Madame de Remusat says, in her curious memoirs: "I ought to speak about Bonaparte's heart; but if it is possible to believe that a being like us in every other respect should yet be destitute of that part of our nature which inspires us with the need of loving and being loved, I should say that when he was created, his heart was probably forgotten; or else, perhaps, that he knew how to repress it completely. He was too anxious for his own fame to be hampered by an affectionate feeling of any sort. He scarcely recognized the ties of blood, the rights of nature."

This opinion seems to us strangely exaggerated. Doubtless ambition and the lust of glory finally prevailed over every other feeling in this man's soul. Yet we are not justified in saying, with Lamartine:

No human feeling beat beneath thy thick armor.
Without hate and without love, thou didst live to think.
Like an eagle, reigning in a solitary heaven,
Thou hadst but a glance wherewith to measure the earth,
And talons to embrace it."

Whatever the poet may say, Napoleon knew both hate and love. Whatever power a man may obtain, he cannot rise outside of humanity. Heroes and rulers, unable to satisfy that void which is called the heart with the triumphs of glory and ambition, they feel the need of personal happiness, like humble citizens; and they are often more elate over a word, a glance, a smile, than over all the splendor of their greatness and all the intoxication of victory.

To deny Bonaparte's passionate love for Josephine in 1796 would be to deny the evidence. All those who were in his company at the time agree in bearing witness to this feeling. His secretary, Bourrienne, and his aides-de-camp, Marmont and Lavalette, his friend, the poet Arnault, were all equally struck by it.

Marmont has said, in the part of his Memoirs devoted to the first Italian campaign: "Bonaparte, however occupied he may have been with his greatness, the interest entrusted to him, and with his future, had nevertheless time to devote to feelings of another sort; he was continually thinking of his wife. He desired her, and awaited her with impatience. . . . He often spoke to me of her, and of his love, with all the frankness, fire, and illusion of a very young man. Her continual postponement of her departure tormented him most grievously; and he gave way to feelings of jealousy, and to a sort of superstition which was a marked trait of his character. During a trip we made together at this time, to inspect the places in Piedmont that had fallen into our hands, one morning, at Tortona, the glass in front of his wife's portrait, which he always carried with him, broke in his hands. He grew frightfully pale, and suffered the keenest alarm. "'Marmont,' he said to me, 'my wife is either ill or unfaithful.'"

The excitement of war, so far from distracting Bonaparte from his love, rendered him only more ardent, eager, and enthusiastic. His impetuous nature could easily be moved by two passions at once, by his love for his wife and his love of glory. The perpetual restlessness in which he lived made him a ready victim of the tender passion. In his desires there was an impatient, imperious, despotic quality. He could no more understand a woman's resistance than the failure to win a victory.

He summoned Josephine; consequently, Josephine must hasten to him. Rather a lover than a husband, he had passed but forty-eight hours with her since their marriage, and all his sentiment had been aroused, without being satiated. The careless creole, who was unaccustomed to such transports, was perhaps more surprised than delighted by them.

M. Lanfrey has, in our opinion, given a very exact account of the different feelings of Josephine and her husband at this time, when he says, speaking of Napoleon's love for his wife:

"In this love, which has been said to be the only one that touched his heart, all the fire and flame of his masterful nature showed itself. As for Josephine, in his presence she felt more embarrassment and surprise than love. The very genius which she saw glowing in his piercing and commanding eye exercised over her amiable and indolent nature a sort of fascination which she could not feel without a secret terror, and before yielding to it she wondered more than once whether the extraordinary self-confidence manifested in the general's most insignificant words might not be merely the result of a young man's presumption which might easily be destined to bitter disappointment."

Without doubt she was much flattered by Bonaparte's early successes, but, as Marmont points out, "she preferred enjoying her husband's triumphs in Paris to joining him."

To her it was a serious matter to leave her children, her relatives, and her life in Paris, so admirably suited to her kindly, amiable, affectionate but withal somewhat light and frivolous nature. She liked that amusing and brilliant city, which, though still shorn of its former animation, was yet busy and charming. The theatres, which at that time were crowded, the drawing-rooms, which were slowly reopening, the elegance and courtly manners of the old regime, which were appearing anew, the palace of the Directory, all these things pleased Josephine.

