on against me and saving rivers of blood. Waterloo might never
have been fought had you emulated your matchless sister-in-law,
Catherine of Westphalia, in her attitude of supreme womanhood, and
your fame might have surpassed that of Joan of Arc, and been handed
down to distant ages as an example of heroic firmness and devotion,
and then you would have been beatified by the Church and acclaimed a
saint by the people to which you belong. You shared with me the
unequalled grandeur of the most powerful throne on earth. I was
devoted to you and you betrayed me. Your father insisted that you
should break your marriage vow and found in you a willing accomplice
in the outrage committed against me. You had shared my throne, and I
had reason to expect that every human instinct would call you to my
side in my exile, and the thought that burns into my soul is that in
the infamy of years, posterity will not be reproached for averting its
eye from you as well as from that heartless father who requested you
to forsake me. Catherine of Westphalia did better. She defied her
father, and clung more closely to her husband when he needed all the
succour of a sympathetic being to comfort him in his hour of dire
misfortune. These gloomy thoughts are forced upon me by every law of
nature, and now that I have but a brief time left, I am impelled to
bequeath to you in the third paragraph of my last will and testament
some tender remembrance of you. I do this notwithstanding that you,
Marie Louise, Empress of the French, prayed to God that He would bless
the arms of the enemies of the land of your adoption. And then that
letter which I sent you from Grenoble in a nutshell on my way from
Elba to Paris to reclaim the throne which treason had deprived me of.
I requested you to come to me with my son the King of Rome. You
ignored that, as you did other communications which I sent, and which
I am assured you received. I make no public accusation against you.
_That_ would be undignified and unkingly."

In spite of his apparent unaltered affection for his wife, Napoleon
reflectively made occasional remarks during his exile which indicated
that her conduct was much in his mind; and the foregoing portrayal of
his sentiments towards her may be regarded as a human probability. The
remarkable thing is that he should have made any reference at all to
this erotic woman in his will. It puzzled his companions in exile, who
knew well enough that she was the cause