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THE Taschers de La Pagerie were a noble French family established since the seventeenth century in the island of Martinique, where they owned a large sugar plantation employing 150 Negroes, nominally slaves but in fact a well-treated community producing cane sugar, coffee and rum. The Taschers of Martinique had some things in common with the Buonapartes of Corsica. They were nobles residing overseas from their country of origin; they lived simply, close to nature, and in so doing, had retained the old virtues of the nobility. But the Taschers were richer and had an easier life.

Rose was born on 23 June 1763, the eldest of three children, all girls. She spent a happy childhood in Martinique, which is as lush as Corsica is rugged. Around her house grew scarlet hibiscus and wild orchids, breadfruit and banana trees and coconut palms. The pace of life was relaxed. Rose gossiped with the Negro women, swung in a hammock, played the guitar, but read few books. At twelve she went to a convent boarding-school for four years. Meanwhile a suitable marriage was arranged for her with a man she had only occasionally met, Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, the son of a former Governor of the French West Indies. He was serving as an officer in France, and to France at sixteen Rose Tascher set sail.

Alexandre de Beauharnais was nineteen, handsome and rich – he had an income of 40,000 francs. He had been educated at the University of Heidelberg. He was the best dancer in France and had the privilege of dancing in Marie Antoinette’s quadrilles. But the gifted Alexandre had lost his mother as a child and had grown up with three weaknesses: he was pretentious, he was self-centred, and where women were concerned he had no control.

Alexandre was pleased with his bride, in particular with her ‘honesty and gentleness’, and Rose Tascher became the Vicomtesse de Beauharnais. The young couple had two children. Then Alexandre went off with another woman to live in Martinique. There he listened to totally unfounded gossip about Rose Tascher’s girlhood, and the man who had deserted his wife for twelve months thought fit, ‘choking with rage’, to write her a pompous epistle denouncing her ‘crimes and atrocities’.

This was too much for the honest Rose. When her husband showed no sign of returning to live with her, she applied for a legal separation. This was granted in February 1785, Rose receiving 6,000 francs a year. At the age of twenty-two the Vicomtesse de Beauharnais went to live with other ladies in the same situation, at the house of the Bernardine nuns of the Abbey of Penthémont in the fashionable Rue de Grenelle. During the autumn she stayed in Fontainebleau and rode to hounds with the King’s hunt.

In the summer of 1788 Rose learned that her father was ill and her sister dying. Selling some of her belongings, including her harp, to pay the passage, she returned to Martinique, taking her daughter Hortense, but leaving her son at the Institution de la Jeune Noblesse. She stayed in Martinique two years. On the voyage back to France seven-year-old Hortense showed early signs of the courage that was to be her distinctive trait. She used to please the French crew with Caribbean songs and dances. Soon the rough wooden deck had worn big holes in her only pair of shoes, but, not to disappoint the sailors, she continued her dances to the end, though the soles of her feet were cut and bleeding.

In France, where the Revolution had broken out, Alexandre became a leading member of the Constituent Assembly. When Prussia and Austria invaded, he rejoined the army, was promoted general, and in 1793 got the chance of a lifetime when he was called to the relief of Mainz. Instead of racing to the beleaguered town, Alexandre, according to the commissioners, ‘made a fool of himself at Strasbourg by chasing after whores all day and giving balls for them at night.’ In March 1794 Alexandre was thrown into the Carmelite prison. Rose worked hard to try to get him out, writing petitions and pleading with friends. Then she received an anonymous letter, warning her that she was in danger. A lesser woman might have fled but, as Rose wrote to her aunt, ‘Where could I go without compromising my husband?’ In April she was arrested.

All the right people were in prison. Rose shared the former convent with dukes and duchesses, an admiral, a prince. Every day brave little Hortense and her brother Eugène came to visit their parents. Later however they were forbidden even to write. ‘We tried to make up for this,’ says Hortense, ‘by writing at the bottom of the laundry list, “Your children are well,” but the porter was barbarous enough to erase it. As a last resort we would copy out the laundry list ourselves so that our parents would see our writing and know at least we were still alive.’

