happy he excused her extravagance and overlooked the capricious,
peevish way in which she gave her domestic confidences concerning
himself to her friends, who were oft-times his enemies, and so
forgiving was he of faults which were so glaring to others, that he
frequently caressed when he should have chastised.

Josephine played upon his purblindness where she was concerned in
most scandalous ways. She had no money sense, and combined with this
defect she had no moral sense in money matters. Her debts were
chronic, and periodically so enlarged that she adopted the most
monstrous methods to reduce them before the balances were put before
Napoleon by herself, or an inkling conveyed to him by a wily creditor;
but these subterfuges only added to her spending resources. It is said
that she actually did not shrink from receiving a thousand francs per
day from Fouche as the price of information given him of what was
going on in the Tuileries, and also that she received half a million
francs from Flachats, the predatory army contractors.

It is unthinkable that Napoleon, whose rigid uprightness in matters of
money has never been disputed, could have known that his wife was
involved in such shocking financial dealings, or he would have taken
salutary measures to put a definite end to them. He knew that he was
surrounded by men who were inveterate thieves, and when their
defalcations were brought to his knowledge, they were either cashiered
or made to disgorge. Bourrienne, Talleyrand, and Fouche, for instance.
But there is no evidence to show that he ever suspected Josephine at
any time, and let us hope that the Fouche-Flachats transactions were
either exaggerated or mere invention, though it is hard to believe
that there was no truth in the accusation.

Napoleon was no sooner made Consul than there began to be hints and
innuendoes of an heir, and as Josephine knew that she could not bear
him one, she was thrown into fits of despondency lest he should be
driven by designing persons in and outside his family to listen to a
scheme of divorce and remarriage. The alternative was to nominate one
of his brothers as his heir. Joseph and Lucien were impossible, so he
fixed his mind on Louis. But the plot to assassinate him on the way to
the opera, together with the Duc d'Enghien, Cadoudal, Moreau, and
Pichegru affair, brought the change from Life Consul to Emperor more
quickly. The marriage of Louis to Hortense eased Josephine's mind.