Empress Josephine: An Historical Sketch of the Days of Napoleon Part 51

"You have now received quite a long letter from me! The sentiment of delight in talking about our two sons has carried me away, and this sentiment will make me excusable for having so long intruded upon you.

As sorrow needs concentration, so joy needs expansion. This, sire, explains this letter, long as a volume, and which I cannot close with-out once more expressing my deepest grat.i.tude.

"JOSEPHINE." [Footnote: Ducrest, "Memoires," vol. iii., p. 294.]

CHAPTER XLIV. DEATH.

Happy the man to whom it is granted to close a beautiful and worthy life with a beautiful and worthy death! Happy Josephine, for whom it was not reserved like the rest of the Bonapartes to wander about Europe seeking for a refuge where they might hide themselves from the persecutions and hatred of the princes and people! To her alone, of all the Napoleonic race, was reserved the enviable fate to die under the ruins of the imperial throne, whose fragments fell so heavily upon her heart as to break it.

For France the days of fear had come, for Napoleon the days of vengeance. The nations of Europe had at last risen with the strength of the lion that breaks his chains and is determined to obtain liberty by devouring those who deprived him of it, and so those irritated nations had with the power of their wrath forced their princes, who had been so obediently submissive to Napoleon, to declare war and to fight against him for life or death.

The conflicts, battles, and endless victories of the constantly defeated Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and English, belong to history--this everlasting tribunal where the deeds of men are judged, and where they are written on its pages to be for ages to come as lessons and examples of warning and encouragement.

Josephine, the lonely and rejected one, had nothing to do with those fearful events which shook France; she played no active part in the great drama which was performed before the walls of Paris, and which closed with the fall of the hero whom she had so warmly and so truly loved.

Josephine, during those days of horror and of decisive conflicts, was in her pleasure-castle of Navarra. Her daughter, Queen Hortense, with her two sons, Napoleon Louis and Louis Napoleon, was with her. There she learned the treachery of the marshals, the capitulation of Marmont, the surrender of Paris, and the entrance of the foreign foe into the capital of France.

But where was Napoleon? Where was the emperor? Did Josephine know anything of him? Why did he not come to the rescue of his capital, and drive the foe away?

Such were the questions which afflicted Josephine's heart, and to which the news, finally re-echoed through Paris, gave her the fearful response.

Napoleon had come too late, and when he had arrived in Fontainebleau with the remnants of the army defeated by Blucher, he learned there that Marmont had capitulated, and that the allies had already entered Paris, and all was lost.

The deputies of the senate and Napoleon's faithless marshals came from Paris to Fontainebleau to require from him that he should resign his crown, and that he should save France by the sacrifice of himself and his imperial dignity. These men, lately the most humble, devoted courtiers and flatterers of Napoleon, who owed to him everything--name, position, fortune, and rank--had now the courage to approach him with lofty demeanor and to request of him to depart into exile.

Napoleon, overcome by all this misfortune and treachery which fell upon him, did what they required of him. He abdicated in favor of his son, and left Paris, left France, to go to the small island of Elba, there to dream of the days which had been and of the days which were coming, when he would regain his glory and his emperor's crown.

Amid the agonies, cares, and humiliations of his present situation, Napoleon thought of the woman whom he had once named the "angel of his happiness," and who he well knew would readily and gladly be the angel of his misfortune. Before leaving Fontainebleau to retire to the island of Elba, Napoleon wrote to Josephine a farewell letter, telling her of the fate reserved for him, and a.s.suring her of his never-ending friends.h.i.+p and affection. He sent this letter to the castle of Navarra by M. de Maussion, and the messenger of evil tidings arrived there in the middle of the night.

Josephine had given orders that she should be awakened as soon as any one brought news for her. She immediately arose from her bed, threw a mantle over her shoulders, and bade M. de Maussion come in.

"Does the emperor live?" cried she, as he approached. "Only answer me this: does the emperor live?"

Then, when she had received this a.s.surance, after reading Napoleon's letter, and learning all the sad, humiliating news, pale, and trembling in all her limbs, she hastened to her daughter Hortense.

"Ah, Hortense," exclaimed she, overcome and falling into an arm-chair near her daughter's bed, "ah, Hortense, the unfortunate Napoleon! They are sending him to the island of Elba! Now he is unhappy, abandoned, and I am not near him! Were I not his wife I would go to him and exile myself with him! Oh, why cannot I be with him?" [Footnote: Mlle.

Cochelet, "Memoires," vol. ii.]

But she dared not! Napoleon, knowing her heart and her love, had commissioned the Duke de Ba.s.sano expressly to tell the Empress Josephine to make no attempt to follow him, and "to respect the rights of another."

This other, however, had not been pleased to claim the right which Josephine was to respect. Napoleon left Fontainebleau on the 21st of April, 1814, to go to the island of Elba. It was his wish to meet there his wife and his son. But Maria Louisa did not come; she did not obey her husband's call; she descended from the imperial throne, and was satisfied to be again an archd.u.c.h.ess of Austria, and to see the little King of Rome dispossessed of country, rank, father, and even name. The poor little Napoleon was now called Frank--he was but the son of the Archd.u.c.h.ess Maria Louisa; he dared not ask for his father, and yet memory ever and ever re-echoed through his heart the sounds of other days; this memory caused the death of the Duke de Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon.

