Page:History of the Empress Josephine (1).pdf/3

Rh phantom of power which he then enjoyed, together with his wife at one and the same moment. When all this oeeurred, as had been foreseen, M. de Beauharnois himself was denounced as an aristocrat by his own soldiers, deprived of his commission by superior authority, and conducted to Paris, where he was placed in a state of arrest. Josephine, the sensibility of whose heart is well known, immediately interposed, and adopted every possible mode, both through the medium of friends as well as by her own personal solicitations, to obtain his liberty. Her husband, on his part, was deeply moved by the affectionate attachment and unceasing assiduity of his wife, who was not only soon after denied the pleasure of consoling her unhappy husband, but actually deprived of her own liberty, having been seized and confined at the eoncent of the Carmelites. In the eourse of a few weeks, the unfortunate vicomte was carried before the revolutionary tribunal, which instantly condemned him to death.

Dr. Memes has published so interesting an account of the empress Josephine, that we gladly avail ourselves of his valuable "Memoirs," which throw much new light on the domestie life of this accomplished female. Josephine, we need not remind our readers, was a Creole. The native eleganee of mind and manner so often possessed by these transatlantic Europeans, their aptness in the acquisition of all external accomlishments, their warm temperament modified and restrained by natural self-possession, are generally known:-"As regards aeomplishments, she played, espeeially on the harp, and sung, with exquisite feeling, and with science sufficient to render listening an intellectual pleasure without exeiting the surmise at the cultivation of an attainment less showy, but more valuable, had been sacrificed. Her dancing is said to have been perfect. An eye-witness describes her light form; rising scarcelyabove the middle size, as seeming in its faultless symmetry to at rather than to move the very personation of graee. She exereised her pencil, and-though such be now antiquated r an elegante- her needle and embroidering frame, with beautiful address. A love of flowers,'that truly feminine inspiration, and, according to a master in elegance and virtue,