He was rarely at home; and, when he was, he could not disguise the irritation which his wifes gaucherie and lack of education caused him. He suggested that she should learn the text of contemporary plays, even study Roman history so that she could converse with the kind of people to whom he was ashamed to introduce her. As it was, she was an object who had nothing to say to him.
As time passed, however, and on those rare occasions when he returned from weeks spent away from the rue Thévenot on military duties or, more often, enjoying himself with other women, he did sometimes take his wife on excursions into Parisian society: to fashionable salons, to the receptions held by the duc dOrléanss attractive if rather precise mistress, Félicité de Genlis, at the Palais Royal, and to the salon at the Swedish Embassy, presided over by Germaine de Staël, daughter of Jacques Necker, the Swiss financier, wife of the Swedish Ambassador, and brilliant woman of letters and conversationalist before whom the Duke of Wellington, in an unaccustomed gesture of obeisance, was to stoop on bended knee, and of whom he was to say, She was a most agreeable woman if only you kept her light and away from politics. But that was not easy. She was always trying to come to matters of state. I have said to her more than once, Je dêteste parler politique; and she answered, Parler politique pour moi cest vivre.
In such company, Rose, vicomtesse de Beauharnais, was, at first, a fascinated observer rather than an example of the influence of women over men, irritating her husband by expecting his attention. She has become jealous, he complained, and wants to know what I am doing. Exasperated by what he described as her possessiveness and pettish outbursts, he accepted his godmothers suggestion that he should make a tour by himself of Italy whence he wrote letters home expressing less enjoyment of his travels than envy of those who had been fortunate enough to have been left behind.
When he returned to Paris to a new house near the faubourg St Honoré, he decided he must soon go abroad again this time to the West Indies, to serve with his regiment in order to gain some experience of active service against the British as a preliminary to a higher command.
Rose who had borne him a son, Eugène, on 3 September 1781 and was now pregnant with their second child, Hortense pleaded with him not to leave France again so soon; but he replied in peevish letters complaining of his lot and of a wife who did not, unlike the wives of other officers, write regularly to her husband. To Désirée he wrote to say that the comtesse Laure de La Touche de Longpré, the mother of his illegitimate child, would be sailing in the same ship as himself; so would she keep an eye on their son and the comtesses other child while they were away and would she also, as the comtesse suggested, send a set of the game of lotto to occupy the idle hours of the long voyage. To his wife he wrote: I begin to fear that our marriage is turning out undeniably badly. You have only yourself to blame.
The letters that subsequently arrived in Paris from the West Indies were almost hysterical in their fury. Her husband told Rose, the vilest of creatures, that he had learned that her behaviour at Martinique had been outrageous, and that, on the very eve of her departure for France, she had been discovered in the arms of a lover. What am I to think of this second child of yours, he asked, born eight months and a few days after my return from Italy? I swear by heaven that it belongs to someone else. Kindly take yourself off to a convent as soon as you receive this letter. This is my last word on the subject and nothing in the world can move me to change it.
Other letters from him followed in the same vein, upbraiding his wife and pitying himself, protesting his virtuous conduct, even though a man in whose house he had stayed at Fort Royal had locked his own wife up in her room, convinced that the vicomte had seduced her.
Self-righteous and indignant as ever, he returned to Paris, professing fury that Rose had not yet entered a convent as he had required.
His own conduct, he declared, was in striking contrast to his wifes unfaithfulness. His health was badly affected; his legs had become extremely weak; this was due to his fearful state of mind; he was greatly to be pitied. He was not, however, too ill to drive off with his son, Eugène, whom he was obliged to send back to the boys mother by order of the Provost of Paris. He then demanded the return of both the jewellery which he had given his wife and the furniture in their house.
