She was right, her heart was broken, it would not be healed!  It seemed at first but merely an indisposition which seized the empress, and which obliged her to decline the announced visit of the Emperor Alexander, nothing but a slight inflammation of the neck, accompanied by a little fever.  But the disease increased hour after hour.  On the 27th of May, Josephine was obliged to keep her bed; on the 29th her sufferings in the neck were so serious that she nearly suffocated, and her fever had become so intense that she had but few moments of consciousness.  In her fancy she often called aloud for Napoleon, and the last word which her dying lips uttered was his name.

Josephine died on the 29th of May, 1814.  That love which had illumined her life occasioned her death, and will sanctify her name for ever as with a saintly halo.

She was buried on the 2d of June in the church at Rueil.  It was a solemn funeral procession, to which all the kings and princes assembled in Paris sent their substitutes in their carriages; but the most beautiful mourning procession which followed her to the grave were the tears, the sighs of the poor, the suffering of the unfortunate, for all whom Josephine had been a benefactress, a good angel, and who lost in her a comforter, a mother.

In the church of Rueil, Eugene and Hortense erected a monument to their mother; and when in 1837 Queen Hortense, the mother of the Emperor Napoleon iii., died at Arenenberg, her corpse was, according to her last wishes, brought to Rueil and laid at her mother’s side.  Her son erected there a monument to her; and this son, the grandchild of Josephine, is now the Emperor of the French, Napoleon iii.

Josephine’s sacrifice has been in vain.  Napoleon’s dynasty, for whose sake she sacrificed happiness, love, and a crown, has not been perpetuated through the woman to whom Josephine was sacrificed—­not through Maria Louisa, who gave to France and to the emperor a son, but through the daughter of Josephine, who gave to Napoleon more than a son, her love, her heart, and her life!

Providence is just!  Upon the throne from which the childless empress was rejected, sits now the grandchild of Josephine, and his very existence demonstrates how vain are all man’s calculations and desires, and how like withered leaves they are carried away and tossed about by the breath of destiny!

It was not the emperor’s daughter who perpetuated Napoleon’s dynasty, but the widow of General Beauharnais, Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie.

Josephine, therefore, is avenged in history; she was also avenged in Napoleon’s heart, for he bitterly lamented that he had ever been separated from her.  “I ought not to have allowed myself to be separated from Josephine,” said he, a short time before his death in St. Helena, “no, I ought not to have been divorced from her; that was my misfortune!”

The end