, she is surrounding herself with souvenirs of him whom she never ceases to lament; and has even ordered the erection of a magnificent mausoleum to his memory, in token of the bitterness of her regret."

* Legitimatio per subsequens matrimonium is admitted in those countries whose jurisprudence is chiefly founded on the Roman law; among others, in Scotland.

ART. VIII.-Tra Los Montes. Par THEOPHILE GAUTIER. Paris. 1843.

MONSIEUR GAUTIER tells us, that having inadvertently expressed a desire to travel in Spain, his friends took the mere ejaculation as an already formed resolve; the consequence of which was that whenever he appeared in public, he was so harassed with looks of surprise, and questions of astonishment, that he at last felt that he owed his friends three months' absence. If, after so frank an avowal, we take up M. Gautier's book of travels, expecting to find disquisitions upon the moral or political state of Spain, it is no fault of the author's should we fail in the object of our search. If on the other hand, we want a very lively, very pert, very fanciful, sometimes very extravagant, but combining all in one word, very French picture of cities, churches, convents, mountains, bull-fights, and pretty women, presented through the coloured glasses of a Paris cockney, who, weary of the lounges and blasé with the Grand Opera, sets out in search of a sensation, we may expect entertainment to our heart's content.

From Paris to Bourdeaux, our impatient traveller finds all barren: arrived here, however, the catacombs give him an opportunity of doing something in the way of reflection and description. The details, done à la Victor Hugo, we shall spare the reader; preserving merely one compendious phrase, which we acknowledge our inability to render into English. The mouths of the skulls in the catacombs yawn frightfully, comme si elles étaient contractées par l'incommensurable ennui de l'éternité. Lest the yawn should prove infectious we are hurried to Bayonne, and are tra los Montes with inconceivable rapidity. The first approach of a Spanish cart tells the traveller, in sounds not to be misunderstood, the price his bones must sometimes pay for the mind's enjoyment of the picturesque.

"A strange inexplicable, hoarse, frightful, and ludicrous noise, for some time sounded upon our ears, as if from a multitude of magpies plumed alive, of children getting a flogging, of caterwauling cats, of sharpening saws, of scraping pots, of heavy prison-doors being forced on rusty hinges: what was this but a car drawn by oxen, which ascended the street of Irun, with its wheels screeching from want of grease, which the conductor had probably preserved for his own soup."

The noise, it appears, is heard at half a league's distance, and is considered rather agreeable than otherwise. This was not, however, the diligence drawn by shaved mules, in which our traveller was destined to cogitate upon the beautiful villages

smiling at the foot of the mountains, from which he expected to see every moment, a Kettly present herself. How the enthusiasm of the Parisian must have been excited by the sublimity of Spanish scenery, when it thus recalled to mind Donizetti and the Opera Comique! Ay, and when the Pyrenees lay stretched behind him, they actually reminded him of a velvet cloak covered with spangles, thrown carelessly somewhere, perhaps upon the boards of the Porte St. Martin by Bocage, in the last drama played before his setting out! But if he be little among mountains, he is great over soup, and for just reasons.

"At the risk of seeming minute, we shall describe it (the soup), for the difference between one people and another is remarkable precisely in these thousand little details, which travellers neglect for great poetical and political considerations that may as well be written without the trouble of leaving home."

The great distinction, then, between Spanish and French soup, for the benefit of the curious, lies in an infusion of saffron. Such is the difference of national taste. One stains its eyelids with henna, another dyes its soups. Arrived at Burgos, M. Gautier of course visits its celebrated cathedral, telling us with naïveté that the Romantic school has taught people to admire old cathedrals; and truly our romantic friend does not spare language in the expres sion of his own elaborate admiration. Here, too, notwithstanding his preference of the science of gastronomy over poetical and political considerations, he allows himself to be surprised into the following serious reflections.

"Spain has lost much of her picturesque character by the suppression of monks, and I do not see what she has acquired in the way of compensation. Admirable monuments, whose loss will be irreparable, and which had until then been preserved with the most minute care, are about to crumble away neglected, and to add more ruin to the too many ruins of this unfortunate country: unheard-of wealth in statues, in pictures, and in objects of art, will be lost without profit to any body."

And then follows an apostrophe to the effect,-Cut each other's throats if you like, but spare marble.

Away from Burgos, at what the author calls un train d'enfer,' a regular steeple-chase rate-the car, a kind of box suspended by cords-but we must translate as literally as we can:

"This machine swung behind the mules like a kettle at the tail of a tiger, exciting them as much by its sounds as by its motions. Some straw, lighted in the middle of the road, had nearly rendered them ungovernable. They were so restive, that whenever another carriage was approaching, it was necessary not only to hold them in tightly, but to put a band before their eyes. For it is a general rule, that when two

A Bull-Fight: Worth all Shakspeare.'

carriages drawn by mules meet, one or other must overturn. happened with us.'

467

And so it

Fortunately the passengers escaped uninjured; but they were obliged to mount a car without springs, called a galere, and then to stretch themselves upon a matelas; and as all machines travel at the same rate, away again they were carried at the rate of five French leagues an hour, up and down hill, never slackening for a moment their triple gallop.'

6

M. Gautier stoutly vindicates the cleanliness of Spanish inns. But we can well believe that an unfortunate traveller, exposed to such horrors as have been just described, would find any inn a haven of rest. Arrived at Valladolid, he is struck with the depopulated air of this ancient city. Built to hold 200,000 it hardly contains 20,000 inhabitants. But his melancholy is not of long duration, for at the theatre that night they gave the 'Hernani of Victor Hugo, translated by Don Eugenio de Ochoa, with some suppressions: for the Spaniards do not like to be treated in a poetical manner.' This we can easily understand. The Spaniards are afflicted with the irritability of an unfortunate people, and treat compliments to their semi-barbarous spirit of chivalry as so many reflections upon their backwardness in the arts of civilized life. M. Gautier, who was in search of the picturesque, was frequently confounded by assurances of new modes about to be adopted for cleansing, lighting, ventilating, pipewatering, and so forth, offered as sarcastic comments upon his ravings about the sublime and the beautiful.

By the time Gautier reached Madrid he had enjoyed an abundance of sensations: but the climax awaited him then in the shape of a bull-fight.

"It has been asserted and repeated from all parts (he indignantly exclaims), that the taste for bull-fighting is on the decline in Spain, and that progressing civilization will destroy it altogether: if it does, so much the worse for civilization: for a bull-fight is one of the finest spectacles that man can imagine."

He proceeds to describe the delightful excitement into which the whole population of Madrid is thrown by the prospect of this sort of sport. He gives you the spectacle in all its details, but as they would not be new to most of our readers, we will take leave to skip these vivid pages (for the description is really animated), until we arrive at the last act of the drama.

"The Picadores retired, leaving the field clear for the Espada, Juan Pastor, who having saluted the Ayuntamiento, asked permission to kill the bull: the permission granted, he threw his montera into the air, as if to show that he was about to deal his last card, and walked delibe