Napoleon's Letters to Josephine: 10 Lines in French and English, Dated and Checked
Ten lines from Napoleon's letters to Josephine, 1795 to 1809, each dated, in French and English, plus the famous lines he never wrote, like "don't wash".
Napoleon's letters to Josephine survive in the hundreds: the Didot collection alone, first printed in Paris in 1833, holds 228 of them. Below are ten lines from those letters, from a December morning in 1795 to the week of the divorce in 1809, each with its place and date, the French original and an English version. Most of the English is Henry Foljambe Hall's 1901 translation, the first full one. After the ten lines you'll find where the translations disagree, three famous lines he never wrote to her (including "don't wash"), and a short guide to borrowing a line for your own letter. More letters by other writers are gathered in the love quotes collection.
The marriage in seven dates
The letters make more sense once you know where he was when he wrote them. Almost all the passionate ones come from a single year, 1796, when he was 26 and leading the French army through northern Italy, and she had stayed behind in Paris.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 23 June 1763 | Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie, later Josephine, is born on Martinique. |
| 15 August 1769 | Napoleone Buonaparte is born in Ajaccio, Corsica. She is six years older. |
| October 1795 | The first surviving notes between them, in Paris. |
| 9 March 1796 | Civil marriage in Paris. Two days later he leaves to command the Army of Italy. |
| March to November 1796 | The great run of love letters, written on campaign. |
| 16 December 1809 | The Senate pronounces the divorce. He needs an heir; she has given him none. |
| 29 May 1814 | Josephine dies at Malmaison, the house outside Paris where his last letters to her were sent. |
Spring 1796: the first weeks apart
He wrote almost daily, sometimes twice a day, and complained in nearly every letter that she did not write back often enough. The first line here is older than the marriage. Hall prints it without a date; the 1888 French edition of Napoleon's writings places it in Paris, December 1795.
"My waking thoughts are all of thee. Your portrait and the remembrance of last night's delirium have robbed my senses of repose."
« Je me réveille plein de toi. Ton portrait et l'enivrante soirée d'hier n'ont point laissé de repos à mes sens. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Paris, "seven o'clock in the morning", December 1795 (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901)
The French is plainer than Hall's English: "Je me réveille plein de toi" means "I wake up full of you", and that is how most modern versions render it. The same short note ends with the lines most often quoted from the whole correspondence: "Meanwhile, mio dolce amor, accept a thousand kisses, but give me none, for they fire my blood." The Italian is his own. Corsica had been Genoese until the year before he was born, and Italian was his first language.
"Every moment separates me further from you, my beloved, and every moment I have less energy to exist so far from you."
« Chaque instant m'éloigne de toi, adorable amie, et, à chaque instant, je trouve moins de force pour supporter d'être éloigné de toi. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Chanceaux post house, 14 March 1796 (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901)
Three days married and already on the road south. The letter opens with business, a power of attorney so she could collect money owed to him, and then turns, in one sentence, into this. It is a useful model for anyone writing on the way to the airport: begin with the practical thing and let the feeling come in behind it.
"I have not spent a day without loving you; I have not spent a night without holding you in my arms; I have not taken a cup of tea without cursing the glory and ambition that keep me far from the soul of my life."
« Je n'ai pas passé un jour sans t'aimer ; je n'ai pas passé une nuit sans te serrer dans mes bras ; je n'ai pas pris une tasse de thé sans maudire la gloire et l'ambition qui me tiennent éloigné de l'âme de ma vie. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Nice, 10 Germinal Year IV (30 March 1796); our translation
This is the most famous of all the letters, and it is not in Hall's book. The original was sold at Drouot in Paris on 19 November 1997 for 650,000 francs, according to the Fondation Napoléon, whose historian François Houdecek names the buyer as Bill Gates. The tender opening is the part people quote. The rest of the letter is a quarrel: she had written to him as vous instead of tu. "Vous toi-même !" he answers, and later: "Nature made me with a strong and decided soul. She built you of lace and gauze." He asks her for neither eternal love nor faithfulness, "but only... truth, frankness without limits."
