After the humiliation of the Hapsburgs and of the Spanish patriots, nothing seemed wanting to Napoleon’s triumph but an heir who should found a durable dynasty.  This aim was now to be reached.  As soon as the Emperor returned to Paris, his behaviour towards Josephine showed a marked reserve.  The passage communicating between their private apartments was closed, and the gleams of triumphant jealousy that flashed from her sisters-in-law warned Josephine of her approaching doom.  The divorce so long bruited by news-mongers was at hand.  The Emperor broke the tidings to his consort in the private drawing-room of the Tuileries on November 30th, and strove to tone down the harshness of his decision by basing it on the imperative needs of the State.  But she spurned the dictates of statecraft.  With all her faults, she was affectionate and tender; she was a woman first and an Empress afterwards; she now clung to Napoleon, not merely for the splendour of the destiny which he had opened to her, but also from genuine love.

Their relations had curiously changed.  At the outset she had slighted his mad devotion by her shallow coldness and occasional infidelities, until his lava-like passion petrified.  Thenceforth it was for her to woo, and woo in vain.  For years past she had to bemoan the waning of his affection and his many conjugal sins.  And now the chasm, which she thought to have spanned by the religious ceremony on the eve of the coronation, yawned at her feet.  The woman and the Empress in her shrank back from the black void of the future; and with piteous reproaches she flung back the orders of the Emperor and the soothings of the husband.  Napoleon, it would seem, had nerved himself against such an outbreak.  In vain did Josephine sink down at his feet with heart-rending cries that she would never survive the disgrace:  failing to calm her himself, he opened the door and summoned the prefect of the palace, Bausset, and bade him bear her away to her private apartments.  Down the narrow stairs she was borne, the Emperor lifting her feet and Bausset supporting her shoulders, until, half fainting, she was left to the sympathies of her women and the attentions of Corvisart.  But hers was a wound that no sympathy or skill could cure.[220]

On his side, Napoleon felt the wrench.  Not only the ghost of his early love, but his dislike of new associates and novel ways cried out against the change.  “In separating myself from my wife,” Napoleon once said to Talleyrand, “I renounce much.  I should have to study the tastes and habits of a young woman.  Josephine accommodates herself to everything:  she understands me perfectly."[221] But his boundless triumphs, his alliance with the Czar and total overthrow of the Bourbons and the Pope, had fed the fires of his ambition.  He aspired to give the mot d’ordre to the universe; and he scrupled not to put aside a consort who could not help him to found a dynasty.  Yet it was not without pangs of sorrow and remorse.  His laboured,