This is the reason that, out of all the letters which Bonaparte wrote to Josephine during long years, not one is lost; that there is no gap in the correspondence, and that we can with complete certainty, from week to week and year to year, follow the relations which existed between them, and that the thermometer can be placed on Bonaparte’s heart to observe how by degrees the heat diminishes, the warmth of passion disappears into the cool temperature of a quiet friendship, and how it never sinks to cold indifference, even when Josephine had to yield to the young and proud daughter of Austria, and give up her place at the side of the emperor.

Of all the letters of Josephine to Bonaparte, which were now so glowing that they seemed to devour him with flames of fire and bewildered his senses, and then so cold and indifferent that they caused the chill of death to pass over his frame—­of all these, not one has been preserved to posterity.  Perhaps the Emperor Napoleon destroyed them; when in the Tuileries he received Josephine’s successor, his second wife, and when he endeavored to destroy in his own proud heart the memory of the beautiful, happy past, he there destroyed those letters, that they might return to dust, even as his own love had returned.

CHAPTER XXV.

Josephine in Italy.

Bonaparte’s letter, which the courier brought to Josephine, found her recovered, and ready to follow her husband’s call, and go to Milan.  But she was deprived of one precious and joyous hope:  the child, which Bonaparte so much envied because it would pass many years in Josephine’s arms, was never to be born.

In the last days of the month of June Josephine arrived in Milan.  Her whole journey had been one uninterrupted triumph.  In Turin, at the court of the King of Sardinia, she had received the homage of the people as if she were the wife of a mighty ruler; and wherever she went, she was received with honors and distinction.  To Turin Bonaparte had sent before him one of his adjutants, General Marmont, afterward Duke de Ragusa, to convey to her his kindest regards and to accompany her with a military escort as far as Milan.  In the palace de Serbelloni, his residence in Milan, adorned as for a feast, Bonaparte received her with a countenance radiant with joy and happy smiles such as seldom brightened his pale, gloomy features.

But Bonaparte had neither much time nor leisure to devote to his domestic happiness, to his long-expected reunion with Josephine.  Only three days could the happy lover obtain from the restless commander; then he had to tear himself away from his sweet repose, to carry on further the deadly strife which he had begun in Italy against Austria—­which had decided not to give away one foot of Lombardy without a struggle—­and not to submit to the conqueror of Lodi.  A new army was marched into Italy under the command of General Wurmser, the same against whom, three years before, on the shores of the Rhine, Alexandre de Beauharnais had fought in vain.  At the head of sixty thousand men Wurmser moved into Italy to relieve Mantua, besieged by the French.