This woman, celebrated under the Directory for her liaison with one of
the five kings of that reign, married, through that all-powerful
protection, a purveyor who was making his millions out of the
government, and whom Napoleon ruined in 1802. This man, named Husson,
became insane through his sudden fall from opulence to poverty; he
flung himself into the Seine, leaving the beautiful Madame Husson
pregnant. Moreau, very intimately allied with Madame Husson, was at
that time condemned to death; he was unable therefore to marry the
widow, being forced to leave France. Madame Husson, then twenty-two
years old, married in her deep distress a government clerk named
Clapart, aged twenty-seven, who was said to be a rising man. At that
period of our history, government clerks were apt to become persons of
importance; for Napoleon was ever on the lookout for capacity. But
Clapart, though endowed by nature with a certain coarse beauty, proved
to have no intelligence. Thinking Madame Husson very rich, he feigned
a great passion for her, and was simply saddled with the impossibility
of satisfying either then or in the future the wants she had acquired
in a life of opulence. He filled, very poorly, a place in the Treasury
that gave him a salary of eighteen hundred francs; which was all the
new household had to live on. When Moreau returned to France as the
secretary of the Comte de Serizy he heard of Madame Husson's pitiable
condition, and he was able, before his own marriage, to get her an
appointment as head-waiting-woman to Madame Mere, the Emperor's
mother. But in spite of that powerful protection Clapart was never
promoted; his incapacity was too apparent.

Ruined in 1815 by the fall of the Empire, the brilliant Aspasia of the
Directory had no other resources than Clapart's salary of twelve
hundred francs from a clerkship obtained for him through the Comte de
Serizy. Moreau, the only protector of a woman whom he had known in