"The people acted freely and according to their own will," said Hortense, with a sad smile, as she saw her son turn pale, and wrinkles gather on his brow. "Honor the will of the people, my son! In order to reward the emperor for his great services to the country, the people of France had unanimously chosen him their emperor. The people who give have also the right to take back again. The Bourbons, who consider themselves the owners of France, may reclaim it as an estate of which they have been robbed by the house of Orleans. But the Bonapartes must remember that they derived all their power from the will of the people. They must be content to await the future expression of its will, and then submit, and conform themselves to it[62]."
[Footnote 62: The duchess's own words. See La Reine Hortense en Italie, Suisse, France, etc., p. 79.]
Louis Napoleon bowed his head and sighed. He must conform to the will of the people; cautiously, under a borrowed name, he must steal into the land of his longing and of his dreams; he must deny his nationality, and be indebted, for his name and passport, to the country that had bound his uncle, like a second Prometheus, to the rock, and left him there to die! But he did it with a sorrowful, with a bleeding heart; he wandered with his mother, who walked heavily veiled at his side, from place to place, listening to her reminiscences of the great past. At her relation of these reminiscences, his love and enthusiasm for the fatherland, from which he had so long been banished, burned brighter and brighter. The sight, the air of this fatherland, had electrified him; he entertained but one wish: to remain in France, and to serve France, although in the humble capacity of a private soldier.
One day Louis Napoleon entered his mother's room with a letter in his hand, and begged her to read it. It was a letter addressed to Louis Philippe, in which Louis Napoleon begged the French king to annul his exile, and to permit him to enter the French army as a private soldier.
Hortense read the letter, and shook her head sadly. It wounded her just pride that her son, the nephew of the great emperor, should ask a favor of him who had not hesitated to make the most of the revolution for himself, but had nevertheless lacked the courage to help the banished Bonapartes to recover their rights, and enable them to return to their country. In his ardent desire to serve France, Louis Napoleon had forgotten this insult of the King of France.