A few days after Josephine’s arrival at Navarre, Hortense joined her, and there the two learned of Napoleon’s abdication and of the return of the Bourbons. After the first paroxysm of grief was over, they began planning for the future. Hortense would go to America, with her children, she declared. There she could rear them so that they would be fit for any future. But Josephine was not for renouncing her position. She began to write feverishly in every direction, apparently hoping to interest her friends in saving something for her in the general overthrow. The allies had no disposition, however, to take from Josephine either her rank or all her income. The Emperor Alexander, who was the real umpire of the game, believed it wise to look after the material interests of the Bonaparte family, and in the treaty arranged that Josephine should have an annual income of 1,000,000 francs and that she should keep all of her property, disposing of it as she pleased. Alexander showed a strong desire to win Josephine’s favor, in fact. Learning that she was at Navarre, he invited her to Malmaison, giving her every assurance that she would be safe there. Before the end of April, she came with Hortense, and here Eugene joined them. Alexander soon came to Malmaison to see the Empress. His attentions to her set the vogue for the court, and repeated assurances came from all sides to Josephine that her position and that of her children was safe with the new régime. But Josephine could not believe it so. Her days and nights were full of foreboding—of laments over the fate of the Emperor. One day, after dining with Alexander at the Chateau of St. Leu, she returned to her room in complete collapse.
“I cannot overcome the frightful sadness which has taken possession of me,” she said. “I make every effort to conceal it from my children, but only suffer the more. I am beginning to lose my courage. The Emperor of Russia has certainly shown great regard and affection for us, but it is nothing but words. What will he decide to do with my son, my daughter and her children? Is he not in a position to do something for them? Do you know what will happen when he has gone away? Nothing he has promised will be carried out. I shall see my children unhappy, and I cannot endure the idea; it causes me the most dreadful suffering. I am suffering enough already on account of the fate of the Emperor Napoleon, stripped of all his greatness, sent into an island far from France, abandoned. Must I, besides this, see my children wanderers? Stripped of fortune? It seems to me this idea is going to kill me.... Is it Austria who opposes my son’s advancement? Is it the Bourbons? Certainly they are under obligations enough to me to be willing to pay them by helping my children. Have I not been good to all of their party in their misfortunes? To be sure, I never imagined they would come back to France; nevertheless, it pleased me to be their friend; they were Frenchmen, they were suffering, they were former acquaintances, and the position of those princes that I had seen in their youth touched my heart. Did I not ask Bonaparte twenty times to let the Duchess of Orleans and the Duchess of Bourbon come back? It was through me that he succored them in their distress, that he allowed them a pension which they received in a foreign country.”
The attention paid her by the allies seemed to leave no ground for any of these anxieties. The King of Prussia and his sons, the grand-dukes of Russia, every great man in Paris, in fact, sought Josephine repeatedly. She distrusted it all, and one moment wept over the fate of herself and children; the next over Napoleon alone on his island—repeatedly she declared she would join him if she did not fear it would cause a misunderstanding between him and Marie Louise, and so prevent the latter from going to Elba, as Josephine thought she ought to do. In her nervous state she searched for signs of the neglect and discourtesy which she believed were in store for her. She planned to sell her jewels. Everyone in the household became thoroughly disturbed over her condition. “My mother is courageous and amiable, when she is receiving,” Hortense said one day; “but as soon as she is alone, she gives up to a grief which is my despair. I am afraid that the misfortunes which have fallen upon us have affected her too deeply and that her health will never reassert itself.”
Josephine was in this nervous condition when she took a severe cold, and on May 25th her condition was so serious that the best physicians of Paris were summoned. The Emperor of Russia sent his private physician, and went himself frequently to Malmaison. Everything that could be done was done, but poor Josephine’s power of resistance was at an end. Restlessly tossing hour after hour on her pillow, murmuring at intervals—“Bonaparte”—“Elba”—“Marie Louise”—she lay for four days. On the morning of the 29th, it was evident to Hortense and Eugene, evident to Josephine herself, that she could not live long. The priest was summoned, and alone with him she confessed for the last time, while in the chapel below her children knelt and listened to the mass said for their mother. After the confession, the members of the household gathered about her bed while the sacrament was administered. A few moments after the last words of the solemn service were said, the Empress was pronounced dead.
The news of the death of Josephine produced a profound impression in Paris. She had died of grief, they said, grief at Napoleon’s downfall. Even those who had no sympathy for her in life were moved by the tragic circumstances of her end and hastened to pay a last tribute to her memory. For three days the body of the Empress lay on a catafalque in the vestibule of the chateau at Malmaison, and in that time over 20,000 persons looked upon it.
At the funeral, which took place on June 2nd, in the little church at Reuil, near Malmaison, royal honors were accorded Josephine; though the really touching feature of the procession and service was the presence of hundreds of people—soldiers, peasants, old men, children—who came to pay the only tribute possible to them to the “good Josephine,” the “Star” of the Emperor.
The Empress still lies in the little church at Reuil, where she was laid eighty-six years ago, and her grave and the Chateau of Malmaison have remained until to-day, places of pilgrimage for those who knew and loved her in life as well as for many thousands whose hearts have been touched by the melancholy story of her life of adventure, glory, and sorrow. In June, 1815, before departing for Waterloo, Napoleon visited the chateau. Hortense, who had not been there since her mother’s death, received him. For an hour he walked in the park talking of Josephine; then he went over the chateau, looking at every room, at almost every article of furniture. At the door of the room where Josephine had died, it is told that he stopped and said to Hortense, “My daughter, I wish to go in alone.” When he came out his eyes were wet.
Scarcely more than two weeks later he returned to Malmaison. Defeated at Waterloo, he was an outcast unless France rallied to him. That the country could not do. It was thus from the home of Josephine that Napoleon went into captivity.