M. Masson declares that there was never a reconciliation, and that they lived apart, but met in society, and spoke to one another, mainly about their children’s education.  Josephine caused him to withdraw before her lawyer the gross and unfounded charges he had made against her and to agree to a satisfactory allowance.

Alexandre, finding soldiering distasteful, embarked upon a political career as an aristocrat Liberal.  His rise to position was swift, and after the death of Mirabeau he followed him as President of the Assembly.  Before his fall came, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Rhine, and at the head of sixty thousand men failed to relieve Mayence and resigned his command.

His Liberal pretensions did not prevent him being included amongst the proscribed.  He was made captive, accused of attempting to escape, condemned to death and guillotined.  Josephine’s device of reassuring the Revolutionists of her conversion to Republicanism by apprenticing Hortense to a dressmaker and Eugene to a carpenter did not avail.  She was suspected and sent to Les Carmes, where frequent conversations took place between her philosophic and abandoned husband and herself, mainly concerning their children’s education, and had not the reaction against the regime of blood brought about the fall of Robespierre, she would assuredly have shared the fate of Alexandre; and had the cry of “A bas le tyrant” been heard a few days earlier, Beauharnais would have escaped too, and cheated Josephine of becoming Empress of the French and Queen of Italy.  As it was, some of the very same people who but a short time before had harangued the mob to “Behold the friend of the people, the great defender of liberty,” switched their murderous vengeance on to their late idol, and ere many hours the widow Beauharnais was set free.  The thought of the appalling end and the brevity of time that seemed left to her impressed Josephine with all its ghastly horror.  She had shrieked and wept herself into a deathlike illness.  The doctor predicted that she could not survive more than a week, and for this reason she escaped being brought before the Tribunal.

A wondrous Providence this, which, with frantic speed, broke the power of a hideous monster, and thereby saved the woman who was to enter upon a new era, and to be borne swiftly on to share the glory of an unequalled Empire.

M. Masson’s theory is that Josephine’s womanly grief had much to do with awakening the sentiment of Paris, and breaking the Reign of Terror; and, indeed, there is some reason in this view, for tears are not only useful as an indication of sorrow, suffering, or conquest, but an effective means of gaining sympathy.  Josephine was an adept at trying the efficacy of weeping, and if M. Masson has gauged the influence of melting the heart of the spirit of massacre aright, then Josephine was gifted with, and made the instrument of, a divine instinct that should claim attention and reverence for all time, even though her subsequent misdeeds occasionally incline us to avert the eye.