o dazzling a part a generation earlier, as
favourite of the King of Prussia and Queen of her loveliest women.

CHAPTER XII

THE CORSICAN AND THE CREOLE

Of the many women who succeeded one another with such bewildering
rapidity in the favour of the first Napoleon, from Desiree Clary,
daughter of the Marseilles silk-merchant, the "little wife" of his days
of obscurity, to Madame Walewska, the beautiful Pole, who so fruitlessly
bartered her charms for her country's salvation, only one really
captured his fickle heart--Josephine de Beauharnais, the woman whom he
raised to the splendour of an Imperial crown, only to fling her aside
when she no longer served the purposes of his ambition.

It was one October day in the year 1795 that Josephine, Vicomtesse de
Beauharnais, first cast the spell of her beauty on the "ugly little
Corsican," who had then got his foot well planted on the ladder, at the
summit of which was his crown of empire. At twenty-six, the man who, but
a little earlier, was an out-of-work captain, eating his heart out in a
Marseilles slum, was General-in-Chief of the armies of France, with the
disarmed rebels of Paris grovelling at his feet.

One day a handsome boy came to him, craving permission to retain the
sword his father had won, a favour which the General, pleased by the
boy's frankness and manliness, granted. The next day the young rebel's
mother presented herself to thank him with gracious words for his
kindness to her son--a creature of another world than his, with a
beauty, grace and refinement which were a new revelation to his
bourgeois eyes.

The fair vision haunted him; the music of her voice lingered in his
ears. He must see her again. And, before another day had passed, we find
the pale-faced, grim Corsican, with the burning eyes, sitting awkwardly
on a horse-hair chair of Madame's dining-room in her small house in the
Rue Chantereine, nervously awaiting the entry of the Vicomtesse who had
already played such havoc with his peace of mind. And when at last she
made her appearance, few would have recognised in the man, who made his
shy, awkward bow, the famous General with whose name the whole of France
was ringing.

It was little wonder, perhaps, that the little Corsican's heart went
pit-a-pat, or that his knees trembled under him, for the lady whose
smile and the touch of whose hand sent a thrill through him, was indeed,
to quote his own words, "beautiful as a dream." From the c