This decision was regarded by Josephine as highly satisfactory to herself.  She made no fuss about it, but was greatly overjoyed at the prospect of the effect it would have on Napoleon, and for a time no more was openly heard of divorce; but the venom was insidiously eating its way to that end all the same, and as he grew in power, so did the conspiracy develop.  His own family were eager that she should be put away, but there were influences more powerful than that of Madame Mere and her sons and daughters.  Talleyrand and Fouche being the High Commissioners who founded the direct hereditary idea, they persistently worried him with the plea that the State claimed that he should make the sacrifice.  They knew that this was the strongest and most effective reason they could put forward to a man who would have given his soul in the service of his country.

The birth of Madame Eleonore Denuelle’s son Leon on December 29, 1806, made a great impression on the Emperor’s mind.  It was well known that he was the father of the child, and now that there was no doubt as to the possibility of him having an heir, it was only to be expected that the advocates of divorce would press their claim that an alliance should be made with one of the powerful ruling families.  The advantages to France would be inestimable, and would it not establish himself and his dynasty more firmly on the throne?  It is not unlikely that Napoleon pondered over the great possibilities of such a marriage, but he could not bring himself to the thought of divorcing the woman he still loved.  He went so far as to seek Josephine’s support in the plan of making his natural son his heir, and Masson says that in support of his desire he vigorously used “precedents and invented justifications.”  Happily he did not stretch the law of hereditary succession further than this.

Leon, when he grew up, became a great source of trouble to all those with whom he was connected.  His features and physical make up had a marked resemblance to his father’s, but his mind was erratic.  He had inherited none of the steady, sane genius of the Emperor, though but for a freak of nature which gave him a mental twist, he would have been as near his prototype as may be.  He was always full of great schemes, which in the hands of a normally constituted person would have been fashioned into public usefulness.

Masson gives a vivid and somewhat categorical account of his predilections, which were “gambling, duels, politics, writing pamphlets, the conception of colossal canal, railway, and commercial undertakings that never got far beyond the initial and rocky mental stage.”  He was one of the chief mourners when his father’s remains were brought to Paris from St. Helena in 1840, and in 1848 aspired to the Presidency of the Republic, which fell to the lot of his cousin Louis Napoleon, whose life he desired to take, but who, with great generosity, gave him a pension and paid the legacy left him by Napoleon.  He died in 1881.