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 Rose’s 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 France’s 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 Pichegru’s 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.
They were not to remain so for long. Within a week or two, Hoche was marched out of Les Carmes to face the Revolutionary Tribunal and by the end of November, released on its orders, was in command of the army of Brest.
Rose was left alone with her fear. For much of the time, unlike the other more stoical women in the prison, she was in tears or anxiously setting out her tarot cards in vain attempts to discover her fate.
Beyond the walls of Les Carmes the Revolution was reaching a climax. In the heat of the month known in the new revolutionary calendar as Thermidor, power was slipping from the hands of Maximilien Robespierre who had been elected President by the National Convention in June; and on 28 July 1794, his jaw shattered by a self-inflicted pistol shot, he and twenty-one of his supporters were guillotined before a cheering crowd in the Place de la Révolution. The Revolution was now about to take a sudden lurch to the right.
Rose emerged into startling sunlight, one of the first of the three thousand prisoners to be released by the end of August. Désirée Hosten being still in prison, Rose agreed with another Creole friend, Mme de Krény, to take an apartment in the rue de l’Université. Here she was soon once more deep in debt and borrowing money from anyone who would lend it to her, even from Hortense’s governess, who lent her a lifetime’s savings, and from General Hoche, who also sent her passionate love letters to which she replied in terms no less ardent, though she was not so exclusively devoted to him that she declined to submit, so it was said, to the rough overtures of one of his grooms.
It was not a time to be short of money in Paris. With the ending of the Terror the city had emerged suddenly from gloomy foreboding into bright and exciting life. Theatres reopened; cafés were thronged; dance halls and brothels sprang up everywhere. Profiteers and speculators, spending money as rapidly as they made it, sped through the streets with their women in ornately painted carriages to expensive restaurants, to gambling dens and to places of entertainment