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If had been a year of ominous portent for France, and were years of disaster. As Napoleon gathered another great army to meet the coalition massing against him in Saxony and Bohemia, Josephine was so far removed from events as hardly to know their nature, and certainly not to realize their catastrophic significance. As autumn approached, Napoleon's shattering defeat at Leipzig in October announced the beginning of the end.
Loyalties were giving way like rotted timbers in an overloaded bridge. Spain was already gone, and Wellington's armies now crossed the passes of the Pyrenees into France.
Russian armies had overrun the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; Prussia had become a pillar of the great coalition; and members of the Confederation of the Rhine were turning one by one against Napoleon. Josephine had reason to be proud, so she told her son more than once, of his constancy.
The unhappy episode, which placed an additional strain on the last months of Josephine's life, had almost trivial beginnings. Reports of this overture to Austria aroused Napoleon's suspicions, all the more since he had learned that Joachim Murat was in the process of going over to the enemy.
