The Sun.
London, England, 1829-10-10 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

MEMOIRS OF THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE
3Ls. LONDON, 1829.

The character of Madame de Beauharnais,
afterwards the well-known Empress Josephine,
the first and best-beloved wife of Napoleon,
combines the strength and weakness of the sex,
its alternate tenderness and coldness, caprice,
fixedness of purpose, and unalterable love of no-
velty, to a degree beyond any other heroine on
record. The life of this extraordinary woman,
who, from the humble situation of a planter's
daughter, ascended the throne of the most power-
ful nation in Europe, was, from first to last, an
eventful one, crowded with incidents, and made
up in nearly equal portions of happiness and
suffering. Her childhood, up to the age of
seventeen, was spent with her uncle and aunt in
the island of Martinique, at which period she
married Monsieur de Beauharnais, a handsome
Young French officer. With this person she
quitted her native place, and embarked for France,
where she took up her abode at Paris, alternately
• vexed and gratified by her husband's conduct,
who, as appears from some imperfect hints
thrown out in the course of her extended cor-
respondence, was a bit of a roue among women.

When, however, the Revolution broke out, and
Beauharnais was condemned, together
with hundreds of others, to the scaffold, all his
wife's resentments were forgotten ; henceforth
she-zernembered only that he was the father_ of
her two defenceless children, and when he ulti-
mately perished took his death so much to
heart, that the hour of her recovery from a long
and dangerous illness was, as she pathetically
observes in one of her letters, the most painful
she had ever known. Happiness, however, and
good fortune, had not yet quite deserted her.
Ina year or two—or perhaps more, for she is
silent on this point—Buonaparte, at that time a
General of rising celebrity, but as yet compara-
tively unknown, was struck with her beauty, es-
Pecially with the graces of her address, and with
some difficulty, and not without much coquetting
and hesitation on her part, succeeded in gaining
her hand. It is singular that this union was at
first productive of any thing but happiness to
either party. Josephine did not originally
love her husband ; his fits of jealousy, his
ardent passions and towering ambition, kept
her in a state of perpetual alarm, while lie
was equally excited by the reports he every where
heard (afterwards, however, °roved to have been
false) of her infidelities and • incurable coquetry.
It was not until the return of Napoleon from his
Italian campaigns, where he had humbled the
Pride of Austria, and earned for himself the
proud title of the first warrior in the world, that
the pride of the woman was complete, and
Josephine's heart and affections henceforth
irrecoverably engaged through the medium of
her vanity. From this period she looked up to
her husband with an admiration bordering upon
idolatry. She was his friend, his counsellor in
all hi projects ; the faithful sharer of his
Perils and his triumphs, the only one who
clung to him when the rest of Europe—
of that Europe which, with the single ex-
eon of -Great Britain, had cringed and
trembled beneath his power, and worshipped
the Very dust upon which lie trod—had deserted
In the year 1805 she ascended the throne
of trance, from which elevated station she dis-
er.led, according to the unvarying testimony of
her cotemporaries, the patronage of power and
Place with a grace which has seldom been
;Nailed, certainly never surpassed. Her sole
iefects at this period of her life were a thought-
reas extravagance and general indolence of cha-
. I:eter incompatible with the high station she
eld, and more especially with the character and
Fishes of Napoleon. On these two points the
,itnPeror and Empress were eternally at variance.
tehe former was perpetually dunned by the !at-
creditors, who, aware of her husband's
sternness and regularity in all money matters,
itiL 're particularly in those which respected his
'th°usehold establishment, never dared to tell him
exact extent of her embarrassments. Such,
"'ever, was the force of Josephine's influence
foraNapoleon that after a quarrel, which lasted
day or two, he rarely failed, whether right
Even
Wrong, to return a sincere penitent to her arms.
when subsequently divorced from her—an
iet of injustice and inhumanity, not to say of
Nliey, which was wrung from him after much
setb
riens altercation with his Ministers—he never
forgot the affection or the duties of a husband.
' 141.hQugh Maria Louisa held the chief place at
tight hand, Josephine sat nearest his heart.
01
f the one he could make a friend and a corn-
" ruaion as well as a wife ; the other was nothing
.\ nota plaything, pretty indeed, and regal and in-
queei.4) but deficient in all those companionable
' lies with which women, who wish to hold
mividtral sway over their husband's hearts,
thaw,
birt,to- he gifted. After having lived to see the
'' of her rival's child, the king of Rome, after
trip.
Also„.lg witnessed the retirement of her husband
."11ba, his return, and defeat at Waterloo, as
u.lhe triumphant entrance of the Allies into
1,04.1rai and the final restoration of the Bourbons,
tows
and ill-health, deserted bymost of her
yetids, an outcast in a country where but a few
adze before she had held imperial sway, " the
e:n.ired of all eyes, the observed of all observers,"
the of of a broken heart at Malmaison, with
Name of the Emperor Napoleon on her lips.
sorer letters in the volumes before us, treat
ailjeLa"d perspicuously of most of the incidents
The" we have here briefly attempted to sketch.
elo Y are full of feeling, and sometimes even of
finstierce, occasionally trifling, and replete with
aesse
and small-talk, but in every instance sin-
tr•re "
h
orn of the heart. The letter to a
thennd
on the subject of Napoleon, who had just
si avowed his attachment to Josephine, is a
trnstlislar specimen of the way in which a woman
to he_tlf a suitor, who is not altogether indifferent
r, but for love of whom she is not, as Jose-
.
thild„ asserts, she should be, 4‘ stark-staring
Oral, She first hesitates, then accepts, then
3 off, then again condescends to parley,