Napoleon’s star led the Corsican on, farther and farther away from the path that Lafayette hoped he would follow. In May, 1804, the man who was “Consul for life” became the Emperor of France, and seated himself on the most powerful throne in Europe. Lafayette was tremendously disappointed at this step. Again Napoleon’s friends made overtures to the General, and the latter’s own cousin, the Count de Segur, who had wanted to go with him to America to fight for freedom, and who was now the Grand Master of Ceremonies at the new Emperor’s court, wrote to him asking him to become one of the high officers of the Legion of Honor. Lafayette refused the invitation, and from that time the friendship between him and Napoleon ceased. The Emperor had now no use for the lover of liberty, and carried his dislike for the latter so far that Lafayette’s son George, though a brave and brilliant officer in the army, was forced to resign his commission. Napoleon went on and on, his victories over all the armies of Europe dazzling the eyes of his people. Those who had been aristocrats under Louis XVI. and those who had been Jacobins during the Reign of Terror were glad to accept the smallest favors from the all-powerful Emperor. But Lafayette stayed away from Paris and gave all his attention to his farm, which began to prove productive. In his house portraits of his great friends, Washington, Franklin, La Rochefoucauld, Fox, kept fresh the memory of more stirring times. But France, and even the Emperor, had not forgotten him. Once in an angry speech to his chief councilors about the men who had brought about the French Revolution, Napoleon exclaimed, “Gentlemen, this talk is not aimed at you; I know your devotion to the throne. Everybody in France is corrected. I was thinking of the only man who is not,--Lafayette. He has never retreated an inch.” And at another time, when a conspiracy against the life of the Emperor was discovered, Napoleon was inclined to charge Lafayette with having been concerned in it. “Don’t be afraid,” said Napoleon’s brother Joseph. “Wherever there are aristocrats and kings you are certain not to find Lafayette.” Meantime at Lagrange Madame Lafayette fell ill and died in December, 1807. No husband and wife were ever more devoted to each other, and Lafayette expressed his feelings in regard to her in a letter to his friend Maubourg. “During the thirty-four years of a union, in which the love and the elevation, the delicacy and the generosity of her soul charmed, adorned, and honored my days,” he wrote, “I was so much accustomed to all that she was to me, that I did not distinguish her from my own existence. Her heart wedded all that interested me. I thought that I loved her and needed her; but it is only in losing her that I can at last clearly see the wreck of me that remains for the rest of my life; for there only remain for me memories of the woman to whom I owed the happiness of every moment, undimmed by any cloud.”