first aide-de-camp down to his youngest page, any slight offence or
negligence is punished with confinement, either public or private. In
the former case the culprits are shut up in their own apartments, but in
the latter they are ordered into one of the small rooms, constructed in
the dark galleries at the Tuileries and St. Cloud, near the kitchens,
where they are guarded day and night by sentries, who answer for their
persons, and that nobody visits them.

When, on the 28th of March, 1804, the Senate had determined on offering
Bonaparte the Imperial dignity, he immediately gave his wife full powers,
with order to form her household of persons who, from birth and from
their principles, might be worthy, and could be trusted to encompass the
Imperial couple. She consulted Madame Remusat, who, in her turn,
consulted her friend De Segur, who also consulted his bonne amie, Madame
de Montbrune. This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were
desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry
and honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices. She was not
therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart
vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant
overtures to those families of the ancient French nobility who had been
ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have found on a
level with their circumstances. These, however, either suspecting her
intent and her views, or preferring honest poverty to degrading and
disgraceful splendour, had started objections which she was not prepared
to encounter. Thus the time passed away; and when, on the 18th of the
following May, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the
French, not a Chamberlain was ready to attend him, nor a Maid of Honour
to wait on his wife.

On the morning of the 20th May, the day fixed for the constitutional