Josephine might have imagined that nothing had been altered in her situation, and that she was still Napoleon’s wife.  But there were wanting in their intercourse those little, inexpressible shades of confidence which her exquisite tact and her instinctive feelings felt yet more deeply than the more important and visible changes.

When Napoleon came or went, he no longer embraced her, but merely pressed her hand in a friendly manner, and often called her “madame” and “you;” he was more formal, more polite to her than he had ever been before.

And then his daily visits ceased; in their place came his letters, it is true, but they were only the letters of a friend, who tried to comfort her in her misfortune, but took no sympathetic interest in her distress.

Soon these letters became more rare, and when they did come they were shorter.  The emperor had to busy himself with other matters than with the solitary, rejected woman in Malmaison; he had now to occupy his thoughts with his young and beautiful bride—­with Maria Louisa, the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, who was soon to enter Paris as the wife of Napoleon, the Emperor of France.

Bitter and painful indeed were those first days of resignation for Josephine; harsh and unsparing were the conflicts she had to fight with her own heart, before its wounds could be closed, and its pains and its humiliations cease to torment her!

But Josephine had a brave heart, a strong will, and a resolute determination to control herself.  She conquered herself into rest and resignation; she did not wish that the emperor, the happy bridegroom, should ever hear of her red, weeping eyes, of her lamentations and sighs; she did not wish that, in the golden cup which the husband of the emperor’s young daughter was drinking in the full joyousness of a conqueror, her tears should commingle therein as drops of gall.

She controlled herself so far as to be able with smiling calmness to have related to her how Paris was celebrating the new marriage festivities, how the new Empress of the French was everywhere received with enthusiasm.  She was even able to inquire, with an expression of friendly sympathy, after Maria Louisa, the young wife of sixteen, who had taken the place of the woman of forty-eight, and from whom Josephine, in the sincerity of her love, required but one thing, namely, to make Napoleon happy.

When she was told that Napoleon loved Maria Louisa with all the passion of a fiery lover, Josephine conquered herself so as to smile and thank God that she had accepted her sacrifice and thus secured Napoleon’s happiness.