“Does the emperor live?” cried she, as he approached. “Only answer me this: does the emperor live?”
Then, when she had received this assurance, after reading Napoleon’s letter, and learning all the sad, humiliating news, pale, and trembling in all her limbs, she hastened to her daughter Hortense.
“Ah, Hortense,” exclaimed she, overcome and falling into an arm-chair near her daughter’s bed, “ah, Hortense, the unfortunate Napoleon! They are sending him to the island of Elba! Now he is unhappy, abandoned, and I am not near him! Were I not his wife I would go to him and exile myself with him! Oh, why cannot I be with him?” [Footnote: Mlle. Cochelet, “Memoires,” vol. ii.]
But she dared not! Napoleon, knowing her heart and her love, had commissioned the Duke de Bassano expressly to tell the Empress Josephine to make no attempt to follow him, and “to respect the rights of another.”
This other, however, had not been pleased to claim the right which Josephine was to respect. Napoleon left Fontainebleau on the 21st of April, 1814, to go to the island of Elba. It was his wish to meet there his wife and his son. But Maria Louisa did not come; she did not obey her husband’s call; she descended from the imperial throne, and was satisfied to be again an archduchess of Austria, and to see the little King of Rome dispossessed of country, rank, father, and even name. The poor little Napoleon was now called Frank—he was but the son of the Archduchess Maria Louisa; he dared not ask for his father, and yet memory ever and ever re-echoed through his heart the sounds of other days; this memory caused the death of the Duke de Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon.
Napoleon had gone to Elba, and there he waited in vain for Maria Louisa, to fill whose place Josephine would have gladly poured her heart’s blood.
But she dared not! she submitted faithfully and devotedly to Napoleon’s will. To her he was, though banished, humiliated, and conquered, still the emperor and the sovereign; and her tearful eyes gazed toward the solitary island which to her would have been a paradise could she but have lived there by the side of her Napoleon!
But she had to remain in France; she had sacred duties to perform; she had to save out of the wreck of the empire at least something for her children! For herself she wanted nothing, she desired nothing; but the future of her children had to be secured.
Therefore, Josephine gathered all her courage; she pressed her hands on the mortal wounds of her heart, and kept it still alive, for it must not yet bleed to death; her children yet claimed her care.
Josephine, therefore, left the castle of Navarra for that of Malmaison, thus fulfilling the wishes of the Emperor Alexander, who desired to know Josephine’s wishes in reference to herself and to her children, and who sincerely wished to become acquainted with her, that he might offer her his homage, and transfer to her the friendship he once cherished for Napoleon.