Chapter XXIV

A Marriage of Inclination and Interest[58].

The Taschers and Beauharnais — Execution of Alexandre Beauharnais — Adventures of His Widow — Meeting of Napoleon and Josephine — The Latter's Uncertainties — Her Character and Station — Passion and Convenience — The Bride's Dowry — Buonaparte's Philosophy of Life — The Ladder to Glory.

1796.

In 1779, while the boys at Brienne were still tormenting the little untamed Corsican nobleman, and driving him to his garden fortalice to seek lonely refuge from their taunts in company with his Plutarch, there had arrived in Paris from Martinique a successful planter of that island, a French gentleman of good family, M. Tascher de la Pagerie, bringing back to that city for the second time his daughter Josephine. She was then a girl of sixteen, without either beauty or education, but thoroughly matured, and with a quick Creole intelligence and a graceful litheness of figure which made her a most attractive woman. She had spent the years of her life from ten to fourteen in the convent of Port Royal. Having passed the interval in her native isle, she was about to contract a marriage which her relatives in France had arranged. Her betrothed was the younger son of a family friend, the Marquis de Beauharnais. The bride landed on October twentieth, and the ceremony took place on December thirteenth. The young vicomte brought his wife home to a suitable establishment in the capital. Two children were born to them—Eugène and Hortense; but before the birth of the latter the husband quarreled with his wife, for reasons that have never been known. The court granted a separation, with alimony, to Mme. de Beauharnais, who some years later withdrew to her father's home in Martinique. Her husband sailed to America with the forces of Bouillé, and remained there until the outbreak of the Revolution, when he returned, and was elected a deputy to the States-General.

Becoming an ardent republican, he was several times president of the National Assembly, and his house was an important center of influence. In 1790 M. Tascher died, and his daughter, with her children, returned to France. It was probably at her husband's instance, for she at once joined him at his country-seat, where they continued to live, as "brother and sister," until Citizen Beauharnais was made commander of the Army of the Rhine. As the days of the Terror approached, every man of noble blood was more and more in danger. At last Beauharnais's turn came; he too was denounced to the Commune, and imprisoned. Before long his wife was behind the same bars. Their children were in the care of an aunt, Mme. Églé, who had been, and was again to be, a woman of distinction in the social world, but had temporarily sought the protection of an old acquaintance, a former abbé, who had become a member of the Commune. The gallant young general was not one of the four acquitted out of the batch of forty-nine among whom he was finally summoned to the bar of the revolutionary tribunal. He died on June twenty-third, 1794, true to his convictions, acknowledging in his farewell letter to his wife a fraternal affection for her, and committing solemnly to her charge his own good name, which she was to restore by proving his devotion to France. The children were to be her consolation; they were to wipe out the disgrace of his punishment by the practice of virtue and—civism!

The divinity who could awaken such ardor in a Napoleon was in reality six years older than her suitor, and Lucien proves by his exaggeration of four years that she certainly looked more than her real age. She had no fortune, though by the subterfuges of which a clever woman could make use she led Buonaparte to think her in affluent circumstances. She had no social station; for her drawing-room, though frequented by men of ancient name and exalted position, was not graced by the presence of their wives. The very house she occupied had a doubtful reputation, having been a gift to the wife of Talma the actor from one of her lovers, and being a loan to Mme. Beauharnais from Barras. She had thin brown hair, a complexion neither fresh nor faded, expressive eyes, a small retroussé nose, a pretty mouth, and a voice that charmed all listeners. She was rather undersized, but her figure was so perfectly proportioned as to give the impression of height and suppleness. Its charms were scarcely concealed by the clothing she wore, made as it was in the suggestive fashion of the day, with no support to the form but a belt, and as scanty about her shoulders as it was about her shapely feet. It appears to have been her elegance and her manners, as well as her sensuality, which overpowered Buonaparte; for he described her as having "the calm and dignified demeanor which belongs to the old régime."

