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Rh a great personage to visit Madame Walewska for him, and to present to her his homage and his entreaties. She proudly refused proposals made too brusquely, or was it perhaps the coquetry innate in woman that suggested to her to refuse?"

Napoleon, however, wrote a letter which in some degree made up for his brusqueness, and the young Countess promised to visit him.

The Emperor, while waiting for her, walked about the room and displayed as much impatience as emotion. Every moment he inquired the time. Madame Walewska arrived at last, but in what a state!—pale, dumb, her eyes bathed in tears.

Everybody knows the end of the story. Madame Walewska, after the disappearance of Napoleon from her native country, remained in shadow; she made her presence felt for the first time when reverses began to come. Then she wrote to her old lover, and she visited him in the island of Elba after his first dethronement. But perhaps the favour she conferred on him that he valued most was that she gave him a son. In due time the son lived to be one of the chief advisers and Ministers of Napoleon III., and died before the war in which the whole Napoleonic dynasty went down.

In the meantime poor Josephine comes part of the way to her husband, but he tells her to go back; the weather, he says, is bad, the roads unsafe. "Return to Paris," he writes to her; "be