ed to associate. Her task was not easy,
but she knew so well how to say a kind word to all, and her tact was
so great that when she became empress the duties and requirements
of that office were natural to her. She won the Republicans by her
friendship with Fouche, the representative of the revolutionary
element--the aristocracy, by her dignity and refinement. Her whole
appearance had a peculiar charm.

In 1803 the conditions began to be reversed. In 1796 Josephine had
worried Napoleon on account of her inconstancy; she was then young
and beautiful, while he was penniless and ailing. In 1803 he was
thirty-four and she forty--he in his prime, wealthy and popular,
she faded and powerless, no longer able to give cause for suspicion.
However, nothing could make Napoleon reject her, because she was
useful to him. "Her kindness was a weapon against her enemies, a charm
for her friends, and the source of her power over her husband." "I
gained battles, Josephine gained me hearts," are the well-known words
of Napoleon. As empress she had every wish gratified, but she
realized that a woman of her age could not continue indefinitely her
fascination over a man as capricious as Napoleon. In the brilliant
court of Fontainebleau she held the highest place, and no one could
suspect the anxieties that tormented her, so cool and happy did she
appear.

Josephine did many things that later on gradually helped reconcile
Napoleon to a divorce: her pride, her aristocratic tendencies,
extravagance and lavishness; her objection to the marriage of Hortense
to General Duroc on the grounds of humble birth; her religious
tendencies; her difficulty in keeping secrets, which led to highly
tragic scenes between her and Bonaparte; the encouragement she gave
to the jealousies and hatred of her brothers and sisters-in-law,
who maliciously slandered her at every opportunity; and finally, her
barrenness.

Her career after her divorce was honorable, and to-day Josephine is
still held in the highest esteem in France and in the world at large.
Her greatness is not in having been the wife of a great emperor, but
in knowing how to adapt herself to the conditions in France into which
she was suddenly thrust. As a conciliator and a mediator between two
almost hopelessly irreconcilable classes of society, she deserves a
prominent place among great French women.

CHAPTER XIV

WOMEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Among the unusually large number of prom