“Sometimes, I say to myself:  ’I trouble myself without cause, she is already well, she has left Paris and is on the way, she is perhaps in Lyons.’ ...  Fruitless deception!  You are in your bed, suffering—­ more interesting—­more worthy of adoration; you are pale, and your eyes are more languishing than ever! when you are well again, if one of us is to be sick, cannot I be the one? for I am stronger, I have more vital power, and would therefore sooner conquer sickness.  Fate is cruel, it strikes me through you.

“What sometimes comforts me is to know that on fate depends your sickness, but that it depends on no one to oblige me to outlive you.

“Be careful, my dearly-beloved one, to tell me in your letter that you are convinced that I love you above all that can be conceived; that never has it come to me to think of other women; that they are all in my eyes without grace, beauty, or wit; that you, you entirely, you as I see you, as you are, can please me and fetter all the powers of my soul; that you have grasped it in all its immeasurableness; that my heart has no folds closed from your eyes, no thoughts which belong not to you; that my energies, arms, mind, every thing in me, is subject to you; that my spirit lives in your body; that the day when you will be inconstant or when you will cease to live, will be the day of my death, and that nature and earth are beautiful to my eyes only because you live in them.  If you do not believe all this, if your soul is not convinced of it, penetrated with it, then I am deceived in you, then you love me no more.  A magnetic fluid runs between persons who love one another.  You know that I could never see, much less could I endure, a lover:  to see him and to tear his heart would be one and the same thing; and then I might even lay hands on your sacred person. ... no, I would never dare do it, but I would fly from a world where those I deem the most virtuous have deceived me.

“But I am certain of your love, and proud of it.  Accidents are probations which keep alive all the energies of our mutual affections.  My adored one, you will give birth to a child resembling his mother; it will pass many years in your arms.  Unfortunate that I am, I would be satisfied with one day!  A thousand kisses on your eyes and lips! .... adored wife, how mighty is your spell!  I am ill on account of your illness.  I have a burning fever.  Retain the courier no longer than six hours; then let him return, that he may bring me a letter from my sovereign.  N. B.”

These were the first letters which Josephine received from her loving, tender husband.  They are a splendid monument of affection with which love adorns the solitary grave of the departed empress; and surely in the dark hours of her life, the remembrance of these days of happiness, of these letters so full of passionate ardor, must have alleviated the bitterness of her grief and given her the consolation that at least she was once loved as perhaps no other woman on earth can boast!  All these letters of Bonaparte, during the days of his first prosperity, and of his earnest cravings, Josephine had carefully gathered; they were to be, amid the precious and costly treasures which the future was to lay at her feet, the most glorious and most prized, and which she preserved with sacred loyalty as long as she lived.