As the poet Arnault says in his Souvenirs of a Sexagenarian: "The Terror, which had so long made Paris its prey, was followed by a period of almost absolute indifference with regard to everything except pleasure. By enjoyment of the present, society anticipated the future and made up for the Past. The Luxembourg, of which the five Directors had taken possession, had already become what will always be the place where authority rules, a court; and since it was open to women, they had introduced softer manners. The Republicans began to abandon their brutal ways and to see that gallantry was not wholly incompatible with politics, and that indeed skill might be shown in employing it as a way of retaining power. The entertainments in which ladies resumed the empire from which they had been driven during the long reign of the Convention, showed clearly that those in power thought less of destroying the old customs than of imitating them."

Besides, all Madame Bonaparte's friends never tired of telling her that her place was not in Italy; that the war had only begun; that she should leave the victorious general entirely to his military affairs, his campaign plans, his strategy; and that a young wife was not intended to take part in all the tumult of a fight or the disorderliness of a camp.

M. Aubenas, in his excellent History of the Empress Josephine, says: "Madame Bonaparte has been severely criticised for not hastening to Italy in the month of April, at her husband's first summons, before the victory of Lodi and the subjection of Lombardy; but frankly, it was only her husband, whose genius inspired him with confidence in his success, whose love scorned every obstacle, who could have imagined such excessive haste. Certainly, in the early wars of the Republic, it was not usual to see the general's wives following the armies. Prudence and regulations, for obvious reasons, forbade such a course.

We have no intention of carving an image of Josephine as the Roman heroine. To start out thus at once to face all the fatigues and uncertainty of a great war, to bivouac in the Italian towns, in a word, to undertake the campaign, was an extreme demand to make of this creole nature in which indifference was a fault as well as a charm."

Bonaparte could not tolerate such hesitation. In order to persuade his wife to come to him, he wrote a mass of letters, each more urgent than its predecessor. The men of the old regime, who had paid attention to Josephine, would probably have smiled at the style and the manner. That a husband should love his wife in that way would probably have seemed to them a little vulgar. To be sure, they used to read the Nouvelle Heloise, but nevertheless they had not formed the habit of writing to their legal wives tirades and hyperboles in imitation of Jean Jacques.

Alexander de Beauharnais had not prepared his wife for love of this sort, which the fashionable society of Versailles might have regarded as proper for lovers, but absurd from a husband to his wife. Madame Bonaparte did not take seriously her husband's torrents of passion.

As Arnault says: "Murat gave to Madame Bonaparte a letter in which the young hero urged her speedy departure; she showed me this letter, as well as all he had written since leaving her, and all expressed the most violent passion. Josephine found a good deal of amusement in this feeling, which was not devoid of jealousy. I seem to hear her once more reading one passage in which her husband, in the effort to allay the suspicions which evidently tortured him, said, 'But suppose it true! Fear Othello's dagger!' I hear her say with her creole accent, while she smiles, 'How funny Bonaparte is!'"

Madame de Remusat, unfavorable as she is to Napoleon, and with every disposition to deny him any trace of tenderness, is nevertheless compelled to make this acknowledgment in her Memoirs: "For Josephine he felt some affection, and if he was at times moved, it was only for her and by her. Even a Bonaparte cannot escape every feeling."

Yes; Bonaparte knew the force of love. I ask no other proof than the letter full of real eloquence and ardent passion which he wrote to Josephine from Tortona, June 15, 1796, and which at last induced her to join a husband who loved her madly. Perhaps there are traces here and there of Jean Jacques Rousseau's declamatory eloquence, but still in this volcanic style, emotion and truth and accents of sincere conviction are very manifest.

Tortona, Midday, the 27th Prairial, Year IV of the Republic [June 15, 1796].

To JOSEPHINE.

My life is a perpetual nightmare. A black presentiment makes breathing difficult. I am no longer alive; I have lost more than life, more than happiness, more than peace; I am almost without hope. I am sending you a courier. He will stay only four hours in Paris, and then will bring me your answer.

Write to me ten pages; that is the only thing that can console me in the least. You are ill; you love me; I have distressed you; you are with child; and I don't see you. This thought overwhelms me. [Symptoms which amounted to nothing had in fact delayed Josephine's departure for Italy, and her husband reproached himself for having been unkind to her.] I have treated you so ill that I do not know how to set myself right in your eyes. I have been blaming you for staying in Paris, and you have been ill there.

Forgive me, my dear; the love with which you have filled me has robbed me of my reason, and I shall never recover it. It is a malady from which there is no recovery. My forebodings are so gloomy that all I ask is to see you, to hold you in my arms for two hours, and that we may die together. Who is taking care of you? I suppose that you have sent for Hortense; I love the dear child a thousand times better since I think that she may console you a little.

