The Jacobin Club, a short time after the capture of Mayence, began again in an infuriated session the conflict against the nobility, and the fanatical Hebert moved: 

“All the noblemen who serve in the army, in the magistracy, in any public office, must be driven away and dismissed.  The people must require this, the people themselves!  They must go in masses to the Convention, and after exposing the crimes and the treachery of the aristocrats, must insist on their expulsion.  The people must not leave the Convention, it must remain in permanent session, there until it is assured that its will is carried out.”

The multitude with loud, jubilant tones cried, “Yes. yes, that is what we want, let us go to the Convention!  No more nobility! the nobles are our murderers!”

The next day, the Jacobins, accompanied by thousands of shouting women and infuriated men, went to the Convention to make known its will in the name of the people.  The Convention received their petition and decreed the exile and the dissolution of the nobility, and delivered to the punishment of the law the guilty subject who would dare use the name of noble.

General de Beauharnais saw full well the blow aimed at him, and at all the officers from the nobility in the army; he foresaw that they would not stop at these measures; that soon he and his companions of fate would be accused and charged with treason, as had been already done to General Custine, and to so many others who had paid with their lives their tried loyalty to the republic.  He wanted to anticipate the storm, and sent in his resignation.  As the Convention left his petition unanswered, he renewed it, and as it remained still ineffective, he gladly, forced to this measure by sickness, transferred his command to General Landremont.  The Convention had then to grant him leave of absence, and, as it maintained him in his rank, they ordered him back to Paris.

At last Josephine saw her husband again, for whom during the last few months she had suffered so much anxiety and pain.  At last she was enabled to bring to her children the father for whom every evening they had prayed God to guard him from foes abroad and from foes at home.  As a gift sent again by Heaven, she received her husband and entreated him to save himself with his family from revolution’s yawning abyss, which was ready to swallow them all, and to go away with his own into a foreign land, as his brother had done, who for some months past had been in Coblentz with the Prince d’Artois.

But Alexandre de Beanharnais rejected with something like anger these tearful supplications of his wife.  He was not blinded to the dangers which threatened him, but he wanted to meet them bravely; true to the oath he had taken to the republic and to his country, he wished as a dutiful son to remain near her, even if his allegiance had to be paid with his death.

Josephine, on the bosom of her husband, wept hot, burning tears as he communicated to her his irrevocable decision not to leave France, but in the depths of her heart she experienced a noble satisfaction to find her husband so heroic and so brave, and, offering him her hand, said with tears in her eyes: