Much of this censure was well deserved by all of them—­by Caroline and Elise and Pauline.  But when we look at the facts impartially we shall find something which makes Pauline stand out alone as infinitely superior to her sisters.  Of all the Bonapartes she was the only one who showed fidelity and gratitude to the great emperor, her brother.  Even Mme. Mere, Napoleon’s mother, who beyond all question transmitted to him his great mental and physical power, did nothing for him.  At the height of his splendor she hoarded sous and francs and grumblingly remarked: 

“All this is for a time.  It isn’t going to last!”

Pauline, however, was in one respect different from all her kindred.  Napoleon made Elise a princess in her own right and gave her the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.  He married Caroline to Marshal Murat, and they became respectively King and Queen of Naples.  For Pauline he did very little—­less, in fact, than for any other member of his family—­and yet she alone stood by him to the end.

This feather-headed, languishing, beautiful, distracting morsel of frivolity, who had the manners of a kitten and the morals of a cat, nevertheless was not wholly unworthy to be Napoleon’s sister.  One has to tell many hard things of her; and yet one almost pardons her because of her underlying devotion to the man who made the name of Bonaparte illustrious for ever.  Caroline, Queen of Naples, urged her husband to turn against his former chief.  Elise, sour and greedy, threw in her fortunes with the Murats.  Pauline, as we shall see, had the one redeeming trait of gratitude.

To those who knew her she was from girlhood an incarnation of what used to be called “femininity.”  We have to-day another and a higher definition of womanhood, but to her contemporaries, and to many modern writers, she has seemed to be first of all woman—­ “woman to the tips of her rosy finger-nails,” says Levy.  Those who saw her were distracted by her loveliness.  They say that no one can form any idea of her beauty from her pictures.  “A veritable masterpiece of creation,” she had been called.  Frederic Masson declares: 

She was so much more the typical woman that with her the defects common to women reached their highest development, while her beauty attained a perfection which may justly be called unique.

No one speaks of Pauline Bonaparte’s character or of her intellect, but wholly of her loveliness and charm, and, it must be added, of her utter lack of anything like a moral sense.

Even as a child of thirteen, when the Bonapartes left Corsica and took up their abode in Marseilles, she attracted universal attention by her wonderful eyes, her grace, and also by the utter lack of decorum which she showed.  The Bonaparte girls at this time lived almost on charity.  The future emperor was then a captain of artillery and could give them but little out of his scanty pay.