Since he could produce no proof of the wild accusations he made about his wifes behaviour, he was eventually compelled to retract them, to accept paternity of their daughter, Hortense, and to pay Rose an allowance of five thousand livres a year. With all this settled to her satisfaction, Rose moved into the convent of Penthémont in a fashionable part of Paris, a comfortable establishment which provided rooms for upper-class ladies in need, for one reason or another, of a temporary retreat from the outside world. Here; at the age of twenty-one, she embarked upon her delayed education, watching and listening to the sophisticated young aristocrats in whose company she now found herself, taking note of the subjects and manner of their conversation, assuming their graceful movements and seductive gestures, cultivating a delightful and rather husky tone of voice made all the more alluring by its melodious Caribbean inflexion in which her Rs all but disappeared, contriving even to lose weight and the plumpness in her cheeks, and walking with that slightly swaying gait characteristic of the slaves of Martinique.
After living at Penthémont for just over a year, Rose joined her son Eugène, her daughter Hortense, her aunt Désirée Renaudin, and her aunts lover, the marquis de Beauharnais, at Fontainebleau, where they were then living in rather straitened circumstances. Rose, extravagant and improvident, was also short of money, although those who met her at this time, and were struck by the elegance of her fashionable dresses, could not suppose that this was the case.
It was generally believed that these dresses were not all bought with her own money. At Fontainebleau, it was rumoured that the alluring, provocative young woman, separated from her husband, was conducting an affair not only with the duc de Lorge, a well-known figure at court in the nearby royal château, but also with the chevalier de Coigny; and it was further supposed that her liaison with one or other, if not both of these men, was the reason why, taking her daughter with her, and leaving Eugène in the care of Mme Renaudin at Fontainebleau, she suddenly left one day in the greatest hurry for Le Havre, where she clambered aboard a merchant ship for the Atlantic crossing to Martinique.
Here she seems to have found other lovers among the officers at the naval base in Fort Royal, among them comte Scipion du Roure. Without being exactly pretty, another naval officer wrote of her, she was attractive because of her wit, gaiety and good mannersShe cared nothing for public opinionAnd, as her funds were extremely limited, and she was most extravagant, she was often obliged to draw upon her admirers pockets.
She remained on the island for two years until, warned that rioting slaves as well as French soldiers, who had mutinied and joined forces with them, were threatening to attack Fort Royal, she and Hortense sought safety aboard comte Scipion du Roures ship, La Sensible, in which, in October 1790, after a voyage of almost two months, they managed to reach Toulon.
She remained on the island for two years until, warned that rioting slaves as well as French soldiers, who had mutinied and joined forces with them, were threatening to attack Fort Royal, she and Hortense sought safety aboard comte Scipion du Roures ship, La Sensible, in which, in October 1790, after a voyage of almost two months, they managed to reach Toulon.
3 THE CITOYENNE BEAUHARNAIS
She confessed she was
too indolent to take sides.
ROSE AND HER DAUGHTER found France in a mood of expectancy. The year before, a large crowd of assailants had attacked the Parisian prison, that symbol of repression known as the Bastille, and had released its four remaining inmates. Since then the attention of the country had been directed towards the National Assembly as the people waited for the next act in the drama to begin.
The President of the Assembly in October 1790, the month of Roses return from Martinique, was her former husband, relishing the opportunity now afforded him of making a series of sententious speeches.
Often to be seen listening to the deliberations of the Assembly in the gallery of the Tuileries Palace riding school, where their meetings were held, was Rose de Beauharnais, no longer vicomtesse, now citoyenne, in accordance with a decision taken by liberal French nobles to disclaim their titles. She also attended the salons of both Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis as well as the drawing rooms held in their houses by the radical German Prince Frederick of Salm-Kyrbourg and his sister, Princess Amalia.
Forceful as were the opinions expressed in these salons, Rose de Beauharnais gave no indication that she either approved or disapproved of them. As she herself confessed, she was too indolent to take sides; and, indeed, as a woman who knew her well was later to observe, her attention soon wandered from any discussion of abstract ideas. When it suited her to do so, however, she could readily feign an intelligent interest in what was said and knew well enough, as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the statesman and diplomatist, was to testify, when to keep silent rather than expose her ignorance or ingénuité.
As well as in the gallery of the National Assembly, Rose de Beauharnais was also to be seen at the exhibitions of the Academy where, among the portraits on display, was that of her husband, peering proudly from the canvas, his long Roman nose above an undershot chin.
