, his own servant,
July Fifteenth, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-four.

Immediately all "suspects" imprisoned on his instigation were released.

Madame Fontenay and the widow Beauharnais were free. Soon after this
Madame Fontenay became Madame Tallien. Josephine got her children back
from the country, but her property was gone and she was in sore straits.
But she had friends, yet none so loyal and helpful as Citizen Tallien and
his wife. Their home was hers. And it was there she met a man by the name
of Barras, and there too she met a man who was a friend of Barras; by
name, Bonaparte--Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte was twenty-six. He was five
feet two inches high and weighed one hundred twenty pounds. He was
beardless and looked like a boy, and at that time his face was illumined
by an eruption.

Out of employment and waiting for something to turn up, he yet had a very
self-satisfied manner.

His peculiar way of listening to conversation--absorbing everything and
giving nothing out--made one uncomfortable. Josephine, seven years his
senior, did not like the youth. She had had a wider experience and been
better brought up than he, and she let him know it, but he did not seem
especially abashed.

* * * * *

Exactly what the French Revolution was, no one has yet told us. Read
"Carlyle" backward or forward and it is grand: it puts your head in a
whirl of heroic intoxication, but it does not explain the Revolution.

Suspicion, hate, tyranny, fear, mawkish sentimentality, mad desire, were
in the air. One leader was deposed because he did nothing, and his
successor was carried to the guillotine because he did too much.
Convention after convention was dissolved and re-formed.

On the Fourth of October, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-five, there was a howl
and a roar and a shriek from forty thousand citizens of Paris.

No one knew just what they wanted--the forty thousand did not explain.
Perhaps it was nothing--only the leaders who wanted power. They demanded
that the Convention should be dissolved: certain men must be put out and
others put in.

The Convention convened and all the members felt to see if their heads
were in proper place--tomorrow they might not be. The room was crowded to
suffocation. Spectators filled the windows, perched on the
gallery-railing, climbed and clung on the projecting parts of columns.

High up on one of these columns sat the young man Bonaparte, silent,
unmoved, s