and that you share in the general affection. This
renders me happy. My health is very good at the present moment, but my
heart is always sad.

"All the private letters which I have seen agree in the declaration that
the Emperor exposed himself very much at the battle of Eylau. I
frequently receive tidings from him, and sometimes two letters a day.
This is a great consolation, but it does not replace him."

That Napoleon, in the midst of the ten thousand cares of so arduous a
campaign, could have found time to write daily to Josephine, and often
twice a day, is surely extraordinary. There are not many husbands, it is
to be feared, who are so thoughtful of the anxieties of an absent wife.

Early in May the Empress received the portrait, of which we have spoken,
of her idolized grandchild, Napoleon Charles, in his amusing military
costume. She was intending to send it as a pleasing memorial to the
Emperor in his distant encampment.

Just then she received the dreadful tidings that little Napoleon Charles
had been taken sick with the croup, and, after the illness of but a few
hours, had died. It was the 5th of May, 1807. Josephine was in Paris;
Hortense at the Hague, in Holland; Napoleon was hundreds of leagues
distant in the north, with his army almost buried in snow upon the banks
of the Vistula.

The world perhaps has never witnessed the death of a child which has
caused so much anguish. Hortense did not leave her son for a moment, as
the terrible disease advanced to its termination. When he breathed his
last she seemed completely stunned. Not a tear dimmed her eye. Not a
word, not a moan was uttered. Like a marble statue, she sat upon the
sofa where the child had died, gazing around her with a look of wild,
amazed, delirious agony. With much difficulty she was taken from the
room, being removed on the sofa upon which she reclined. Her anguish was
so great that for some time it was feared that reason was dethroned, and
that the blow would prove fatal. Her limbs were rigid, and her dry and
glassy eye was riveted upon vacancy. At length, in the endeavor to bring
her out from this dreadful state, the lifeless body of the child,
dressed for the grave, was brought in and placed in the lap of its
mother. The pent-up anguish of Hortense now found momentary relief in a
flood of tears, and in loud and uncontrollable sobbings.

The anguish of Josephine surpassed, if possible, even that of Hortense.
The Empress knew that Nap