Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/335

Rh of a lake, by moonlight, and not one instant passed without my thinking of Josephine. I have lost my snuff-box, and beg you to choose me one—rather flat, and to have something rather pretty written upon it, with your hair. A thousand kisses, as burning as you are cold."

And meantime poor, lazy, tepid Josephine proves a very poor correspondent. Letter after letter from Bonaparte begins with some such phrase as this: "Two days without a letter from you. Thirty times to-day have I said that to myself." "I hope that on arriving to-night I shall receive a letter from you." "I am starting immediately for Verona. I had hoped for a letter from you, and am in a state of the utmost anxiety." "No letter from you. I am really anxious." "I write to you frequently, my dear one, and you but little to me. You are haughty and unkind, as unkind as you are heedless."

And so it goes on in reproach after reproach:

"I have received your letters and have pressed them to my heart and my lips, and the grief at my absence, divided from you as I am a hundred. miles, has vanished. But your letters are as cold as if you were fifty; they might have been written after fifteen years of married life."

Here is another:

"I love you no longer; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a wretch, very clumsy, very stupid, a Cinderella. You never write to me;