LITMIR.BIZ

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denouncing her ‘crimes and atrocities’.

      This was too much for the honest Rose. When her husband showed no sign of returning to live with her, she applied for a legal separation. This was granted in February 1785, Rose receiving 6,000 francs a year. At the age of twenty-two the Vicomtesse de Beauharnais went to live with other ladies in the same situation, at the house of the Bernardine nuns of the Abbey of Penthémont in the fashionable Rue de Grenelle. During the autumn she stayed in Fontainebleau and rode to hounds with the King’s hunt.

      In the summer of 1788 Rose learned that her father was ill and her sister dying. Selling some of her belongings, including her harp, to pay the passage, she returned to Martinique, taking her daughter Hortense, but leaving her son at the Institution de la Jeune Noblesse. She stayed in Martinique two years. On the voyage back to France seven-year-old Hortense showed early signs of the courage that was to be her distinctive trait. She used to please the French crew with Caribbean songs and dances. Soon the rough wooden deck had worn big holes in her only pair of shoes, but, not to disappoint the sailors, she continued her dances to the end, though the soles of her feet were cut and bleeding.

      In France, where the Revolution had broken out, Alexandre became a leading member of the Constituent Assembly. When Prussia and Austria invaded, he rejoined the army, was promoted general, and in 1793 got the chance of a lifetime when he was called to the relief of Mainz. Instead of racing to the beleaguered town, Alexandre, according to the commissioners, ‘made a fool of himself at Strasbourg by chasing after whores all day and giving balls for them at night.’ In March 1794 Alexandre was thrown into the Carmelite prison. Rose worked hard to try to get him out, writing petitions and pleading with friends. Then she received an anonymous letter, warning her that she was in danger. A lesser woman might have fled but, as Rose wrote to her aunt, ‘Where could I go without compromising my husband?’ In April she was arrested.

      All the right people were in prison. Rose shared the former convent with dukes and duchesses, an admiral, a prince. Every day brave little Hortense and her brother Eugène came to visit their parents. Later however they were forbidden even to write. ‘We tried to make up for this,’ says Hortense, ‘by writing at the bottom of the laundry list, “Your children are well,” but the porter was barbarous enough to erase it. As a last resort we would copy out the laundry list ourselves so that our parents would see our writing and know at least we were still alive.’

      At the height of the Terror it became an offence for a prisoner merely to seek the company of aristocratic fellow prisoners, and on this charge Alexandre de Beauharnais went to the guillotine on 23 July. Rose wept for a husband she had loved despite his faults, and her fears increased for her own life. She spent the long days trying to read her future in a pack of cards and, being prone to tears, openly crying: something her companions frowned on, ‘for it was bad form to tremble at the thought of the tumbril.’ One by one the great names of France were called, and the prison began to empty. On the evening of 6 August another name was shouted by the turnkey: ‘The widow Beauharnais!’ Rose fainted – from joy. For Robespierre had just been guillotined, her friend Tallien was in power and the turnkey was opening the prison door to freedom.

      Rose and her children went to live in the house of a poetry-writing aunt, Fanny de Beauharnais, the Eglé mocked by Ecouchard Lebrun:

       Eglé, belle et poète, a deux petits travers: Elle fait son visage et ne fait pas ses vers.

      Fanny had influential friends. They, and Tallien, arranged that Rose should receive substantial compensation – including a carriage – for losses incurred during her four months’ imprisonment. They also put profitable business deals her way. In August 1795 Rose could afford to make the down payment on a pretty house of her own, 6 Rue Chantereine: a two-storey building with a bow-shaped garden front, set amid lime trees.

      The occupant of this pretty little house was herself pretty and petite: five feet in height, with a slim figure, and small hands and feet. Her eyes were dark-brown and had long lashes. Her silky, light chestnut hair she usually wore curled and combed forward. Her weak feature was her teeth; when she laughed she was careful barely to part her lips, letting the laughter bubble in her throat. Her two best points were her dazzlingly fine skin and her pretty voice with its light Creole accent: she barely sounded her r’s, a mannerism that happened to be fashionable.

      Rose was pretty without being beautiful and in a city like Paris would never have got far by her looks alone. But she possessed two other qualities: she was gay and she was kind. The small incidents of life she constantly found ‘amusing’ – drôle, one of her favourite words, which she pronounced drolle; and according to an English lady who knew her in prison Rose was ‘one of the most accomplished and amiable women I have ever met’.

      The Bernardine nuns with whom she had lodged before the Revolution were now suppressed, and this symbolized the change in Rose’s own life. Now she lived alone, and she lived for fun. Those terrible four months in the shadow of the guillotine she wanted to blot out with parties and the frou-frou of pretty clothes. In a letter to her close friend, Thérésia Tallien, Rose is preparing for a dance:

      As it seems important to me that we should be dressed in exactly the same way, I give you notice that I shall have on my hair a red kerchief knotted Creole style with three curls on each side of my brow. What may be rather daring for me will be perfectly normal for you as you are younger, perhaps no prettier, but infinitely fresher. You see I am fair to everyone. But it is all part of a plan. The idea is to throw the Trois Bichons and the Bretelles Anglaises [two groups of fashionable young men] into despair. You will understand the importance of this conspiracy, the need for secrecy, and the enormous effect that will result. Till tomorrow, I count on you.

      Into this gay, pleasure-loving world, in late summer 1795, stepped Napoleon Buonaparte. He was then on half pay and did not get enough to eat. His sallow face was thin, his cheeks sunken, and on either side his ill-powdered hair hung ‘like spaniel’s ears’. Laconic speech was the fashion, but friends found that Napoleon carried it too far – he spoke chiefly in monosyllables. This is how he impressed one lady: ‘Very poor and as proud as a Scot … he had turned down a command in the Vendée because he would not give up the artillery: “That’s my weapon,” he often said – at which we young women went into gales of laughter, unable to understand how anyone could refer to a cannon in the same terms as to a sword … You would never have guessed him to be a soldier; there was nothing dashing about him, no swagger, no bluster, nothing rough.’

      Napoleon probably met Rose at Thérésia Tallien’s cottage. He was just twenty-six, she thirty-two. What he made of her we can only surmise. She had the features he was predisposed to like; she had a gentle, very feminine nature; she was, he once said, ‘all lace’. As for her character, Napoleon may well have thought as a contemporary did: ‘her even temper, her easy-going disposition, the kindness that filled her eyes and was expressed not only in her words but in the very tone of her voice … all this gave her a charm that counter-balanced the dazzling beauty of her two rivals – Madame Tallien and Madame Récamier.’

      Napoleon and Rose had friends in common, notably Paul Barras, and after his appointment to command the Army of the Interior, Napoleon was invited to the house on which Rose had made a down payment. He found it furnished with luxuries rather than necessities. There was a harp, a bust of Socrates, and some dainty chairs with curved backs covered with blue nankeen, but no saucepans, no glasses, no plates. What furniture there was, however, Rose had arranged with taste; moreover, she kept the house spotless – in the Carmelite she had been one of the few prisoners to clean her room – and this was a quality Napoleon liked. There was an exotic atmosphere too which would have appealed to the soldier who revelled in Paul et Virginie. Some of the furniture came from Martinique and the coffee Rose served him had been grown on her mother’s plantation.

      Rose was a firm believer in destiny and in fortune-telling. During the early days of their acquaintance, at a party in the Tallien cottage, she persuaded Napoleon to tell fortunes. Among the guests was General Hoche, who had been in prison with Rose and was in love with her. Very tall and muscular, with a duelling scar like a comma between his brows, Hoche looked every inch the soldier; Napoleon, who did not look like a soldier at all, and was

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