istrar who obligingly described the bride as
twenty-nine (thus robbing her of three years), and added two to the
bridegroom's twenty-six years.

After two days of rapturous honeymooning Napoleon was on his way to join
his army in Italy, as reluctant a bridegroom as ever left Cupid at the
bidding of Mars. At every change of horses during the long journey he
dispatched letters to the wife he had left behind--letters full of
passion and yearning. In one of them he wrote, "When I am tempted to
curse my fate, I place my hand on my heart and find your portrait there.
As I gaze at it I am filled with a joy unutterable. Life seems to hold
no pain, save that of severance from my beloved."

At Nice, amid all the labours and anxieties of organising his rabble
army for a campaign, his thoughts are always taking wings to her; her
portrait is ever in his hand. He says his prayers before it; and, when
once he accidentally broke the glass, he was in an agony of despair and
superstitious foreboding. His one cry was, "Come to me! Come to my heart
and to my arms. Oh, that you had wings!"

Even when flushed with the surrender of Piedmont after a fortnight's
brilliant fighting, in which he had won half a dozen battles and reaped
twenty-one standards, he would have bartered all his laurels for a sight
of the woman he loved so passionately. But while he was thus yearning
for her in distant Italy, Madame was much too happy in her beloved Paris
to lend an ear to his pleadings. As wife of the great Napoleon she was a
veritable Queen, fawned on and flattered by all the great ones in the
capital. Hers was the place of honour at every fete and banquet; the
banners her husband had captured were presented to her amid a tumult of
acclamation; when she entered a theatre the entire house rose to greet
her with cheers. She was thus in no mood to leave her Queendom for the
arms of her husband, whose unattractive person and clumsy ardour only
repelled her.

When his letters calling her to him became more and more imperative, she
could no longer ignore them. But she could, at least, invent an
excellent excuse for her tarrying. She wrote to tell him that she was
expecting to become a mother. This at least would put a stop to his
importunity. And it did. Napoleon was full of delight--and self-reproach
at the joyful news. "Forgive me, my beloved," he wrote. "How can I ever
atone? You were ill and I accused you of lingering in Paris. My love
robs me of my r