As for Napoleon, he was a vanquished man—­and he knew it—­before ever he set foot in Madame’s modest dining-room.  When he left, he “trod on air,” for the Vicomtesse had been more than gracious to him.  The next day he was drawn as by a magnet to the Rue Chantereine, and the next and the next, each interview with his divinity forging fresh links for the chain that bound him; and at each visit he met under Madame’s roof some of the great ones of that other world in which Josephine moved, the old noblesse of France—­who paid her the homage due to a Queen.

Thus vanity and ambition fed the flames of the passion which was consuming him; and within a fortnight he had laid his heart and his fortune, which at the time consisted of “his personal wardrobe and his military accoutrements” at the feet of the Creole widow; and one March day in 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte, General, and Josephine de Beauharnais, were made one by a registrar who obligingly described the bride as twenty-nine (thus robbing her of three years), and added two to the bridegroom’s twenty-six years.

After two days of rapturous honeymooning Napoleon was on his way to join his army in Italy, as reluctant a bridegroom as ever left Cupid at the bidding of Mars.  At every change of horses during the long journey he dispatched letters to the wife he had left behind—­letters full of passion and yearning.  In one of them he wrote, “When I am tempted to curse my fate, I place my hand on my heart and find your portrait there.  As I gaze at it I am filled with a joy unutterable.  Life seems to hold no pain, save that of severance from my beloved.”

At Nice, amid all the labours and anxieties of organising his rabble army for a campaign, his thoughts are always taking wings to her; her portrait is ever in his hand.  He says his prayers before it; and, when once he accidentally broke the glass, he was in an agony of despair and superstitious foreboding.  His one cry was, “Come to me!  Come to my heart and to my arms.  Oh, that you had wings!”

Even when flushed with the surrender of Piedmont after a fortnight’s brilliant fighting, in which he had won half a dozen battles and reaped twenty-one standards, he would have bartered all his laurels for a sight of the woman he loved so passionately.  But while he was thus yearning for her in distant Italy, Madame was much too happy in her beloved Paris to lend an ear to his pleadings.  As wife of the great Napoleon she was a veritable Queen, fawned on and flattered by all the great ones in the capital.  Hers was the place of honour at every fete and banquet; the banners her husband had captured were presented to her amid a tumult of acclamation; when she entered a theatre the entire house rose to greet her with cheers.  She was thus in no mood to leave her Queendom for the arms of her husband, whose unattractive person and clumsy ardour only repelled her.