es us chickens, bread, and wine in abundance.)

As for Josephine, her pretty legend has quite disappeared in the light
of these recent memoirs, and the historians and commentators no longer
attempt to defend her against even the abominable stories which Barras
tells of her. "It would be Don-quixotism to deny them," says M. Gustave
Larroumet, among others; "the Josephines prefer the Barras to the
Bonapartes."

The marriage with Josephine was declared null, in virtue of an order of
the Council of Trent on the 14th of January, 1810, and Napoleon was
condemned by the municipality of Paris to a fine of six francs for the
benefit of the poor. The curious engraving, reproduced on page 123,
illustrates the brilliant ceremony of the arrival of the new Empress at
the Tuileries on the 2d of April following. A tremendous storm broke
over the city the night before, but at one o'clock in the afternoon,
when the Imperial couple arrived at the Arch of Triumph, then incomplete
but represented by a temporary _maquette_, the sun was shining brightly.
The cavalry of the Guard and the heralds-at-arms preceded the gorgeous
coronation carriage in which they were seated; the procession descended
the avenue of the Champs-Elysees, traversed the gardens of the
Tuileries, and halted before the Pavillon de l'Horloge. Then the Empress
assumed the coronation robe, the cortege ascended the grand stairway,
traversed the grand gallery of the Louvre between a double row of
invited guests, and entered the Salon Carre, which had been transformed
into a chapel, and where the nuptial altar had been erected. After the
mass, there was a _Te Deum_, and in the evening a grand banquet in the
Tuileries. The musicians sang the chorus of the _Iphigenie_ of Gluck:
_Que d'attraits, que de majeste!_ to the accompaniment of thousands of
voices.

_La Femme_ has always played a most important role in France; nowhere is
she so much discussed, nowhere is she so much respected as Mother, and
nowhere, it may be said, is she so little respected as Woman. The women
of the eighteenth century enjoy a species of popular renown as somewhat
more _piquant_, brilliant, and peculiarly feminine, as it were,--thanks
largely to the chroniclers and the romancers in literature and art;
there is a very general idea that they were all, more or less, of the
type of Madame de Pompadour, we will say, as set forth by one of her
most recent biographers: "It would seem that the grace and the good