by Robert Asprey
Josephine was a gracious and elegant creole of French parents from Martinique in the French West Indies. She had been married at 16 to 19-year-old Alexandre Vicomte de Beauharnais who brought her to Paris in 1779 and later deserted her and their two Children, Eugene and Hortense. After several years of very loose, often scandalous living she had become reconciled with the viscount, who meanwhile had enjoyed a noteworthy career as president of the Constituent Assembly and commander in chief of the Army of the Rhine. Their new life was savagely ended during the Terror. They were imprisoned; he was guillotined only a short time before the overthrow of Robespierre, a fate narrowly missed by Josephine before her release from jail.
At the time of her meeting with Napoleon she was 32, a scarcely desirable age in the Paris of that day. She had been mistress to a number of well-placed lovers, General Louis Lazare Hoche (with whom she had cohabited while in prison) among others. She had hardly any money other than what came from male friends, chief of whom was Napoleon’s benefactor, Paul Barras, who claimed her as mistress. Together with her two children she lived in a scantily furnished small house in the rue Chantereine, an altogether unsatisfactory and highly precarious existence that she longed to improve.
Josephine was more handsome than beautiful, gracious in or out of distress, a fine face albeit marred by blackened teeth which she tried not to show when smiling, long chestnut hair, beautifully alive eyes, a small slightly turned-up nose, a lovely voice sounding more of West Indian somnolence than of Parisian clatter. Coquettish, flattering, sympathetic and giving, she had a supple figure with invitingly long arms and legs.
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