At the height of the Terror it became an offence for a prisoner merely to seek the company of aristocratic fellow prisoners, and on this charge Alexandre de Beauharnais went to the guillotine on 23 July. Rose wept for a husband she had loved despite his faults, and her fears increased for her own life. She spent the long days trying to read her future in a pack of cards and, being prone to tears, openly crying: something her companions frowned on, ‘for it was bad form to tremble at the thought of the tumbril.’ One by one the great names of France were called, and the prison began to empty. On the evening of 6 August another name was shouted by the turnkey: ‘The widow Beauharnais!’ Rose fainted – from joy. For Robespierre had just been guillotined, her friend Tallien was in power and the turnkey was opening the prison door to freedom.

Rose and her children went to live in the house of a poetry-writing aunt, Fanny de Beauharnais, the Eglé mocked by Ecouchard Lebrun:

Eglé, belle et poète, a deux petits travers: Elle fait son visage et ne fait pas ses vers.

Fanny had influential friends. They, and Tallien, arranged that Rose should receive substantial compensation – including a carriage – for losses incurred during her four months’ imprisonment. They also put profitable business deals her way. In August 1795 Rose could afford to make the down payment on a pretty house of her own, 6 Rue Chantereine: a two-storey building with a bow-shaped garden front, set amid lime trees.

The occupant of this pretty little house was herself pretty and petite: five feet in height, with a slim figure, and small hands and feet. Her eyes were dark-brown and had long lashes. Her silky, light chestnut hair she usually wore curled and combed forward. Her weak feature was her teeth; when she laughed she was careful barely to part her lips, letting the laughter bubble in her throat. Her two best points were her dazzlingly fine skin and her pretty voice with its light Creole accent: she barely sounded her r’s, a mannerism that happened to be fashionable.

Rose was pretty without being beautiful and in a city like Paris would never have got far by her looks alone. But she possessed two other qualities: she was gay and she was kind. The small incidents of life she constantly found ‘amusing’ – drôle, one of her favourite words, which she pronounced drolle; and according to an English lady who knew her in prison Rose was ‘one of the most accomplished and amiable women I have ever met’.

The Bernardine nuns with whom she had lodged before the Revolution were now suppressed, and this symbolized the change in Rose’s own life. Now she lived alone, and she lived for fun. Those terrible four months in the shadow of the guillotine she wanted to blot out with parties and the frou-frou of pretty clothes. In a letter to her close friend, Thérésia Tallien, Rose is preparing for a dance:

As it seems important to me that we should be dressed in exactly the same way, I give you notice that I shall have on my hair a red kerchief knotted Creole style with three curls on each side of my brow. What may be rather daring for me will be perfectly normal for you as you are younger, perhaps no prettier, but infinitely fresher. You see I am fair to everyone. But it is all part of a plan. The idea is to throw the Trois Bichons and the Bretelles Anglaises [two groups of fashionable young men] into despair. You will understand the importance of this conspiracy, the need for secrecy, and the enormous effect that will result. Till tomorrow, I count on you.

Into this gay, pleasure-loving world, in late summer 1795, stepped Napoleon Buonaparte. He was then on half pay and did not get enough to eat. His sallow face was thin, his cheeks sunken, and on either side his ill-powdered hair hung ‘like spaniel’s ears’. Laconic speech was the fashion, but friends found that Napoleon carried it too far – he spoke chiefly in monosyllables. This is how he impressed one lady: ‘Very poor and as proud as a Scot … he had turned down a command in the Vendée because he would not give up the artillery: “That’s my weapon,” he often said – at which we young women went into gales of laughter, unable to understand how anyone could refer to a cannon in the same terms as to a sword … You would never have guessed him to be a soldier; there was nothing dashing about him, no swagger, no bluster, nothing rough.’

Napoleon probably met Rose at Thérésia Tallien’s cottage. He was just twenty-six, she thirty-two. What he made of her we can only surmise. She had the features he was predisposed to like; she had a gentle, very feminine nature; she was, he once said, ‘all lace’. As for her character, Napoleon may well have thought as a contemporary did: ‘her even temper, her easy-going disposition, the kindness that filled her eyes and was expressed not only in her words but in the very tone of her voice … all this gave her a charm that counter-balanced the dazzling beauty of her two rivals – Madame Tallien and Madame Récamier.’

