Madame Louis Bonaparte was enceinte.  Josephine, although she tenderly loved her children, did not seem to behold the approaching event which the situation of her daughter indicated with the interest natural to the heart of a mother.  She had long been aware of the calumnious reports circulated respecting the supposed connection between Hortense and the First Consul, and that base accusation cost her many tears.  Poor Josephine paid dearly for the splendour of her station!  As I knew how devoid of foundation these atrocious reports were, I endeavoured to console her by telling her what was true, that I was exerting all my efforts to demonstrate their infamy and falsehood.  Bonaparte, however, dazzled by the affection which was manifested towards him from all quarters, aggravated the sorrow of his wife by a silly vanity.  He endeavoured to persuade her that these reports had their origin only in the wish of the public that he should have a child, so that these seeming consolations offered by self-love to Josephine’s grief gave force to existing conjugal alarms, and the fear of divorce returned with all its horrors.  Under the foolish illusion of his vanity Bonaparte imagined that France was desirous of being governed even by a bastard if supposed to be a child of his,—­a singular mode truly of founding a new legitimacy!

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.