Bonaparte, commander of the Army of the Interior, after the 13th Vendmiaire, when he saved the expiring Convention, had just ordered the disarmament of the sections and the delivery of all arms found in private houses, when a boy of fourteen called upon him to ask to have back the sword of his father, who had commanded the armies of the Republic. This boy was Eugene de Beauharnais, afterwards Viceroy of Italy. Bonaparte, touched by this action, received him graciously. The next day Madame de Beauharnais called upon him to thank him. He was much struck by her charms and proposed to her; she accepted him and they were married March 9, 1796. The Viscountess of Beauharnais became Citizeness Bonaparte. No sooner married, than the young husband, who was only twenty-six, tore himself from her arms and started for the army of Italy. Then Napoleon's love for Josephine was much greater than hers for him. It was he who was jealous, he who wrote burning letters; he it was who was all enthusiasm, ardor, and ablaze with passion. It was only with reluctance that Josephine decided to leave Paris, where she was happy, but in Italy she found a real royalty. At Milan she took possession of the Serbelloni Palace, where she did the honors most admirably and received the homage of the proud aristocracy of Milan. She followed her husband to the war, for he could not bear to be separated from her, and one day when, beset with dangers, she was crying, he exclaimed: "Wurmser shall pay dearly for the tears he causes you." After Arcole, Madame Bonaparte resembled a sovereign. She singularly aided her husband to play the double part which was soon to carry him to the highest rank. When it was a question of repelling royalism, the young conqueror relied on men like Augereau; when it was necessary to attract men of the old rgime, Josephine was the bond of union between him and the French or Italian aristocracy. On her return to Paris, June 2, 1798, she shared her husband's glories. The little house in the rue Chantereine became more famous than the grandest palaces.

Bonaparte left for Egypt, embarking at Toulon, May 19, 1798, after taking tender leave of Josephine. During her husband's absence, she bought the estate of Malmaison, an unknown spot which soon became famous. She skilfully defended Bonaparte's interests with the Directory, and in her drawing-room met celebrities of every kind. But malicious persons soon sent to Egypt hostile rumors, and her impetuous husband, wild with jealous wrath, spoke of nothing but separation and divorce. He reached Paris unexpectedly, October 16, 1799, and not finding his wife there, started off to meet her on a different road from hers, wild with jealousy. His brothers, Josephine's enemies, deceived him, and at first he refused to see her again; but, softened by the supplications of Eugene and Hortense de Beauharnais, he pardoned his wife and opened his door to her; she defended herself, and he let himself be convinced, so that, instead of a divorce, there was a complete reconciliation. Josephine was of use to her husband in the preparations for the 18th Brumaire; she helped him to lull the vigilance of the Republicans and to rise to the highest rank.

Citizeness Bonaparte had become the wife of the First Consul. Like the ladies of the old rgime, she was addressed as Madame until she should be called Empress, or Your Majesty. She was at the head of the Consular Court, rich in youth, glory, and hope. At the Tuileries she took possession of the apartments of Marie Antoinette. At Malmaison she enjoyed the pleasures of the country. The hero of Marengo looked upon her as his good angel, his good genius. Their happiness was interrupted by the infernal machine, but this gloomy incident was soon forgotten. Under Josephine's guidance Parisian society soon resumed its former brilliancy. Monarchical customs reappeared. The Concordat effected a reconciliation of the church with the government, and the wife of the First Consul, surrounded by a real court, heard a Te Deum in the rood-loft of Notre Dame. At heart she was a Royalist by her memories and her feelings, although she was made by fate an Empress. The crown, so far from tempting her, filled her with fear. She yearned to descend as her husband yearned to rise. The proclamation of the Consulate for life, the prelude of the Empire, filled her with gloom and apprehension, Neither the pomp of Saint Cloud, nor the triumphal trip in Belgium. robbed her of her wise and modest ideas. She much preferred Malmaison to any splendid palace, and looked back with regret at the time when she was simply Citizeness Bonaparte. Grandeur, so far from turning her head, only made her less ambitious, She gave her husband excellent advice, which, unfortunately, he did not follow. Had he listened to her, he would not have had the Duke of Enghien killed, he would have been modest in good fortune, and would have remained the first citizen of a great Republic.

Crowned at Notre Dame by the hands of Napoleon, Josephine played a sovereign's part with as much ease as if she had been born on the steps of the throne. The greatest names of the old rgime figured in her house. She adorned magnificent festivities by her presence. In Italy, whither she accompanied her husband, she received as Queen the same homage she had received as Empress. Yet, amid all this splendor, she was not happy. The terrible wars in which Napoleon engaged filled her with anxiety. At Strassburg, during the Austerlitz campaign, at Mayence during that of Jena and that of Poland, she was a victim of the greatest distress of mind and nervous terror. Then, too, her husband's infidelities filled her with despair. Towards the end of 1807 the spectre of divorce arose before her. The loss of a crown would be a trifling matter, but the sight of another woman reigning as lawful wife over Napoleon's heart was a thought to which she could not reconcile herself. From that moment she knew no peace or happiness. She was like a convicted criminal awaiting sentence at any moment, and she had to hide her terrible grief from every one. She always imagined that in the homage paid her by force of habit, there was something false and ironical. She thought of herself only as disgraced, betrayed, repudiated. All that was left of her crown was its mark on her brow. Few peasant women in their huts were ever as thoroughly unhappy as was this sovereign in her palace.

We have seen Josephine in her springtime, in her summer; it remains for us to describe only the autumn of this wonderful and melancholy career. This last study will be profoundly sad. "In the season which despoils nature," said Madame Swetchine, "there is no breeze, no puff of air so light that it fails to detach the leaf from the tree that bore it. In the autumn of the heart there is no movement that does not carry away a happiness or a hope." The great afflictions of Josephine's later years were the divorce, the invasion, and the long agony. Driven from the Tuileries forever, she took refuge at Malmaison one rainy, cold, December night, recalling, doubtless, the starlit evenings when the conqueror of Italy sought calm and happiness in that favorite spot. And after draining the cup of bitterness, the deserted wife exclaimed: "It sometimes seems to me as if I were dead and there was nothing left of me except a sort of vague power of feeling that I no longer exist." She could truly say with Queen Margaret of Navarre: "I have borne more than my share of the weariness which is the common lot of man." A still harder trial awaited her. Napoleon was unhappy, and she was forbidden to comfort him! He was exiled, and she was forbidden to follow him! The Empire she had seen so magnificent she was to see conquered, invaded, dismembered. No one was to mourn the woes of her country more than she. She was to die of grief, and when, May 29, 1814, she had breathed her last after uttering in her death agony these three words which sum up the anguish of her soul: "Napoleon! Elba! Marie Louise!" Mademoiselle Avrillon, the First Lady of her Bedchamber, was to say, "I have seen the Empress Josephine's sleeplessness and her terrible dreams. I have known her to pass whole days buried in the gloomiest thought. I know what I have seen and heard, and I am sure that grief killed her!" Was there ever a life of greater vicissitudes? It was a career full of smiles and tears, presenting every contrast of light and shade, of joy and grief, reproducing all the splendor and all the misery that can be crowded into human existence! It was a career, as fascinating as it was strange, which could only have been seen in those pathetic and disturbed epochs, when one surprise follows another, and the actors are perhaps even more astonished than the spectators at the shifting scenes and the incidents of the drama, in which events always take an unexpected turn, when men and things suffer shocks unknown to previous generations, and when history reads like the wildest romance.

THE END