Napoleon and Rose had friends in common, notably Paul Barras, and after his appointment to command the Army of the Interior, Napoleon was invited to the house on which Rose had made a down payment. He found it furnished with luxuries rather than necessities. There was a harp, a bust of Socrates, and some dainty chairs with curved backs covered with blue nankeen, but no saucepans, no glasses, no plates. What furniture there was, however, Rose had arranged with taste; moreover, she kept the house spotless – in the Carmelite she had been one of the few prisoners to clean her room – and this was a quality Napoleon liked. There was an exotic atmosphere too which would have appealed to the soldier who revelled in Paul et Virginie. Some of the furniture came from Martinique and the coffee Rose served him had been grown on her mother’s plantation.

Rose was a firm believer in destiny and in fortune-telling. During the early days of their acquaintance, at a party in the Tallien cottage, she persuaded Napoleon to tell fortunes. Among the guests was General Hoche, who had been in prison with Rose and was in love with her. Very tall and muscular, with a duelling scar like a comma between his brows, Hoche looked every inch the soldier; Napoleon, who did not look like a soldier at all, and was becoming fond of Rose, may have felt jealous. At any rate, after going round the other guests, taking the hand of each and predicting an agreeable future, he took Hoche’s hand, inspected the lines on it, and announced curtly, ‘You will die in your bed.’ Hoche treated the prediction as an insult and scowled at Napoleon. Quickly and tactfully Rose intervened. ‘Nothing bad about that,’ she said. ‘Alexander the Great died in his bed.’ And the little contretemps passed off gaily.

Napoleon grew increasingly fond of his new friend. But he did not care for the name Rose. He decided to change it, just as he had changed Désirée to Eugénie. One of Rose’s other names was Josèphe. Perhaps recalling the heroine of Le Sourd, which he had seen earlier that year, Napoleon lengthened and softened Josèphe to Josephine, and it was by this name that he began to call Rose Beauharnais.

Among the other visitors to 6 Rue Chantereine was Paul Barras. Food being rationed, he used to send ahead baskets stacked with poultry, game and expensive fruit. With utensils borrowed from a neighbour Josephine’s cook turned these into an elaborate meal, for Barras had high standards where pleasure was concerned. On days when the Director was giving a party in his Chaillot house, Josephine would go there to act as hostess. Rumours circulated in Paris that Josephine was Barras’s mistress.

Napoleon, hearing of this, began to keep away from 6 Rue Chantereine. He concentrated on his military duties, and on keeping order in Paris: no easy task, since people were discontented with the two-ounce ration of black bread composed partly of sawdust, beans and chestnuts. Once he was heckled by a fat woman of Paris: ‘What do these wearers of epaulets care if poor folk starve to death, provided they fill their own skins?’ To which Napoleon replied, ‘My good woman, look at me, and say which of us has fed the best.’

Josephine began to miss Napoleon’s visits. She had become interested in this strange general who did not look like a soldier, and whose life had been as adventurous as her own. A fashionable painter had recently described Napoleon’s features as ‘Grecian’ and perhaps that made her see his gaunt face in a better light. She sent him a little note: ‘You no longer come to see a friend who is fond of you; you have completely abandoned her. You are wrong, for she is tenderly attached to you. Come to lunch tomorrow, Septidi. I want to see you and talk to you about your affairs. Good night, my friend, I embrace you. Widow Beauharnais.’ ‘I embrace you’ was a polite phrase – Marie Antoinette had used it to Fersen – and implies only friendship.

In the winter of 1795 Napoleon resumed his visits. In Josephine he had found a woman prettier and much more of a person than Eugénie. She was not at all the simple flower of nature he had imagined he would fall in love with; she was sophisticated, smartly dressed, and interested in his ‘affairs’, that is, his career. She loved parties and pretty clothes, but Napoleon may well have glimpsed a more serious side: even in her letter to Thérésia about her dress for the dance it is significant how seriously Josephine takes the little plot. In a way he and Josephine were complete opposites; yet underneath they had much in common. They came from the same class, they both believed in the Revolution, they shared certain basic values.

Napoleon began to fall in love. As he did so, he tried to draw back. Perhaps he recalled his sober, thrifty mother, who certainly would not approve of this gay widow with expensive tastes. He told himself sharply that his senses were getting the better of him, that Josephine did not really love him, and that she would bring him unhappiness. And having given himself that warning, Napoleon decided that he did not mind, that he wanted more from life than happiness.