"To live for Josephine, that is the history of my life."
« Vivre pour Joséphine ! voilà l'histoire de ma vie. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Port Maurice, 14 Germinal (3 April 1796) (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901)
Eight words of French and the line that best sums up that spring. In the same letter he says that away from her "the world is a wilderness", and that when men disgust him he puts his hand on his heart "where your portrait beats in unison". He was about to start the campaign that made his name; the letter barely mentions it.
"I am not satisfied with your last letter; it is cold as friendship."
« Je ne suis pas content. Ta dernière lettre est froide comme l'amitié. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Albenga, 18 Germinal (7 April 1796) (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901)
Three words that carry a whole idea of love: friendship is the cold thing, passion the warm one. He had been reading her letters, he says just before, "as one devours, after six hours' hunting, the meat he likes best." Few people would send "cold as friendship" to a partner today, but it shows the mood of the whole year: he wanted more letters, longer ones, and warmer.
Summer 1796: illness, a hoped-for child, Virgil's lake
Josephine was meant to join him in Italy and kept putting it off. She was ill, and there was talk of a pregnancy. His letters swing between worry and jealousy.
"That my soul is in your body; and that the day on which you change or cease to live will be my death-day; that Nature, that Earth, is beautiful only because you dwell therein."
« Que mon âme est dans ton corps, et que le jour où tu aurais changé, ou le jour où tu cesseras de vivre, serait celui de ma mort ; que la nature, la terre n'est belle que parce que tu l'habites. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Tortona, 15 June 1796 (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901)
The odd opening "that" is because this is a list of things he tells her to write back to him: "In your letter, dear, be sure to tell me that you are convinced that I love you more than it is possible to imagine." He dictates her reply. The same letter expects "a child as charming as its mamma"; the 1888 French editor notes that the signs of pregnancy came to nothing. It also closes with a thousand kisses "on your eyes, your lips, your tongue, your heart" in Hall's English, while the 1888 French text stops at the lips with an ellipsis. The editions do not always print the same letter.
"I have been in the village of Virgil, on the banks of the lake, by the silvery light of the moon, and not a moment without dreaming of Josephine."
« J'ai été dans le village de Virgile, sur les bords du lac, au clair argentin de la lune, et pas un instant sans songer à Joséphine. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Marmirolo, 18 July 1796, 2 p.m. (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901)
He was besieging Mantua, Virgil's home town, and had spent the night under arms. The historian Jules Michelet, cited in Hall's notes, thought this visit gave him the idea for the festival of Virgil he set up a few months later. The moonlight sentence sits between a report on the siege and a request that she send presents to her children, Eugène and Hortense, "that I love them as if they were my own". It is the gentlest line in the whole series and one of the easiest to borrow.
November 1796: Arcola, and "I detest you"
By November she was in Milan, he was fighting the Austrians around Verona, and the battle of Arcola (15 to 17 November) nearly finished him.
"Death alone can break the chain which sympathy, love, and sentiment have forged."
« La mort, elle seule, pourra rompre l'union que la sympathie, l'amour et le sentiment ont formée. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Verona, 19 November 1796 (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901, from Bourrienne's memoirs)
Written two days after the victory, the letter begins "Once more I breathe freely. Death is no longer before me." Notice the French: l'union becomes "the chain" in English, which sounds heavier than he meant. And the next sentence in the 1888 French asks for news "du petit ventre", of the little belly, while Hall, following Bourrienne's text, has "Let me have news of your health." Polite editors softened him more than once.
"I don't love you an atom; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a good for nothing, very ungraceful, very tactless, very tatterdemalion."
« Je ne t'aime plus du tout ; au contraire je te déteste. Tu es une vilaine, bien gauche, bien bête, bien cendrillon. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, November 1796 (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901)
This is the letter people search for as "Napoleon I detest you", and it is a joke, though a jealous one. Read on and he asks who "this new lover" is, warns that "one fine night the doors will be broken in", then asks for "four pages immediately" and promises "a million kisses as burning as if under the equator." The two editions disagree about when he wrote it: Hall dates it Verona, 23 November 1796; the 1888 French edition dates it Caldiero, 13 November, before the battle. "Cendrillon", Cinderella, is Hall's "tatterdemalion": a girl in rags by the fire.
