The Court of the Empress Josephine by Imbert de Saint-Amand, Arthur Léon, baron, 1834-1900, Perry, Thomas Sergeant

The Faubourg Saint Germain, in spite of a few adhesions from personal motives, preserved an ironical attitude. General de Segur, then a captain under the orders of the Grand Marshal of the Palace, observed that in 1804, with the exception of several obscure nobles, either poor or ruined, and others already attached to Napoleon's civil and military fortune, many negotiations and various temptations were required to persuade well-known persons to appear at the court as it was at first constituted. He goes on: "As a spectator and confidant of the means employed, I witnessed in those early days many refusals, and some I had to announce myself. I even heard many bitter complaints on this subject. I remember that in reply I mentioned to the Empress my own case, and told her what it had cost me to enlist under the tricolor, and then to enter the First Consul's military household. The Empress understood me so well that she made to me a similar confidence, confessing her own struggles, her almost invincible repugnance, at the end of 1795, in spite of her feeling for Bonaparte, before she could make up her mind to marry the man whom at that time she herself used to call General Vendemiaire."

Although Josephine had become Empress, she remained a Legitimist, and saw clearly the weak points in the Empire. At the Tuileries, in the chamber of Marie Antoinette, she felt out of place; she was surprised to have for Lady of Honor a duchess of an old family, and her sole ambition was to be pardoned by the Royalists for her elevation, to the highest rank. Napoleon, too, was much concerned about the Bourbons, in whom he foresaw his successors, "One of his keenest regrets," wrote Prince Metternich, "was his inability to invoke legitimacy as the foundation of his power. Few men have felt more deeply than he the precariousness and fragility of power when it lacks this foundation, its susceptibility to attack."

After recalling the Emperor's attempt to induce Louis XVIII. to abandon his claims to the throne, Prince Metternich goes on: "In speaking to me of this matter, Napoleon said: 'His reply was noble, full of noble traditions. In those Legitimists there is something outside of mere intellectual force.'" The Emperor, who, at the beginning of his career, displayed such intense Republican enthusiasm, was by nature essentially a lover of authority and of the monarchy. He would have liked to be a sovereign of the old stamp. His pleasure in surrounding himself with members of the old aristocracy attests the aristocratic instincts of the so-called crowned apostle of democracy. The few Republicans who remained faithful to the principles were indignant with these tendencies; it was with grief that they saw the reappearance of the throne; and thus, from different motives the unreconciled Jacobins and the men of Coblentz who had not joined the court, showed the same feeling of bitterness and of hostility to the Empire.