Three Empresses. By Caroline Gearey. (Dig' y, Long, and Co.)
—The "three Empresses" are Josephine, Marie-Louise, and Eugenie. The life of the first is distinctly the most interesting of the three. Napoleon's love-letters, which, " atrociously written and abominably spelt" as they are, are full of feeling, would alone suffice to make it so. And the fortunes of the woman were romantic in the extreme. Miss Gearey tells, on the authority of M. de St. Amand, a curious story of their having been prophesied to her before she left Martinique. She was distinctly unlucky in her first husband ; and it can hardly be said, if one follows Solon's maxim of looking to the end, that she was fortunate in her second. Possibly one may doubt whether she ever loved him very much ; but it is certain that she felt her dispossession very keenly. To have to read such a document as her renunciation, the text of which is given in this volume, was indeed the ne plus ultra of humiliation. As for Marie-Louise, one need not feel much sympathy for her. She was a very thick-skinned creature. If she could secure a lover and the luxuries of life, she did not miss her throne. Probably she thought the genuine Duchy of Parma more distinguished than the parvenu Empire. Miss Gearey has, it is clear, little liking for the woman. Who could, indeed, that had studied her history? Of the third Empress, it is not yet the time to write. Miss Gearey's narrative will serve well enough 'for the present ; but the historian of the future will have some other things to say.
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