Hortense’s marriage was, of course, an important question with the Bonapartes, and various suitors had been considered. The girl herself was not ambitious. Neither wealth nor station obscured her judgment. She wanted to marry for love, she declared. At one time she had a strong feeling for Duroc, and Napoleon favored the marriage strongly. Duroc was of good family and a brave soldier, and Hortense loved him; what better? Josephine opposed it. She had set her heart on Louis Bonaparte, in spite of the fact that Hortense felt something like an antipathy to the young man. Louis himself did not take to the marriage at first. He had imbibed from his mother and brothers the idea that the Beauharnais were the natural enemies of the Bonapartes, and a marriage with Hortense they all declared, would be disloyal. However, in September, 1801, when Louis returned to Paris after several months absence and saw Hortense at a ball, he was so impressed by her charm that he yielded at once to Josephine’s wishes, and asked for her hand. Napoleon consented with a little regret; Hortense obeyed as a matter of duty, urged to it as she was both by her mother and Mme. Campan. The marriage took place early in January, 1802. It was a victory for Josephine over the Bonapartes, so her friends said, and so the Bonapartes felt bitterly. But, alas, it was a victory for which Hortense paid the price. Before the end of the year, it was evident that Mme. Louis Bonaparte was very unhappy; her husband was jealous and exacting, and constantly tried to turn her against her mother in the family feud. Not even the birth of a son, in October, silenced his grievances for long, though to Napoleon and to Josephine the coming of the little Napoleon-Charles, as he was named, was an inexpressible joy. To Josephine the child was a new support to her position, a new reason why a succession could be established without divorcing her and re-marrying. It was a succession through her, too, since this was her daughter’s child.
Napoleon himself soon became more devoted to the child than its father ever was. In a way, his own ardent desire for fatherhood was satisfied by the presence of the baby, which he kept by him as much as he could, riding it on his back, trotting it on his foot, rolling with it on the floor, lying beside it at night until it slept—a touching proof of this extraordinary man’s passion to possess a love which was faithful and disinterested. As time went on and the question of the succession came into the senate, the struggle between the brothers as to how the heredity should be regulated reached its climax. Napoleon determined to adopt Hortense’s child and make him his heir. Joseph, Lucien, and Louis himself refused to resign what they called their rights, and each had important supporters in his position. Lucien, in the struggle, broke entirely with Napoleon.
But if the succession was to be settled to Josephine’s satisfaction, there were other matters which worried her at the beginning of the life Consulate. Chief among these was that Napoleon insisted upon leaving Malmaison for St. Cloud. Josephine’s interest in the former place was so great, her life there had been so happy, that she was violently opposed to any change. St. Cloud was too large; it smacked too much of royalty, the idea of which was awaking such vague alarms in her mind; its associations were too sad. But her opposition availed nothing whatever. Bonaparte felt that a larger residence was necessary. Malmaison was a private home, St. Cloud belonged to the State, and he, as the head of the State, wished to occupy its palaces. They had no sooner taken St. Cloud than their whole mode of life changed; the simple, informal ways of Malmaison were laid aside, and a rigid etiquette adopted. There is a governor of the palace, there are prefects of the palace, there are ladies of the palace. Josephine and Napoleon no longer receive everybody of the household at their table, but eat alone, inviting, two or three times a week, those persons whom they may care particularly to distinguish. The ladies and gentlemen belonging to the palace have tables of their own quite apart. There is a military household annexed to St. Cloud, with four generals and a large guard, an elaborate suite which accompanies the First Consul when he goes forth. Every Sunday, a great crowd of dignitaries—senators, cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, everybody of note in Paris—flock to the First Consul’s receptions. After paying their respects to him, they pass into the apartment of Madame Bonaparte. It is the former apartment of Marie Antoinette, and that Queen herself did not receive in more state than the wife of the First Consul. It is the same at the services in the chapel, which are held every Sunday, and which Bonaparte insists everybody shall attend. At the theatre of the palace, where the little plays which they so much enjoyed at Malmaison are still repeated, there is the same increase of etiquette. Josephine and Bonaparte no longer are seated with their friends, but occupy a loge apart; and when they enter, the whole assembly rises and salutes. People are there by invitation, too, and no one pretends to applaud unless the signal is given by the First Consul.
