Josephine had hitherto, as a simple, sentimental young lady, played the guitar, and chirped with it, in her fresh but uncultivated voice, her sweet songs of love.  She gave up the guitar, the favorite instrument of the creoles, and exchanged it for the harp, for which attainment as well as for the art of singing she procured the best and ablest masters.  Even a dancing-master had to come to Noisy to give to the young viscountess that perfection of art which would enable her, without fear, to dance at a ball alongside of the Viscount de Beauharnais, “the beautiful dancer of Versailles.”  With her aunt she read the works of the writers and poets who were then praised and loved, and with wonderful predilection she also studied botany, to which science she ever clung during her life, and which threw on her existence gleams of joy when the sun of her happiness had long set.

Josephine, who out of pure love for her husband learned and studied zealously, communicated to the viscount, in her letters, every advancement she made in her studies; and she was proud and happy when he applauded her efforts, and when in his letters he praised her assiduity and her progress.

But evidently these letters of the viscount contained nothing of that love and ardor which the young fiery creole longed for from her husband; they were not the utterances of a young, anxious lover, of an enthusiastic, worshipping husband; but they were addressed to Josephine with the quiet, cool benignity of a considerate friend, of a mentor, of a tutor who knows full well how much above his pupil soars his own mind, and with what supreme deference this pupil must look up to him.

“I am delighted,” wrote he once—­“delighted at your zeal to acquire knowledge and culture; this zeal, which we must ever cherish, is ever the source of purest enjoyments, and possesses the glorious advantage, when we follow its dictates, of never producing any grief.  If you persevere in the resolution you have taken, if you continue to labor with unabated zeal at your personal improvement, be assured that the knowledge you will have acquired will exalt you highly above all others; and whereas science and modesty will be combined in you, you will succeed in becoming an accomplished woman.  The talents which you cultivate have their pleasant side, and if you devote to them a portion of the day, you will unite the agreeable to the useful.” [Footnote:  “Histoire de l’Imperatrice Josephine,” vol. i., p. 110.]

This is what Alexandre de Beauharnais wanted.  His wife, through her knowledge, was to be highly exalted above all others.  She was to study the sciences, and become what is now called a learned woman, but what was then termed a philosophical woman.

The ambition of the ardent viscount required that his young wife should be the rival of his learned, verse-writing aunt, the Baroness Fanny de Beauharnais; that Josephine, if not the most beautiful and most intellectual woman of Paris, should be the most accomplished.