“I can never forget the evening,” adds Pasquier, “on which the discarded Empress did the honours of her Court for the last time. It was the day before the official dissolution. A great throng was present, and supper was served, according to custom, in the gallery of Diana, on a number of little tables. Josephine sat at the centre one, and the men went round her, waiting for that particularly graceful nod which she was in the habit of bestowing on those with whom she was acquainted. I stood at a short distance from her for a few minutes, and I could not help being struck with the perfection of her attitude in the presence of all these people who still did her homage, while knowing full well that it was for the last time; that, in an hour, she would descend from the throne, and leave the palace never to re-enter it. Only women can rise superior to the difficulties of such a situation, but I have my doubts as to whether a second one could have been found to do it with such perfect grace and composure. Napoleon did not show as bold a front as did his victim.” The Archduchess was in her eighteenth year, Napoleon in his forty-first. She was not without personal charms, although Pasquier, who keenly sympathised with Josephine, scarcely does her justice. “Her face,” he says, “was her weakest point; but her figure was fine, although somewhat stiff. Her personality was attractive, and she had very pretty feet and hands.” The marriage was celebrated by proxy at Vienna on the 11th March 1810. That Marie Louise grew to love the man of whom she once wrote that “the very sight of this creature would be the worst of all my sufferings” is very improbable, and in the end she played him false. She certainly showed no wish to join him at Elba, and shortly after his death married the dissolute Adam Albert, Graf von Neipperg, her third husband being the Comte de Bombelles. The Emperor believed in her faithfulness to the last. “I desire,” he said to his physician, Antommarchi, “that you preserve my heart in spirits of wine, and that you carry it to Parma to my dear Marie Louise. Please tell her that I loved her tenderly, and that I have not ceased to love her.” CHAPTER XXVII A Broken Friendship and what it Brought (1810-1812)