As for Josephine, she did not love Napoleon. But she found him oddly attractive, this man who spoke his mind in such a decided way and had given her a new name. He did not make her expensive presents, like Barras, but he had a sincerity Barras lacked. He was strange, he was different, and he had eyes only for her. Josephine’s moral standards could be summed up in the phrase, ‘I must look after my children and be kind;’ otherwise she lived for the day. And Napoleon was pressing.

One evening in January 1796 Napoleon made love with Josephine. For her, the mother of two children, it was doubtless a diversion, a kindness, something drolle. But for Napoleon this was the first time he had possessed a woman he loved, and into the experience went all the force of a very passionate nature that had been kept in check since adolescence. Next day he expressed some of his feelings:

Seven in the morning.

I have woken up full of you. Your portrait and the memory of yesterday’s intoxicating evening have given my senses no rest. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an odd effect you have on my heart! Are you displeased? Do I see you sad? Are you worried? Then my soul is grief-stricken, and your friend cannot rest … But I cannot rest either when I yield to the deep feeling that overpowers me and I draw from your lips and heart a flame that burns me. Ah! last night I clearly realized that the portrait I had of you is quite different from the real you! You are leaving at noon, and in three hours I shall see you. Until then, mio dolce amor, thousands of kisses; but don’t kiss me, for your kisses sear my blood.

Josephine was doubtless very surprised to receive a letter in this vein. In her set it was considered poor taste or a bad joke to treat bed as more than a passing pleasure. It spoiled the fun. And when Napoleon began to question her about Barras, it was doubtless to cool his ardour that she told him the rumours were true: she had been Barras’s mistress, though she was so no longer.

This did not deter Napoleon. On the contrary, he decided that Josephine was more lovable than ever for being ‘experienced’. He could easily have had a woman like Josephine as his mistress, and morals are usually relaxed in a revolutionary society, but Napoleon liked everything regular and orderly. He at once began to think about marriage.

Through one of his teachers at the Ecole Militaire, Napoleon got in touch with a Monsieur Emmery, a businessman who had interests in the Caribbean. He learned that the Taschers were a respected family and that La Pagerie, owned now by Josephine’s mother, was a valuable property, from which Josephine could expect an annual income of 50,000 livres. The snag was that since 1794 Martinique had been in English hands, no money from La Pagerie was reaching France and none would be likely to appear until Martinique was recaptured. Josephine had no property in France and did not even own 6 Rue Chantereine. Josephine might one day be very rich, but for the moment she was virtually penniless. Moreover, if he married her, Napoleon would be making himself responsible for her two children, both at expensive schools, at a time when he was already supporting two brothers and three sisters. On his side he had only his general’s pay. Yet so deeply was Napoleon in love that, having made these unpromising calculations, he decided that somehow he would be able to manage.

The next question was, what effect would marriage have on his career? After Vendémiaire Napoleon no longer sought love in the wilds. Acting, instead, on his essay – ‘passion should be governed by reason’ – he wanted, should he marry, to continue to shoulder his responsibilities towards the Republic. In particular, he wished to fight France’s enemies, Austria and Piedmont, in the north of Italy. He had asked Barras, the foremost Director, for the command of the Army of the Alps. But Barras’s first instinct had been to say no. Each of the Directors had a special responsibility, Barras’s being the Interior. Napoleon was doing a good job there and it was against Barras’s interests to move him. Also, there were older generals with a better claim to the command.

Then Barras learned that Napoleon was thinking of marrying Josephine, and Napoleon’s request appeared to him in a new light. Barras had only just come to power and felt insecure. Of the five Directors he alone was of noble birth, and he felt the need of friends from the same class. Josephine and Napoleon were both nobles, but Napoleon as a Corsican, and former friend of the traitor Paoli, was still an outsider, not wholly accepted. By marrying Josephine he would remove any latent doubts about his political loyalty. Then in Josephine and Napoleon Barras would have two useful allies. So Barras encouraged Napoleon to marry his former mistress, from whom, incidentally, he wished to be disentangled. ‘She belongs,’ he said, ‘both to the old régime and to the new. She will give you stability, and she has the best salon in Paris.’ Stability – consistance – was the key word.

Barras not only approved the marriage, he now revised his attitude to Napoleon’s request. If Napoleon acquired ‘stability’, it would be to Barras’s advantage to appoint him to the Army of the Alps, for any successes in that post would reflect credit on Barras. Finally Barras let it be known to Napoleon and Josephine that if they got married his wedding present would be the Army of the Alps.

