It is probable that the liaison with Barras began in 1795, for in August of that year Josephine took a little house in Paris, furnishing it largely from the apartment in town which she had kept so long. She put Hortense in Mme. Campan’s school, and taking Eugène from Hoche sent him to college. She entertained constantly in her new home, and once a week at least received Barras and his friends at her country place at Croissy. It was an open secret that the money for all this was supplied by Barras.
Although Barras was himself notoriously corrupt, he was a man of elegant and highly cultivated tastes, and he always made strenuous efforts to keep his inner circle exclusive. He wished only persons of wit, elegance, and ease about him, when he was at leisure, and as a rule he allowed no others. Now and then, however, the necessities of politics brought into his house a man unused either to its polite refinements or its elegant dissipations. Such a man was admitted in the fall of 1795—a young Corsican, a member of the army who had distinguished himself at the siege of Toulon, and who had recently put Barras and the whole government, in fact, under obligations. The man’s name was Bonaparte—Napoleon Bonaparte. He had come to Paris in the spring of 1795, under orders to join the Western Army, but had fallen into disgrace because he refused to obey. He succeeded, however, through Barras, who had known him at Toulon, in making an impression at the War Office. He was more than an ordinary man, the authorities who listened to his talk and examined his plans of campaign said. A chance came in October to try his metal as a commanding officer. The sections of Paris, dissatisfied with the Convention, had planned an attack for a certain night. The Committee of Defence asked Bonaparte to take command of the guard which was to defend the Tuileries, where the Convention sat. The result was a quick and effectual repulse of the attack of the sections, and Bonaparte was rewarded the next day by being made a general-of-division.
One of the first acts to follow the attack on the Convention was a law ordering that all citizens should be disarmed. Now, Josephine had in her apartment the sword of General de Beauharnais, and in obedience to the new law she at once carried it to the proper authority. Eugène, knowing her intention, hastened there too, and passionately protested against his father’s sword being given up. He would die first, he declared, with boyish vehemence. His youth (he was but fourteen), his genuine emotion touched the commissioner, who hesitated and finally said that Eugène might go to the general in charge of the section, the newly made General Bonaparte, and present his petition. The boy hastened to the General, and with shining eyes and trembling lips, begged that his father’s sword might be returned. Bonaparte, moved by the lad’s earnestness and agitation, ordered that his request be granted. Mme. de Beauharnais, on hearing the story from Eugène, went to the General’s office to thank him. The interview ended by her inviting him to call upon her. It is probable that Barras had felt it wise to admit Bonaparte to his inner circle at about this time, and before long the young general was on good terms with the entire society.
At the time when Bonaparte began to frequent the houses of Barras and Josephine he was, beside most of the men and women he met there—certainly beside Barras and Josephine—a paragon of virtue. They were disciples of pleasure; he of the strenuous life. Up to this time the pleasures of the world had never invited him. He had looked on them as a young philosopher might, bent on seeing and understanding all, but he had never sought them, never been allured by them. To make a place and name for himself was all that Napoleon Bonaparte, up to this time, had desired.
Not only did he here, for the first time, come into a circle which cultivated pleasure as an end; but here, for the first time, he saw the refinements, the luxury, the delights of highly developed society. Beautiful, graceful, and witty women he had never known before; he had never set foot before in rooms such as these in which he found Josephine, Mme. Tallien, and Barras. Dinners like these they offered him were an amazement. Not only was he astonished by his surroundings, he was intoxicated by the attention he received. That Josephine, who seemed to him the perfect type of the grande dame, should invite him to her home, write him flattering little notes when his visits were delayed, admire his courage, listen to his impetuous talk, prophesy a great future for him, excited his imagination and hope as nothing ever had before. A month had not passed before he was paying her an impassioned court. That she was six years his senior and a widow with two children; that she had no certain income and was of another rank; that he had nothing but his “cloak and sword” and was hardly started in his career, though with a mother and several brothers and sisters looking to him to see them through life—these and all other practical considerations seem to have been thrust aside. He loved Josephine and meant to marry her. All through the fall and winter of 1795 and 1796 he was at her side pressing his suit.
But Josephine, though pleased by Napoleon’s devotion, and certainly encouraging him, hesitated. Certainly marriage with the young Corsican was a venture at which a more courageous woman than she might have hesitated, and she, poor woman, had had enough of ventures. Every one so far had ended in disaster—her marriage had ended in separation, her reconciliation with her husband in his death, her property had been lost in a revolution. All she asked of life was an opportunity to settle Eugène and Hortense, and freedom and money enough to be gay. Could she expect this from a marriage with Bonaparte? She herself analyzed her feelings admirably in a letter to a friend:
I am urged, my dear, to marry again by the advice of all my friends (I may almost say), by the commands of my aunt, and the prayers of my children. Why are you not here to help me by your advice on this important occasion, and to tell me whether I ought or ought not to consent to a union, which certainly seems calculated to relieve me from the discomfort of my present situation? Your friendship would render you clear-sighted to my interests, and a word from you would suffice to bring me to a decision.
Among my visitors you have seen General Bonaparte; he is the man who wishes to become a father to the orphans of Alexander de Beauharnais and a husband to his widow.
“Do you love him?” is naturally your first question.
My answer is, “perhaps—No.”