istasteful, embarked upon a political
career as an aristocrat Liberal. His rise to position was swift, and
after the death of Mirabeau he followed him as President of the
Assembly. Before his fall came, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of
the Army of the Rhine, and at the head of sixty thousand men failed to
relieve Mayence and resigned his command.

His Liberal pretensions did not prevent him being included amongst the
proscribed. He was made captive, accused of attempting to escape,
condemned to death and guillotined. Josephine's device of reassuring
the Revolutionists of her conversion to Republicanism by apprenticing
Hortense to a dressmaker and Eugene to a carpenter did not avail. She
was suspected and sent to Les Carmes, where frequent conversations
took place between her philosophic and abandoned husband and herself,
mainly concerning their children's education, and had not the reaction
against the regime of blood brought about the fall of Robespierre, she
would assuredly have shared the fate of Alexandre; and had the cry of
"A bas le tyrant" been heard a few days earlier, Beauharnais would
have escaped too, and cheated Josephine of becoming Empress of the
French and Queen of Italy. As it was, some of the very same people who
but a short time before had harangued the mob to "Behold the friend of
the people, the great defender of liberty," switched their murderous
vengeance on to their late idol, and ere many hours the widow
Beauharnais was set free. The thought of the appalling end and the
brevity of time that seemed left to her impressed Josephine with all
its ghastly horror. She had shrieked and wept herself into a deathlike
illness. The doctor predicted that she could not survive more than a
week, and for this reason she escaped being brought before the
Tribunal.

A wondrous Providence this, which, with frantic speed, broke the
power of a hideous monster, and thereby saved the woman who was to
enter upon a new era, and to be borne swiftly on to share the glory of
an unequalled Empire.

M. Masson's theory is that Josephine's womanly grief had much to do
with awakening the sentiment of Paris, and breaking the Reign of
Terror; and, indeed, there is some reason in this view, for tears are
not only useful as an indication of sorrow, suffering, or conquest,
but an effective means of gaining sympathy. Josephine was an adept at
trying the efficacy of weeping, and if M. Masson has gauged the
influence of melting