his infidelities, at others he seems to have been cynically indifferent to the feelings of his wife; and on one occasion he treated her as only a brute could do. Sometimes, as Taine has told us, he went the length of telling her the details of his amours, replying to her tears and her reproaches with, "I have a right to answer all your objections with an eternal 'Moi.'"
When in 1806–7 Napoleon was in Poland, there was a reversal of the parts which the husband and wife played towards each other in the other epoch of their married life, when Josephine was in Paris and Napoleon was in Italy. The reader will remember the letters of impassioned ardour in which the young soldier addressed in those days the tepid wife—how he pressed her to follow him, to be always near him. When Napoleon went to Poland there is a repetition of the same thing; but it is Josephine that longs to go to Napoleon, it is Napoleon that likes their separation. When Josephine did not get the summons she so eagerly longed for, poor Josephine—she was only a superstitious, weak Creole creature after all—would try to master her feverish impatience and her apprehensions in a characteristic way:
"Every evening," says the Duchesse d'Abrantès, "she used to consult the cards in order to learn whether she would receive the desired orders or not."
Josephine sends letter after letter, resorts to
