to her seat, where he stood by her, drawing upon her the attention of all.  Did she take a drive, at the accustomed hour, in the Champs Elysees, she was confident soon to see General Bonaparte on his gray horse gallop at her side, followed by his brilliant staff, himself the object of public admiration and universal respect; and finally, if she went to the theatre, General Bonaparte never failed to appear in her loge, to remain near her during the performance; and when she left, to offer his arm to accompany her to her carriage.

It could not fail that this persevering homage of the renowned and universally admired young general should make a deep and flattering impression on Josephine’s heart, and fill her with pride and joy.  But Josephine made resistance to this feeling; she endeavored to shield herself from it by maternal love.

She sent for her two children from their respective schools, and with her nearly grown-up son on one side and her daughter budding into maidenhood on the other, she thus presented herself to the general, and with an enchanting smile said:  “See, general, how old I am, with a grown-up son and daughter who soon can make of me a grandmother.”

But Bonaparte with heart-felt emotion reached his hand to Eugene and said, “A man who can call so worthy a youth as this his son, is to be envied.”

A cunning, smiling expression of the eye revealed to Josephine that he had understood her war-stratagem—­that neither the grown-up son nor the marriageable daughter could deter him from his object.

Josephine at last was won by so much love and tenderness, but she could not yet acknowledge that the wounds of her heart were closed; that once more she could trust in happiness, and devote her life to a new love, to a new future.  She shrank timidly away from such a shaping of her destiny; and even the persuasions of her friends and relatives, even of the father of her deceased husband, could not bring her to a decision.

The state of her mind is depicted in a letter which Josephine wrote to her friend Madame de Chateau Renaud, and which describes in a great measure the strange uncertainty of her heart: 

“You have seen General Bonaparte at my house!  Well, then, he is the one who wishes to be the father of the orphans of Alexandre de Beauharnais and the husband of his widow.  ‘Do you love him?’ you will ask.  Well, no!—­“Do you feel any repugnance toward him?’ No, but I feel in a state of vacillation and doubt, a state very disagreeable to me, and which the devout in religious matters consider to be the most scandalizing.  As love is a kind of worship, one ought in its presence to feel animated by other feelings than those I now experience, and therefore I long for your advice, which might bring the constant indecision of my mind to a fixed conclusion.  To adopt a firm course has always appeared to my Creole nonchalance something beyond reach, and I find it infinitely more convenient to be led by the will of another.