Napoleon would have proposed marriage to Josephine anyway, once he had assured himself that he could afford it and that it would not harm his career. Barras’s offer was merely an added incentive. But Josephine at first did not see it like that. She was upset by this mingling of love and politics. One evening in February she made a scene. She accused Napoleon of wanting to marry her only in order to get the command in Italy. Napoleon denied the charge; how, he asked, could Josephine have entertained ‘so base a feeling’? Later, when he returned home, he wrote Josephine a letter saying how pained he was by her charge. But instead of retaliating at this imputation on his sincerity, he finds – to his own surprise – that he returns to lay his heart at her feet. ‘It is impossible to be weaker or to be brought lower. What is your strange power, incomparable Josephine? … I give you three kisses, one on your heart, one on your mouth, one on your eyes.’

Reassured as to Napoleon’s sincerity, reassured also that Barras would continue to protect her and pass business contracts her way, Josephine looked into her heart and asked herself what her feelings were for Napoleon. She liked his courage, the range of his knowledge and the liveliness of his mind. What she liked less was, paradoxically, his passionateness, the fact that he was demanding, and that he would expect her to belong to him alone. Josephine summed up her feelings to a friend: ‘You are going to ask, “Do I love him?” Well … no. “Do you feel aversion to him ?” No. What I feel is tepidness: it annoys me, in fact religious people find it the most tiresome state of all.’

Tiresome also was the fact that Josephine was thirty-two years old. Still very pretty, but thirty-two, with no sure income. As for marriage, had not Chaumette declared it to be ‘no longer a yoke, a heavy chain; it is no more than … the fulfilling of Nature’s grand designs, the payment of a pleasant debt which every citizen owes to the patrie’? Being now only a civil union, it could be ended easily by divorce. Napoleon wanted the marriage ardently, Barras wanted it. At last Josephine said yes.

Josephine took Napoleon to see her notary, Raguideau, in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Raguideau was a tiny man, almost a dwarf. He closeted himself with Josephine, but inadvertently failed to shut the door tight. After Josephine had explained her intentions, through the partly open door Napoleon heard Raguideau say, ‘This is a very great mistake, and you’re going to be sorry for it. You’re doing something quite mad – marrying a man who has only his army cloak and sword.’ Napoleon was deeply hurt and never forgot the incident.

Raguideau drew up a marriage contract extremely unfavourable to Napoleon. There was to be no community of goods, and it was stipulated that he should pay his wife 1,500 livres a year for life. Meanwhile, Barras was seeing about his side of the bargain. It had been a boast to say that he would give Napoleon the Italian command as a wedding present, for he first had to get the consent of his fellow Director, Lazare Carnot, whose special responsibility was the French army. Carnot, a chilly Burgundian mathematician who had been responsible for France’s brilliant victories in 1794, examined Napoleon’s plan, drafted for Pontécoulant, in which he proposed to strike through north Italy and ‘sign peace under the walls of Vienna’. This plan had been criticized by General Berthier, who said it would demand 50,000 extra troops, and by General Scherer, a former commander in the Alps, as ‘the work of a madman such as could be executed only by a madman’. Carnot, however, thought well of the plan; so he and Barras drafted the order transferring Napoleon to command the Army of the Alps. This was signed on 2 March; the marriage was to take place on the 9th.

Napoleon did not have a birth certificate and Corsica was occupied by the English. So he did what Lucien had done two years earlier: borrowed Joseph’s. Josephine did not have a birth certificate either and Martinique also was occupied by the English, so she used the birth certificate of her sister Catherine. This was primarily a practical arrangement, but it had the advantage of making her seem younger than she was. On paper Josephine became twenty-eight instead of thirty-two, and Napoleon twenty-seven instead of twenty-six.

On the evening of 9 March a group of important people gathered in what had once been the gilded drawing-room of a nobleman’s house at 3 Rue d’Antin, and now served as a room for marriages in the town hall of the second arrondissement. Barras the Director was there in his ostentatious triple-plumed velvet hat, and Tallien, to whose courage Josephine owed her life. The third witness was Jérôme Calmelet, Josephine’s lawyer, who approved of her marriage as much as Raguideau disapproved. Josephine herself wore a high-waisted muslin dress decorated with red, white and blue flowers. The last to arrive was Napoleon, in his gold-embroidered blue uniform, accompanied by an aide-de-camp, Lemarois, the fourth witness. The acting registrar, an ex-soldier with a wooden leg, had dozed off beside the fire. Napoleon shook him awake. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘marry us quickly.’

