heart was often imposed on by the artful and rapacious. Those who,
from interested motives, desired to separate her from Napoleon, felt a
secret satisfaction in the uneasiness which her large expenditure
occasionally gave him. To their misrepresentations may be ascribed the
violent bursts of jealousy by which he was at times agitated; but he was
ever ready to perceive that there was no foundation to justify them. It
was during one of their separations, that the insinuations of those
about Napoleon excited his jealousy to such a degree, that he wrote a
hasty letter to Josephine, accusing her of _coquetry_, and of evidently
preferring the society of men to those of her own sex.

"The ladies," she says, in her reply, "are filled with fear and
lamentations for those who serve under you; the gentlemen eagerly
compliment me on your success, and speak of you in a manner that
delights me. My aunt and those about me can tell you, ungrateful as you
are, whether _I have been coquetting with any body_. These are your
words, and they would be hateful to me, were I not certain you see
already that they are unjust, and are sorry for having written them."

Napoleon's brothers strove to alienate his affections from Josephine;
but the intense agony which he suffered when suspicion was awakened,
must have proved to them how deep these affections were. Perhaps no
trait in Josephine's character exalts it more than her conduct to the
family who had endeavored to injure her in the most tender point. She
often was the means of making peace between Napoleon and different
members of his family with whom he was displeased. Even after the
separation which they had been instrumental in effecting, she still
exerted that influence which she never lost, to reconcile differences
which arose between them. Napoleon could never long mistrust her
generous and tender feelings, and the intimate knowledge of such a
disposition every day increased his love; she was not only the object of
his fondest affection, but he believed her to be in some mysterious
manner connected with his destiny; a belief which chimed in with the
popular superstition by which she was regarded as his good genius,--a
superstition which took still deeper hold of the public mind when days
of disaster came, whose date commenced in no long time after the
separation. The apparently accidental circumstance by which Josephine
had escaped the explosion of the infernal machine was construed by m