If there is a theme in the first hand accounts that are broadcast during this project, it this: they say that the Emperor will be vindicated in the future.
Hortense says it below.
English translation:
My journey to France and why it happened.
After having received from fortune everything it could lavish of greatness and adversity. After having retraced those brilliant and sad details in my memoirs, which were completed in 1820, I hoped that fate, tired of overwhelming me, reserved me for nothing more but rest. I thought I had finally found it. But the pain, which leaves me without courage because it annihilates all my faculties, the heartrending pain that the loss of the cherished causes has struck me by repeated blows; Whenever my reason regained its empire, when I was closing in on a sort of joy surrounding what was left to me, merciless death came back to me more and more.
In 1821, I had to endure the sorrow of learning about the ghastly death of the Emperor. He, so great in talent and so great in his soul, who devoted his genius to the welfare of the people, and seemed chained to them to break their chains forever. He who prepared the age of liberty, by enlightening the nations, and by introducing into our beliefs as in our laws, the reign of equality. He perished in an unhealthy and deserted island, far from his own, at the mercy of his enemies. The true circumstances unknown in France, whom he had made so powerful and prosperous in Europe, where each of his conquests created institutions that we regret not still having today!
He had no consolation in his isolation, but in the hope of future glory which he knew would be preserved for him. He alone could foresee the justice that would be restored to him one day, because he alone understood all the good he had done and all the good he had wanted to do.
In 1824, I still even further had the pain of losing the most perfect brother and the most tenderly loved. He was in the strength of age and health. Already the year before, the symptoms of the terrible crisis which took him away later had made us feel all the anguish of an eternal separation. Facing his illness, how much my courage had been put to a terrible trial, when I had seen him dying, abandoned by doctors. When alone I had been instructed to oversee his last rites and I encouraged him to try the remedies which saved him, and brought him back for a few months longer! What a happy time were the two weeks spent with his family on the shores of Lake Constance!
To be continued.
The memoirs so far are available here.
Hortense’s explanation why she broke the law is here.