Bonaparte listened to her with a smile, and generally in silence.  Once only he replied to her:  “Has not your prophetess in Martinique told you that one day you would be more than a queen?”

“And the prophecy is already realized,” exclaimed Josephine.  “The wife of the consul for life is more than a queen, for her husband is the elect of thirty millions of hearts!” Bonaparte laughed, and said nothing.

Another time Josephine asked him—­“Now, Bonaparte, when are you going to make me Empress of the Gauls?”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “What an idea,” said he; “the little Josephine an empress!”

Josephine answered him with the words of Corneille—­“’Le premier qui fut roi fut un soldat heureux’” (the first king was a successful soldier); and she added, “The wife of this fortunate soldier shares his rank.”

He placed his small, white hand, adorned with rings, under her chin, and gazed at her with a deep, strange look.

“Now, Josephine,” said he, after a short pause, “your successful soldier is only, for the present, consul for life, and you are sharing his rank.  Be careful, then, that the wife of the first consul surrounds herself with all the brilliancy and the pomp which beseem her dignity.  No more economy, no more modest simplicity!  The industry of France is at a low ebb—­we must make it rise.  We must give receptions; we must prove to France that the court of a consul can be as splendid as that of a king.  You understand what pomp is—­ none better than you!  Now show yourself brilliant, magnificent, so that the other ladies may imitate you.  But, no foreign stuffs!  Silk and velvet from the fabrics of Lyons!”

“Yes,” said Josephine, with charming tenderness, “and when afterward my bills become due, you cut them down—­you find them too high.”

“I only cut down what is too exorbitant,” said Bonaparte, laughing.  “I have no objection for you to give to the manufacturers any amount of work and profit, but I do not wish them to cheat you.” [Footnote:  Abrantes, “Memoires” vol. iv.]

Henceforth, the consulate began gradually to exhibit a splendor and pomp which were behind no princely court, and which relegated, amid the dark legends of the fabulous past, the fraternity and the equality of the republic.  The absence of pretension, and the simplicity of Malmaison, were now done away with; everywhere the consul for life was followed by the splendors of his dignity, and everywhere Josephine was accompanied by her court.

For now she had a court, and an anteroom, with all its intrigues and flatteries; and its conspiracies already wove their chains around the consul and his wife.  It was not suddenly, it was not spontaneously, that this court of the first consul was formed; two years were required for its organization—­two years of unceasing labor on the new code of regulations, which etiquette dictated from the remembrances of the past to the palace-officers of the Consul Bonaparte.