Her hands dropped heavily—her bosom heaved—and hot, burning tears, such only as flow from a surcharged heart, gushed forth in torrents from her eyes.
“And I—oh! God!” she exclaimed, “I who have shared your joys and sorrows—who have been your companion for years—who loved you through weal and woe—who—but I will not upbraid you, Napoleon. Yet she who supplants me, Maria Louise, the daughter of the Emperor Francis, can never love you as I have done,—oh! no!”
She buried her face in her hands; the emperor remained silent.
“But,” she continued, starting suddenly, and throwing her arms around his neck, “you do not mean it. Oh! no! say you do not! speak,—you cannot mean it. Tell me, quick—say it is not so—that it cannot, must not be. Speak, Napoleon, and the blessing of God rest upon you!”
“Alas! it is too true,” he said, his eyes suffused with tears. Oh! how keen was the pang of conscience that shot through his guilty heart.
“True!” she exclaimed, “and you confirm it? Then Fouché was right. But I will never survive it—no! I will never survive it. Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!”
She uttered a piercing scream, and reeled backward, for she had risen from her seat in her excitement. Napoleon caught her in his arms, and laid her gently upon the carpet. Her agony was too deep for words, and she could only weep and groan in bitterness of spirit. He stepped to the door and called de Bausset. They raised her in their arms, and bore her to her chamber. Her women were immediately summoned, and she was resigned to their care. Napoleon retired, greatly agitated. De Bausset followed; tears were also in his eyes; for Josephine, by her goodness, won all hearts. Napoleon stopped a moment outside to listen to her groan of anguish. He related what had occurred.
“The interests of France:” he continued, addressing De Bausset, “and as my dynasty does violence to my heart, the divorce has become a rigorous duty. I am more afflicted by what has happened to Josephine, because, three days ago, she must have learned it from Hortensia. The unhappy obligation which condemns me to separate myself from her, I deplore with all my heart, but I thought she possessed more strength of character, and I was not prepared for these bursts of grief.”
They hurried away. Conscience, ever-faithful conscience, was already performing its duty; he felt its just upbraidings. He essayed to stifle it. It was this that led him to utter such language to De Bausset—to assert that he thought she possessed strength of character enough to receive the announcement without those bursts of grief. What virtuous and affectionate woman could receive with calmness a sentence of repudiation; and that, too, by the tongue of a beloved husband? Her heart must have become as stone.
On the sixteenth of December, 1809, the law, authorising the divorce, was enacted by the conservative senate. In the following March the nuptials between Napoleon and Marie Louise, were performed in Vienna; and on the first day of April, a little more than four months after the scene above described, they were joined in wedlock in the city of Paris, by his uncle, Cardinal Fesch.