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is desire he vigorously used "precedents and invented justifications." Happily he did not stretch the law of hereditary succession further than this. Leon, when he grew up, became a great source of trouble to all those with whom he was connected. His features and physical make up had a marked resemblance to his father's, but his mind was erratic. He had inherited none of the steady, sane genius of the Emperor, though but for a freak of nature which gave him a mental twist, he would have been as near his prototype as may be. He was always full of great schemes, which in the hands of a normally constituted person would have been fashioned into public usefulness. Masson gives a vivid and somewhat categorical account of his predilections, which were "gambling, duels, politics, writing pamphlets, the conception of colossal canal, railway, and commercial undertakings that never got far beyond the initial and rocky mental stage." He was one of the chief mourners when his father's remains were brought to Paris from St. Helena in 1840, and in 1848 aspired to the Presidency of the Republic, which fell to the lot of his cousin Louis Napoleon, whose life he desired to take, but who, with great generosity, gave him a pension and paid the legacy left him by Napoleon. He died in 1881. The birth of Leon gives him a prominent place in the history of the political divorce, though so far as Napoleon was concerned or affected by it, there is strong evidence to show that he really thought it was a way out, and had he been left to his own inclinations, the probability is that there would have been no second marriage so long as Josephine lived. From 1807 to 1809 his brain was racked to pieces with the inevitable shadow he struggled to evade. He could not bring himself to sever the tie that bound them together in strong attachment for nearly fifteen years. He invented every conceivable device to try and find a more congenial solution than divorce. For two years the Emperor lived in an atmosphere of intolerable anguish which distracted him. The nearer he approached the dreaded theme, the more fascinating his wife appeared to him, and the more tenaciously he clung to the deep impressions that had been made by that youthful passion that swayed his very being in other days. She had frequently recaptured him from the subtle blandishments of an agency that was ever on his track, and then his devotion became more rapturous than ever. Fouche
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