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Rh This is what had been reported to Napoleon. He took his revenge. To this period belongs that well-known intrigue between Napoleon and Madame Pauline Faures, which suggests to Taine one of his most remarkable passages; and from this time forward Napoleon's confidence in his wife was gone. When Josephine heard that he was returning, she determined to forestall her enemies, and to win back his love by going to meet him. Possibly she recollected that most unhappy day when she left Milan, and Napoleon, rushing, as he thought, to her loving and expecting arms, found nothing but emptiness and absence. But fortune was against her this time; she went to meet him by one route, he arrived by another.

So it happened that on October 16th, 1798, at six in the morning, Napoleon found no one when he reached his house in the Rue Chantereine, and his irritation and jealousy were thereby increased.

To make this unexpected solitude in his own home the more exasperating, Napoleon had passed through France amid the mad acclamations of the people—the forerunners of that inexhaustible popularity which very soon was to enable him to mount the throne. After all these wild crowds of almost idolatrous admirers—after all this tumult—to come home and find this silence, this apparent neglect! Napoleon was so exasperated that he refused for some time to even see Josephine, and took measures for having the divorce proceedings