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Rh thoughts from contemporary records, and leave to the reader the conclusions as to his character. Catherine, daughter of the King of Wurtemberg, who was with Napoleon at the time in Paris, gives an excellent description of Napoleon in a letter to her father:

"You will never believe, my dear father, how much in love he is with his future wife. He is excited beyond anything I could have imagined, and every day he sends one of his chamberlains, charged, like Mercury, with the missives of Great Jove. He showed me five of these epistles, which certainly were not written by St. Paul, but which really might have been dictated by an ardent lover. He talks of nothing but her, and what concerns her; I will not enumerate for you all the pleasures and presents he is preparing for her, of which he has given me a detailed account. I will content myself with showing you the disposition of his mind by repeating that he told me that, once married, he would give peace to the whole world, and all the rest of his time to Zaire."

other acts showed his curious self-distrust and incurable suspicion of women—a suspicion, founded not merely on his unhappy experiences with Josephine, but also on his low,