Napoleon: His Wives and Women. Christopher Hibbert

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      They were not to remain so for long. Within a week or two, Hoche was marched out of Les Carmes to face the Revolutionary Tribunal and by the end of November, released on its orders, was in command of the army of Brest.

      Rose was left alone with her fear. For much of the time, unlike the other more stoical women in the prison, she was in tears or anxiously setting out her tarot cards in vain attempts to discover her fate.

      Beyond the walls of Les Carmes the Revolution was reaching a climax. In the heat of the month known in the new revolutionary calendar as Thermidor, power was slipping from the hands of Maximilien Robespierre who had been elected President by the National Convention in June; and on 28 July 1794, his jaw shattered by a self-inflicted pistol shot, he and twenty-one of his supporters were guillotined before a cheering crowd in the Place de la Révolution. The Revolution was now about to take a sudden lurch to the right.

      Rose emerged into startling sunlight, one of the first of the three thousand prisoners to be released by the end of August. Désirée Hosten being still in prison, Rose agreed with another Creole friend, Mme de Krény, to take an apartment in the rue de l’Université. Here she was soon once more deep in debt and borrowing money from anyone who would lend it to her, even from Hortense’s governess, who lent her a lifetime’s savings, and from General Hoche, who also sent her passionate love letters to which she replied in terms no less ardent, though she was not so exclusively devoted to him that she declined to submit, so it was said, to the rough overtures of one of his grooms.

      It was not a time to be short of money in Paris. With the ending of the Terror the city had emerged suddenly from gloomy foreboding into bright and exciting life. Theatres reopened; cafés were thronged; dance halls and brothels sprang up everywhere. Profiteers and speculators, spending money as rapidly as they made it, sped through the streets with their women in ornately painted carriages to expensive restaurants, to gambling dens and to places of entertainment whose private rooms, in the words of a police report, were ‘absolute sewers of debauchery and vice’. The jeunesse dorée, young men of mostly middle-class and artisan background, marched about the streets carrying short sticks weighted with lead with which to intimidate sansculottes, wearing a kind of uniform of square-skirted coats, tight trousers and extremely high cravats, their hair in long locks over their ears and plaited at the back of their heads. Also dandies known as incroyables, affecting lisps and dressed in the most outlandish fashions, appeared in the Tuileries gardens and were seen enjoying boating parties on the Seine accompanied by merveilleuses whose scanty, revealing clothes were equally exotic and whose wigs were triumphs of the perruquiers’ art. At bals des victimes, entertainments at once riotous and ghoulish, guests whose near relations had perished in the Terror wore hair as though prepared for the blade of the guillotine and thin bands of red silk round their necks. They greeted each other by nodding sharply as though their severed heads were falling into the executioner’s basket.

      In this society Rose de Beauharnais contrived to survive, even to flourish, borrowing money whenever she could, cultivating new and influential friends and taking care to keep old friendships in good repair. While many Parisians came close to starvation in the fearful winter of 1794 when the Seine froze over from bank to bank, people could be seen in the streets chopping up beds for firewood to cook what little food they could procure, and long queues formed outside the bakers’ shops to buy the rationed loaves of so-called bread, a soggy concoction made of bran and beans, which, spurned by Baron de Frénilly’s dog, stuck to the wall when his master threw a handful at it.

      Rose de Beauharnais did not go hungry. It became customary for guests to bring their own bread and wine and candles when they dined in other people’s houses; but it was accepted that Rose was not in a position to do so. Nor was she expected to keep a carriage to carry her about the town, so Jean-Lambert Tallien, who had played a prominent part in Robespierre’s overthrow, and Paul Barras, a charming, clever, unscrupulous former army officer of noble birth who had fought bravely before being cashiered, a cousin of the marquis de Sade and Tallien’s successor as President of the National Assembly, arranged for her to be provided with both a coach and a pair of horses.

      Rose was on the best of terms with Tallien’s beautiful young wife, Thérésia, formerly Barras’s mistress, and she was often to be seen at the Talliens’ house, La Chaumière, where the women guests, adopting the neo-classical fashion of their hostess, appeared in Grecian tunics, scanty and almost as revealing as the dress in which the sensual and heavily scented Fortunée Hamelin paraded lasciviously bare-breasted down the Champs-Élysées.

      At La Chaumière, Rose found just the kind of society which she relished, and in which she shone. It was here that she met a man described as ‘Barras’s little Italian protégé’, a twenty-six-year-old brigadier on half-pay, Napoleon Buonaparte.