All Paris listened, eagerly attentive, to the great bells of Notre Dame; steeple answered steeple, until every church had joined in the chorus. All Paris hearkened to the cannon, counting report after report: for if the child were a girl, the shots would stop at twenty-one; if a boy, there would be one hundred. At the sound of the twenty-second gun there burst out a universal shout of joy and congratulation. “Hats flew up into the air, people ran to meet entire strangers, and with mutual embraces shouted, Long live the Emperor! Old soldiers shed tears of joy.”
Behind a curtain at the window of the palace stood Napoleon, looking out upon this display of enthusiastic gladness. “His eyes swam with tears, and he came in that condition to kiss his son.”
Never were national rejoicings greater at the birth of an heir to the throne. Cities, towns, private dwellings, illuminated not only in France, but throughout the Empire. Couriers rode with the news to foreign courts. Congratulations poured into the Tuileries from the four quarters of the earth. The Emperor seemed to be “walking in the midst of a delicious dream.” He was the mightiest monarch of earth; his wife “a daughter of the Cæsars”; his son, his long-yearned-for son, had come, was strong and fair,—the “King of Rome!” Napoleon’s imagination was aflame; human grandeur he had pushed to its limit.
His memory may have swept back to far-off Corsica, and to that day of 1769 when his mother had brought him into the world, lying on the floor “upon a wretched rug.” From that dim period to this, what a march onward!
If Napoleon had been kind and indulgent to the barren Josephine, what was his tenderness to the fruitful Maria! He almost smothered her with caresses, and almost, if not quite, wearied her with attentions. As to his boy, nothing could have been more touching than his boundless pride in him, his infinite patience with him, his intense paternal fondness for him.
Nothing would satisfy the Emperor but that Josephine must see his boy. Maria must not know; Maria being jealous of the ex-Empress. One day Napoleon had his child carried privately out to Bagatelle. Josephine was there. The little King of Rome was presented to her. Was she envious and jealous? Not so. She took the child in her arms, pressed it, kissed it, wept over it, prattled “baby talk” to it, fondling it with “unutterable tenderness” as though it were her own. Poor Josephine! Sternly truthful historians have told us about the infidelities and the want of honesty and scruple. With pain and sorrow we must tell the story of these as it is told to us; but let us turn the picture as quickly as we may, and look upon the other side—for there is another and a brighter.
It was true womanhood at its best when the barren, discarded wife continued to love the husband who had put her away; who loved and fondled the offspring of the other marriage with a greater tenderness than the child’s own mother ever showed it; who remained faithful to Napoleon in the dark days when the second wife was false; who grieved brokenly over his fall, and wished to share his exile.
Evermore will this record speak for Josephine; evermore will it speak for Napoleon also.
Constant relates: “One day when Bonaparte came back very much fatigued from hunting, he sent to ask Maria Louisa to come and see him. She came. The Emperor took her in his arms and gave her a hearty kiss on the cheek. Maria took her handkerchief and wiped it off.
“‘Well, Louise,’ said the Emperor, ‘so I disgust thee?’