Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XXIV

During her sojourn in prison Mme. Beauharnais had made a most useful friend. This was a fellow-sufferer of similar character, but far greater gifts, whose maiden name was Cabarrus, who was later Mme. de Fontenay, who was afterward divorced and, having married Tallien, the Convention deputy at Bordeaux, became renowned as his wife, and who, divorced a second and married a third time, died as the Princesse de Chimay. The ninth of Thermidor saved them both from the guillotine. In the days immediately subsequent they had abundant opportunity to display their light but clever natures. Mme. Beauharnais, as well as her friend, unfolded her wings like a butterfly as she escaped from the bars of her cell. Being a Creole, and having matured early, her physical charms were already fading. Her spirit, too, had reached and passed its zenith; for in her letters of that time she describes herself as listless. Nevertheless, in those very letters there is some sprightliness, and considerable ability of a certain kind. A few weeks after her liberation, having apprenticed Eugène and Hortense to an upholsterer and a dressmaker respectively,[59] she was on terms of intimacy with Barras so close as to be considered suspicious, while her daily intercourse was with those who had brought her husband to a terrible end. In a luxurious and licentious society, she was a successful intriguer in matters both of politics and of pleasure; versed in the arts of coquetry and dress, she became for the needy and ambitious a successful intermediary with those in power. Preferring, as she rather ostentatiously asserted, to be guided by another's will, she gave little thought to her children, or to the sad legacy of her husband's good name. She emulated, outwardly at least, the unprincipled worldliness of those about her, although her friends believed her kind-hearted and virtuous. Whatever her true nature was, she had influence among the foremost men of that gay set which was imitating the court circles of old, and an influence which had become not altogether agreeable to the immoral Provençal noble who entertained and supported the giddy coterie. Perhaps the extravagance of the languid Creole was as trying to Barras as it became afterward to her second husband.