Josephine never took part in these public balls and festivities; never did the widow of General Beauharnais, one of the victims of the revolution, attend these bals a la victime, where man prided himself on his misfortune and gloried in his sorrows.  The Moniteur—­ which then gave daily notices of the balls and amusements that were to take place in Paris, so as to let the world know how cheerful and happy every one felt there, and which made it its business to publish the names of the ci-devants and ex-nobles who had partaken in these festivities—­never in its long and correct list mentions the name of the widow of General Beauharnais.

Josephine kept aloof from all these wild dissipations—­these balls and banquets.  She would neither dance, nor adorn herself in the memory of her husband; she would not take a part in the splendid festivities of a republic which had murdered him, and had pierced her loyal heart with the deepest wounds.

CHAPTER XXII.

The first interview.

In the midst of these joys and amusements of the new-growing Paris, the storm of the thirteenth Vendemiaire launched forth its destructive thunderbolts, and another rent was made in the lofty structure of the republic.  The royalists, who had cunningly frequented these bals a la victime, to weave intrigues and conspiracies, found their webs scattered, and the republic assumed a new form.

Napoleon with his sword had cut to pieces the webs and snares of the royalists as well as of the revolutionists, and France had to bow to the constitution.  In the Tuileries now sat the Council of the Elders; in the Salle du Manege sat the Five Hundred; and in the palace of Luxemburg resided the five directors of the republic.

On the thirteenth Vendemiaire Paris had passed through a crisis of its revolutionary disease; and, to prevent its falling immediately into another, it permitted the newly-appointed commander-in-chief of the army of the interior of France, General Napoleon Bonaparte, to have every house strictly searched, and to confiscate all weapons found.

Even into the house of the Viscountess de Beauharnais, in the rue Chantereine, came the soldiers of the republic to search for secreted weapons.  They found there the sword of Alexandre de Beauharnais, which certainly Josephine had not hidden, for it was the chief ornament of her son’s room.  When Eugene, on the next Saturday, came to Paris from St. Germain, as he did every week, to pass the Sunday in his mother’s house, to his great distress he saw vacant on the wall the place where the sword of his father had been hanging.  With trembling voice and tears in her eyes his mother told him that General Bonaparte, the new commander-in-chief, had ordered the sword to be carried away by his soldiers.