The day before yesterday I was out the whole day. Yesterday I kept my bed. Fever and a racking headache both prevented me writing to my beloved; but I got your letters. I have pressed them to my heart and lips, and the grief of a hundred miles of separation has disappeared. At the present moment I can see you by my side, not capricious and out of humour, but gentle, affectionate, with that mellifluent kindness of which my Josephine is the sole proprietor. It was a dream, judge if it has cured my fever. Your letters are as cold as if you were fifty; we might have been married fifteen years. One finds in them the friendship and feelings of that winter of life. Fie! Josephine. It is very naughty, very unkind, very undutiful of you. What more can you do to make me indeed an object for compassion? Love me no longer? Eh, that is already accomplished! Hate me? Well, I prefer that! Everything grows stale except ill-will; but indifference, with its marble pulse, its rigid stare, its monotonous demeanour!...
A thousand thousand very heartfelt kisses.
I am rather better. I start to-morrow. The English evacuate the Mediterranean. Corsica is ours. Good news for France, and for the army.
Bonaparte.
October 25th.—(Moreau recrosses the Rhine.)
November 1st.—Advance of Marshal Alvinzi. Vaubois defeated by Davidovich on November 5th, after two days' fight.
November 6th.—Napoleon successful, but Vaubois' defeat compels the French army to return to Verona.
No. 14.
To Josephine, at Milan.