“I am far from you, I seem to be surrounded by the blackest night:  I need the lurid light of the thunder-bolts which we are about to hurl on our enemies to dispel the darkness into which your absence has plunged me.  Josephine, you wept when we parted:  you wept!  At that thought all my being trembles.  But be consoled!  Wuermser shall pay dearly for the tears which I have seen you shed.”

What infatuation! to appease a woman’s fancied grief, he will pile high the plains of Mincio with corpses, recking not of the thousand homes where bitter tears will flow.  It is the apotheosis of sentimental egotism and social callousness.  And yet this brain, with its moral vision hopelessly blurred, judged unerringly in its own peculiar plane.  What power it must have possessed, that, unexhausted by the flames of love, it grasped infallibly the myriad problems of war, scanning them the more clearly, perchance, in the white heat of its own passion.

At last there came the time of fruition at Montebello:  of fruition, but not of ease or full contentment; for not only did an average of eight despatches a day claim several hours, during which he jealously guarded his solitude; but Josephine’s behaviour served to damp his ardour.  As, during the time of absence, she had slighted his urgent entreaties for a daily letter, so too, during the sojourn at Montebello, she revealed the shallowness and frivolity of her being.  Fetes, balls, and receptions, provided they were enlivened by a light crackle of compliments from an admiring circle, pleased her more than the devotion of a genius.  She had admitted, before marriage, that her “Creole nonchalance” shrank wearily away from his keen and ardent nature; and now, when torn away from the salons of Paris, she seems to have taken refuge in entertainments and lap-dogs.[82] Doubtless even at this period Josephine evinced something of that warm feeling which deepened with ripening years and lit up her later sorrows with a mild radiance; but her recent association with Madame Tallien and that giddy cohue had accentuated her habits of feline complaisance to all and sundry.  Her facile fondnesses certainly welled forth far too widely to carve out a single channel of love and mingle with the deep torrent of Bonaparte’s early passion.  In time, therefore, his affections strayed into many other courses; and it would seen that even in the later part of this Italian epoch his conduct was irregular.  For this Josephine had herself mainly to thank.  At last she awakened to the real value and greatness of the love which her neglect had served to dull and tarnish, but then it was too late for complete reunion of souls:  the Corsican eagle had by that time soared far beyond reach of her highest flutterings.[83]