As for me, I am without consolation, rest, and hope until I see again the messenger whom I am sending to you, and until you explain to me in a long letter just what is the matter with you and how serious it is. If there were any danger, I warn you that I should start at once for Paris. . . . I have always been fortunate; never has my fate opposed my wishes, and to-day I am wounded when alone: I am sensitive. . . . With no appetite, unable to sleep, having lost all interest in friendship, in glory, in my country. You! you! and the rest of the world will not exist for me any more than if it had been annihilated. I care for honor, because you care for it, for victory, because it brings you pleasure: otherwise I should have abandoned everything to throw myself at your feet."

Walter Scott says, in his Life of Napoleon: "A part of his correspondence with his bride has been preserved, and gives a curious picture of a temperament as fiery in love as in war. The language of the conqueror, who was disposing states at his pleasure and defeating the most celebrated commanders of his time, is as enthusiastic as that of an Arcadian."

The last lines of the letter we have quoted above certainly confirm the great novelist's remark: "My dear, do remember to tell me that you are certain that I love you more than can be imagined -- that you are convinced that my every moment is devoted to you; that no hour passes that I do not think of you; that it has never entered my mind to think of any other woman; that to me they all lack grace, beauty, and intelligence; that you, you as I see you, as you are, can please me and absorb my whole soul; that you have wholly filled it; that my heart has no corners that you do not see, no thoughts that are not subordinate to you; that my strength, my arms, my intelligence, are all yours; that my soul is in your body; and that the day when you shall have changed or shall have ceased to live will be the day of my death; that nature, the earth, is beautiful in my eyes only because you live on it. If you do not believe that, if your soul is not convinced, penetrated, you distress me, you do not love me. There is a magnetic fluid between two persons who are in love. You know that I could never endure to see you in love with any one, still less endure that you should have a lover; to tear out his heart and to see him would be one and the same thing, and then, if I could raise my hand against your sacred person. No! I should never dare, but I should at once abandon a life in which the most virtuous being in the world had deceived me."

This letter, in which his jealousy thus breaks forth, ends with an outburst of confidence and enthusiasm: "I am certain and proud of your love. Our misfortunes are trials which only strengthen the force of our passion. A child as lovely as its mamma will one day be born to you. Wretch that I am, I only ask one day. A thousand kisses on your eyes, your lips. Adorable woman, how great a power you have over me! I am ill with thy complaint! I have again a burning fever! Don't delay the courier more than six hours, and let him return at once with the dear letter of my queen."

Josephine could not withstand this appeal. She was quite recovered, and she was to be installed in splendor at Milan. Nevertheless, according to one of her intimate friends, the poet Arnault, she felt very sad at leaving Paris. He speaks thus about this delicate matter in his curious and witty Memoirs:

"Josephine was evidently flattered by the love with which she inspired so wonderful a man as Bonaparte, although she treated the matter much more lightly than he; she was proud to see that he loved her as much as he loved glory; she enjoyed this glory, which was growing every day, but she preferred enjoying it in Paris, amid the applause which always followed her with every new bulletin from the Army of Italy. Her grief was extreme when she saw that she could no longer postpone her departure. She thought much more of what she was leaving than of what she was going to find, and she would have given the palace at Milan that was made ready for her, she would have given all the palaces in the world for her house in the rue Chantereine, for the little house she had just bought of Talma. . . . It was from the Luxembourg that she started for Italy, after supping there with some of her friends, of whom I was one. . . . Poor woman! she burst into tears, and sobbed as if she were going to her execution: she was going to reign."

The passport which the Directory gave to Madame Bonaparte bore the date of June 24, 1796. A few days afterwards she reached Milan, entering the city in a carriage in which were her brother-in-law Joseph, Junot, her husband's aide-de-camp, and a young officer named Hippolyte Charles, a captain on the staff of Adjutant-General Leclerc.

The Duke of Serbelloni, who had gone to meet her at the gates of the city, followed in a second carriage. Unfortunately, when she arrived, Bonaparte was away on some military duty, and it was not for several days that be had the pleasure of seeing her. Marmont, who had been sent on ahead of Josephine, and had seen the numerous attentions paid to her by the Sardinian court, as she passed through Piedmont, says of the meeting of the happy couple:

"Once at Milan, General Bonaparte was very happy, for then he lived only for his wife; for a long time this had been the case: never did a purer, truer, or more exclusive love fill a man's heart, or the heart of so extraordinary a man."