Hortense Bonaparte was wrought with anxiety over the safety of her two sons, Napoleon Louis and Louis Napoleon - who both had been compelled to join a revolution by those appealing to their noble intentions.
Hortense writes:
[I would] even share their dangers, if necessary, to calm myself down.
Ravenna and Forli, kept coming back to me. I feared there a battle or a misfortune for me. I remembered from my reading of the history of France about the death of Gaston de Foix. This had deeply moved me.
I was very young then, (the active imagination needs to invest its interest in everything that occupies it), I lent him all perfection, and I was touched by his end which was so glorious and so unhappy. This life hardly begun, and then finished, when it promised so much for the future.
Madame de Genlis, to whom I expressed my predilection for this youth one day, sent me a work made about the death of Gaston de Foix.
She asked me to put it to music. I answered her that it was impossible for me to sing about death, especially about the death of a prince who had so much resemblance with my brother, since he was, like Eugene, viceroy of Italy, and that I held affection so much affection for him.
As the Austrians entered via Ravenna, I was extremely frightened to see my children exposed there. I went so far as to worry about the former subject of my interest, like the presentiment of a misfortune which was to happen to me there.
The imagination is our most all encompassing faculty. Blessed is he who uses it only to foresee happiness; it doubles bliss, because it precedes it; but also the pain! ... we feel it twice.
And yet the imagination in a woman who is a mother, the imagination fills our subconscious. I was on my way to Ancona, troubled, agitated, my heart filled with disastrous omens, when at the first post after Foligno, a horse-drawn carriage stops near my carriage.
A man I don't know comes out of it. I don't know why I'm trembling. He’s coming from my children.
"Prince Napoleon is sick," he said to me. "He has measles.”
I cried out.
”He’s asking for you.”
I cried with terror, “It must therefore be very bad!
…
Hortense Bonaparte était inquiète pour la sécurité de ses deux fils, Napoléon Louis et Louis Napoléon - qui avaient tous deux été contraints de rejoindre une révolution par ceux qui faisaient appel à leurs nobles intentions.
Hortense Bonaparte war besorgt über die Sicherheit ihrer beiden Söhne Napoleon Louis und Louis Napoleon, die beide von denjenigen, die an ihre edlen Absichten appellierten, gezwungen worden waren, sich einer Revolution anzuschließen.
