The Wisdom of Hortense, Queen of Holland
In the 1920s, a memoir written over a hundred years earlier by Hortense de Beauharnais, Queen of Holland, was published. Hortense’s life was the sort of thing made for movie screens, but she has been vastly overshadowed by the flashier characters of her family circle, after all she was Napoleon I’s stepdaughter, Josephine Bonaparte’s daughter, Louis Bonaparte’s wife, and Napoleon III’s mother. Recently I re-read The Memoirs of Queen Hortense while writing a play called Happin