more tranquil in his mind; but neither on him nor on us could she have exercised the same continual fascination as this wayward, fickle, frail Creole, that still smiles out upon us with her empty and kindly look from the grave on which the grass has been growing for little short of a century!
It is one of the many proofs of the fascination which the story exercises on the French mind that every detail of her life, of her courtship and her union with Napoleon, is known and recorded with such extraordinary care. Take this volume which lies before me. I declare that I read the account M. Frédéric Masson gives of the first interview between Napoleon and Josephine de Beauharnais, as though it were something that had occurred but yesterday; and as though I were standing and looking on at the whole scene between the two, at their half-stammered words, their exchange of half-timid, half-searching glances, at the very furniture in the rooms; and this love scene took place a hundred years ago! The passages in the book which deal with the episode are a marvellous instance of the power which a good writer, with his facts and details ample and well arranged, can exercise in realising for himself and for you a long-forgotten and long-dead scene.
