Bonaparte received this news with the lofty composure of an emperor who finds it quite natural that the whole world should bow to his wishes, and Josephine received it with the modesty and joyous humility of a pious Christian.  She desired above all things the blessing of God and of the Church to rest upon this crown, whose possession had seemed to her until now a spoliation, a sacrilege, and about which her conscience so often reproached her.  But when God’s vicegerent, when the Holy Father of Christendom should himself have blessed her husband’s crown, and should have made fast on Josephine’s brow the imperial diadem, then all blame was removed, then the empress could hope that Heaven’s blessing would accompany the new emperor and his wife!

But was it really Napoleon’s wish that Josephine should take part in this grand ceremony of coronation?  Did he wish that, like him, she should receive from the hands of the pope the consecrated crown?

Such was the deep, important question which occupied, at the approaching arrival of the pope, the young imperial court; a question, too, which occupied Josephine’s mind, and also the whole family, and more especially the sisters of Bonaparte.

Josephine naturally desired that it should be so, for this solemn coronation would be a new bond uniting her to her husband, a new guaranty against the evil which the empress’s foreboding spirit still dreaded.  But for the very same reasons her enemies prepared their weapons to prevent Josephine from obtaining this new consecration and this new glory, and harsh and bitter conflicts took place within the inner circles of the imperial family on account of it, which on both sides were carried on with the deepest animosity and obstinacy, but finally to a complete triumph for Josephine.

Thiers, in his “History of the Consulate and of the Empire,” relates the last scenes in this family quarrel: 

“Napoleon vacillated between his affection for his wife and the secret presentiments of his policy, when an occurrence took place which nearly caused the sudden ruin of the unfortunate Josephine.  Every one was in a state of agitation about the new monarch—­ brothers, sisters, and allies!  In the solemnity which seemed to give to each a blessing, all desired to perform parts adequate to their actual pretensions, and to their hopes of the future.  At the sight of this restlessness, and witnessing the pretensions and claims to which Napoleon was exposed from one of his sisters, Josephine, carried away by anxiety and jealousy, gave utterance to an insulting suspicion against his sister and against Napoleon, a suspicion which agreed with the most bitter calumnies of the royalist emigrants.  Napoleon grew violently angry, and, as his wrath mastered his better feelings, he declared to Josephine that he wanted to be divorced from her; that he would have to be, sooner or later, and that it was therefore better to announce it on the spot, before other bonds should unite them still