The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise by Imbert de Saint-Amand, Arthur Léon, baron, 1834-1900

The Empress and the King of Rome took refuge at Blois, where there appeared a faint shadow of Imperial government. On Good Friday, April 8, Count Shouvaloff reached Blois with a detachment of Cossacks, and carried Marie Louise and her son to Rambouillet, where the Emperor of Austria was to join them. What Napoleon had feared was soon realized.

April 16, the Emperor of Austria was at Blois. Marie Louise, who two years before had left her father, starting on her triumphal journey to Prague, amid all form of splendor and devotion, was much moved at seeing him again, and placed the King of Rome in his arms, as if to reproach him for deserting the child's cause. The grandfather relented, but the monarch was stern: did he not soon say to Marie Louise: "As my daughter, everything that I have is yours, even my blood and my life; as a sovereign, I do not know you"? The Russian sentinels at the entrance of the castle of Rambouillet were relieved by Austrian grenadiers. The Empress of the French changed captors; she was the prisoner no longer of the Czar's soldiers, but of her own father. Her conjugal affection was not yet wholly extinct, and she reproached herself with not having joined Napoleon at Fontainebleau; but her scruples were soon allayed by the promise that she should soon see her husband again at Elba. She was told that the treaty which had just been signed gave her, and after her, her son, the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla; that the King of Rome was henceforth the hereditary Duke of Parma; that if she had duties as a wife, she also had duties as a mother; that she ought to gain the good-will of the powers, and assure her child's future. They added that she ought to give her husband time to establish himself at Elba, and that meanwhile she would find in Vienna, near her loving parents, a few weeks of moral and physical rest, which must be very necessary after so many emotions and sufferings. Marie Louise, who had been brought up to give her father strict obedience, regarded the advice of the Emperor of Austria as commands which were not to be questioned, and April 23 she left Rambouillet with her son for Vienna.