With all her faults, she was affectionate and tender; she was a woman first and an Empress afterwards; she now clung to Napoleon, not merely for the splendour of the destiny which he had opened to her, but also from genuine love.
Their relations had curiously changed.

At the outset she had slighted his mad devotion by her shallow coldness and occasional infidelities, until his lava-like passion petrified.

Thenceforth it was for her to woo, and woo in vain.

For years past she had to bemoan the waning of his affection and his many conjugal sins.

And now the chasm, which she thought to have spanned by the religious ceremony on the eve of the coronation, yawned at her feet.