But to the happiness of little Josephine it mattered very little in those days whether her home was a sugar-house or a palace, her father an honest man or a sycophant. Her days were spent under the brilliant skies, in the forests or the open fields, chasing birds and butterflies, and gathering the gorgeous tropical flowers which to the end of her life she passionately loved. Almost her only companions were the negroes of the plantations, who gave her willing admiration and obedience. Untaught, unrestrained, idolized by slaves, knowing nothing but the tropical luxury and beauty of the nature about her, she developed like the birds and the negroes, becoming, it is true, a graceful, beautiful little animal, but with hardly more moral sense than they and with even less sense of responsibility. Josephine was ten years old before it occurred to anybody to send her to school. So far her only instruction had been what little she had gathered from a mother occupied with younger children; from the priest of Trois Ilets, who, it is fair to suppose, must have at least tried to teach her the catechism, and from the curious lore and gossip of the negroes. At ten, however, she was sent to a convent at Fort Royale, where she remained some four years. Here she was taught such rudimentary knowledge as enabled her to read,—if not understand, to write a polite note, to dance,—not very well, to sing, and play the guitar a little. It was a small equipment, but no doubt as good as most young girls of Martinique possessed in that day. Indeed many a noble-born maid in France started out with less in the eighteenth century, and it was quite as much as one would suppose from her position that she would need—more than she used indeed, for little Yeyette, as Josephine was called, if amiable and obedient when she left the convent, was indolent and vain, loving far better her childish play of decorating herself with brilliant flowers and watching her own image in the clear water of the pools on the plantation, than she did books and music; and the loving flattery of her old nurse was dearer to her than any amusement she found in the meager society of the island, where she now was to take her place and, her parents hoped, help retrieve the bad fortunes of the family by a good marriage. The opportunity came quickly. Josephine had been but a few months out of the convent when one day her father laid before her what must have been a bewildering and, one would suppose, a terrifying proposition—would she like to leave Martinique and go to France, there to marry Alexander de Beauharnais. The boy was not unknown to her. Like herself, he was born in Martinique, and though he had left there when she was only seven years old and he ten, it is not unlikely that she had seen him occasionally at the home of her grandmother who cared for him in the absence of his father and mother in France.