From time to time, Rose came across him during her excursions about the town; and, in a quite friendly way, they discussed their children of whom he was certainly fond. But she could not persuade him to allow her an increased income of which she now stood sorely in need. Even so, she contrived to live well enough in her house in the rue St Dominique which she shared with a friend, Désirée Hosten, maintaining a household which included a valet, a governess for Hortense, and the freed slave, Euphémie, brought over from Martinique.
Adopting the language and behaviour of the common people, as one of her contemporaries put it, she cultivated sympathetic friends among the radicals, making use of the name of her former husband, who was twice elected President of the Jacobin Club, and, after his appointment to a military command on Frances endangered frontier, ending her letters Lapagerie Beauharnais, wife of the Maréchal de Camp.
Like the Abbé Sieyès, a leading member of the States General, who, when asked what he had done in the ensuing months of bloody revolution, replied, I remained alive, Rose de Beauharnais also survived. She lived through the attack on the Tuileries in the summer of 1792 and the subsequent September Massacres; she saw the erection of the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution which ended the life of the King on 21 January 1793; and she endured the days of the Terror during which the father of her children was also guillotined in 1794 after failing to prevent the fall of Mainz to the allied army which the excesses of the Revolution had provoked into existence.
When the Law of Suspects imposed the death penalty upon former nobles and their families who had not constantly demonstrated their loyalty to the Revolution or who had been guilty of making remarks debasing republican institutions and their elected representatives, Rose thought it as well to leave Paris until she had obtained the Certificate of Good Citizenship for herself and her children which the new law required. Offered a house a few miles outside Paris by her friend Désirée Hosten, she left for Croissy with Hortense, her governess, Marie Lannoy, and Euphémie. Her son, Eugène, who had been sent to school at Strasbourg by his father, joined them there to be apprenticed in accordance with a revolutionary decree to a carpenter, while Hortense was apprenticed to a dressmaker who was, in fact, her governess.
Although the blade of the guillotine was still falling and rising on the orders of the implacable Revolutionary Tribune in what Thomas Carlyle was to call relentless systole-diastole, Rose took her household back to Paris when, through her contacts with such influential friends as Jean-Lambert Tallien, a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety, she had managed to acquire Certificates of Good Citizenship.
She had, however, returned to Paris too soon. On the evening of 21 April 1794, three members of a revolutionary committee knocked on the door of her house in the rue St Dominique with an order for the arrest of the woman Beauharnais, wife of the ci-devant General, and the woman Ostenn. They searched the house for incriminating papers; but, finding none, they renewed their search the following night when in the attic they discovered various papers which Alexandre had sent to Rose to keep for him. She was arrested and taken to the prison known as Les Carmes where, during the September Massacres, prisoners had been dragged into foetid rooms lit by torches and candles, to face groups of judges wearing red caps and butchers aprons, sitting round tables littered with papers, prison registers, bottles, pipes and jars of tobacco, their bare arms streaked with blood and tattooed with the symbols of their respective trades. The walls of the prison still bore the marks of the splashed blood of their victims.
Rose was pushed into the prison, already crowded with seven hundred men and women awaiting execution. There were few nobles amongst them: most were tradesmen, a few professional men, a librarian, a musician and an apothecary amongst them. The handsome, dashing General Lazare Hoche was soon to join them.
Hoche, the son of a stableman in royal service, and himself a groom before enlisting in the Gardes Françaises, was one of the talented Revolutionary generals, inexperienced, impromptu and roturier, who commanded the levées en masse with such success. Hoche himself, then aged twenty-six, had been appointed by the Committee of Public Safety to command the army of the Moselle the year before; but he had been denounced as a traitor by his rival, General Charles Pichegru, a man of peasant stock who had been a sergeant-major in an artillery regiment at the outbreak of the Revolution. Arrested as a consequence of Pichegrus denunciation, Hoche was awaiting his trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal with his customary cheerful demeanour; and, although he had been married for less than a month to a sixteen-year-old wife to whom he was devoted, it was not long before, in the atmosphere of sexual excitement which pervaded the prison, the attractive young general and the promiscuous citoyenne became lovers.