Whilst Bonaparte was pursuing and engaging with Wurmser and Alvinzi in bloody hostilities, and writing to Josephine tender and angry letters of a lover ever jealous, ever dissatisfied and envious, Josephine was leading in Milan a life full of pleasure and amusement, full of splendor and triumphs, of receptions and festivities. Every new victory, every onward movement, was for the inhabitants of Milan, and her proud and rich nobles, a fresh and welcome occasion to celebrate and glorify the wife of General Bonaparte, and, through her, the hero who was to take away from their necks the yoke of the Austrian, and who suspected not that he was so soon to place upon them another yoke.
Josephine, true to the wishes and commands of Bonaparte, accepted these festivities and this homage with all the affability and grace which distinguished her. She had by degrees become familiar with this ceaseless homage, which at first seemed so wearisome; by degrees she took delight in this life of pleasure, in the incense of adulation, and the brilliancies of fame. All the indolence, the dreamy carelessness, the graceful abandonment of the creole had been again awakened in her. She cradled herself playfully on the lulling, bright waves of pleasure as an insect with golden wings, and she smiled complacently at the stream of encircling festivities.
Bonaparte had told her to use all the arts of a woman to bind the Milanese and the Lombards to herself and to her husband. With her smiles she was to continue the conquest begun by Bonaparte’s sword.
She could not, therefore, live alone in quiet solitude; she could not remain in obscurity while her husband was performing his part on the theatre of war; she could not, by an appearance of gravity, or by a clouded brow, furnish occasion to the suspicion that there existed doubt in the future success of her husband, or in his prosperity and victory.
Roses were to crown her brow—a cheerful smile was to beam on her countenance; with joyous spirit, she was to take part in the festivities and pleasures—that the Milanese might see with what earnest confidence she believed in Napoleon’s star! But Bonaparte, with all the instinct of a genuine lover, had read the deepest secret of her soul; he was envious and jealous, because he felt that Josephine did not belong to him with her whole heart, her whole being, all her emotions and thoughts. Her heart, which had received from the past so many scars and wounds, could not yet have blossomed anew; it had been warmed by the glow of Bonaparte’s love, but it was not yet thoroughly penetrated with that passion which Bonaparte so painfully missed, so intensely craved.
The earnest, unfettered nature of his love intimidated her, while it ravished and flattered her vanity; but her heart was not entirely his, it had yet room for her children, for her friends, for the things of this world!
Josephine loved Bonaparte with that soft, modest, and retiring affection, which only by degrees—by the storms of anguish, jealousy, agony, and the possibility of losing him—was to be fanned into that vitality and glow which never cooled again in her heart, and which at last gave her the death-stroke.
She therefore thought she was fulfilling her task when she, while Bonaparte was fighting with weapons, conquered with smiles, and received the homage of the conquered only as a tribute which they brought through her to the warlike genius of her husband.
Meanwhile Bonaparte had taken vengeance for his defeat at Caldiero. Through a ruse of war, he had decoyed Alvinzi from his safe and impregnable position into one where he could meet him with his army anxious for the fray, and give him battle.
The gigantic struggle lasted three days—and the close of the third day brought to the conqueror, Bonaparte, the laurel-wreath of undying glory, which, more enduring and dazzling than an imperial crown, surrounded with a halo the hero’s brow long after that crown had fallen from it.