Thus the years passed away; the two sons of the Marquis de Beauharnais had grown up under the care of their maternal friend:  they had been through their collegiate course, had been one year students at Heidelberg, had returned, had been through the drill of soldier and officer, a mere form which custom then imposed on young men of high birth; and the younger son Alexander, the godchild of the Baroness de Renaudin, had scarcely passed his sixteenth year when he received his commission as sub-lieutenant.

A year afterward his elder brother married one of his cousins, the Countess Claude Beauharnais, and the sight of this youthful happy love excited envy in the heart of the young lieutenant of seventeen years, and awoke in him a longing for a similar blessedness.  Freely and without reserve he communicated his wishes to his father, begged of him to choose him a wife, and promised to take readily and cheerfully as such her whom his father or his sponsor, his second mother, would select for him.

A few months later reached Martinique the letters which, as already said, were to be of the utmost importance to the family of M. Tascher de la Pagerie.

The first of these letters was from the Marquis de Beauharnais, and addressed to the parents of Josephine, but with a considerate and delicate tact the marquis had not written the letter with his own hand, but had dictated it to his son Alexander, so as to prove to the family of his friend De la Pagerie that the son was in perfect unison of sentiment with the father, and that the latter only expressed what the son desired and approved.

“I cannot express,” wrote the marquis, “how much satisfaction I have in being at this moment able to give you a proof of the inclination and friendship which I always have had for you.  As you will perceive, this satisfaction is not merely on the surface.

“My two sons,” continues he, “are now enjoying an annual income of forty thousand livres.  It is in your power to give me your daughter to enjoy this income with my son, the chevalier.  The esteem and affection he feels for Madame de Renaudin makes him passionately desire to be united with her niece.  I can assure you that I am only gratifying his wishes when I pray you to give me for him your second daughter, whose age corresponds at best with his.  I sincerely wish that your eldest daughter were a few years younger, for then she would certainly have had the preference, the more so that she is described to me under the most advantageous colors.  But I confess my son, who is but seventeen and a half years old, thinks that a young lady of fifteen is too near him in age.  This is one of those cases in which reasonable and reflecting parents will accommodate themselves to circumstances.”