No. 41
Young Tascher.—The third of Josephine’s cousins-germain of that name. He was afterwards aide-de-camp of Prince Eugène, and later major-domo of the Empress Eugénie.
No. 42
After this letter St. Amand declares that Napoleon’s letters to his wife become “cold, short, banal, absolutely insignificant.” “They consisted of a few remarks about the rain or the fine weather, and always the same refrain—the invitation to be cheerful.... Napoleon, occupied elsewhere, wrote no longer to his legitimate wife, but as a duty, as paying a debt of conscience.” He was occupied, indeed, but barely as the author supposes. It is Bingham (vol. ii. 281) who reminds us that in the first three months of 1807 we have 1715 letters and despatches preserved of his work during that period, while he often rode forty leagues a day, and had instructed his librarian to send him by each morning’s courier two or three new books from Paris. Aubenas is more just than St. Amand. “If his style is no longer that of the First Consul, still less of the General of Italy, he was solicitous, punctilious, attentive, affectionate even although laconic, in that correspondence (with Josephine) which, in the midst of his much greater preoccupations, seems for him as much a pleasure as a duty.”