Napoleon, after turning that army into such a fighting machine as the world had never before known, thrashed Italy and Austria and came home the hero and idol of the hour--to find, beyond all doubt or hope, that Josephine was unfaithful to him! He ordered her out of his house. She wept. Her family wept. Every one wept. Every one pleaded. Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and let her stay. But ever thereafter he treated her with mere friendly tolerance. His love for her was stone-dead. And he amused himself wherever amusement could be found. Also, when it suited his turn in after years he calmly divorced her. "Lefebvre," said Napoleon, in Egypt, "what is Josephine doing at this moment?" "Weeping for your return," promptly babbled the future Duke of Dantzig. "Lefebvre," soulfully returned Napoleon, "you're a fool or a liar! Or both. She is riding a white horse in the Bois, in the worst kind of company she can find at such short notice." Men of rank and wit were choking Madame Recamier's salon to overflowing. She was the inaccessible goal of a hundred Don Juans' ambitions. Grandees of the old and the new regime as well--aristocrats of the noblesse--who would not deign to visit the Tuileries while the Corsican adventurer held sway in that house of kings--all flocked to the Recamier home and vied with one another to do Jeanne honor. Her beauty, her siren charm, her snowy--or frosty--virtue were the talk of France. What more natural than that Napoleon should seek out this new paragon; that sheer conceit as well as genuine love should make him burn to succeed where all the world had failed? Other women--women whose houses he could not have entered, seven years earlier, save as a dependent--were making fools of themselves over the Man of Destiny. He had but to throw the handkerchief for a hundred frail beauties to scramble for its possession. Irresistible, perfect in power and in the serene knowledge of that power, he deigned to make lazy love to Jeanne Recamier. She was not used to lazy love-making. She did not understand it, but took it for a mere new mannerism of the hypermanneristic emperor. Her seeming indifference had the same effect on Napoleon as might a war campaign that promised grave obstacles. It turned his idle fancy to keen pursuit. Madame Recamier failed to be impressed. Napoleon, thinking he must be mistaken in the idea that any living woman could fail to be dazzled by his attentions, made his meaning quite clear. Only to meet with a very good-humored but extremely definite rebuff from his charmer. It was past his understanding. He stooped to bribes; offering to put a big share of the state finances through the Recamier bank, and, with much pomp and ceremony, announcing the appointment of Madame Recamier as one of the Empress Josephine's ladies in waiting.