It is quite a reasonable proposition to suppose that Napoleon must have had a secret suspicion of his wife's infidelity. It is even hard to believe that he had not a full knowledge of her actual association with Count Neipperg. It will be observed that while his reference to her is dutiful, not to say tender, there is still something lacking, as though he kept something snugly in the back of his head, something like the following:--"I cannot make this historical document without alluding to you for my son's sake, though I know full well you have wronged me and consorted with my enemies and betrayers. I know all this, but I am about to pass on, and true to my instincts of compassion and to my Imperial dignity, I must carry my sorrow and grief with me, and having given you as good a testimonial as I can, I must leave you to settle accounts with posterity as to your conduct towards me and your adopted country. I shall not do by you as you have done. I hope full allowance will be made for all you have made me suffer. Meanwhile, I am about to relieve the digestion of Kings by passing to the Elysian Fields, there to be greeted by Kleber, Desaix, Bessières, Duroc, Ney, Murat, Masséna, and Berthier, and we shall talk of the deeds we have done together. Yes, Marie Louise, I bend under the terrible yoke your father, his Chancellor, and the allied satellites have made for me, and yet I keep these incomparable warriors of Europe in a state of alarm. I wish you joy of your allies, who have behaved so nobly to your husband in captivity. I have often thought in my solitude, Louise, that it would have been a more popular national union had I carried out my intention of taking for my second wife a Frenchwoman. It may be that my marriage with you, consummated by every token of peace and goodwill, was really the beginning of my downfall. Ah! how much more noble of you to have followed me in my adversity to Elba. You might have done great service to France and to your native land, to say nothing of the possibility of breaking up the coalition against me and saving rivers of blood. Waterloo might never have been fought had you emulated your matchless sister-in-law, Catherine of Westphalia, in her attitude of supreme womanhood, and your fame might have surpassed that of Joan of Arc, and been handed down to distant ages as an example of heroic firmness and devotion, and then you would have been beatified by the Church and acclaimed a saint by the people to which you belong. You shared with me the unequalled grandeur of the most powerful throne on earth. I was devoted to you and you betrayed me. Your father insisted that you should break your marriage vow and found in you a willing accomplice in the outrage committed against me. You had shared my throne, and I had reason to expect that every human instinct would call you to my side in my exile, and the thought that burns into my soul is that in the infamy of years, posterity will not be reproached for averting its eye from you as well as from that heartless father who requested you to forsake me. Catherine of Westphalia did better. She defied her father, and clung more closely to her husband when he needed all the succour of a sympathetic being to comfort him in his hour of dire misfortune. These gloomy thoughts are forced upon me by every law of nature, and now that I have but a brief time left, I am impelled to bequeath to you in the third paragraph of my last will and testament some tender remembrance of you. I do this notwithstanding that you, Marie Louise, Empress of the French, prayed to God that He would bless the arms of the enemies of the land of your adoption. And then that letter which I sent you from Grenoble in a nutshell on my way from Elba to Paris to reclaim the throne which treason had deprived me of. I requested you to come to me with my son the King of Rome. You ignored that, as you did other communications which I sent, and which I am assured you received. I make no public accusation against you. _That_ would be undignified and unkingly."