terms with the General before they met in Les Carmes, but that it was more than friendship is a mere hypothesis.  Her relation with that unspeakable libertine Barras was especially unfortunate.  No doubt she was driven to extremities after her release.  Her fate was as hard as it is possible to conceive.  She was without the proper means of sustenance for herself and her family, and appears to have lost no time in really becoming the chosen friend of a creature who took advantage of her and then betrayed her to the world.  It is he who tells in his memoirs the sad and sickening story of his connection with Josephine, and gloats over the opportunity it gives him of repeating conversations he had with General Hoche as to her love entanglements.  He declares that she was “the patient mistress of Hoche in the sight of the whole world.”

The editor of the memoirs to some extent tones down the brutal statements of the author.  But a man who publicly exposes the relations he has had with a fascinating woman who gives herself to him may not be readily believed when he deliberately involves his own friends in the liaisons.  There is no question of what his part was in the degradation of Josephine, but the luxury of dragging other names into the moral quagmire, in order, it may be, to justify his own dealings and to further debase her, could only be undertaken by a person soaked with the venom of indecency, and, in this case, had no other object than that of gratifying his malice against her husband.  His assumption of moral superiority is quite entertaining when he, the seducer and corrupter, speaks of the unfortunate woman’s “libertinism,” and calls her in his bitterness “a licentious Creole.”

This representative of the Republic one and indivisible, embodying Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, at the end of the eighteenth century, will forever disgrace the judgment and moral condition of the France which knew Charlemagne.

“Citizen” Barras repudiates the story of Eugene asking the Commander-in-Chief for his beheaded father’s sword.  He claims that Napoleon himself invented the story.  But it is highly improbable that Napoleon would risk at the beginning of his career having his veracity doubted.  In itself, the incident is a small matter.  The only real interest attached to it is the touching pathos of the small boy asking for and receiving the sword, which, of course, gave his mother the opportunity of calling to thank the General for his goodness, and in this way it has historic importance, as Napoleon and Josephine were married four months after, i.e., March 9, 1796, her age being thirty-two and his twenty-five.