Queen Hortense | Page 4

relentless crater. This guillotine had
become the altar of the so-called enfranchisement of nations, and upon
this altar the intoxicated, unthinking masses offered up to their new idol
those who, until then, had been their lords and masters, and by whose
death they now believed that they could purchase freedom for
evermore.
"Egalité! fraternité! liberté!" Such was the battle-cry of this howling,
murdering populace. Such were the three words which burned in
blood-red letters of fire above the guillotine, and their mocking emblem

was the glittering axe, that flashed down, to sever from their bodies the
heads of the aristocrats whom, in spite of the new religion represented
in those three words, they would not recognize as brethren and equals,
or admit to the freedom of life and of opinion. And this battle-cry of the
murderous French populace had penetrated as far as Martinique, where
it had aroused the slaves from their sullen obedience to the point of
demanding by force that participation in freedom, equality, and
brotherhood, that had so long been denied them. They, at last, rose
everywhere in open insurrection against their masters, and the
firebrands which they hurled into the dwellings of the whites served as
the bridal torches to their espousal of liberty.
The house of Madame Tascher de la Pagerie was one of the abodes in
which these firebrands fell.
One night Josephine was awakened by the blinding light of the flames,
which had already penetrated to her chamber. With a shriek of terror,
she sprang from her bed, caught up little Hortense in her arms from the
couch where the child lay quietly slumbering, wrapped her in the
bedclothes, and rushed, in her night-attire, from the house. She burst,
with the lion-like courage of a mother, through the shouting, fighting
crowds of soldiers and blacks outside, and fled, with all the speed of
mortal terror, toward the harbor. There lay a French vessel, just ready
to weigh anchor. An officer, who at that moment was stepping into the
small boat that was to convey him to the departing ship, saw this young
woman, as, holding her child tightly to her bosom, she sank down, with
one last despairing cry, half inanimate, upon the beach. Filled with the
deepest compassion, he hastened to her, and, raising both mother and
child in his arms, he bore them to his boat, which then instantly put out
from land, and bounded away over the billows with its lovely burden.
The ship was soon reached, and Josephine, still tightly clasping her
child to her breast, and happy in having saved this only jewel, climbed
up the unsteady ladder to the ship's decks. Until this moment all her
thoughts remained concentrated upon her child, and it was only when
she had seen her little Hortense safely put to bed in the cabin and free
from all danger--only after she had fulfilled all the duties of a mother,

that the woman revived in her breast, and she cast shamed and
frightened glances around her. Only half-clad, in light, fluttering
night-clothes, without any other covering to her beautiful neck and
bosom than her superb, luxuriant hair, which fell around her and partly
hid them, like a thick black veil, stood the young Viscountess
Josephine de Beauharnais, in the midst of a group of gazing men!
However, some of the ladies on the ship came to her aid, and, so soon
as her toilet had been sufficiently improved, Josephine eagerly
requested to be taken back to land, in order that she might fly to her
mother's assistance.
But the captain opposed this request, as he was unwilling to give the
young fugitive over to the tender mercies of the assassins who were
burning and massacring ashore, and whose murderous yells could be
distinctly heard on board of the vessel. The entire coast, so far as the
eye could reach, looked like another sea--a sea, though, of flame and
smoke, which shot up its leaping billows in long tongues of fire far
against the sky. It was a terrible, an appalling spectacle; and Josephine
fled from it to the bedside of her little sleeping daughter. Then,
kneeling there by the couch of her child, she uplifted to heaven her face,
down which the tears were streaming, and implored God to spare her
mother.
But, meanwhile, the ship weighed anchor, and sped farther and farther
away from this blazing coast.
Josephine stood on the deck and gazed back at her mother's burning
home, which gradually grew less to her sight, then glimmered only like
a tiny star on the distant horizon, and finally vanished altogether. With
that last ray her childhood and past life had sunk forever in the sea, and
a new world and a new life opened for both mother and child. The past