The Duchesse D’Abrantes gives this account of a visit to Josephine just previous to the public announcement of the divorce: “I had an interview with the empress at Malmaison. I had sent her a plant from the Pyrenees, and she wished me to see it in the hot-house. But in vain she attempted to employ herself with those objects which pleased her the most; her eyes were frequently suffused with tears; she was pale, and her whole manner marked indisposition. ‘It is very cold!’ she said, drawing her shawl about her; but, alas! it was the chill of grief creeping about her heart, like the cold hand of death. ‘Madame Junot,’ she said, ‘remember what I say to you this day here, in this hot-house,—this place which is now a paradise, but which may soon become a desert to me,—remember that this separation will be my death, and it is they who will have killed me! I shall be driven in disgrace from him who has given me a crown! Yet God is my witness that I love him more than my life, and much more than that throne, that crown, which he has given me.’ The empress may have appeared more beautiful, but never more attractive than at that moment. If Napoleon had seen her then, surely he could never have divorced her.” Lanfrey thus comments upon this event: “On the evening of Nov. 30, the prefect of the palace was on duty in an apartment adjoining the drawing-room where the emperor and Josephine were sitting, when he heard piercing cries, and with amazement recognized the voice of the empress. A few moments afterwards the door opened, and Napoleon having called him in, he beheld the empress suffering from a violent nervous attack, and uttering exclamations of distress and despair. He then helped Napoleon to carry her into her own apartment. In fact, the much-dreaded explosion had taken place. The emperor had at first determined to await the arrival of the Prince Eugène in Paris, in order that the presence and consolations of the son whom Josephine so tenderly loved might soften the bitterness of his intended communication. When he announced the terrible news to her who alone was ignorant of it,—to the woman who, by having brought him among her wedding presents the chief command of the army in Italy, had so eminently contributed towards his exalted fortune,—eight days had already elapsed since he had desired Champagny to ask for him the hand of the Emperor Alexander’s sister. It was Russia, his ally, not Austria, whom he thought it better to address first.