Josephine, whose susceptibility appears to me even now excusable, well knew my sentiments on the subject of Bonaparte’s founding a dynasty, and she had not forgotten my conduct when two years before the question had been agitated on the occasion of Louis XVIII.’s letters to the First Consul.  I remember that one day, after the publication of the parallel of Caesar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte, Josephine having entered our cabinet without being announced, which she sometimes did when from the good humour exhibited at breakfast she reckoned upon its continuance, approached Bonaparte softly, seated herself on his knee, passed her hand gently through his hair and over his face, and thinking the moment favourable, said to him in a burst of tenderness, “I entreat of you, Bonaparte, do not make yourself a King!  It is that wretch Lucien who urges you to it.  Do not listen to him!” Bonaparte replied, without anger, and even smiling as he pronounced the last words, “You are mad, my poor Josephine.  It is your old dowagers of the Faubourg St. Germain, your Rochefoucaulds, who tell you all these fables!......  Come now, you interrupt me—­leave me alone.”

What Bonaparte said that day good-naturedly to his wife I have often heard him declare seriously.  I have been present at five or six altercations on the subject.  That there existed, too, an enmity connected with this question between the family of beauharnais and the family of Bonaparte cannot be denied.

Fouche, as I have stated, was in the interest of Josephine, and Lucien was the most bitter of her enemies.  One day Raederer inveighed with so much violence against Fouche in the presence of Madame Bonaparte that she replied with extreme warmth, “The real enemies of Bonaparte are those who feed him with notions of hereditary descent, of a dynasty, of divorce, and of marriage!” Josephine could not check this exclamation, as she knew that Roederer encouraged those ideas, which he spread abroad by Lucien’s direction.  I recollect one day when she had been to see us at our little house at Ruel:  as I walked with her along the high road to her carriage, which she had sent forward, I acknowledged too unreservedly my fears on account of the ambition of Bonaparte, and of the perfidious advice of his brothers.  “Madame,” said I, “if we cannot succeed in dissuading the General from making himself a King, I dread the future for his sake.  If ever he re-establishes royalty he will in all probability labour for the Bourbons, and enable them one day to re-ascend the throne which he shall erect.  No one, doubtless, without passing for a fool, can pretend to say with certainty what series of chances and events such a proceeding will produce; but common sense alone is sufficient to convince any one that unfavourable chances must long be dreaded.  The ancient system being re-established, the occupation of the throne will then be only a family question, and not a question of government between liberty and despotic power.