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connection with Beauharnais:

"Were it not for my children, I should, without a pang, renounce France
forever. My duty requires me to forget William. And yet, if _we_ had
been united together, I should not to-day have been troubling you with
my griefs."

Viscount Beauharnais chanced to see this letter. It roused his jealousy
fearfully. A sense of "honor" would allow him to lavish his attentions
upon guilty favorites, while that same sense of "honor" would urge him
to wreak vengeance upon his unhappy, injured wife, because, in her
neglect and anguish, with no false, but only a true affection, her
memory turned to the loved companion of her childhood. According to the
standard of the fashionable world, Beauharnais was a very honorable man.
According to the standard of Christianity, he was a sinner in the sight
of God, and was to answer for this conduct at the final judgment.

He reproached his wife in the severest language of denunciation. He took
from her her son Eugene. He applied to the courts for a divorce,
demanding his daughter Hortense also. Josephine pleaded with him in
vain, for the sake of their children, not to proclaim their disagreement
to the world. Grief-stricken, poor Josephine retired to a convent to
await the trial. The verdict was triumphantly in her favor. But her
heart was broken. She was separated from her husband, though the legal
tie was not severed.

Her friends in Martinique, informed of these events, wrote, urging her
to return to them. She decided to accept the invitation. Hortense was
with her mother. M. de Beauharnais had sent Eugene, whom he had taken
from her, to a boarding-school. Before sailing for Martinique she
obtained an interview with M. de Beauharnais, and with tears entreated
that she might take Eugene with her also. He was unrelenting; Josephine,
with a crushed and world-weary heart, folded Hortense to her bosom, then
an infant but three years of age, and returned to her tropical home,
which she had sadly left but a few years before. Here, on the retired
plantation, soothed by the sympathy of her friends, she strove to
conceal her anguish.

There was never a more loving heart than that with which Josephine was
endowed. She clung to Hortense with tenderness which has rarely been
equalled. They were always together. During the day Hortense was ever by
her side, and at night she nestled in her mother's bosom. Living amidst
the scenes of tropical luxuriance and beauty, endeare