Josephine had read this letter with a thousand tears, but she hoped still; she believed still in the possibility that the gloomy forebodings of her husband would not be realized; that some fortunate circumstance would save him or at least retard his death.

But this hope was not to be fulfilled.  A few hours after receiving this letter the turnkey brought to the prisoners the bulletin of the executions of the preceding day.  It was that day Josephine’s turn to read this bulletin to her companions.  She therefore began her sad task; and, as slowly and thoughtfully she let fall name after name from her lips, here and there the faces of her hearers were blanched, and their eyes filled with tears.

Suddenly Josephine uttered a piercing cry, and sprang up with the movement of madness toward the door, shook it in her deathly sorrow, as if her life hung upon the opening of that door, and then she sank down fainting.

Unfortunate Josephine! she had seen in the list of those who had been executed the name of General Beauharnais, and in the first excitement of horror she wanted to rush out to see him, or at least to give to his body the parting kiss.

On the sixth Thermidor, in the year ii., that is, on the 24th of July, 1794, fell on the scaffold the head of the General Viscount de Beauharnais.  With quiet, composed coolness he had ascended the scaffold, and his last cry, as he laid his head on the block, was, “Long live the republic!”

In the wagon which drove him to the scaffold, he had found again a friend, the Prince de Salm-Kirbourg, who was now on his way to the guillotine, and who had risked his life in bringing back to Paris the children of Josephine.

His bloodthirsty enemies had not enough of the head of General Beauharnais; his wife’s head also should fall, and the name of the traitor of his country was to be extinguished forever.

Two days after the execution of her husband, the turnkey brought to Josephine the writ of her accusation, and the summons to appear before the tribunal of the revolution—­a summons which then had all the significancy of a death-warrant.

Josephine heard the summons of the jailer with a quiet, easy smile; she had not even a look for the fatal paper which lay on her bed.  Near this bed stood the physician, whom the compassionate republic, which would not leave its prisoners to die on a sick-bed, but only on the scaffold, had sent to Josephine to inquire into her illness and afford her relief.

With indignation he eagerly snatched the paper from the bed, and, returning it back to the jailer, exclaimed:  “Tell the tribunal of the revolution that it has nothing more to do with this woman!  Disease will bring on justice here, and leave nothing to do for the guillotine.  In eight days Citoyenne Beauharnais is dead!” [Footnote:  Aubenas, “Histoire de l’Imperatrice Josephine,” vol. i., p. 235.]

This decision of the physician was transmitted to the tribunal, which resolved that the trial of Madame Beauharnais would be postponed for eight days, and that the tribunal would wait and see if truly death would save her from the guillotine.