could explain her later childlessness. At all events, Rose stayed in
Martinique for two years. In 1790 she returned to Paris where, though
still separated, she was on reasonable terms with Alexandre de
Beauharnais.
During the Revolution the ex-oligarch de Beauharnais moved ever
leftwards until he was one of the Mountain faction. However, he was
caught up in the collective madness of the Terror, where one species of
Jacobin shark ate another. Falling foul of Robespierre and St-Just, he was
imprisoned in the notorious Les Carmes prison in April I794· For
petitioning for his release, Rose suffered the same fate. In Les Carmes,
which had the reputation of being a gigantic brothel, where the soon-to
die coupled frenziedly to thumb their noses at the guillotine, Alexandre
de Beauharnais was having an affair with Delphine de Custine. Rose, who
had turned to casual liaisons after her return to Paris in 1790, took
General Hoche as her lover. In prison there was an amazing cameraderie
of the damned. Once they had locked their charges securely inside the
prison, the warders were indifferent what they got up to. The result was a
kind of combination of perpetual orgy with social club for the doomed.
Among women friends Rose made in jail were Grace Dalrymple and
Theresia Tallien.
Alexandre de Beauharnais was taken out for execution on 22 July, just
five days before Robespierre's downfall in the Thermidorian coup. Ten
days after the coup Rose herself was at liberty. Attaching herself to
Theresia Tallien and the Chaumiere set, she became Barras's mistress
and lived a life of luxury totally at odds with her private financial
situation, which was desperate; this trait seems to have been a cultural
legacy of Martinique where insolvent plantation families indulged in
conspicuous consumption to overawe their slaves.
Apart from her relentless frivolity - she never read a book but spent a
fortune on clothes - Rose most impressed her contemporaries by her
sexual appetite. When she came out of prison and found that Hoche had
not, after all, been guillotined, she tried to resume her affair with him.
Hoche admitted that she was wonderful in bed but, alongside his desire
for her, was disgusted by her voracious appetite. He snubbed her with the
words: 'Such an amour can be pardoned in a prison but hardly outside
... One may take a prostitute for a mistress but hardly for a wife.'
According to Barras's later testimony - but it must be remembered that
by this time he hated both Napoleon and Josephine and spewed out
malicious rumour - Hoche was disposed to resume the affair until he
found the lecherous Rose in the arms of his giant Alsatian groom named
Van Acker. The cynical libertine Barras, however, cared nothing about