o the
prison. Some of the ladies in the prison had received the intimation
that M. Beauharnais had fallen. They watched, therefore, the arrival of
the journal, and, finding their fears established, they tried, for a
time, to conceal the dreadful intelligence from the unconscious widow.
But Josephine was eagerly inquiring for the paper, and at last obtaining
it, she ran her eye hastily over the record of executions, and found the
name of her husband in the fatal list. She fell senseless upon the
floor. For a long time she remained in a swoon. When consciousness
returned, and with it a sense of the misery into which she was plunged,
in the delirium of her anguish she exclaimed, "Oh God! let me die! let
me die! There is no peace for me but in the grave."

Her friends gathered around her. They implored her to think of her
children, and for their sake to prize a life she could no longer prize
for her own. The poignancy of her grief gradually subsided into the calm
of despair. A sleepless night lingered slowly away. The darkness and
the gloom of a prison settled down upon her soul. The morning dawned
drearily. A band of rough and merciless agents from the Revolutionary
Assembly came to her with the almost welcome intelligence that in two
days she was to be led to the Conciergerie, and from thence to her
execution. These tidings would have been joyful to Josephine were it
not for her children. A mother's love clung to the orphans, and it was
with pain inexpressible that she thought of leaving them alone in this
tempestuous world--a world made so stormy, so woeful, by man's
inhumanity to his fellow-man.

The day preceding the one assigned for her execution arrived. The
numerous friends of Josephine in the prison hung around her with tears.
The heartless jailer came and took away her mattress, saying, with a
sneer, that she would need it no longer, as her head was soon to repose
upon the soft pillow of the guillotine. It is reported that, as the hour
of execution drew nearer, Josephine became not only perfectly calm, but
even cheerful in spirit. She looked affectionately upon the weeping
group gathered around her, and, recalling at the moment the prediction
of the aged negress, gently smiling, said, "We have no cause for alarm
my friends; I am not to be executed. It is written in the decrees of
Fate that I am yet to be Queen of France." Some of her friends thought
that the suppressed anguish of her heart had driven her to delir