Bonaparte returned from Saint Cloud to Paris, between three and four in the morning, having in the carriage with him his brother Lucien, Sieyes, and General Gardanne. All the way he was absorbed, thoughtful, silent. Was it physical and moral fatigue following so many emotions? Was it a presentiment of the future, the thought of his future deeds, which were busying the imagination of this great historical character? What reflections he must have made on the turns of fortune!

Had he been beaten, he would have been outlawed; as the conqueror, he knew no law but his own will. Beaten, he would have been an apostate, a renegade, a wretch; his laurels would have been dragged in the dust, and he himself would have been carted to the gibbet. As conqueror, he was to ascend the steps to the capitol, swearing that he was his country's saviour. Conquered, he would have been a vile Corsican, unworthy the name of Frenchman.

As conqueror, he was the man of destiny, the protecting genius. Instead of abuse, he was to hear songs of praise, and to see the old parties laying down their arms; young Royalists enthusiastically joining him under the tricolored flag; the army and populace rending the air with their cheers; priests singing hymns; in the forum, the camp, the churches, - he was to find everywhere the same outburst of joy. Yet those who make the coup d'etat know very well that the ovations which greet them depend solely on their success, and that their success depends on the merest trifles. Succeed, and you are a hero; fail, and you are a traitor. How ridiculous is human judgment, how vain and uncertain the verdict of history! Posterity, like universal suffrage, is forever altering its judgment. What is truth one year is false the next. The voice of the people is not the voice of God.

Bonaparte was back in the house in the rue de la Victoire, which had always brought him happiness, - where he was married, whence he started for Italy and Egypt, whither he always returned victorious, and where two days before he had felt confident of the success of the coup d'etat, the origin of his supreme power. He kissed Josephine tenderly and told her all the incidents of the day, passing rapidly over the danger he had been through in the orange house, and jesting about the embarrassment which he, a man of action, felt when compelled to speak. Then he rested a few hours, and woke up in the morning, the master of Paris and of France.

Fate had spoken. Who would resist the man with whom marched "the God of fortune and of war"?

This is what is said by Edgar Quinet, the great democratic writer, who describes the passive adhesion of the whole people: "This was, I imagine, the greatest grief of the last representatives of liberty in France; after which all grief is but a jest. They imagined that they were followed by people whose souls they owned.

For many days they were going here and there, peering into the cross-ways and public places. Where were the magnificent orators at the bar of the old assemblies? Where the forests of pikes so often uplifted, and the repeated oaths of fourteen years, and the magnanimous nation which the mere shade of a master had so often driven wild with anger? Where was their pride? Where the Roman indignation? How could those great hearts have fallen in so few years? No echo answered. The Five Hundred found only astonished faces, sudden conversions to force, incredulity, and silence. All was dissipated in a moment; they themselves seemed to be pursuing a vision."

The time was drawing nigh when republican simplicity was to give way to the formal and refined etiquette of a monarchy; when the woman who languished in the prison of the Carmes, under the Terror, was to be surrounded with the pomp and splendor of an Asiatic queen; when Lucien Bonaparte was to congratulate himself, as he said, that "he had not got into the crowd of princes and princesses who were taken in tow by all the renegades of the Republic."

For, he goes on, "who knows whether the exampleof all these apostasies might not have perverted my political and philosophic sentiments?"

The more one studies history, the more depressing it is. The illusions in which peoples indulge call forth a smile - illusions about liberty, about absolutism. Every government thinks itself immortal; not one, before its fall, sees the abyss yawning before it. If we compare the results and the efforts, we can only lament the vicious circle in which unhappy humanity forever turns. What would Bonaparte have said, what his admirers and officers, if any one had announced to them what the end of their epoch would be? And what did the Republicans, formerly so haughty and arrogant, think of their change of heart? France has paid a high price for these incessant apostasies. By dint of burning what she has adored, and adoring what she has burned, she has become distrustful of her own glories, ready to destroy the most illustrious legends of centuries, to scoff at royalty, imperialism, and the republic in turn, and to get rid of ideas, enthusiasms, and principles as readily as an actress gets rid of a worn dress.

It was done. Josephine had a new position. She was no more to be called Citizeness Bonaparte, but Madame, like the ladies of the old regime, until she should bear the title of Empress and Your Majesty.

The Republic existed only in name; its institutions were gone. One man alone was left: Bonaparte as First Consul was more than a constitutional sovereign, and many queens possess less influence and prestige than did his wife. Yet on the whole, the really republican period of their lives was the happiest portion. Before Brumaire Bonaparte counted for a soldier of liberty, and his wife was deemed a truly patriotic woman. All that time, she had served the interests of her ambitious husband with great intelligence.

