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She says, "It was a most extraordinary thing for us to see the man whose head was filled with such vast affairs enter into the most minute details of the female toilet and of what dresses, what robes, and what jewels the Empress should wear on such and such an occasion. One day he daubed her dress with ink because be did not like it, and wanted her to put on another.
If it can be so far honoured as to be counted as a party, it is the party that murdered King Humbert, that assassinated the Empress of Austria, and that would sooner or later kill the Pope, if he left the safe refuge which some persons still insist on calling his prison.
She wrote again from Saint Cloud, June 11: "Your boy is very well, and amuses me a great deal; he is so gentle; I think he has all the ways of the poor boy we mourn." Josephine understood consolation better than the Emperor. What could be more touching, more maternal, than this letter from the Empress?
"Sire," said I, "he is a good man, who has no fortune, and supports a numerous family; and if he has to quit the service of her Majesty the Empress, it will not be believed that it was on account of a fault for which the wine was more to be blamed than he, and he will be utterly ruined."
The Emperor had been much annoyed by all these bickerings, and, in order to avoid them in future, chose, from the ladies charged with the education of the daughters of the Legion of Honor in the school at Rouen, four new ladies of announcement for the Empress Marie Louise.
There were four tables in the palace, that of the officers and ladies-in-waiting, that of the officers of the guard and the pages, that of the ladies who read to the Empress and introduced visitors. The Grand Marshal had under his orders the prefects of the palace: M. de Lucay, M. de Bausset, and M. de Saint Didier.
The Empress was fooled, and the white banner flaunted from the windows. The generals whom he had made his nearest friends abandoned him for the Bourbons a set of people no one had heard tell of.
He must not die one day after the Empress Dowager as that would create talk. And he ought to die some time before her. The death fuse is one which often burns very much longer than we expect was it not one of the English kings who said "I fear I am a very long time a-dying, gentlemen" and sometimes it burns out sooner than is intended.
Both these expedients he tried. In 1869 he announced that he was about to grant France liberal institutions. He put the empress forward whenever it was possible, and he made up his mind that as war with Germany was sure to come, the sooner it came, the better, that he might reap its fruits while some measure of life and strength was left him.
Everything remained gloomy and silent among the inhabitants of this last imperial residence; but, nevertheless, the Emperor personally seemed to me more calm since he had come to a definite conclusion than at the time he was wavering in painful indecision. He spoke sometimes in my presence of the Empress and his son, but not as often as might have been expected.
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