After the divorce: "mon amie"
The divorce was his decision, made for an heir. In the weeks after it he wrote to her at Malmaison often, short notes in a new voice: still tu, but "mon amie", my friend, where he used to write "my adored".
"Adieu, dear. Sleep well; dream that I wish it."
« Adieu, mon amie ; dors bien ; songe que je le veux. »
— Napoleon to Josephine, Trianon, 18 December 1809, 8 p.m. (tr. H. F. Hall, 1901)
Two days after the Senate's decree. Songe can mean "dream" or "bear in mind", so the French holds both "dream that I want it" and "remember that I want it": an order and a tenderness at once. The note before it tells her to stop giving way "to a doleful melancholy". In January 1810 he signs off "never doubt my feelings for you", and by June 1812, writing from Gumbinnen on his way into Russia, the word left is friendship: "Never doubt the interest I have in you, and my friendship." The man who once wrote that her letter was "cold as friendship" ends on that word himself.
Where the French and the English part ways
If you quote Napoleon in English, you are quoting a translator. These are the places where the versions on this page differ in a way that changes the meaning.
| French | Hall 1901 or other English | Closer literal sense |
|---|---|---|
| Je me réveille plein de toi | My waking thoughts are all of thee | I wake up full of you. |
| Tu m'aimes moins ; tu seras consolée | You love me less; but you will recover (Fondation Napoléon) | You love me less; you will be consoled. |
| froide comme l'amitié | cold as friendship | Same: a close match. |
| l'union que la sympathie, l'amour et le sentiment ont formée | the chain which sympathy, love, and sentiment have forged | the union that sympathy, love and feeling have formed. |
| des nouvelles du petit ventre | news of your health | news of the little belly (a hoped-for pregnancy). |
| bien cendrillon | very tatterdemalion | a real Cinderella, a girl in rags. |
| songe que je le veux | dream that I wish it | dream, or bear in mind, that I want it. |
One more case: in the Nice letter, the French text on Wikisource reads "the day you say 'I love you less' will be the last of my life", while the Fondation Napoléon's English has "will either be the end of my love or the last day of my life". We could not see the manuscript, so we have quoted only the opening of that letter, where the texts agree.
Lines Napoleon never wrote to Josephine
Three of the best-known "Napoleon and Josephine" lines are not in any of his surviving letters to her.
| The line | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| "Home in three days. Don't wash." | Not in the published letters. The historian Alexander Mikaberidze told Slate in 2023 he would like to see "the original letter or at least a reputable source citing the original" and called the story "a latter-day invention". Andrew Roberts, who had repeated it in an interview, told the same reporter he didn't know whether it was genuine. |
| "Not tonight, Josephine." | A catchphrase, not a letter. It appears in American newspapers from 1904 and in several songs of 1910, including "Not To-night, Josephine" by Will A. Heelan and Seymour Furth. Its origin is unknown, and the Napoleon story is attached to it after the fact. |
| The 1814 farewell from Fontainebleau, ending that he "has never forgotten, and never will forget you". | Hall prints it in his appendix of reputed letters taken from the memoirs of Georgette Ducrest. He asked Frédéric Masson, the leading Napoleon scholar of the day, who replied: "pas une n'est authentique", not one is authentic. The same goes for "My first laurel, my love, must be for my country; my second shall be for you." |
Hall also notes that only two letters from Josephine to Napoleon are of unquestioned authenticity, so almost everything we "know" about her side of the marriage comes from his letters and from memoirs. For more lines that travel under the wrong name, see our list of misattributed love quotes.
