At the trial which followed some very grave indictments were preferred against her.  She was charged with having betrayed State secrets; with having robbed the Royal Exchequer; stolen the King’s portfolio; and removed the priceless solitaire diamond from his crown, and the very rings from his fingers as he lay dying.  To these and other equally grave charges the Countess gave a dignified denial, which the evidence she was able to produce supported.  The diamond and the rings were, in fact, discovered in places indicated by her where they had been put, by the King’s orders, for safe custody.

The trial had a happier ending than, from the malignity of her enemies, especially of the King, might have been expected.  After three months of durance she was removed to a Silesian fortress.  Her houses and lands were taken from her; but her furniture and jewels were left untouched, and with them she was allowed to enjoy a pension of four thousand thalers a year.  Such was the judgment of a Court which proved more merciful than she had perhaps a right to expect.  And two months later, the influence and pleading of her friends set her free from her fortress-prison to spend her life where and as she would.

The sun of her splendour had indeed set, but many years of peaceful and not unhappy life remained for our ex-Queen, who was still in the prime of her womanhood and beauty and with the magnetism that, to her last day, brought men to her feet.  At fifty she was able to inspire such passion in the breast of a young artist, Francis Holbein, that he asked and won her hand in marriage.  But this romance was short-lived, for within a year he left her, to spend the remainder of her days in Paris, Vienna, and her native Prussia.  Here her adventurous career closed in such obscurity, at the age of sixty-eight, that even those who ministered to her last moments were unaware that the dying woman was the Countess who had played so dazzling a part a generation earlier, as favourite of the King of Prussia and Queen of her loveliest women.

CHAPTER XII

THE CORSICAN AND THE CREOLE

Of the many women who succeeded one another with such bewildering rapidity in the favour of the first Napoleon, from Desiree Clary, daughter of the Marseilles silk-merchant, the “little wife” of his days of obscurity, to Madame Walewska, the beautiful Pole, who so fruitlessly bartered her charms for her country’s salvation, only one really captured his fickle heart—­Josephine de Beauharnais, the woman whom he raised to the splendour of an Imperial crown, only to fling her aside when she no longer served the purposes of his ambition.

It was one October day in the year 1795 that Josephine, Vicomtesse de Beauharnais, first cast the spell of her beauty on the “ugly little Corsican,” who had then got his foot well planted on the ladder, at the summit of which was his crown of empire.  At twenty-six, the man who, but a little earlier, was an out-of-work captain, eating his heart out in a Marseilles slum, was General-in-Chief of the armies of France, with the disarmed rebels of Paris grovelling at his feet.