The Court of the Empress JosephineImbert de Saint-Amand
History
The Court of the Empress Josephine
Imbert de Saint-Amand
Josephine, Empress, consort of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1763-1814
go about everywhere like a commoner."
The greatness which the Emperor spoke about was no consolation to
Josephine. She was unhappier beneath the gilded ceilings of the Tuileries
than a peasant woman in a hovel. She besought her husband to let her join
him in Poland, and wrote to him despairing letters.
Napoleon answered from Osterode, March 27: "My dear, I am much pained by
your letters. You must not die: you are well and have no real cause of
grief. I think you ought to go to Saint Cloud in May. but you ought to
spend April in Paris.... You must not think of travelling this summer; all
that is impossible. You couldn't be racing through inns and camps. I am as
anxious as you can be to see you and be quiet. I understand other things
than war; but duty is before everything. All my life I have sacrificed
everything--peace, interest, happiness--to my destiny." These phrases in
no way consoled Josephine who knew very well that her husband, in spite of
his assumption of Spartan austerity; occasionally indulged in
distractions.
In the month of March something occurred which somewhat moderated the
Empress's sufferings. Her daughter-in-law, the Vice-Queen of Italy, gave
birth at Milan, on the 17th, to a daughter who was named Josephine
Maximilienne Augusta. She it was who was to marry, in 1827, Oscar, Crown
Prince and later King of Sweden. "You will hear with pleasure," the
Empress wrote Queen Hortense, "of the Princess Augusta's happy delivery.
Eugene is delighted with his daughter; his only complaint is that she
sleeps too much, so that he can't see her as much as he would like."
Josephine would gladly have gone to Milan to congratulate her son and to
kiss her granddaughter, but her grandeur kept her in Paris, where the
prolongation of her husband's absence and the torments of too well
justified jealousy plunged her into the deepest gloom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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