The Fischer brothers had done good service in the campaign of 1804. Hulot, after the peace, had obtained for them their contract to supply forage in Alsace, not knowing that he himself would be sent later to Strasbourg, to make preparations there for the campaign of 1806.

For the young peasant girl, this marriage was something like an Assumption. The lovely Adeline passed without transition from her village mud to the paradise of the Imperial Court; for it was at that time that the Commissary general, one of the most trustworthy and most active and indefatigable members of his corps, was made Baron, given a place near the Emperor, and attached to the Imperial Guard. The beautiful village maid had the spirit to educate herself, out of love for her husband, with whom she was quite madly in love. It is easy to understand why, for the Commissary general was a masculine counterpart of Adeline, as outstanding among men as she was among women, one of the elect company of handsome men. Tall, well-built, fair, with blue eyes of a gaiety, fire, and charm that were irresistible, with an elegant and graceful figure, he was remarkable even among the d’Orsays, the Forbins, the Ouvrards, and the whole array of the Empire beaux. He was a man accustomed to making conquests and imbued with the ideas of Directory times regarding women, yet his gay career was at that period interrupted for a considerable time by his attachment to his wife.

For Adeline, the Baron was therefore from the beginning a kind of god who could do no wrong. She owed everything to him: fortune – she had a carriage, a fine house, all the luxury of the period; happiness, for she was openly loved; a title – she was a Baroness; celebrity – she was known as the beautiful Madame Hulot, and in Paris! To complete her success, she had the honour of refusing the Emperor’s addresses; and he presented her with a diamond necklace and repeatedly singled her out for marks of his interest, continuing to ask from time to time: ‘And is the lovely Madame Hulot still as virtuous as ever?’ in the tone of a man prepared to exact vengeance from anyone who had triumphed where he had failed.

It does not require much penetration, then, to understand the causes, affecting a simple, unsophisticated, and magnanimous soul – of the fanatical strain in Madame Hulot’s love. Having once fairly said to herself that in her eyes her husband could do no wrong, she became, of her own volition, in her inmost being, the humble, devoted, and blind servant of the man who had made her what she was.

Note, moreover, that she was endowed with great good sense, the good sense of the common people, which gave her education solidity. In society, she was accustomed to talk little, spoke ill of no one, made no effort to shine. She reflected upon everything, listened, and modelled herself upon the women most respected for their integrity and good breeding.

In 1815 Hulot followed the example of Prince de Wissem-bourg, one of his intimate friends, and became one of the organizers of that improvized army whose defeat brought the Napoleonic era to an end, at Waterloo. In 1816 the Baron was one of the most hated men of the Feltre Ministry, and was reappointed to the Commissariat only in 1823, when he was needed on account of the war in Spain. In 1830 he reappeared in the administration as Deputy Minister, at the time when Louis-Philippe was levying a kind of conscription among the old Napoleonic adherents. Since the advent to the throne of the younger branch, which he had actively supported, he had remained in the administration, an indispensable Director at the War Office. He had already been given his Marshal’s baton, and there was nothing more the King could do for him, short of making him a Minister, or a Peer of France.

With no occupation in the years between 1818 and 1823, the Baron had gone on active service – in a campaign against women. Madame Hulot dated her Hector’s first infidelities from the final dissolution of the Empire. The Baroness, then, had held for a dozen years of her married life the position of prima donna assoluta, unchallenged. She still continued to enjoy the inveterate old affection that husbands bear to wives who have resigned themselves to playing the part of good and kind companions. She knew that no rival would stand for two hours against one word of reproach from her, but she shut her eyes, she stopped her ears, her wish was to know nothing of her husband’s conduct outside his home. In the end, she came to treat her Hector as a mother treats a spoiled child. Three years before the conversation with Crevel that has been described, Hortense had recognized her father at the Variétés, in a first tier stage box, in Jenny Cadine’s company, and exclaimed:

‘There’s Papa!’

‘You are mistaken, my dear; he is with the Marshal,’ the Baroness replied.

The Baroness had certainly seen Jenny Cadine; but instead of being sick at heart when she saw that she was so pretty, she had said to herself: ‘That rascal Hector is very lucky.’ She suffered nevertheless; she gave way secretly to storms of violent feeling; but as soon as she saw her Hector again, she saw again her twelve years of pure happiness, and was quite incapable of uttering a single word of complaint. She would very much have liked the Baron to confide in her; but she had never dared to let him know that she knew of his escapades, out of respect for him. Such excessive delicacy is found only in girls of noble character sprung from the people, who know how to take blows without returning them. In their veins flows the blood of the early martyrs. Well-born girls, as their husbands’ equals, feel a need to bait their husbands, to score off them as in a game of billiards, to make up for their acts of tolerance by biting remarks, in a spirit of revengeful spite and in order to assure themselves either of their own superiority or of their right to have their revenge.

The Baroness had an ardent admirer in her brother-in-law, Lieutenant-General Hulot, the venerable Colonel of the Infantry Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, who was to be given a Marshal’s baton in his later years. This veteran, after commanding from 1830 to 1834 the military region that included the Breton Departments of France (the theatre of his exploits in 1799 and 1800), had come to live in Paris, near his brother, for whom he still felt a fatherly affection. This old soldier’s heart was instinctively drawn to his sister-in-law. He admired her as the noblest, the saintliest creature of her sex. He had not married because he had hoped to meet a second Adeline, and had vainly searched for her in twenty provinces during a score of campaigns. Rather than suffer any diminution of the esteem in which she was held by the pure-souled unimpeachable old Republican, of whom Napoleon said: ‘that fine fellow Hulot is the most obstinate of Republicans, but he will never betray me,’ Adeline would have endured far worse pain than that she had just experienced.