Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1888 — AN EMPRESS AND HER PETS. [ARTICLE]

AN EMPRESS AND HER PETS.

Ho* Napoleon Sought to Win Marie Louise’s Love. Marie Louise’s dog was a slim Italian greyhound, and as far as she was concerned it proved to be a very winsome bit of dogflesh. It twined itself into her affections by its graceful ways. She had her other pets—her singing birds and her parrot—in her boudoir at Vienna, a room where, we read, there was “scarcely a thing, down to the carpet on the floor, which was uot the work of some loved hand.” Mme. Junot says when the Archduchess became Empress she had to leave her fawncolored favorite behind her at Vienna. In the memoir of the Empress Marie Louise by Saint Arnaud, he says it was at Munich “she was compelled to separate from a little dog she loved dearly, which the Countess (Lazansky) had to take back to Vienna with her.” The reason of this was that Napoleon did not like dogs. Mme. Junot says, “the Emperor used to be annoyed by Josephine’s favorite pet dogs, with Fortune at the head.” The Empress cried bitterly when she found the plaintivefaced little hound had to return with her grand mistress. Every one was anxious to swell the train of this new Empress. She longed to keep her coaxing little friend beside her, because she knew it alone cared to be with her, not because she was the wife of the man who had so much of Europe in his grasp, but simply because it worshiped her from the depth of its true little heart. “It was a cruel separation,” writes Mme. Junot, “and the Empress and her favorite parted with a duo of complaints. ” “ The acquisition of a colossal empire did not console the sovereign for the loss of a little dog,” says another historian. It is satisfactory to know that the timid, shrinking hound was not long parted from the Empress. Berthier told Napoleon of Marie Louise’s tears over leaving her dog, her feathered friends, her room made dear by cherished association, and Napoleon prepared a delectable surprise for his wife, a strategy to win her love. Leading her from the balcony of the Tuileries, where he had presented her to the people who had thronged below, he led her, in wonderment as to her destination, up a dimly lighted corridor. A woe-begone greyhound had been sitting in a room there forlorn and puzzled till it heard a step it knew, and, whining with impatience, sprang out when Napoleon opened the door. The phlegmatic Empress greeted her recovered pet wlh effusion. She knew its adoration was genuine. The fickle multitude that cheered her might turn on her as they had turned on her grand-aunt, the Queen of , France; but this four-legged courtier • was genuine and stanch. In the room where her trusty favorite awaited her Marie Louise found her birds, her music, “in fact, every article was there, and placed in the room in the same manner as she had left them on quitting her paternal roof.” Napoleon was well pleased with the delight his kindly thoughtfulness gave the Empress, and maybe honored the overjoyed hound with some notice. Four years after this the dog left the Tuileries with the Empress and her son. It returned, to Vienna with her, loving her as truly as a pensioner and a prisoner at her father’s court as w<ien she was Empress over a powerful nation.— Art Journal.