Hortense de Beauharnais, stiefdochter van Napoleon I, vrouw van Louis Bonaparte (koning Lodewijk I van Holland, 1806-1810) en moeder van koning Lodewijk II (Napoleon Louis Bonaparte) van Holland (gedurende iets minder dan twee weken in juli 1810) en Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon Bonaparte), keizer der Fransen (1852-1870)
“On 25 July [1807] she visited the waterfall at Gavarnie, high up in the Pyrenees, and was stranded there overnight, sleeping at a small wayside inn. This visit to Gavarnie has attracted a great deal of attention on the part of historians, as it took place nine months, almost to the day, before the birth of Napoleon III [on 20 April 1808]. It has often been suggested that at the inn at Gavarnie, or somewhere else during her travels in the Pyrenees, she went to bed with some man who was Napoleon III’s true father. It is not surprising that when Louis Napoleon was President and Emperor of France, his enemies spread the rumour that he was not King Louis’s son. As he owed his popularity with his supporters and his advent to the imperial throne entirely to the fact that he was thought to be the nephew of the great Napoleon, he would have been completely discredited if it could have been proved that he was not a Bonaparte; and the state of relations between Louis and Hortense at the time of his birth gave good scope for this insinuation. But gossip of this kind is usually wrong. For some reason it selected the Dutch Admiral Verhuell as Louis Napoleon’s father; but apart from the fact that there is no evidence at all that Verhuell was ever anything more than a casual acquaintance of Hortense, there is no doubt that he was in Holland throughout the summer of 1807 and did not go to the Pyrenees when Hortense was there, though his brother did. … Several other men have been suggested as the father. The strongest case can perhaps be made out for Hortense’s Chancellor, Villeneuve, who stayed with Hortense and her party in the inn at Gavernie, and a week before, at Cauterets, had hurried the other gentlemen off to bed so as to have the opportunity of being alone that night with Hortense. Louis was still in the south of France, and Hortense travelled to Toulouse and met him there on 11 August. Both Hortense and Louis afterwards declared that he made love to her at Toulouse, and that, unlike at Cauterets, she granted him his wish. They traveled from Toulouse to Paris, and had sexual relations on several occasions during this journey. … Why did Hortense, after refusing for more than three years [since Jan. 1804 when Napoleon Louis was conceived] to go to bed with her husband, suddenly agree to do so at Toulouse on 11 August 1807? One possible explanation is that, having had sexual relations with a man in the inn at Gavarnie on the night of 25 July, she realized that she might be pregnant … and therefore hastened to Toulouse and into Louis’s bed so that it would be impossible for anyone to prove that her baby was illegitimate.” (Jasper Ridley, Napoleon III and Eugénie [Londen 1979], p. 13-15)