1804, with the exception of several obscure nobles, either poor or ruined,
and others already attached to Napoleon's civil and military fortune, many
negotiations and various temptations were required to persuade well-known
persons to appear at the court as it was at first constituted. He goes on:
"As a spectator and confidant of the means employed, I witnessed in those
early days many refusals, and some I had to announce myself. I even heard
many bitter complaints on this subject. I remember that in reply I
mentioned to the Empress my own case, and told her what it had cost me to
enlist under the tricolor, and then to enter the First Consul's military
household. The Empress understood me so well that she made to me a similar
confidence, confessing her own struggles, her almost invincible
repugnance, at the end of 1795, in spite of her feeling for Bonaparte,
before she could make up her mind to marry the man whom at that time she
herself used to call General Vendemiaire."

Although Josephine had become Empress, she remained a Legitimist, and saw
clearly the weak points in the Empire. At the Tuileries, in the chamber of
Marie Antoinette, she felt out of place; she was surprised to have for
Lady of Honor a duchess of an old family, and her sole ambition was to be
pardoned by the Royalists for her elevation, to the highest rank.
Napoleon, too, was much concerned about the Bourbons, in whom he foresaw
his successors, "One of his keenest regrets," wrote Prince Metternich,
"was his inability to invoke legitimacy as the foundation of his power.
Few men have felt more deeply than he the precariousness and fragility of
power when it lacks this foundation, its susceptibility to attack."

After recalling the Emperor's attempt to induce Louis XVIII. to abandon
his claims to the throne, Prince Metternich goes on: "In speaking to me of
this matter, Napoleon said: 'His reply was noble, full of noble
traditions. In those Legitimists there is something outside of mere