Joséphine reached Malmaison on her return from Switzerland the 25 October, the day after the Malet affair. She wrote Eugène that the consternation had been general, but had not lasted long: at the end of several hours, everything was as calm as before. The whole plot turned upon the false report of the death of the Emperor. Armed with forged papers, and supported only by two battalions of the Paris garrison, this madman succeeded in gaining possession of the Post Office and the Treasury, and imprisoning Savary, the minister, and Pasquier, the prefect of police. He was finally arrested, condemned by a military court, and executed.

The Malet plot for the first time clearly revealed to the public the instability of the Empire, which was founded only on the glory and the genius of Napoleon. In this moment of crisis, when the conspirators shouted, “The Emperor is dead!” not a voice was raised to cry: “L’Empereur est mort! Vive l’Empereur!”

When the news reached Napoleon he said: “While the Empress was there, the King of Rome, my ministers, and all the great bodies of the State! Is then a man everything here? the institutions, the oaths, nothing!” Yes, a man was everything, and nothing else counted.

Joséphine has often been accused, at this crisis in the career of the Emperor, of being interested only in her own selfish affairs, but her letters tell another story. She writes from Malmaison to her daughter: “You give me new life, my dear Hortense, in assuring me that you have read the letters of the Emperor to the Empress; she is very amiable to have shown them to you.... I must admit to you that I was very Uneasy.”

We have also the testimony of her attendant, Mlle. Avrillon: “No words can describe the effect produced by the bulletins which announced the terrible disasters of Moscow. The profound anxiety which we saw depicted upon the face of the Empress Joséphine contributed above all to make us sad.... Seeing her at these sad moments, it seemed as if she reproached Fate, as if she accused Heaven of having separated them, of having withdrawn from Napoleon the safeguard of her presence.”

The Parisians had hardly finished reading the terrible Twenty-ninth Bulletin, when it became known that the Emperor was at the Tuileries. In the midst of the cares and the work which overwhelmed him, he sent Joséphine, through Hortense, his tender remembrances. As soon as he could find an opportunity he visited Malmaison. Although there is much doubt as to the exact date, it seems to have been at this time, during the last week in December, that Joséphine persuaded him to let her see the little King of Rome. The meeting took place at the château known as Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne. The child usually took a drive every afternoon in the Bois with his governess, and on this occasion the Emperor accompanied them on horseback. Joséphine drove over from Malmaison and met them. This was the only time Joséphine ever saw the boy, and it is the general opinion that this was also her last meeting with Napoleon.

On New Year’s day, Joséphine, always a prey to superstition, noticed the date with alarm. “Have you remarked,” she said, “that the year begins on a Friday, and that it is Eighteen-thirteen! It is a sign of great misfortunes.”

On leaving the remnants of the Grand Army, to return to Paris, the Emperor had placed Murat in command. In a letter to the Emperor from Posen under date of the 17 January, Eugène stated that the King of Naples had left that morning, in spite of all the efforts made by himself and Berthier to keep him, and that he himself had provisionally assumed the command, while awaiting the orders of the Emperor. Joséphine was much pleased by the terms in which the Moniteur officially announced the change: “The King of Naples, being indisposed, has been obliged to give up the command of the army, which he has placed in the hands of the Viceroy. The latter has more experience in administering large affairs, and he has the entire confidence of the Emperor.”

At the same time, the Emperor sent Eugène the following letter:

To the Viceroy Eugène

Notwithstanding the terrible Russian disaster, Napoleon at the beginning of 1813 was still in a position to save his empire. He had 250,000 veteran troops in Spain, and 150,000 more in the German fortresses. If he had abandoned the hopeless effort to keep Joseph on his throne, sent Ferdinand back to Spain, and concentrated all of his forces behind the Elbe, he could have met the Russians and Prussians with a seasoned army of 400,000 men, with a reserve force nearly as large in training in the dépôts of France; he could easily have defeated the Allies, and Austria would never have entered the coalition.

The Emperor left Paris for the front on the 15 April. In May he gained two brilliant victories, at Lutzen and Bautzen, but they were indecisive because he did not have the cavalry to follow them up. The first week in June he consented to an armistice, which was finally extended until the 10 August, when Austria joined the Allies. Two weeks later he won at Dresden his last great victory, but this too proved indecisive; in October he was beaten at Leipzig, and forced to withdraw behind the Rhine. This was the poorest campaign ever conducted by Napoleon, “the weakest in conception, the most fertile in blunders, and the most disastrous in its results.”

Joséphine passed the winter of 1813 very quietly at Malmaison. While the Emperor was in Paris, there were but few callers, but after his departure in April, they began once more to flock to Malmaison. The fine weather also made her life more cheerful. In May she spent several days with her daughter at Saint-Leu, and when Hortense left for Aix-les-Bains in June, she confided her children to her mother for the period of her absence. This was a great joy for Joséphine, who was a doting grandmother, whatever may have been her shortcomings as a mother.

This sojourn with their grandmother at Malmaison made such a profound impression upon the children, that Louis, the future Napoleon the Third, who was then only five years old, retraced his recollections of the visit sixty years later, in some memoirs which have remained unpublished. He writes:

“I can still see the Empress Joséphine in her salon, on the ground-floor, smothering me with her caresses, and already flattering my amour-propre by the attention she paid to my sayings. For my grandmother spoiled me in the fullest sense of the word, while on the contrary my mother, from my earliest infancy, endeavored to repress my faults, and develop my good qualities.

