in value, it is said, to two hundred thousand francs a year. But Napoleon does not care to think—perhaps is incapable of thinking of all this, and makes no attempt to appeal to this worthier, better side of the young girl's nature. It is well to remember all this at this particular moment in the lives of the two; it throws a curious light on the character of Napoleon; it is the key to their subsequent relations; above all, it represents the triumph of the simplicity and the spiritual and the humane in human nature over the cold calculations, the material and gross conceptions of its motives and factors by the cynical and the corrupt.
IX.
THE FIRST MEETING.
We can find no better revelation, both of Napoleon's essential vulgarity and of his distinctive misunderstanding of the human heart, than his conduct at his first meeting with his wife. His apologists do their best to extenuate and even to eulogise his conduct on this occasion. I shall be surprised if my readers take the same view of the transaction.
Let us listen, first, to M. Lévy, and see how he opens the story of the transaction:
"As politics had given Napoleon a new wife, he undertook to make the conquest. With this object he invented all sorts of romantic ways of
