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