Such was the meeting of the unfaithful Josephine and the husband who had vowed that he would no longer call her wife.  The reconciliation was complete; for Napoleon was no man of half-measures.  He frankly forgave the weeping woman all her sins against him; and with generous hand removed the mountain of debt her extravagance had heaped up—­debts amounting to more than two million francs, one million two hundred thousand of which she owed to tradespeople alone.

But Napoleon’s passion for his wife, of whose beauty few traces now remained, was dead.  His loyalty only remained; and this, in turn, was to be swept away by the tide of his ambition.  A few years later Josephine was crowned Empress by her husband, and consecrated by the Pope, after a priest had given the sanction of the Church to her incomplete nuptials.

She had now reached the dazzling zenith of her career.  At the Tuileries, at St Cloud, and at Malmaison, she held her splendid Courts as Empress.  She had the most magnificent crown jewels in the world; and at Malmaison she spent her happiest hours in spreading her gems out on the table before her, and feasting her eyes on their many-hued fires.  Her wardrobes were full of the daintiest and costliest gowns of which, we are told, more than two hundred were summer-dresses of percale and of muslin, costing from one thousand to two thousand francs each.

Less than six years of such splendour and luxury, and the inevitable end of it all came.  Napoleon’s eyes were dazzled by the offer of an alliance with the eldest daughter of the Austrian Emperor.  His whole ambition now was focused on providing a successor to his crown (Josephine had failed him in this important matter); and in Marie Louise of Austria he not only saw the prospective mother of his heir, but an alliance with one of the great reigning houses of Europe, which would lend a much-needed glamour to his bourgeois crown.

His mind was at last inevitably made up.  Josephine must be divorced.  Her pleadings and tears and faintings were powerless to melt him.  And one December day, in the year 1809, Napoleon was free to wed his Austrian Princess; and Josephine was left to console herself as best she might, with the knowledge that at least she had rescued from her downfall a life-income of three million francs a year, on which she could still play the role of Empress at the Elysee, Malmaison, and Navarre, the sumptuous homes with which Napoleon’s generosity had dowered the wife who failed.

CHAPTER XIII

THE ENSLAVER OF A KING

More than fifty years have gone since the penitent soul of Lola Montez took flight to its Creator; but there must be some still living whose pulses quicken at the very mention of a name which recalls so much mystery and romance and bewildering fascination of the days when, for them, as for her, “all the world was young.”

Who was she, this woman whose beauty dazzled the eyes and whose witchery turned the heads of men in the forties and fifties of last century?  A dozen countries, from Spain to India, were credited with her birth.  Some said she was the daughter of a noble house, kidnapped by gipsies in her infancy; others were equally confident that she had for father the coroneted rake, Lord Byron, and for mother a charwoman.