If only she could escape from her detested husband she would be the happiest woman on earth.  But Napoleon on this point was adamant.  In her rage and rebellion she tore her hair, rolled on the floor, took drugs to make her ill; and at last so succeeded in alarming her Imperial brother that he summoned her back to France, where her army of lovers gave her a warm welcome, and where she could indulge in any vanity and folly unchecked.

Matters were now hastening to a tragic climax for Napoleon and the family he had raised from slumdom in Marseilles to crowns and coronets.  Josephine had been divorced, to Pauline’s undisguised joy; and her place had been taken by Marie Louise, the proud Austrian, whom she liked at least as little.  When Napoleon fell from his throne, she alone of all his sisters helped to cheer his exile in Elba; for the brother she loved and feared was the only man to whom Pauline’s fickle heart was ever true.  She even stripped herself of all her jewels to make the way smooth back to his crown.  And when at last news came to her at Rome of his death at St Helena it was she who shed the bitterest tears and refused to be comforted.  That an empire was lost, was nothing compared with the loss of the brother who had always been so lenient to her failings, so responsive to her love.

Two years later her own end came at Florence.  When she felt the cold hand of death on her, she called feebly for a mirror, that she might look for the last time on her beauty.  “Thank God,” she whispered, as she gazed, “I am still lovely!  I am ready to die.”  A few moments later, with the mirror still clutched in her hand, and her eyes still feasting on the charms which time and death itself were powerless to dim, died Pauline Bonaparte, sister of an Emperor and herself an Empress by the right of her incomparable beauty.

CHAPTER XI

A SIREN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

When Wilhelmine Encke first opened her eyes on the world one day in the year 1754, he would have been a bold prophet who would have predicted that she would one day be the uncrowned Queen of the Court of Russia, plus Reine que la Reine, and that her children would have in their veins the proudest blood in Europe.  Such a prophecy might well have been laughed to scorn, for little Wilhelmine had as obscure a cradle as almost any infant in all Prussia.  Her father was an army bugler, who wore private’s uniform in Frederick the Great’s army; and her early years were to be spent playing with other soldiers’ children in the sordid environment of Berlin barracks.

When her father turned his back on the army, while Wilhelmine was still nursing her dolls, it was to play the humble role of landlord of a small tavern, from which he was lured by the bait of a place as French-horn player in Frederick’s private band; and the goal of his modest ambition was reached when he was appointed trumpeter to the King.