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splendour of the fete which heralded the title of First Consul for
Life, proclaimed on August 15th: that day was also memorable as being
the First Consul's thirty-third birthday, the festival of the
Assumption, and the anniversary of the ratification of the Concordat.
The decorations and fireworks were worthy of so remarkable a
confluence of solemnities. High on one of the towers of Notre Dame
glittered an enormous star, and at its centre there shone the sign of
the Zodiac which had shed its influence over his first hours of life.
The myriads of spectators who gazed at that natal emblem might well
have thought that his life's star was now at its zenith. Few could
have dared to think that it was to mount far higher into unknown
depths of space, blazing as a baleful portent to kings and peoples;
still less was there any Cassandra shriek of doom as to its final
headlong fall into the wastes of ocean. All was joy and jubilation
over a career that had even now surpassed the records of antique
heroism, that blended the romance of oriental prowess with the
beneficent toils of the legislator, and prospered alike in war and
peace.

And yet black care cast one shadow over that jubilant festival. There
was a void in the First Consul's life such as saddened but few of the
millions of peasants who looked up to him as their saviour. His wife
had borne him no heir: and there seemed no prospect that a child of
his own would ever succeed to his glorious heritage. Family joys, it
seemed, were not for him. Suspicions and bickerings were his lot. His
brothers, in their feverish desire for the establishment of a
Bonapartist dynasty, ceaselessly urged that he should take means to
provide himself with a legitimate heir, in the last resort by
divorcing Josephine. With a consideration for her feelings which does
him credit, Napoleon refused to countenance such proceedings. Yet it
is certain that from this time onwards he kept in view the
desirability, on political grounds, of divorcing her, and made this
the excuse for indulgence in amours against which Josephine's tears
and reproaches were all in vain.

The consolidation of personal rule, the institution of the Legion of
Honour, and the return of very many of the emigrant nobles under the
terms of the recent amnesty, favoured the growth of luxury in the
capital and of Court etiquette at the Tuileries and St. Cloud. At
these palaces the pomp of the _ancien regime_ was laboriously copied.