as a handsomer man at this period than he had been in her earlier days.  They spent the evening at the chateau of Compiegne, and were remarried, on the 2nd of April, at Paris, amidst every circumstance of splendour.  Among other imperial gallantries, Napoleon had provided a set of apartments at the Tuileries in which, down to the minutest article of furniture, Maria-Louisa found a facsimile of those which she had been accustomed to occupy in her father’s palace of Schoenbrunn.  For some time he seemed to devote himself, like a mere lover, to the society of his new partner; and was really, according to his own account at St. Helena, enchanted with the contrast which her youthful simplicity of character and manners presented to the finished and elaborate graces of Josephine.  Of the uniform attachment and affection of both his wives, he spoke afterwards with equal praises.  But he in vain endeavoured to prevail on Maria-Louisa to make a personal acquaintance with her predecessor; and, at length, found it necessary to give up his own visits to Malmaison, which for a time were not unfrequent.

Napoleon, in his exile, said that “the Spanish ulcer” and the Austrian match were the two main causes of his ruin;—­and they both contributed to it largely, though by no means equally.  His alliance with the haughtiest of the old sovereign houses gave deep offence indeed to that great party in France, who, though willing to submit to a Dictator, still loathed the name of hereditary monarchy.  Nothing, perhaps, could have shocked those men more grievously than to see the victorious heir and representative of their revolution seeking to mix his blood with that of its inveterate enemies, and making himself free, as it were, of what they had been accustomed to call the old-established “corporation of tyrants.”  Another, and, it is to be hoped, as large a class of his subjects, were disgusted with his abandonment of the wife of his youth, for the sake of gratifying his vanity and ambition.  There were also, we may easily believe, not a few royalists of the old school who had hitherto acquiesced in his sway the more easily, because he seemed destined to die childless, and in a contest for the throne of France, they flattered themselves the legitimate heir of the monarchy might outweigh any of his remoter kindred.  And, lastly, it is not improvable that some of Napoleon’s marshals had accustomed themselves to dream of events such as occurred on the death of Alexander the Great.  But making all allowance for these exceptions, it is hardly possible to doubt that a vast proportion of the upper classes of society in France must have been disposed to hail the Emperor’s alliance with the house of Austria, as a pledge of his desire to adopt, henceforth, a more moderate line of policy as to his foreign relations; or that his throne must have been strengthened in the eyes of the nation at large by the prospect—­soon realised—­of a son of his own blood to fill it after him.  Napoleon’s own opinion was, that the error lay, not in seeking a bride of imperial birth, but in choosing her at Vienna.  Had he persisted in his demands, the Czar, he doubted not, would have granted him his sister; the proud dreams of Tilsit would have been realised, and Paris and St. Petersburg become the only two capitals of Europe.