How Josephine strove to silence these agonizing whisperings of her heart!  With what restlessness of sorrow she rushed into the gayeties and amusements of a court life!  How she sought, in charitable occupations, in the joys of society, in every thing which was congruous to the life of a woman, of an empress, to obtain the forgetfulness of her torments!  With what envious attention she listened to the whispers of courtiers, scrutinized their features, read their looks, to find out if they still believed in the existence of an empress in the wife of Napoleon!  With what jealous solicitude she observed all the families on European thrones, and considered what princesses among them were marriageable, and whether Napoleon’s relations with the fathers of such princesses were more intimate than those with the other princes!

And then she ever sought to deafen this vigilant, warning voice, by comforting herself with the thought that the emperor had adopted his brother’s son, the son of Hortense, and that he had made him his heir, and consequently the throne and the dynasty were secure in a successor.

But alas!  Fate would not leave this last comfort to the unfortunate empress.  In May of the year 1807, Prince Napoleon, the crown prince of Holland, Napoleon’s adopted son and successor, died of a child’s disease, which in a few days tore him away from the arms of his despairing mother.

Josephine’s anguish was boundless, and in the first hours of this misfortune, which with such annihilating force fell upon her, the empress, as if in a state of hallucination, gazed into the future, and, with prophetic voice, exclaimed:  “Now I am lost!  Now is divorce certain!”

Yes, she was lost!  She felt it, she knew it!  Nothing the emperor did to pacify her anguish—­the numerous expressions of his love, of his sympathy, of his winning affection—­nothing could any longer deceive Josephine.  The voices which had so long whispered in her breast now cried aloud:  “You must give place to another!  Napoleon will reject you, so as to have a son!”

But the emperor seemed still to try to dispel these fears, and, to give to his Josephine a new proof of his love and faithfulness, he chose Eugene de Beauharnais, the son of Josephine, for his adopted heir, and named him Vice-King of Italy, and gave him in marriage the daughter of the King of Bavaria; he thus afforded to Europe the proof that he still considered Josephine as his wife, and that he desired to be shown to her all the respect due to her dignity, for he travelled to Munich in company with her in order to be present at the nuptials.

This journey to attend her son’s marriage was the last pleasure of Josephine—­her last days of honors and happiness.  Once more she saw herself surrounded by all the splendor and the pomp of her rank; once more she was publicly honored and admired as the wife of the first and greatest ruler of the world, the wife of the Emperor Napoleon.