romantic hopes by the foolish
promise of an ignorant impostor, that she would rise to great
eminence, and have been stimulated to greater exertions to realize
those hopes. This may have urged her to intimacy with the corrupt and
immoral Directory, with whom a beautiful and accomplished woman could
not fail to be a favorite; may have secured her marriage to a very
young and ardent man, who all believed must rise to eminence; and may
have even induced her to excite her husband to the policy which
secured a crown. But to believe that a prediction, giving all the
leading events of the lives of several different persons, and those
persons actors in scenes so wonderful, would be a folly equally weak
and blasphemous. The same superstition is frequently betrayed in these
volumes; and we have as many dreams and portents as ever disturbed the
sleeping and waking hours of the wife of the first Napoleon,
Caliphurnia.

The pages of these memoirs afford us the harshest and most repulsive
views of Napoleon's character that we have yet seen. His affectionate
consort was undoubtedly discerning, and used her keenness of
perception with proper diligence to discover all her husband's faults.
We have never shared in the excessive and extraordinary admiration
with which the character of this man-hater and earth-spoiler is
regarded in this land of liberty; but it seems to us that the
portraiture before us would be deemed unjust coming from his foes, and
is at least singular when traced by the hand of the affectionate and
gentle Josephine. The praise awarded him is cold, formal and stinted;
but the censure is interjected among her details with a freedom that
we could not have anticipated. That she should have resented his
heartless repudiation of the companion of all his struggles and
fortunes, is natural, and perhaps just; but that she should have
revenged the wrong, if indeed that be the motive, by depreciating him
seems out of character with the Josephine of our imaginations. She
describes him as vain, cruel, often weak, and at times abjectly
cowardly. She dwells with great fullness upon his crimes, and passes
rapidly and coldly over the many great and good things he achieved for
France. In some instances positive misrepresentations are resorted
to, calculated to blacken his character. Thus, in relation to the
disaster at the bridge on the Elster, she says:

"I likewise learned that my husband has passed the only bridge by
which he could