Josephine had played her part in the drama with surprising shrewdness and marked devotion to her husband's cause. He was rewarded by being made First Consul, and she by becoming the first lady of the Republic and the leader of society. They quickly availed themselves of the distinction by removing from their humble habitation, first to the Petit Luxembourg and then to the Tuileries, where she occupied the bedroom of the famous Marie Antoinette and the apartments formerly inhabited by Louis, which were immediately above. They gathered round them men of merit representing science, art, literature, law, politics, military notables, and fashion. They set up, in fact, a little Court, but lived a quiet, unostentatious life, so far as it was diplomatic and permissive.
It was not until the advent of the Empire that gaiety and grandeur began, excelling and putting into the shade every other Court in Europe. Josephine wallowed in it, but Napoleon adopted and encouraged it more from policy than taste. In fact, when in a whimsical mood, he often said it bored him. That is not to say that he did not adapt himself to what he believed was a necessity. An Oriental potentate could not have carried the dignity of splendour more naturally than he. Whilst in his secret heart he loathed its pomp and extravagance, fixed in his memory was the impression of poverty and suffering that he had passed through in his boyhood days, when, in the streets of Paris, he was on the verge of starvation and at one time obliged to sell his meagre possession of books to find food for the mouth of his brother Louis, and went without himself. To his intimate friends he was accustomed to relate the story, not in a whining manner, but with a vividness and pathos that brought tears to the eyes of every one who heard it.
The wilful and false conception of Napoleon's character that existed amongst thousands of those who were contemporary with him, and the persistent efforts to defame him, even now, by a section of the world's community, are extraordinary, when so many convincing proofs are available which show him to have been the reverse of what they say he was. As brother, son, husband, father, or friend, his love, devotion, and loyalty were matchless. He was never once known to upbraid Josephine after the condonement of her infidelities. He paid her colossal debts, not without protest, but rather than make her unhappy he excused her extravagance and overlooked the capricious, peevish way in which she gave her domestic confidences concerning himself to her friends, who were oft-times his enemies, and so forgiving was he of faults which were so glaring to others, that he frequently caressed when he should have chastised.
Josephine played upon his purblindness where she was concerned in most scandalous ways. She had no money sense, and combined with this defect she had no moral sense in money matters. Her debts were chronic, and periodically so enlarged that she adopted the most monstrous methods to reduce them before the balances were put before Napoleon by herself, or an inkling conveyed to him by a wily creditor; but these subterfuges only added to her spending resources. It is said that she actually did not shrink from receiving a thousand francs per day from Fouché as the price of information given him of what was going on in the Tuileries, and also that she received half a million francs from Flachats, the predatory army contractors.
It is unthinkable that Napoleon, whose rigid uprightness in matters of money has never been disputed, could have known that his wife was involved in such shocking financial dealings, or he would have taken salutary measures to put a definite end to them. He knew that he was surrounded by men who were inveterate thieves, and when their defalcations were brought to his knowledge, they were either cashiered or made to disgorge. Bourrienne, Talleyrand, and Fouché, for instance. But there is no evidence to show that he ever suspected Josephine at any time, and let us hope that the Fouché-Flachats transactions were either exaggerated or mere invention, though it is hard to believe that there was no truth in the accusation.
Napoleon was no sooner made Consul than there began to be hints and innuendoes of an heir, and as Josephine knew that she could not bear him one, she was thrown into fits of despondency lest he should be driven by designing persons in and outside his family to listen to a scheme of divorce and remarriage. The alternative was to nominate one of his brothers as his heir. Joseph and Lucien were impossible, so he fixed his mind on Louis. But the plot to assassinate him on the way to the opera, together with the Duc d'Enghien, Cadoudal, Moreau, and Pichegru affair, brought the change from Life Consul to Emperor more quickly. The marriage of Louis to Hortense eased Josephine's mind. She had in view the fact that an heir might be born to them, and the possibility of the inheritance going to him. In due course Napoleon Charles was born, and an attempt made by Napoleon to carry his idea out. Louis was at first in favour of it, but Joseph and Lucien had envious conceptions of what the brothers' rights were. Louis became impressed with their views, and ultimately decided against Napoleon's wishes. The Senate passed a resolution in favour of "direct natural, legitimate, and adoptive descendants of Napoleon Bonaparte, and on the direct, natural, legitimate descendants of Joseph and Louis." The plebiscite supported the resolution of the Senate, and Joseph and Louis had the mortification of seeing that to them the succession was barred.
This decision was regarded by Josephine as highly satisfactory to herself. She made no fuss about it, but was greatly overjoyed at the prospect of the effect it would have on Napoleon, and for a time no more was openly heard of divorce; but the venom was insidiously eating its way to that end all the same, and as he grew in power, so did the conspiracy develop. His own family were eager that she should be put away, but there were influences more powerful than that of Madame Mère and her sons and daughters. Talleyrand and Fouché being the High Commissioners who founded the direct hereditary idea, they persistently worried him with the plea that the State claimed that he should make the sacrifice. They knew that this was the strongest and most effective reason they could put forward to a man who would have given his soul in the service of his country.
The birth of Madame Eleonore Denuelle's son Leon on December 29, 1806, made a great impression on the Emperor's mind. It was well known that he was the father of the child, and now that there was no doubt as to the possibility of him having an heir, it was only to be expected that the advocates of divorce would press their claim that an alliance should be made with one of the powerful ruling families. The advantages to France would be inestimable, and would it not establish himself and his dynasty more firmly on the throne? It is not unlikely that Napoleon pondered over the great possibilities of such a marriage, but he could not bring himself to the thought of divorcing the woman he still loved. He went so far as to seek Josephine's support in the plan of making his natural son his heir, and Masson says that in support of his desire he vigorously used "precedents and invented justifications." Happily he did not stretch the law of hereditary succession further than this.
Leon, when he grew up, became a great source of trouble to all those with whom he was connected. His features and physical make up had a marked resemblance to his father's, but his mind was erratic. He had inherited none of the steady, sane genius of the Emperor, though but for a freak of nature which gave him a mental twist, he would have been as near his prototype as may be. He was always full of great schemes, which in the hands of a normally constituted person would have been fashioned into public usefulness.
Masson gives a vivid and somewhat categorical account of his predilections, which were "gambling, duels, politics, writing pamphlets, the conception of colossal canal, railway, and commercial undertakings that never got far beyond the initial and rocky mental stage." He was one of the chief mourners when his father's remains were brought to Paris from St. Helena in 1840, and in 1848 aspired to the Presidency of the Republic, which fell to the lot of his cousin Louis Napoleon, whose life he desired to take, but who, with great generosity, gave him a pension and paid the legacy left him by Napoleon. He died in 1881.