But alas! Fate would not leave this last comfort to the unfortunate empress. In May of the year 1807, Prince Napoleon, the crown prince of Holland, Napoleon’s adopted son and successor, died of a child’s disease, which in a few days tore him away from the arms of his despairing mother.
Josephine’s anguish was boundless, and in the first hours of this misfortune, which with such annihilating force fell upon her, the empress, as if in a state of hallucination, gazed into the future, and, with prophetic voice, exclaimed: “Now I am lost! Now is divorce certain!”
Yes, she was lost! She felt it, she knew it! Nothing the emperor did to pacify her anguish—the numerous expressions of his love, of his sympathy, of his winning affection—nothing could any longer deceive Josephine. The voices which had so long whispered in her breast now cried aloud: “You must give place to another! Napoleon will reject you, so as to have a son!”
But the emperor seemed still to try to dispel these fears, and, to give to his Josephine a new proof of his love and faithfulness, he chose Eugene de Beauharnais, the son of Josephine, for his adopted heir, and named him Vice-King of Italy, and gave him in marriage the daughter of the King of Bavaria; he thus afforded to Europe the proof that he still considered Josephine as his wife, and that he desired to be shown to her all the respect due to her dignity, for he travelled to Munich in company with her in order to be present at the nuptials.
This journey to attend her son’s marriage was the last pleasure of Josephine—her last days of honors and happiness. Once more she saw herself surrounded by all the splendor and the pomp of her rank; once more she was publicly honored and admired as the wife of the first and greatest ruler of the world, the wife of the Emperor Napoleon.
Perhaps Josephine, in these hours of happiness, when as empress, wife, and mother, she enjoyed the purest and most sacred pleasure, forgot the sad forebodings and fears of her soul. Perhaps she now believed that, since Napoleon had adopted her Eugene as his son, and had given to this son a wife of royal extraction, Fate would be propitious to her; that the emperor would be satisfied with the son of his choice, and that the future scions of the royal princess would be the heirs of his throne.
But one word of Napoleon frightened her out of this ephemeral security into which happiness had lulled her.
Josephine wept as she bade farewell to her son; she was comfortless when with his young wife Eugene left for Italy. She complained to Napoleon, in justification of her tears, that she should seldom see her son, that now he was lost to his mother’s heart.
The emperor, who at first had endeavored to comfort her felt at last wounded by her sorrow.
“You weep, Josephine,” said he, hastily, “but you have no reasonable motives to do so; you weep simply because you are separated from your son. If already the absence of your children causes you so much sorrow, think then what I must endure! The tenderness which you feel for your children makes me cruelly experience how unhappy it is for me to have none.” [Footnote: Avrillon, “Memoires sur l’Imperatrice Josephine,” vol. i., p. 202.]