her voice, in words composed by herself, half-childish prayer, half
rhapsody of love, and revealing the most secret thoughts of the fair
young being who stood on the threshold of womanhood, bidding adieu to
childhood with a blissful smile, and dreaming of the future.



CHAPTER IV.

GENERAL BUONAPARTE.

While Josephine de Beauharnais, after the trials of these long and
stormy years, was enjoying blissful days of quiet happiness and repose,
the gusts of revolution kept bursting forth from time to time in fits of
fury, and tranquillity continued far from being permanently restored.
The clubs, those hot-beds of the revolution, still exercised their
pestilential influence over the populace of Paris, and stirred the rude
masses incessantly to fresh paroxysms of discontent and disorder.

But already the man had been found who was to crush those wild masses in
his iron grasp, and dash the speakers of the clubs down into the dust
with the flashing master-glance of his resistless eye.

That man was Napoleon Buonaparte. He was hardly twenty-nine years of
age, yet already all France was talking him as a hero crowned with
laurels, already had he trodden a brilliant career of victory. As
commander of a battalion he had performed prodigies of valor at the
recapture of Toulon; and then, after being promoted to the rank of
general, had gone to the army in Italy on behalf of the republic.
Bedecked with the laurels of his Italian campaign, the young general of