“I am not satisfied with your last letter it is cold as friendship,” Napoleon replied to one. And those that do exist are much more tepid in tone. Notably, Joséphine appears to have written far fewer letters to her husband. ![]() You are the constant object of my thoughts.” Although he had to leave his new bride two days after the wedding to lead a French army into Italy, he wrote to her continuously, with gushing declarations of love: “Every moment separates me further from you, my beloved, and every moment I have less energy to exist so far from you. Napoleon scandalized his family by marrying a widow with children, but he was besotted. The two married just months after their first meeting, in March 1796. But he showered her with gifts and won over her children with his playfulness. Joséphine did not immediately take to the prospect of Napoleon as a husband, allegedly calling him a “puss in boots” and sniffing at his lower-class “family of beggars, writes Adam Zamoyski, author of Napoleon: A Life. Napoleon's Bloodless Coup Napoleon Wrote Joséphine Besotted Letters Little did Barras know that four years later, that soldier would rise to power in a bloodless coup against the Directoire, and that five years after that, he would crown himself emperor. However, by 1795 Barras had tired of his mistress and happily introduced her to the ambitious young soldier at a society ball he hosted. Her concerted campaign to launch herself into the new post-revolutionary French society clearly worked: After a series of affairs with a number of senior political figures, she became the lover of Napoleon’s powerful mentor Paul Barras, part of the nation’s five-person leadership coalition called the Directoire. She needed to secure her future and so quickly arranged for loans from various quarters to install herself in an apartment on the rue Chantereine where, as French historian Frédéric Masson writes in his book Napoleon et les femmes, “she hoped for some kind of miracle to rescue her from her state.” Released from the Carmes Prison, Joséphine was a 32-year-old widowed mother of two without access to her family funds, and with a set of rotting teeth. Joséphine, who had also been imprisoned, barely missed being guillotined due to the timely fall of Robespierre. ![]() Although Alexandre found political success, becoming President of the National Constituent Assembly, he could not escape the state-sanctioned violence of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, and was guillotined in 1794. When she was in her teens, her family married her off to a minor French noble, Alexandre de Beauharnais, a philanderer whose multiple affairs resulted in the couple’s court-ordered separation. Joséphine, whose real name was Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie (Napoleon gave her the name Joséphine based on her middle name), had grown up on a plantation in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique.
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