The acting registrar got up from his chair, faced the couple, and addressed Napoleon. ‘General Buonaparte, citizen, do you consent to take as your lawful wife Madame Beauharnais, here present, to keep faith with her, and to observe conjugal fidelity?’

‘Citizen, I do.’

The registrar addressed Josephine. ‘Madame Beauharnais, citizen, do you consent to take as your lawful husband General Buonaparte, here present, to keep faith with him and to observe conjugal fidelity?’

‘Citizen, I do.’

‘General Buonaparte and Madame Beauharnais, the law unites you.’

After signing the register, Napoleon and Josephine drove through the cold March night to the pretty, unpaid-for house in Rue Chantereine. As a wedding present, Napoleon gave Josephine a simple necklace of hair-fine gold from which hung a plaque of gold and enamel. On the plaque were inscribed two words: ‘Au destin’. In an age without religion it was Napoleon’s way of saying, in the language Josephine favoured, that Providence had brought them together and would look after their marriage.

In the ground-floor bedroom upholstered in blue and hung with lots of looking-glasses Napoleon found that he was not to be alone with his bride. Josephine had a pug called Fortuné who was devoted to her. The pug had been with her in prison and carried messages to her friends hidden in his collar. Since then he had had the privilege of sleeping on Josephine’s bed. When Napoleon sought to avail himself of the same privilege, Fortuné resented it. He barked, snapped and finally bit his rival in the calf.

Napoleon’s feelings towards his new wife are described in the letters he wrote to her as soon as they were apart. His heart, he said, had never felt anything by halves, and it had shielded itself against love. Then he had found Josephine. Her whim was a sacred law. To be able to see her was his supreme happiness. She was beautiful and gracious. He adored everything about her. Had she been less experienced or younger, he would have loved her less. Glory attracted him only in so far as it was pleasing to Josephine and flattered her self-esteem.

Only one thing troubled Napoleon – Josephine’s feelings for him. While he was never away from Josephine for an hour without taking out her portrait from his pocket and covering it with kisses, he learned with dismay that she had never once taken out of her drawer the portrait of himself which he had given her in October. He sensed that she cared for him less deeply than he cared for her, and that one day even that affection would diminish. It was the ending of ‘Clisson et Eugénie’ come true. The thought ‘terrified’ Napoleon, and he sought to dispel it by bringing it into the open. ‘I ask neither eternal love nor fidelity,’ he told Josephine, ‘but only … truth, unlimited frankness. The day when you will say to me “I love you less” will be the last day of my love or the last of my life.’

On the day after their wedding Napoleon and Josephine went to see Hortense at Madame Campan’s fashionable school in Saint-Germain. Hortense had opposed her mother remarrying because, as she told Eugène, ‘she’ll be bound to love us less’ – a prediction which was to be proved untrue. Napoleon, who was fond of children in general, and of Josephine’s children in particular, put himself out to please the blue-eyed Hortense. On returning to Rue Chantereine, he immersed himself in books which he had taken out of the National Library three days previously. They were the Memoirs of Marshal de Catinat, a Life of Prince Eugène, three folio volumes of Prince Eugène’s battles, a book on the topography of Piedmont and Savoy, Saint-Simon’s Guerre des Alpes, and an account of Maillebois’s campaigns – all bearing on the region where he was going to fight. These dry tomes were not exactly the stuff of which a honeymoon is made, but when Josephine tried to lure him away from them, Napoleon said, ‘Patience, my dear. We’ll have time to make love when the war is won.’

This soldier’s honeymoon lasted only two days and two nights. For Napoleon, inexperienced in bedroom niceties, that was not long enough to win Josephine. He was leaving too much to Providence when he said that love-making could wait.

On the evening of the 11th Napoleon took Josephine in his arms and kissed her goodbye. Then in a light, fast carriage he took the road south to his new command. With him went Junot and Chauvet, paymaster of the Army of Italy, 8,000 livres in gold louis, 100,000 livres in bills of exchange, a promise, dragged out of the Directors, of reinforcements, and the portrait, seldom long from his lips, of his ‘incomparable’ wife.