On the whole, the summer and fall of 1810 were not unpleasant. She had dismissed, for the time, her doubt of the Emperor, and suffered only from the separation from him. That separation Napoleon did as much as the situation allowed to soften. In May, after her return to Malmaison, he went to see her, and the visit seems to have been as free from restraint and grief as could be expected. Josephine was greatly pleased by the Emperor’s attention. “Yesterday was a day of joy for me,” she wrote to Hortense. “The Emperor came to see me. His presence made me happy, though it awakened my sorrow. As long as he stayed with me I had the courage to keep back my tears, but when he was gone, I was not able to restrain them, and I found myself very wretched. He was as good as ever to me, and I hope he read in my heart all the devotion and tenderness I feel for him.” Not only did Napoleon go to visit her, he conceived a notion incomprehensible to a feminine mind of some day taking Marie Louise, and broached the subject one day as the two were driving near Malmaison in Josephine’s absence, by asking the Empress if she would not like to go over the chateau. Marie Louise immediately began to cry, and Napoleon, overwhelmed by what he had done, though probably not understanding at all, never ventured to go further. He probably saw no reason why the two women could not in private be friends. Everywhere that Josephine went in these first journeys after her divorce she was received with such expressions of devotion and interest that she must have been convinced that the people had adopted the Emperor’s view of the divorce and looked upon her as one who had sacrificed herself for the country. Curiously enough, they brought petitions to her praying her to remit them to the Emperor; her influence over him and her relation to him were thus publicly acknowledged. In all the interviews Josephine gave to persons who sought her as she traveled she was exceedingly discreet; especially admirable was the way in which she talked of the Emperor. It was as of a brother whom she loved dearly and whose interests she had deeply at heart. Although, as a rule, she received cordially all who sought her, she did refuse, if she believed the person hostile to Napoleon. In September, while Josephine was in Switzerland, Mme. de Staël, then in exile, tried to secure an interview. Josephine declined. “I know her too well,” she said, “to wish an interview. In the first book she published, she would report our conversation, and the Lord only knows how many things she would make me say of which I never thought.” [Illustration: EUGÉNIE HORTENSE DE BEAUHARNAIS. 1783–1837. Daughter of Josephine, wife of Louis, King of Holland, and mother of Napoleon III.]