a sad plight when all one's affections are centred upon one person. Arrange that I should have active employment on my return, either near Paris or in Burgundy. I wish to pass the winter there, and to shut myself up; I am tired of human nature. I want solitude and isolation; grandeur wearies me, my affections are dried up."
Prince Eugène—Josephine's son—has in his Memoirs to confess that his mother's conduct disturbed Napoleon. He puts down the reports that reach his stepfather to malice and calumny; but, nevertheless, he has to give us a picture of Napoleon which is not without pathos:
"Although I was very young, I inspired him with so much confidence that he made me a sharer in his sorrows, It was generally at night that he thus unbosomed himself, walking with great strides up and down his tent. I was the only person to whom he could talk openly. I sought to soften his resentment, I comforted him as best I could, and as much as my age and the respect I felt for him permitted."
At last there came one of those violent explosions of wrath which were the terror of Napoleon's surrounding. He addressed Bourrienne in a voice stifled with rage; reproaches him that he has not repeated the reports which Junot had brought fresh from Paris—Junot might have been better employed—and then went on:
"Josephine . . . . and I am six hundred leagues