“I remember that, arrived at Malmaison, my brother and I were allowed to do as we pleased. The Empress, who was passionately fond of her plants and her hothouses, permitted us to cut and suck the sugarcane, and she always told us to ask for anything we wanted. When she said this one day, on the eve of a fête, my brother, who was three years older than myself, and consequently more sentimental, asked for a watch with the picture of our mother. But when the Empress said to me: ‘Louis, ask for what will give you the greatest pleasure,’ I asked her to let me walk in the mud with the little ragamuffins. Let no one think that this request was ridiculous, for all the time that I remained in France, up to the age of seven years, it was one of my greatest griefs to be obliged to drive into the city with four or six horses.”

Joséphine, who feared to be scolded by Hortense, for the way in which she spoiled the children, writes: “Do not worry about your sons, for they are entirely well. Their color is rose and white; I can assure you that they have not had the slightest illness since they are here. I am delighted to have them with me; they are charming.”

In July, Joséphine was shocked to hear of the tragic death of Madame de Broc, the most intimate friend of Hortense. In visiting with the Queen the cascade of Grésy, which Joséphine had so much admired two years before, she slipped upon a wet plank, and fell into the gulf below. She was a sister of the wife of Marshal Ney, and a niece of Madame Campan; she had been brought up with Hortense, married by her, and after the death of her husband had become her inseparable friend. Joséphine offered to go at once to her daughter if her presence and her care could be of any use to her, and also sent one of her chamberlains. But Hortense did not take advantage of this offer, and prolonged her stay at Aix until the middle of August. Upon her return she stopped only a day at Malmaison and then left with her sons for Dieppe, where she had been ordered to take sea baths. The departure of the two boys left a great void in the life of Joséphine. Their visit was almost the only pleasure she had during this trying year.

In November, the Rémusats came to dine at Malmaison, and brought the news that Louis had written the Emperor, expressing the wish to become reconciled with him, and not to be separated from him in his hour of misfortune. Joséphine, who never treasured up any grudges, expressed herself as thinking that this was very praiseworthy on the part of Louis. She only feared for her daughter “new torments.” But Hortense reassured her on this point. She wrote: “I am not at all uneasy; my husband is a good Frenchman; he proves it by returning to France at a moment when all Europe declares against her. He is a worthy man, and, if our characters are not sympathetic, it is because we have faults which cannot be reconciled.”

At this moment Eugène also gave proofs of devotion which contrasted strongly with the treachery of Murat and Bernadotte, who were so closely connected by marriage with the Bonapartes, and this served also to increase the maternal pride of Joséphine. The middle of October, Eugène received a letter from his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria, announcing his adhesion to the coalition, and suggesting an armistice with the Army of Italy. Eugène declined this overture, and in his reply expressed his entire devotion to the Emperor. Augusta, at the same time, wrote her father in a similar vein, and in a letter to the Emperor stated that nothing in the world would ever cause her or her husband to forget their duty to him. A month later an aide de camp of the King of Bavaria asked for an interview with the Viceroy, and presented a letter containing a new offer to assure the future of his family. Once more Eugène refused, saying: “It is useless to deny that the star of the Emperor is beginning to pale, but it is all the greater reason for those who have received benefits from him to remain faithful.”

This attitude of Eugène, plainly approved by his wife, could not but fill Joséphine and Hortense with pride. “Nothing which is good, noble and grand can astonish us on the part of our excellent Eugène,” Augusta wrote to her good mother, “but since yesterday I am still more happy and proud to be the wife of such a man; and to allow you to share my joy I hasten to send you a copy of a letter he wrote me after having refused a crown they offered him, if he consented to be an ingrat, and a coward, in fine, to betray the Emperor like the King of Naples.”

Notwithstanding this fine attitude on the part of Eugène, the Emperor appears to have conceived some doubts of his entire fidelity, which perhaps was natural in the midst of so many examples of treason and ingratitude. Upon no other basis can we explain the letter he wrote to Joseph from Nogent on the 8 February 1814: “My brother, have this letter delivered personally to the Empress Joséphine. I have written her in order that she may write to Eugène.” Upon receipt of this letter, of which the text has been lost, Joséphine wrote her son:

To the Viceroy Eugène

At that critical time it took the fastest courier a week to go from Paris to Milan, and it was not until the 18 February that Eugène received at Volta this letter from his mother. He seems, quite naturally, to have resented this new method of the Emperor, in transmitting orders to one of his lieutenants through his mother, instead of by the Minister of War, or the Chief of Staff. The tone, almost of supplication, used by Joséphine, seemed to imply that the Emperor doubted his fidelity.

There followed a long correspondence between the Viceroy and the Emperor, for which we have no space here. It is all set forth at length in the Mémoires of Eugène, to which the reader is referred. Eugène attempts, but with poor success, to justify his adhesion to what he considered to be the letter, if not the spirit, of the Emperor’s orders.

In the meantime the Allies were steadily drawing nearer to Paris, which was a hotbed of treason. Even at Malmaison, although she knew it not, Joséphine was surrounded by spies and traitors in her own household. By decision of the Council of State, and the Emperor’s own orders, Marie-Louise and the King of Rome were on the point of leaving for Blois. Hortense, who had been commanded to follow the Court, wrote to her mother, announcing the news. Joséphine replied:

To Queen Hortense, at Paris

The following morning, which was cold and wet, Joséphine left Malmaison with her household. As she was not sure of finding relays at the posts en route, she took all of her horses and carriages. In cash, she had only about fifty thousand francs which she had borrowed from Hortense and one or two friends. In a wadded petticoat were sewn her most valuable diamonds and pearls, while her jewelry cases were packed in the carriages. It was impossible to carry with her anything more.

She travelled slowly, passing the night at Mantes, and taking two days for the journey. She was very well received at Évreux. The authorities offered her a guard of honor at the château, for she had left behind at Malmaison the sixteen wounded soldiers of the Imperial Guard.