Borrowing a Napoleon line for your own letter
The 1796 letters are possessive and often jealous, so choose with care. Here is how the ten lines behave out of context.
| Line begins | Mood | Use it? |
|---|---|---|
| "My waking thoughts" | Morning, desire | Yes, a good morning note. |
| "Every moment separates me" | Leaving | Yes, for travel or a first night apart. |
| "I have not spent a day" | Devotion | Yes, but leave out the cursed ambition if you are the one who left. |
| "To live for Josephine" | Declaration | Yes, swap in the name and credit him. |
| "Cold as friendship" | Complaint | Only as a joke between two people sure of each other. |
| "My soul is in your body" | Intense | A long letter, not a card. |
| "The village of Virgil" | Tender, travelling | Yes, the safest of all. |
| "Death alone can break" | Vow | Anniversaries and weddings. |
| "I detest you" | Teasing, jealous | Better quoted about him than sent as your own. |
| "Sleep well" | Goodnight | Yes, works as a short text. |
Two rules make a borrowed line honest. Put his name and the year under it ("Napoleon to Josephine, 1796"), and write at least one sentence of your own next to it, about your own life, so the letter is still yours. If you want help with the opening and the sign-off, the guide to how to start and end a love letter compares how famous writers did both. Beethoven's Immortal Beloved letter, written in July 1812, makes a good contrast, because nobody knows who it was for: see the full text and the search for her. And for Napoleon next to Keats, Mozart and Beethoven, try love letters of great men.
Questions about Napoleon's letters to Josephine
Did Napoleon actually write the letters to Josephine?
Yes, most of them. The Didot collection published in 1833 (228 letters) and the Tennant letters are accepted as his, and originals such as the Nice letter of 30 March 1796 have been sold at auction. A smaller group printed in the memoirs of Georgette Ducrest is considered forged, and the "don't wash" note has no source at all.
What did Napoleon's letters to Josephine say?
In 1796 they are mostly about how much he missed her, how rarely she wrote, and jealousy, mixed with quick reports from the war. After the 1809 divorce they become short, kind notes about her health and her spirits, addressed to "mon amie".
What does "not tonight, Josephine" mean?
It means "not now": a joking refusal, usually of something romantic. It was a popular phrase and song title in the United States by 1910. No letter or reliable record has Napoleon saying it.
What was the age gap between Napoleon and Josephine?
About six years. Josephine was born on 23 June 1763 and Napoleon on 15 August 1769, so at their wedding in March 1796 she was 32 and he was 26.
Is there a book of Napoleon's letters to Josephine?
Yes. The standard English one is Henry Foljambe Hall's Napoleon's Letters to Josephine, 1796–1812 (London, 1901), which is free on Project Gutenberg. In French, the letters were first printed in 1833 and are reprinted in the first volume of the 1888 Œuvres littéraires de Napoléon Bonaparte (Albert Savine).
Sources
- Henry Foljambe Hall (trans. and ed.), Napoleon's Letters to Josephine, 1796–1812 (1901): Project Gutenberg #37499, read in full 2 November 2026. English text of all quoted letters except Nice; the Didot count (228), the 1833 date, the two authentic letters of Josephine, the divorce date, and Appendix 3 with Masson's verdict.
- French texts: Tancrède Martel (ed.), Œuvres littéraires de Napoléon Bonaparte, vol. 1, "Lettres à Joséphine" (Paris: Albert Savine, 1888), on French Wikisource; dates of December 1795, 13 November 1796 and 18 December 1809; Josephine's birth and death dates; the pregnancy note.
- Nice letter, French text: "Lettres à Joséphine", French Wikisource; English and sale record: Fondation Napoléon.
- François Houdecek, "La première lettre de Napoléon à Joséphine ou le mystère d'un fac-similé", Fondation Napoléon, September 2021 (the 1997 buyer).
- Luke Winkie, "How the Whole World Came to Believe That Napoleon Bonaparte Liked Smelly Women", Slate, 21 November 2023 (Mikaberidze and Roberts on "don't wash").
- "Not tonight, Josephine": Word Histories, 13 February 2025 (newspaper uses from 1904, songs of 1910).
