Little by little the amazing past from which he had sprung opened up before his eyes. He became acquainted with the words his father had adressed to him from his distant rock before dying. Napoleon became for him “the greatest man of all time,” and he waxed indignant over such attacks on his father’s memory as that made by Baron Hormayr. Soon he was drunk with glory (…). Already, on November 21, 1826, in a letter to Parma, he wrote to Marie Louise about Napoleon in terms which, said Dietrichstein, “will surprise Your Majesty.” No doubt Reichstadt’s ambitions were still centered on the “white uniform” of an Austrian officer, but the tutor was none the less rather concerned about the ex-Empress’s possible reactions on reading these lines written by a son whom she wanted to turn into “a German prince,” a son who had received at birth a name which, she said, was “an unfortunate one”:
I am indeed convinced of the need for study and, putting as I do the prospect of the white uniform above everything else, I know that I can only attain it by making good progress. I am therefore trying, as best I can, to make up for lost time, in order to offer you, dear Mamma, on your return, the sight of a morally superior and nobler being and thus show you the foundations of a character which will remind you of my father’s; for a soldier on the threshold of his career, can there be a finer and more admirable model of constancy, endurance, manly gravity, valiance and courage?
André Castelot: King of Rome. A biography of Napoleon’s tragic son.