Day by day Josephine bemoaned this new departure; and as hostile criticisms and sneers reached her, she set her face against the changes. Her protests were useless: “Josephine, you are tiresome—you know nothing about these things,” Napoleon finally told her, and Fouché, her friend, finally silenced her by his cynical advice. “Be quiet, Madame; you annoy your husband uselessly. He will be Consul for life, King or Emperor, all that he can be. Your fears disturb him; your advice would wound him. Keep your proper place, and let the events which neither you nor I know how to prevent work out.”
She did accept, and took her part. If it was true that Napoleon was going to make himself Emperor, she must, before all, so conduct herself that he would prefer her on the throne at his side to all the world. As the weeks went on and it became evident that an Empire would soon be proclaimed, Josephine had increasing need of discretion. The Bonaparte family had set themselves again to prevent the succession going to a Beauharnais. Josephine should be divorced, they said; Eugène, to whom Napoleon was greatly attached, should be sent off with his mother. As for his adopting little Napoleon-Charles, the child of Hortense, neither Joseph nor Louis, the father, would hear to it. “Why should I give up to my son a part of your succession?” said Louis to his brother. “What have I done that I should be disinherited? What will be my place when this child has become yours and finds himself in a position far superior to mine, independent of me, outranking me, looking upon me with suspicion and perhaps with contempt? No, I will never consent to it, and rather than consent to bow my head before my son I will leave France; I will take Napoleon away with me, and we will see if you will dare to steal a child from his father.”
Napoleon’s sisters, particularly Caroline, Mme. Murat, were no less determined than the brothers to secure all the advantages possible from his glory. In their eagerness, they showed such envy and bitterness that Napoleon was deeply disgusted, and gave them no satisfaction as to his intentions. He even took some pains to tease them. One day when the family were together and he was playing with little Napoleon, he said, “Do you know, little one, that you are in danger of being King one of these days?”
“And Achille?” Murat exclaimed, referring to his own son.
“Oh, Achille will make a good soldier,” answered Napoleon laughing, and when he saw the black looks of both Caroline and Murat, he added: “At all events, my poor little one, I advise you, if you want to live, to accept no meals that your cousins offer you.”
In spite of all the plotting and protesting of the Bonapartes, Josephine was proclaimed Empress, and the law of succession was passed as it pleased Napoleon:—“The French people desire the inheritance of the Imperial dignity in the direct natural or adoptive line of descent from Napoleon Bonaparte and in the direct natural, legitimate line of descent from Joseph Bonaparte and from Louis Bonaparte.” Napoleon was free to adopt either Eugène or Napoleon-Charles and make him his heir. The law mentioned neither Joseph nor Louis as heir. Josephine’s victory in this instance was as much due to the fact that she had made no protests about the succession and had asked nothing, as to anything else. Her seeming confidence (as a matter of fact, she feared the worst for herself) and her generous pleasure in the satisfaction those about took in their new honors offered such a contrast to the jealousy and faultfinding of the Bonapartes that Napoleon felt more and more, as he had often said to her in family quarrels: “You are my only comfort, Josephine.” Not only Josephine, but Hortense and Eugène showed themselves in all this period wise and generous. The two latter apparently felt sincerely that Napoleon did more for them than they had a right to expect. The gratitude and disinterestedness they showed was indeed one of the few real satisfactions of Napoleon’s life, for he seems to have believed always that they were genuine, something he never felt about the expressions of his own family.
Not only was the law of succession fixed to Josephine’s satisfaction; but to her unspeakable joy, Napoleon finally told her that she was to be crowned at the same time as he. In the new government she had no political rights, but in this supreme ceremony she should share. Here again it may have been as much family opposition as love for Josephine and desire to associate her with himself in this greatest of royal spectacles that finally led Napoleon to this decision. Just as before the proclamation of the Empire the Bonapartes quarreled about the succession, now they tormented the Emperor about their positions and their privileges. “One would think,” he said testily one day to Caroline, when she was upbraiding him for not according to his sisters the honors due them, “that I had robbed you of the inheritance of the late King, our father.” Joseph did not hesitate to say sarcastic things, even in official gatherings, about the impropriety of crowning a woman who had given her husband no successor. Napoleon stood it for some time, and finally in a violent outburst of passion silenced him at least for the time. The announcement that Josephine was to be crowned, and that her sisters-in-law were to carry the train of her robe, caused still further heart-burnings, but the fiat had gone forth and everybody finally submitted.