No. 4
Thursday, December 21st, is the date.
The weather is very damp.—Making Malmaison as unhealthy as its very name warranted, and rendering more difficult the task which Madame de Rémusat had set herself of resting Josephine mentally by tiring her physically. This typical toady—Napoleon’s Eavesdropper Extraordinary—had arrived at Malmaison on December 18th. She writes on the Friday (December 22nd), beseeching her husband to advise the Emperor to moderate the tone of his letters, especially this one (Thursday, December 21st), which had upset Josephine frightfully. Surely a more harmless letter was never penned. But it is the Rémusat all over; she lives in a chronic atmosphere of suspicion that all her letters are read by the Emperor, and therefore, like Stevenson’s nursery rhymes, they are always written with “one eye on the grown-up person”85—on the grown-up person par excellence of France and the century. The opening of letters by the government was doubtless a blemish, which, however, Napoleon tried to neutralise by entrusting the Post Office to his wife’s relative, Lavalette, a man whose ever-kind heart prevented this necessary espionage degenerating into unnecessary interference with individual rights.