By the will of the allies, Louis XVIII. was recalled, and Napoleon was banished to the Island of Elba, east of Corsica, with an annual income from France of $500,000. He bade the Old Guard an affectionate good-by. "Adieu, my children," he said. "I would that I could press you all to my heart. Let me at least embrace your general and your eagle." He put his arms around General Petit, and kissed the eagle on its silver beak. Amid the tears and sobs of his brave soldiers, on April 20, Napoleon drove away from Fontainebleau to Fréjus, and in the British frigate, The Undaunted, set sail for Elba, April 27, 1814.
He had frequently written to Josephine through these melancholy months. Once he wrote: "To me death would now be a blessing. But I would once more see Josephine," and he saw her before his departure.
Four days before he left Fontainebleau for Elba, he wrote, "Adieu, my dear Josephine. Be resigned, as I am, and never forget him who never forgot, and who never will forget you. Farewell, Josephine."
She longed to follow him to Elba, but waited to see if Marie Louise would join him. At first Marie Louise desired to go to him, but was prevailed upon by her father, the Emperor Francis, to return to Austria, where she and her son became virtually prisoners. She finally retired to the Duchy of Parma, which the allies had given her, and later married her chamberlain, Count de Neipperg, an Austrian general.
Josephine wrote to Napoleon: "I have been on the point of quitting France to follow your footsteps, and to consecrate to you the remainder of an existence which you so long embellished. A single motive restrains me, and that you may divine.... Say but the word, and I depart."
As soon as Napoleon went to Elba, Josephine's health rapidly declined. She caught cold in driving in the park at Malmaison. When near death she said to Hortense, "I can say with truth, in this, my dying hour, that the first wife of Napoleon never caused a single tear to flow."
Napoleon landed at Elba, May 4, 1814. A month later, May 29, Josephine died, uttering, with her last breath, "Napoleon! Elba!"
"I have seen," said Mademoiselle Avrillon, the first lady of her bedchamber, "the Empress Josephine's sleeplessness and her terrible dreams. I have known her to pass whole days buried in the gloomiest thought. I know what I have seen and heard, and I am sure that grief killed her!"
Napoleon's mother, a woman of sixty-four, and his sister Pauline, joined him at Elba. The latter had married Prince Borghese in 1803, but they soon separated. After several years they were reconciled to each other. She died at Florence in 1825.