The Viscount escaped arrest until the spring of 1794; then the committee of Public Safety remembered him. There seems to have been no reason for his arrest other than that he was a noble—certainly no man in France had surpassed him in vehement republicanism or had been more fertile in schemes for saving the country. He was taken immediately to Paris, and confined in the prison of les Carmes. A month later, Josephine followed him. Her activity for her friends had continued after the retirement of her husband and the efforts she began at once to make to save him when he was arrested, caused a virtuous patriot to suggest anonymously to the authorities that she too ought to be looked after. She was promptly arrested. For three months husband and wife lived side by side in that awful prison, the walls of which still bore the red imprints made in the September massacre, and in garden of which blood still oozed, it was believed, from the roots of the tree where murdered men had been stacked up by the score. With them were confined men from every rank of life, princes, merchants, sailors, chimney-sweeps, along with women and children. Almost daily a group was called to die, but their places were quickly filled. The awful tragedy of their lot drew Josephine and her husband no closer together. It is a terrible comment on the times that no one thought it strange that Beauharnais should have paid court here at the gate of death to a beautiful woman, a prisoner like himself, or that Josephine should have been so intimate with General Hoche, also a prisoner, that history has made a record of the fact. Many efforts were made to save the Viscount and his wife, chiefly under their direction, for they were allowed to see their friends, and also their children. It is quite possible that certain petitions in their favor which have been found in the French archives, bearing the names of Eugène and Hortense, were dictated by the Viscount himself. But every effort was useless, and on July 21 Beauharnais was taken to the Conciergerie: the next day he was tried; the next guillotined. To the end he was brave and self-controlled. In his final words to Josephine, he even charged his death to the plots of the aristocrats, upholding the republic even as it struck him.