Josephine had her share of his glory, and in these months added largely to her circle of acquaintances from the motley crowd which the levelling of things had brought together in French society. She met many of the aristocrats unknown to her until then; but what was vastly more important, she made acquaintances among the “true patriots”, those who had been born in the third estate, and who were already beginning to consider themselves the only part of the population fit to conduct the general regeneration of France. In 1792, war breaking out, Beauharnais went to the front, where he made a respectable record, which he himself reported frequently to the Assembly in glowing letters, filled with good advice to that body. He was steadily advanced until, in May, 1793, he was made general-in-chief of the Army of the North. During all this period Josephine was in Paris or the vicinity, and there were few more active women there than she. Whether advised by her husband or not she had the wit to make the acquaintance of the men of each new party as fast as it came into power. Thus, when the Girondins were at the helm in 1792, she hastened to interview them one by one, to demonstrate to them her devotion to the new civism, to extol the patriotism of her husband, General de Beauharnais. The acquaintance made, she immediately had a favor to ask—this friend was in prison, that one wanted a passport. All through the agitated winter of 1792 and 1793 Josephine was busy getting her friends out of prison and out of France. She seems to have had no fear for herself. As a matter of fact, the men who helped her were so convinced of her simple goodness of heart that they granted her much which would have been denied a more intelligent woman, and they did not question her loyalty. Was she not, too, the wife of General de Beauharnais? That fact did not, however, hold value for many months. Beauharnais’s conduct came into question before the Assembly; he resigned, offering to go into the line. The privilege was denied him, and he was retired from the army. He went at once to his family home near Blois, and threw himself actively into the work of the municipality and of the Jacobins. Josephine, warned of possible danger from her husband’s downfall and fearing the new law against the suspected, decided to leave Paris. She rented, in the winter, a little house at Croissy, not far out of the city, and near many of her friends, and there lived as quietly as she could. One method that she took of showing her devotion to democratic principles was to bind Eugène, who had been in school for several years, as an apprentice to a carpenter; and it is said that Hortense was placed with a dressmaker to learn the trade.