Headquarters, Modena, 26 Vendémiaire Year V [October 17, 1796] at 9 p.m.
I was on campaign all day the day before yesterday. I stayed in bed yesterday: fever and a violent headache. It stopped me from writing to my lovely friend, but I received her letters, I pressed them to my heart and my lips and the color of absence, a hundred miles of distance, disappeared. I felt you not capricious and angry, but gentle, tender, with this anointing of kindness, which is exclusively the share of my Joséphine. Her hands were at my collar, her heart was beating hard. Judge if this cured me of the fever. A bath of sweat, a very heavy head, almost delirium, it was the fruit of this delicious, but too delicious, dream. Your letters are as cold as fifty years, they resemble fifteen years of marriage; one can see in them friendship without discord and the feelings of this winter of life. Fi! Joséphine, this is very mean, very bad, very traitorous to you. What do you have left to make me pitiable: no longer love me, eh! It’s done, hating me, oh well! I hope so; for everything debases except hatred, but indifference to the marble pulse, to the fixed eye, to the monotonous gait!...
A thousand, thousand kisses as tender as my heart. I'm feeling a little better. I leave tomorrow. The English are evacuating the Mediterranean, Corsica is ours, good, good news for France, for the army, for us.
BP.