attempts to gain the hand of a lady had been unsuccessful.  He had been refused, first by Mlle. Clary, sister of his brother Joseph’s wife, and quite recently by Madame Permon.  Indeed, the scarecrow young officer had not been a brilliant match.  But now he saw at that salon a charming widow, Josephine de Beauharnais, whose husband had perished in the Terror.  The ardour of his southern temperament, long repressed by his privations, speedily rekindles in her presence:  his stiff, awkward manners thaw under her smiles:  his silence vanishes when she praises his military gifts:  he admires her tact, her sympathy, her beauty:  he determines to marry her.  The lady, on her part, seems to have been somewhat terrified by her uncanny wooer:  she comments questioningly on his “violent tenderness almost amounting to frenzy”:  she notes uneasily his “keen inexplicable gaze which imposes even on our Directors”:  How would this eager nature, this masterful energy, consort with her own “Creole nonchalance”?  She did well to ask herself whether the general’s almost volcanic passion would not soon exhaust itself, and turn from her own fading charms to those of women who were his equals in age.  Besides, when she frankly asked her own heart, she found that she loved him not:  she only admired him.  Her chief consolation was that if she married him, her friend Barras would help to gain for Buonaparte the command of the Army of Italy.  The advice of Barras undoubtedly helped to still the questioning surmises of Josephine; and the wedding was celebrated, as a civil contract, on March 9th, 1796.  With a pardonable coquetry, the bride entered her age on the register as four years less than the thirty-four which had passed over her:  while her husband, desiring still further to lessen the disparity, entered his date of birth as 1768.

A fortnight before the wedding, he had been appointed to command the Army of Italy:  and after a honeymoon of two days at Paris, he left his bride to take up his new military duties.  Clearly, then, there was some connection between this brilliant fortune and his espousal of Josephine.  But the assertion that this command was the “dowry” offered by Barras to the somewhat reluctant bride is more piquant than correct.  That the brilliance of Buonaparte’s prospects finally dissipated her scruples may be frankly admitted.  But the appointment to a command of a French army did not rest with Barras.  He was only one of the five Directors who now decided the chief details of administration.  His colleagues were Letourneur, Rewbell, La Reveilliere-Lepeaux, and the great Carnot; and, as a matter of fact, it was the last-named who chiefly decided the appointment in question.