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LATE CONSORT OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, AND STYLED EMPRESS OF FRANCE AND QUEEN OF ITALY.

With her Portrait, elegantly engraved from an undoubted original miniature.

JOSEPHINE LA PAGERIE, was born at Martinique, according to some accounts, June 24, 1768, but according to others, which, in fact, from the age of her children, and other circumstances, seems more probable, some years earlier. At the age of twentytwo she married the viscount Alexander Beauharnois, likewise a native of Martinique, though, like herself, brought early to Europe, and educated in France. Madame la Pagerie and her husband were both descended from noble but obscure and reduced families, who had transplanted themselves to the West Indies, to repair their shattered fortunes; in which the parents of Josephine so far succeeded that she was possessed of considerable property; while Beauharnois was poor, and in debt. He was likewise some years younger than his wife; so that this raarriage, though it might originate from love on the one side,

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was probably concluded from interest and necessity on the other.

The viscount was, at that time, second major in a regiment of infantry, a place which he had obtained, not by his military talents, but by his intrigues and assiduous attendance at Versailles in the antichambers of favourites and ministers, and his intrigues with their ladies, with whom he had acquired the reputation of being a most agreeable and accomplished dancer.

Soon after their marriage, Monsieur and Madame de Beauharnois were introduced at court, and presented to the king, Louis XVI, though they in general associated principally with those persons and their ladies, who afterwards figured most conspicuously in the French revolution. Talleyrand, Charles and Alexander La Methe, Besumetz, La Tour Meaubeuge, and others of that class, were the persons most visited by Madame de Beauharnois and her husband.

At the time of the meeting of the states-general, M. de Beauharnois was chosen a deputy by the nobility of the bailiwick of Blois, and in this assembly, which was afterwards called the national assembly, disregarding all the benefits he had received from the bounty of his sovereign, he took a decided part against the court, and appeared its implacable enemy. Though his powers of oratory and elocution, when he ascended the tribune in this assembly, were not such as to obtain much attention to his harangues, his friends, La Fayette and La Methe, procured him to be elected the president of it in June, 1791, and as such he signed the proclamation addressed to the French when Louis XVI. was arrested at Varennes. In October, the same year, he made his peace with the court, and was promoted to be an adjutant-general, in which rank he served under General Biron, when the French troops, in April, 1792, were defeated near Mons. He was the warm friend of La Fayette as long as he was popular, and afterwards joined his enemy and successor in popularity, Dumorier; antl, when he was proscribed, courted Coustine; whom, when proscribed in his turn, he succeeded in the command of the army of the Rhine, which command he, contrary to the wishes of the jacobins, desired to resign, but was forced to retain it until August, 1793, when the represen

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tatives of the people suspended him from all his functions, and ordered him to retire above twenty leagues from the frontiers. He was soon afterwards, with his wife, arrested as a suspected person, and, on the 23d of July, 1794, sent to the guillotine, as an accomplice in the imaginary conspiracy of the prisons, The day before his execution, he wrote a long letter to his wife, in which he recommended to her, in the republican style of those times, his children, and, in particular, not to neglect to vindicate his memory and reputation, by proving that his whole life had been consecrated to serve liberty and equality. This revolutionary hypocrisy of a man, who had been for twenty years a courtier, and for four only a patriot, is surprising, when it is considered that, at that time, liberty and equality were very fashionable words in republican France; and M. de Beauharnois, no doubt, intended to die, as he had lived, a fashionable man. It is, however, said, that, when he ascended the scaffold of the guillotine, he exclaimed, "If I had served my king with the same zeal and fidelity as I have done his murderers, he would have rewarded me in a different manner."

During the revolutionary career of general Beauharnois, his wife Josephine lost many of her former friends, either by emigration, as the two brothers La Methe; by proscription, as Talleyrand and La Fayette; or by the guillotine, as Barnave, Sillery, and Flahault.

