The preparations for the Coronation proved very advantageous to the trading classes of Paris.  Great numbers of foreigners and people from the provinces visited the capital, and the return of luxury and the revival of old customs gave occupation to a variety of tradespeople who could get no employment under the Directory or Consulate, such as saddlers, carriage-makers, lacemen, embroiderers, and others.  By these positive interests were created more partisans of the Empire than by opinion and reflection; and it is but just to say that trade had not been so active for a dozen years before.  The Imperial crown jewels were exhibited to the public at Biennais the jeweller’s.  The crown was of a light form, and, with its leaves of gold, it less resembled the crown of France than the antique crown of the Caesars.  These things were afterwards placed in the public treasury, together with the imperial insignia of Charlemagne, which Bonaparte had ordered to be brought from Aix-la-Chapelle.  But while Bonaparte was thus priding himself in his crown and his imagined resemblance to Charlemagne, Mr. Pitt, lately recalled to the Ministry, was concluding at Stockholm a treaty with Sweden, and agreeing to pay a subsidy to that power to enable it to maintain hostilities against France.  This treaty was concluded on the 3d of December, the day after the Coronation.

—­[The details of the preparation for the Coronation caused many stormy scenes between Napoleon and his family.  The Princesses, his sisters and sisters-in-law, were especially shocked at having to carry the train of the Imperial mantle of Josephine, and even when Josephine was actually moving from the altar to the throne the Princesses evinced their reluctance so plainly that Josephine could not advance and an altercation took place which had to be stopped by Napoleon himself.  Joseph was quite willing himself give up appearing in a mantle with a train, but he wished to prevent his wife bearing the mantle of the Empress; and he opposed his brother on so many points that Napoleon ended by calling on him to either give up his position and retire from all politics, or else to fully accept the imperial regime.  How the economical Camberceres used up the ermine he could not wear will be seen in Junot tome iii. p. 196.  Josephine herself was in the greatest anxiety as to whether the wish of the Bonaparte family that she should be divorced would carry the day with her husband.  When she had gained her cause for the time and after the Pope had engaged to crown her, she seems to have most cleverly managed to get the Pope informed that she was only united to Napoleon by a civil marriage.  The Pope insisted on a religious marriage.  Napoleon was angry, but could not recede, and the religions rite was performed by Cardinal Fesch the day, or two days, before the Coronation.  The certificate of the marriage was carefully guarded from Napoleon by Josephine, and even placed beyond his reach at the time of the divorce.