A BONAPARTE IN POVERTY.

Inangahua Times, Volume II, 18 August 1880, Page 2

A BONAPARTE IN POVERTY.

(San Francisco Bulletin.) There is scarcely a day that, if you walk in the garden of the Luxembourg, writes a Paris correspondent, you mny not see an elderly and a young lady walking side by side, one sad as the other, both in deep morning', now grown rusty (it has been wine monlhs since the death of the Imperial Prince), both bearing nil those thousand:.find<one little indication 3 of poverty which strike thf observer. The elderly lady has grown fat. She had great beauty once. She has all wrinkles now, more of them furrowed by care than by time (though thess are not wanting). She was famous once for bor grace ; she now waddles carelessly. Her elegance was town talk ; she is dowdy grown. She had a palace and 30,000 dollars once; with servants for neighbors, and she is dependent on charity for daily bread. Mother and dangler boUi are princesses ; the daughter is gran 1 daughter of Letitia Bonaparte.; Napo!enn I, King Jerome, King Murat, King Louis were her great uncles • Empress Josephine, Empress Marie Lnn'se. Queen Hortense. were her great sunt« ; Napoleon IIT, was her second cousin — and yet there are days when, if you a stranger, were \o offer mother end daughter a fivo franc piece they would take it; if they did not they won'd go breakfastless, dinnerless, snp« perl'es*, • for that day. A hard fate ! Nevertheless, nobody, not even the people who gn've them alms, pify them. Pity is withheld, not so much because they enjoyed 30,000d015. annually for eighteen years w'tbout giving a thought to t)ie rainy dajs (whose clouds were always visible above the horizon), but because they had a great share in bring* ing those rainy days on France. One is the wife the other is the daughter of , the assassin of Victor Noir— Prinee Pierre Bonaparte. Wife and daughter lire in a 'garret, ' Rue de Lilie. Princess" Matilda gives them monthly, that is almost every month, 20 dollars ; occasionally this or that Bonapartist frmi'y slips a flve»franc or a twO'franc into their hand, or invites them to breakfast or to dinner. They have no other income. The daughter, Princess Jeanne Bonaparte, is studying sculpture and engraving, with a view to earn bread and board. Her brother Eoland, is a sub-lieutenant in the 35th regiment of infantry ; she gets occasionally 20 dollars as a present from Prince Jerome Napoleon — you kn<jw Prince Napoleon has got a generoug hand. Prince Pierre's plight is still ■ worse ; swollen by gout till scarcely to be frecogs nised, unable to walk except with crutches, and very, weak even with their aid, he sponges on the charity of an innkeeper in Versailles— an inn-keeper and a wife, both Corsicans and idolators ot the Bonapartes. He eats nothing but a Rheims biscuit soked in wine. He never leaves the inn except to go to mass ; whenever he is able to go out he shies to church and communes ; he is daily visited by a Jesuit priest. If he wishes exercise he hobbles up and down the ball-room of the inn. His wife and children never go near him. Are the wicked never punished on earth ?