The second act of the emperor, on the first day of his new dignity, was to invest the members of his family also with new dignities, and to confer upon them the rank of Princes of France, with the title "imperial highness." Moreover, he made his brother Joseph prince elector, and his brother Louis connétable. On the same day it devolved upon Louis, in his new dignity, to present the generals and staff officers to the emperor, and then to conduct them to the empress--the Empress Josephine. The prophecy of the negress of Martinique was now fulfilled. Josephine was "more than a queen." But Josephine, in the midst of the splendor of her new dignity, could only think, with an anxious heart, of the prophecy of the clairvoyante of Paris, who had told her, "You will wear a crown, but only for a short time." She felt that this wondrous fortune could not last long--that the new emperor would have to do as the kings or old had done, and sacrifice his dearest possession to Fate, in order to appease the hungry demons of vengeance and envy; and that he would, therefore, sacrifice her, in order to secure the perpetuity of his fortune and dynasty. It was this that weighed down the heart of the new empress, and made her shrink in alarm from her new grandeur. It was, therefore, with a feeling of deep anxiety that she took possession of the new titles and honors that Fate had showered upon her, as from an inexhaustible horn of plenty. With a degree of alarm, and almost with shame, she heard herself addressed with the titles with which she had addressed the Queen of France years before, in these same halls, when she came to the Tuileries as Marquise de Beauharnais, to do homage to the beautiful Marie Antoinette. She had died on the scaffold and now Josephine was the "majesty" that sat enthroned in the Tuileries, her brilliant court assembled around her, while in a retired nook of England the legitimate King of France was leading a lonely and gloomy life. Josephine, as we have said, was a good royalist; and, as empress, she still mourned over the fate of the unfortunate Bourbons, and esteemed it her sacred duty to assist and advise those who, true to their principles and duties, had followed the royal family, or had emigrated, in order that they might, at least, not be compelled to do homage to the new system. Her purse was always at the service of the emigrants; and, if Josephine continually made debts, in spite of her enormous monthly allowance, her extravagance was not alone the cause, but also her kindly, generous heart; for she was in the habit of setting apart the half of her monthly income for the relief of poor emigrants, and, no matter how great her own embarrassment, or how pressing her creditors, she never suffered the amount devoted to the relief of misfortune and the reward of fidelity to be applied to any other purpose[13]. [Footnote 13: Mémoires sur la reine Hortense, par le Baron van Schelten, vol. i., p. 145.]