ocence and peace. When she sat with her
harp at the window in the evening twilight, the last rays of the setting
sun gilding her sweet countenance, and surrounding as with a halo her
beautiful blond hair, Josephine imagined she saw before her one of those
angel-forms of innocence and love which the poet and painter portray.
In a kind of trance she listened to the sweet sounds and melodies which
Hortense lured from her harp, and accompanied with the silvery tones of
her voice, in words composed by herself, half-childish prayer, half
rhapsody of love, and revealing the most secret thoughts of the fair
young being who stood on the threshold of womanhood, bidding adieu to
childhood with a blissful smile, and dreaming of the future.

CHAPTER IV.

GENERAL BUONAPARTE.

While Josephine de Beauharnais, after the trials of these long and
stormy years, was enjoying blissful days of quiet happiness and repose,
the gusts of revolution kept bursting forth from time to time in fits of
fury, and tranquillity continued far from being permanently restored.
The clubs, those hot-beds of the revolution, still exercised their
pestilential influence over the populace of Paris, and stirred the rude
masses incessantly to fresh paroxysms of discontent and disorder.

But already the man had been found who was to crush those wild masses in
his iron grasp, and dash the speakers of the clubs down into the dust
with the flashing master-glance of his resistless eye.

That man was Napoleon Buonaparte. He was hardly twenty-nine years of
age, yet already all France was talking him as a hero crowned with
laurels, already had he trodden a brilliant career of victory. As
commander of a battalion he had performed prodigies of valor at the
recapture of Toulon; and then, after being promoted to the rank of
general, had gone to the army in Italy on behalf of the republic.
Bedecked with the laurels of his Italian campaign, the young general of
five-and-twenty had returned to France. There, the government, being
still hostile and ill-disposed toward him, wished to remove him from
Paris, and send him to La Vendee as a brigadier-general. Buonaparte
declined this mission, because he preferred remaining in the artillery
service, and, for that reason, the government of the republic relieved
him of his duties and put him on half-pay.

So, Buonaparte remained in Paris and waited. He waited for the brilliant
star that was soon to climb the firmament for him, an