Napoleon had gone to Elba, and there he waited in vain for Maria Louisa, to fill whose place Josephine would have gladly poured her heart's blood.

But she dared not! she submitted faithfully and devotedly to Napoleon's will. To her he was, though banished, humiliated, and conquered, still the emperor and the sovereign; and her tearful eyes gazed toward the solitary island which to her would have been a paradise could she but have lived there by the side of her Napoleon!

But she had to remain in France; she had sacred duties to perform; she had to save out of the wreck of the empire at least something for her children! For herself she wanted nothing, she desired nothing; but the future of her children had to be secured.

Therefore, Josephine gathered all her courage; she pressed her hands on the mortal wounds of her heart, and kept it still alive, for it must not yet bleed to death; her children yet claimed her care.

Josephine, therefore, left the castle of Navarra for that of Malmaison, thus fulfilling the wishes of the Emperor Alexander, who desired to know Josephine's wishes in reference to herself and to her children, and who sincerely wished to become acquainted with her, that he might offer her his homage, and transfer to her the friends.h.i.+p he once cherished for Napoleon.

Josephine received in Malmaison the first visit of Alexander, and from this time he came every day, to the great grief of the returned Bourbons, who felt bitterly hurt at the homage thus publicly offered before all the world by the conqueror of Napoleon to the divorced Empress Josephine, who, in the eyes of the proud Bourbons, was but the widow of General de Beauharnais.

Notwithstanding this, the rest of the princes of the victorious allies followed the example of Alexander. They all came to Malmaison to visit the Empress Josephine; so that again, as in the days of her imperial glory, she received at her residence the conquerors of Europe, and saw around her emperors and kings. The Emperor Alexander, with his brothers; the King Frederick William, with his sons; the Duke of Coburg, and many others of the little German princes, were guests at her table, and endeavored, through the respect they manifested to her, and the expressions of their esteem and devotedness, to turn away from her the sad fate which had come upon all the Bonapartes.

But her heart was mortally wounded. "I cannot overcome the fearful sadness which has seized me," said she to Mlle. Cochelet, the friend of her daughter Hortense; "I do all I can to hide my cares from my children, but I suffer only the more." [Footnote: Mlle. Cochelet.

"Memoires," vol. ii.]

"You will see," said she to the d.u.c.h.ess d'Abrantes, who had visited her at Malmaison, "you will see that Napoleon's misfortune will cause my death. My heart is broken--it will not be healed." [Footnote: Abrantes, "Memoires," vol. xvii.]

She was right, her heart was broken, it would not be healed! It seemed at first but merely an indisposition which seized the empress, and which obliged her to decline the announced visit of the Emperor Alexander, nothing but a slight inflammation of the neck, accompanied by a little fever. But the disease increased hour after hour. On the 27th of May, Josephine was obliged to keep her bed; on the 29th her sufferings in the neck were so serious that she nearly suffocated, and her fever had become so intense that she had but few moments of consciousness. In her fancy she often called aloud for Napoleon, and the last word which her dying lips uttered was his name.

Josephine died on the 29th of May, 1814. That love which had illumined her life occasioned her death, and will sanctify her name for ever as with a saintly halo.

She was buried on the 2d of June in the church at Rueil. It was a solemn funeral procession, to which all the kings and princes a.s.sembled in Paris sent their subst.i.tutes in their carriages; but the most beautiful mourning procession which followed her to the grave were the tears, the sighs of the poor, the suffering of the unfortunate, for all whom Josephine had been a benefactress, a good angel, and who lost in her a comforter, a mother.

In the church of Rueil, Eugene and Hortense erected a monument to their mother; and when in 1837 Queen Hortense, the mother of the Emperor Napoleon III., died at Arenenberg, her corpse was, according to her last wishes, brought to Rueil and laid at her mother's side. Her son erected there a monument to her; and this son, the grandchild of Josephine, is now the Emperor of the French, Napoleon III. Josephine's sacrifice has been in vain. Napoleon's dynasty, for whose sake she sacrificed happiness, love, and a crown, has not been perpetuated through the woman to whom Josephine was sacrificed--not through Maria Louisa, who gave to France and to the emperor a son, but through the daughter of Josephine, who gave to Napoleon more than a son, her love, her heart, and her life!

Providence is just! Upon the throne from which the childless empress was rejected, sits now the grandchild of Josephine, and his very existence demonstrates how vain are all man's calculations and desires, and how like withered leaves they are carried away and tossed about by the breath of destiny!

It was not the emperor's daughter who perpetuated Napoleon's dynasty, but the widow of General Beauharnais, Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie.

Josephine, therefore, is avenged in history; she was also avenged in Napoleon's heart, for he bitterly lamented that he had ever been separated from her. "I ought not to have allowed myself to be separated from Josephine," said he, a short time before his death in St.

Helena, "no, I ought not to have been divorced from her; that was my misfortune!"

THE END