Poor Leclerc, who really loved Pauline, grew thin, and graver still in manner.  He was sent to Spain and Portugal, and finally was made commander-in-chief of the French expedition to Haiti, where the famous black rebel, Toussaint l’Ouverture, was heading an uprising of the negroes.

Napoleon ordered Pauline to accompany her husband.  Pauline flatly refused, although she made this an occasion for ordering “mountains of pretty clothes and pyramids of hats.”  But still she refused to go on board the flag-ship.  Leclerc expostulated and pleaded, but the lovely witch laughed in his face and still persisted that she would never go.

Word was brought to Napoleon.  He made short work of her resistance.

“Bring a litter,” he said, with one of his steely glances.  “Order six grenadiers to thrust her into it, and see that she goes on board forthwith.”

And so, screeching like an angry cat, she was carried on board, and set sail with her husband and one of her former lovers.  She found Haiti and Santo Domingo more agreeable than she had supposed.  She was there a sort of queen who could do as she pleased and have her orders implicitly obeyed.  Her dissipation was something frightful.  Her folly and her vanity were beyond belief.

But at the end of two years both she and her husband fell ill.  He was stricken down by the yellow fever, which was decimating the French army.  Pauline was suffering from the results of her life in a tropical climate.  Leclerc died, the expedition was abandoned, and Pauline brought the general’s body back to France.  When he was buried she, still recovering from her fever, had him interred in a costly coffin and paid him the tribute of cutting off her beautiful hair and burying it with him.

“What a touching tribute to her dead husband!” said some one to Napoleon.

The emperor smiled cynically as he remarked: 

“H’m!  Of course she knows that her hair is bound to fall out after her fever, and that it will come in longer and thicker for being cropped.”

Napoleon, in fact, though he loved Pauline better than his other sisters—­or perhaps because he loved her better—­was very strict with her.  He obliged her to wear mourning, and to observe some of the proprieties; but it was hard to keep her within bounds.

Presently it became noised about that Prince Camillo Borghese was exceedingly intimate with her.  The prince was an excellent specimen of the fashionable Italian.  He was immensely rich.  His palace at Rome was crammed with pictures, statues, and every sort of artistic treasure.  He was the owner, moreover, of the famous Borghese jewels, the finest collection of diamonds in the world.

Napoleon rather sternly insisted upon her marrying Borghese.  Fortunately, the prince was very willing to be connected with Napoleon; while Pauline was delighted at the idea of having diamonds that would eclipse all the gems which Josephine possessed; for, like all of the Bonapartes, she detested her brother’s wife.  So she would be married and show her diamonds to Josephine.  It was a bit of feminine malice which she could not resist.