Note 27 — Chapter L
Reading edition
"It would ill have become me to have kept within my own breast the suggestions of my foresight. In a confidential memoir, which I read to Napoleon himself, I represented to him the necessity of dissolving his marriage; of immediately forming, as Emperor, a new alliance more suitable and more happy; and of giving an heir to the throne on which Providence had placed him. Without declaring any thing positive, Napoleon let me perceive, that, in a political point of view, the dissolution of his marriage was already determined in his mind."—Fouché, tom. i., p. 326.