What motives may have combined to overcome her scruples we cannot tell; perhaps a love of adventure, probably an awakened ambition for a success in other domains than the one which advancing years would soon compel her to abandon. She knew that Buonaparte had no fortune whatever, but she also knew, on the highest authority, that both favor and fortune would by her assistance soon be his. At all events, his suit made swift advance, and by the end of January, 1796, he was secure of his prize. His love-letters, to judge from one which has been preserved, were as fiery as the despatches with which he soon began to electrify his soldiers and all France. "I awaken full of thee," he wrote; "thy portrait and yester eve's intoxicating charm have left my senses no repose. Sweet and matchless Josephine, how strange your influence upon my heart! Are you angry, do I see you sad, are you uneasy, ... my soul is moved with grief, and there is no rest for your friend; but is there then more when, yielding to an overmastering desire, I draw from your lips, your heart, a flame which consumes me? Ah, this very night, I knew your portrait was not you! Thou leavest at noon; three hours more, and I shall see thee again. Meantime, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses; but give me none, for they set me all afire." What genuine and reckless passion! The "thou" and "you" maybe strangely jumbled; the grammar may be mixed and bad; the language may even be somewhat indelicate, as it sounds in other passages than those given: but the meaning would be strong enough incense for the most exacting woman.

There was one weird omen which, read aright, distinguishes the otherwise commonplace occurrence. In the wedding-ring were two words—"To destiny." The words were ominous, for they were indicative of a policy long since formed and never afterward concealed, being a pretense to deceive Josephine as well as the rest of the world: the giver was about to assume a new rôle,—that of the "man of destiny,"—to work for a time on the imagination and superstition of his age. Sometimes he forgot his part, and displayed the shrewd, calculating, hard-working man behind the mask, who was less a fatalist than a personified fate, less a child of fortune than its maker. "Great events," he wrote a very short time later from Italy, "ever depend but upon a single hair. The adroit man profits by everything, neglects nothing which can increase his chances; the less adroit, by sometimes disregarding a single chance, fails in everything." Here is the whole philosophy of Bonaparte's life. He may have been sincere at times in the other profession; if so, it was because he could find no other expression for what in his nature corresponded to romance in others.

The general and his adjutant reached Marseilles in due season. Associated with them were Marmont, Junot, Murat, Berthier, and Duroc. The two last named had as yet accomplished little: Berthier was forty-three, Duroc only twenty-three. Both were destined to close intimacy with Napoleon and to a career of high renown. The good news of Napoleon's successes having long preceded them, the home of the Bonapartes had become the resort of many among the best and most ambitious men in the southern land. Elisa was now twenty, and though much sought after, was showing a marked preference for Pasquale Bacciocchi, the poor young Corsican whom she afterward married. Pauline was sixteen, a great beauty, and deep in a serious flirtation with Fréron, who, not having been elected to the Five Hundred, had been appointed to a lucrative but uninfluential office in the great provincial town—that of commissioner for the department. Caroline, the youngest sister, was blossoming with greater promise even than Pauline. Napoleon stopped a few days under his mother's roof to regulate these matrimonial proceedings as he thought most advantageous. On March twenty-second he reached the headquarters of the Army of Italy. The command was assumed with simple and appropriate ceremonial. The short despatch to the Directory announcing this momentous event was signed "Bonaparte." The Corsican nobleman di Buonaparte was now entirely transformed into the French general Bonaparte. The process had been long and difficult: loyal Corsican; mercenary cosmopolitan, ready as an expert artillery officer for service in any land or under any banner; lastly, Frenchman, liberal, and revolutionary. So far he had been consistent in each character; for years to come he remained stationary as a sincere French patriot, always of course with an eye to the main chance. As events unfolded, the transformation began again; and the "adroit" man, taking advantage of every chance, became once more a cosmopolitan—this time not as a soldier, but as a statesman; not as a servant, but as the imperator universalis, too large for a single land, determined to reunite once more all Western Christendom, and, like the great German Charles a thousand years before, make the imperial limits conterminous with those of orthodox Christianity. The power of this empire was, however, to rest on a Latin, not on a Teuton; not on Germany, but on France. Its splendor was not to be embodied in Aachen nor in the Eternal City, but in Paris; and its destiny was not to bring in a Christian millennium for the glory of God, but a scientific equilibrium of social states to the glory of Napoleon's dynasty, permanent because universally beneficent.[Back to Contents]