averting its eye from you as well as from that heartless father who requested you to forsake me.  Catherine of Westphalia did better.  She defied her father, and clung more closely to her husband when he needed all the succour of a sympathetic being to comfort him in his hour of dire misfortune.  These gloomy thoughts are forced upon me by every law of nature, and now that I have but a brief time left, I am impelled to bequeath to you in the third paragraph of my last will and testament some tender remembrance of you.  I do this notwithstanding that you, Marie Louise, Empress of the French, prayed to God that He would bless the arms of the enemies of the land of your adoption.  And then that letter which I sent you from Grenoble in a nutshell on my way from Elba to Paris to reclaim the throne which treason had deprived me of.  I requested you to come to me with my son the King of Rome.  You ignored that, as you did other communications which I sent, and which I am assured you received.  I make no public accusation against you. That would be undignified and unkingly.”

In spite of his apparent unaltered affection for his wife, Napoleon reflectively made occasional remarks during his exile which indicated that her conduct was much in his mind; and the foregoing portrayal of his sentiments towards her may be regarded as a human probability.  The remarkable thing is that he should have made any reference at all to this erotic woman in his will.  It puzzled his companions in exile, who knew well enough that she was the cause of much mental anguish to him.  It afflicted him so keenly on two notable occasions that he drew pathetically a comparison between her conduct and that which would have been Josephine’s under similar circumstances.  It is an astonishing characteristic in Napoleon that he always forgave those who had injured him most.

In order to emphasise the spirit of forgiveness, he specially refers to a matter that must have taken a lot of forgiving.  In the sixth paragraph of his will he says:  “The two unfortunate results of the invasions of France, when she had still so many resources, are to be attributed to the treason of Marmont, Augereau, Talleyrand, and La Fayette.  I forgive them—­may the posterity of France forgive them as I do.”  Then in the seventh paragraph he pardons his brother Louis for the libel he published in 1820, although, as he states, “It is replete with false assertions and falsified documents.”  He heaps coals of fire on Marie Louise by requesting Marchand to preserve some of his hair and to cause a bracelet to be made of it with a little gold clasp.  It is highly probable that the wife of Count Neipperg would rather not have been reminded of her amorous habits and other culpable conduct by these little attentions.