e French nation."

Josephine probably had very little religious knowledge. She regarded
Christianity as a sentiment rather than a principle. She felt the poetic
beauty of its revelations and its ordinances. She knew how holy were its
charities, how pure its precepts, how ennobling its influences, even
when encumbered with the grossest superstitions. She had seen, and
dreadfully had she felt, what France was without religion--with marriage
a mockery, conscience a phantom, and death proclaimed to all an eternal
sleep. She therefore most warmly seconded her husband in all endeavors
to restore again to desolated France the religion of Jesus Christ.

The next morning after the issuing of the proclamation announcing the
re-establishment of public worship, a grand religious ceremony took
place in honor of the occasion in the church of Notre Dame. Napoleon, to
produce a deep impression upon the public mind, invested the occasion
with all possible pomp. As he was preparing to go to the Cathedral, one
of his colleagues, Cambaceres, entered the room.

"Well," said the first consul, rubbing his hands in fine spirits, "we go
to church this morning; what say they to that in Paris?"

"Many people," replied Cambaceres, "propose to attend the first
representation in order to hiss the piece, should they not find it
amusing."

"If any one takes it into his head to hiss, I shall put him out of the
door by the grenadiers of the consular guard."

"But what if the grenadiers themselves take to hissing like the rest?"

"As to that, I have no fear. My old mustaches will go here to Notre Dame
just as at Cairo they would have gone to the mosque. They will remark
how I do, and, seeing their general grave and decent, they will be so
too, passing the watchword to each other, _Decency_!"

In the noble proclamation which the first consul issued upon this great
event, he says, "An insane policy has sought, during the Revolution, to
smother religious dissensions under the ruins of the altar, under the
ashes of religion itself. At its voice all those pious solemnities
ceased in which the citizens called each other by the endearing name of
brothers, and acknowledged their common equality in the sight of Heaven.
The dying, left alone in his agonies, no longer heard that consoling
voice which calls the Christian to a better world. God himself seemed
exiled from the face of nature. Ministers of the religion of peace! let
a complete oblivion veil over