General Beauharnois was beheaded five days before Robespierre was deprived of the authority he had so ferociously exercised, and was himself guillotined. After the fall of that sanguinary tyrant, seals were put upon all the papers of the revolutionary tribunal, which were delivered to the committee of public safety. Among these papers were found thirty-six lists of persons who were arrested, or suspected, and in the thirtysix following days were destined for the guillotine. Madame de Beauharnois' name was inserted in the twenty-fifth of these lists. If, therefore, Robespierre had not lost his power and his life at the time he did, she would certainly have ascended the scaffold in her turn: nor could Barras, who afterwards protected her, have saved her, as his name was contained in the ninth list, and he would therefore have suffered before her.

Madame de Beauharnois recovered her liberty on the 24th of Thermidor, or 12th of August, 1794, having been released by Legendre, frequently called the butcher, both from his violent revolutionary habits, and from his being actually the son of a butcher. He kindly protected her for some time in his house, where she made the acquaintance both of Madame Tallien and of Barras, who, to the great disappointment of Legendre, caused the seals to be taken off her house rue de Victoires, and to protect her in his turn, occupied an apartment in her house until he exchanged it, in October, 1795, for the Luxemburgh; and in March, 1796, perhaps finding his taste for her attractions diminish, he procured for her a husband in his friend and abettor, Napoleon Bonaparte, on whom he, at the same time, as generally believed, conferred, as her dower, the command of the army of Italy, where the military talents of Napoleon prepared the way for the attainment of that astonishing greatness at which this extraordinary man has arrived.

Whilst Madame de Beauharnois, in company with Barras, consoled herself for the loss of her husband, Madame Tallien, a beautiful woman, but whose character is represented to have been as depraved as her form was perfect, was the then fashionable idol of the gay, licentious, and giddy Parisians. Those two female friends of Barras soon became rivals in the scandalous chronicles, in which were recorded their mutual efforts to outshine each other; to make conquests, and to exhibit their more than half naked persons and successive lovers at the theatres, in the public walks, and assemblies. Madame Tallien, however, had obtained and kept the precedence in the Parisian popularity and favour, and was the most fashionable idol of those times; but when, by the peace of Campo Formio, or still more by the revolution of the 18th of Fructidor, or 4th of September, 1797, Bonaparte had silenced at least, if not reconciled his enemies, the flatterers of his fortune caused his wife to share in his triumph, and forced Madame Tallien to renounce, or at least to admit, a competitor upon the throne of fashion.

Bonaparte, during the whole progress of his ambitious career, appears to have acted with the greatest generosity and fidelity towards his Josephine, until his late extraordinary di

vorce. When he proclaimed and crowned himself emperor of the French, he crowned her empress likewise; and when he afterwards assumed the title of king of Italy, and crowned himself with the iron crown of Charlemagne, he at the same time crowned her queen. In all his journeys, and in his latter campaigns, when set out for the army, he has taken her with him, at least to the frontiers of France. When he left Paris to head his army in his late expedition against Austria, she accompanied him as far as Strasburg, and remained there some time before her return to the capital. What induced him, after the successful termination of that expedition, to divorce her, does not appear as yet to be known with certainty, except we give credit implicitly to the reason he has himself assigned-his wish for an immediate heir to inherit the extensive dominions he has acquired: yet, even in this act, he appears to have treated her with at least the pageantry of respect and honour, and apparent affection. The proceedings relative to this divorce, and the ceremony employed on the occasion, are thus stated in the French official gazette:

Extract from the Register of the Conservative Senate of Saturday, Dec. 16, 1809.

The conservative senate, assembled to the number of members prescribed by article 90th of the acts of the constitution, and dated the 13th of December, 1799, having seen the act drawn up, the 15th of the present month, by the prince archchancellor of the empire, of which the following is the sub

stance:

In the year 1809, and the 15th of December, at nine o'clock in the evening, we Jean-Jaques Regis Cambaceres, prince archchancellor of the Empire, duke of Parma, exercising the functions prescribed to us by title the 2d of the 14th article of the statute of the imperial family, and in consequence of orders addressed to us by his majesty the emperor and king, in his private letter dated that day, of the following tenor: "My cousin,

“Our desire is, that you repair this day, at nine o'clock in the evening, to our grand cabinet of the palace of the Thuilleries, attended by the civil secretary of state of our imperial fa

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