events should be seen as cause and effect, not coincidence, as in the
versions of some credulous biographers. The usual story is that after 13
Vendemiaire Napoleon issued a decree that Parisians should hand in all
weapons. In the light of this decree, Rose de Beauharnais's fourteen-year
old son, Eugene, went to see Napoleon to ask him if he could keep his
father's ceremonial sword, which had been bequeathed him. Napoleon
agreed, Rose called to thank him, and the affair took off from there.
This is obvious legend. Rose de Beauharnais was Theresia Tallien's
best friend, and Napoleon would have seen her many times at the
gatherings at La Chaumiere. But then he was nothing, and would not
have excited her interest. After Vendemiaire he was a rising star. The
fable about Eugene was invented later to save face on both sides. Rose
wanted to conceal the fact that she had set her cap at the young general,
while Bonaparte wanted to rewrite the historical fact that he had been
Barras's creature and that it was Barras who suggested the liaison. If we
discount the transparent story about the sword, what is lef t is the
historical fact that on 15 October Napoleon made his first visit to her
house in the rue de Chantereine.
Who was this Rose de Beauharnais, who would be known to history
and legend as Josephine? She was born on 23 June 1763 in the French
colony of Martinique in the West Indies and christened Marie-Josephe
Rose. Her father was the struggling plantation owner Joseph Tascher de
Ia Pagerie. At sixteen, despite being in love with the son of a Scots
Jacobite emigre, she had been sent to France to wed Alexandre de
Beauharnais in a marriage arranged by her aunt, who was the mistress of
the bridegroom's father. Rose's marriage was turbulent, and in the first
four years Alexandre spent just ten months with her, long enough to
beget a son, Eugene, born in 1781. When she was pregnant with a second
child (her daughter Hortense), Alexandre decided to visit Martinique and
departed with a former mistress, Laure de Longpre. The jealous Laure
poisoned his mind against Rose and, once in Martinique, bribed and
threatened the Ia Pagerie slaves to say that Rose had led a promiscuous
life before she left for France. In letters to Rose full of bitterness,
Alexandre repudiated the paternity of Hortense. When he returned to
France, he abducted Eugene, but was forced to give him up.
During the separation that followed, Rose seems to have undergone a
change of personality, for it is in these years that the sensual, pleasure
loving, promiscuous woman first emerges. In 1788 Rose took Hortense
with her to Martinique on a transatlantic voyage that no one has
explained satisfactorily. Some say she was pregnant when she boarded
ship and certainly not by her husband. A possible abortion on board ship
marcin
(Marcin)
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