Napoleon, overcome by all this misfortune and treachery which fell upon him, did what they required of him.  He abdicated in favor of his son, and left Paris, left France, to go to the small island of Elba, there to dream of the days which had been and of the days which were coming, when be would regain his glory and his emperor’s crown.

Amid the agonies, cares, and humiliations of his present situation, Napoleon thought of the woman whom he had once named the “angel of his happiness,” and who he well knew would readily and gladly be the angel of his misfortune.  Before leaving Fontainebleau to retire to the island of Elba, Napoleon wrote to Josephine a farewell letter, telling her of the fate reserved for him, and assuring her of his never-ending friendship and affection.  He sent this letter to the castle of Navarra by M. de Maussion, and the messenger of evil tidings arrived there in the middle of the night.

Josephine had given orders that she should be awakened as soon as any one brought news for her.  She immediately arose from her bed, threw a mantle over her shoulders, and bade M. de Maussion come in.

“Does the emperor live?” cried she, as he approached.  “Only answer me this:  does the emperor live?”

Then, when she had received this assurance, after reading Napoleon’s letter, and learning all the sad, humiliating news, pale, and trembling in all her limbs, she hastened to her daughter Hortense.

“Ah, Hortense,” exclaimed she, overcome and falling into an arm-chair near her daughter’s bed, “ah, Hortense, the unfortunate Napoleon!  They are sending him to the island of Elba!  Now he is unhappy, abandoned, and I am not near him!  Were I not his wife I would go to him and exile myself with him!  Oh, why cannot I be with him?” [Footnote:  Mlle. Cochelet, “Memoires,” vol. ii.]

But she dared not!  Napoleon, knowing her heart and her love, had commissioned the Duke de Bassano expressly to tell the Empress Josephine to make no attempt to follow him, and “to respect the rights of another.”

This other, however, had not been pleased to claim the right which Josephine was to respect.  Napoleon left Fontainebleau on the 21st of April, 1814, to go to the island of Elba.  It was his wish to meet there his wife and his son.  But Maria Louisa did not come; she did not obey her husband’s call; she descended from the imperial throne, and was satisfied to be again an archduchess of Austria, and to see the little King of Rome dispossessed of country, rank, father, and even name.  The poor little Napoleon was now called Frank—­he was but the son of the Archduchess Maria Louisa; he dared not ask for his father, and yet memory ever and ever re-echoed through his heart the sounds of other days; this memory caused the death of the Duke de Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon.

Napoleon had gone to Elba, and there he waited in vain for Maria Louisa, to fill whose place Josephine would have gladly poured her heart’s blood.