It was arranged that Josephine and the Emperor should meet in Belgium.  He proceeded thither from the camp of Boulogne, to the astonishment of those who believed that the moment for the invasion of England had at length arrived.  He joined the Empress at the Palace of Lacken, which the Emperor had ordered to be repaired and newly furnished with great magnificence.

The Emperor continued his journey by the towns bordering on the Rhine.  He stopped first in the town of Charlemagne, passed through the three bishoprics,

     —­[There are two or three little circumstances in connection with
     this journey that seem worth inserting here: 

Mademoiselle Avrillion was the ‘femme de chambre’ of Josephine, and was constantly about her person from the time of the first Consulship to the death of the Empress in 1814.  In all such matters as we shall quote from them, her memoirs seem worthy of credit.  According to Mademoiselle, the Empress during her stay at Aix-la- Chapelle, drank the waters with much eagerness and some hope.  As the theatre there was only supplied with some German singers who were not to Josephine’s taste, she had part of a French operatic company sent to her from Paris.  The amiable creole had always a most royal disregard of expense.  When Bonaparte joined her, he renewed his old custom of visiting his wife now and then at her toilet, and according to Mademoiselle Avrillion, he took great interest in the subject of her dressing.  She says, “It was a most extraordinary thing for us to see the man whose head was filled with such vast affairs enter into the most minute details of the female toilet and of what dresses, what robes, and what jewels the Empress should wear on such and such an occasion.  One day he daubed her dress with ink because be did not like it, and wanted her to put on another.  Whenever he looked into her wardrobe he was sure to throw everything topsy-turvy.”

This characteristic anecdote perfectly agrees with what we have
heard from other persons.   When the Neapolitan Princess di----- was
at the Tuileries as ‘dame d’honneur’ to Bonaparte’s sister Caroline
Murat, then Queen of Naples, on the grand occasion of the marriage
with Maria Louisa, the, Princess, to her astonishment, saw the
Emperor go up to a lady of the Court and address her thus:  “This is
the same gown you wore the day before yesterday!   What’s the meaning
of this, madame?   This is not right, madame!”

Josephine never gave him a similar cause of complaint, but even when he was Emperor she often made him murmur at the profusion of her expenditure under this head.  The next anecdote will give some idea of the quantity of dresses which she wore for a day or so, and then gave away to her attendants, who appear to have carried on a very active trade in them.

“While we were at Mayence the Palace was literally besieged by Jews, who continually