Without her he would hardly have attained such wonderful results. She it was who secured for him the support of Barras, and had him made, when but twenty-six, the commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy; at Milan she was as useful to him as in Paris, by conciliating aristocratic society in both cities; during the Directory, she allayed the jealousy of the Directory, and made herself welcome to both Royalists and Republicans; on the morning of the 18th Brumaire, she covered his sword with flowers, and in her perfumed note laid a snare for Gohier. The movement was irresistible; Madame Bonaparte's smiles completed her husband's work.

After the 18th Brumaire Lucien still nourished liberal hopes, like Daunou, Cabanis, Gregoire, Carnot, and Lafayette. He was sure that the Republic would never turn into a monarchy, and sincerely believed that he had saved liberty. Later, he said at Saint Cyr to General Gouvion: "Will you not acknowledge, dear General, that you knew this soldier, once your equal, now your Emperor, when he was a sincere and ardent Republican? No, you will say, he deceived us by false appearances. Well, for my part, I will say that he deceived himself; for a long time General Bonaparte was a Republican like you or me. He served the Republic of the Convention with all the ardor which you saw, and as you would not, perhaps, have dared to do yourself in such a land, amid such a population....The independent character of the sturdy mountaineers among whom we were born taught him to respect human dignity; and it was only when the temporary consulship was succeeded by the consulate for life, when a sort of court grew up at the Tuileries, and Madame Bonaparte was surrounded by prefects and ladies-in-waiting, that any change could be detected in the master's mind, and that he proceeded to treat everybody as everybody desired to be treated."

It was possibly in spite of himself that Napoleon became a Caesar. The evening of the 18th Brumaire he still hoped to secure the consent of the two Councils and to avoid all illegality. Who knows? If the Directors had consented to lower the limit of age, and to receive him as a colleague, although he was not yet thirty, and the Constitution required that the Directors should be forty years old, the coup d'etat might never have happened. On what things the fate of republics and empires depends!

At first, Bonaparte was a Republican, and Josephine a Legitimist. As Emperor and Empress they became Imperialists. But royal splendors cannot make us forget the Republican period. The modest uniform of the hero of Arcole was perhaps preferred to the gorgeous coronation robes, and more than once, beneath the golden hangings of the Imperial palaces, Josephine regretted the modest house in the rue de la Victoire, the sanctuary of her love. The bright sun of the South could not make her forget the first rays of dawn. Like France, she lost in liberty what she gained in grandeur. A life of almost absolute independence was followed by all the slavery of the highest rank. She was already a queen except in name.

When she left her little house in the rue de la Victoire a few days after the 18th Brumaire, it was to take up her quarters in the Luxembourg. But the residence of Maria de Medici was not large enough for the First Consul and Madame Bonaparte They went in a few days to take the place in the Tuileries of the King and Queen of France, and Lucien, the unwitting promoter of the Empire, was to regret, as he put it, "that the Constitution of the Consular Republic could have been so readily sacrificed to what may be called the personification of the monarchical power, which in the person of the unfortunate Louis XVI, the best-meaning of sovereign had been so barbarously destroyed."

Madame Bonaparte was to be compelled to part company with Madame Tallien and several of her best friends of the society of the Directory. Even the name of Barras, once so powerful, now obscure and forgotten in his estate Grosbois, was never to be uttered. Bonaparte cannot bear to be reminded that once he had been dependent on that man. Already the herd of flatterers who were to form the consular court, gad begun to gather. The ideas and fashions of the past were about to reappear. Many Republican innovations did not outlaw the new almanac. A dead society came back to life. Madame Bonaparte appeared what she was in fact, though not to a careless observer, a woman of the old regime. The Tuileries were not far from the Faubourg Saint Germain.

But for all her success, her wealth, her greatness, Josephine could not recall the days of the Republic without emotion. Then she was young; and nothing can take the place of youth. Then she was powerful; and is not hope always sweeter than the reality? Then she was beautiful; and for a woman is not beauty the only true power? Then she was worshipped by her husband, and to appear charming in his eyes she did not need the splendor of the throne.

In her plain dress of white muslin and a white flower in her hair, she seemed to him more beautiful than in her coronation robes of silver brocade covered with pink bees, and her crown sparkling with gems. She had no equerries, chamberlains, or maids of honor; but her youth adorned her more than a diadem. As Empress and Queen, Josephine was doubtless to regret the time when in a Republican society she bore no other title than that of Citizeness Bonaparte.