Among the women whom he met in the _salon_ of Madame Tallien and at Barras’s own house, was the Viscountess de Beauharnais (_née_ Tascher de la Pagerie), widow of the Marquis de Beauharnais, guillotined on the 5th Thermidor, 1794. At the time of the marquis’s death his wife was a prisoner. She was released soon after and had become a intimate friend of Madame Tallien. All Madame Tallien’s circle had, indeed, become attached to Josephine de Beauharnais, and with Barras she was on terms of intimacy which led to a great amount of gossip. Without fortune, having two children to support, still trembling at the memory of her imprisonment, indolent and vain, it is not remarkable that Josephine yielded to the pleasures of the society which had saved her from prison and which now opened its arms to her, nor that she accepted the protection of the powerful Director Barras. She was certainly one of the regular _habitués_ of his house, and every week kept court for him at her little home at Croissy, a few miles from Paris. The Baron Pasquier, afterwards one of the members of Napoleon’s Council of State, was at that moment living in poverty at Croissy—and was a neighbor of Josephine. In his “Memoirs” he has left a paragraph on the gay little outings taken there by Barras and his friends. “Her house was next to ours,” says Pasquier. “She did not come out often at that time, rarely more than once a week, to receive Barras and the troop which always followed him. From early in the morning we saw the hampers coming. Then mounted _gendarmes_ began to circulate on the route from Nanterre to Croissy, for the young Director came usually on horseback. “Madame de Beauharnais’s house had, as is often the case among creoles, an appearance of luxury; but, the superfluous aside, the most necessary things were lacking. Birds, game, rare fruits, were piled up in the kitchen (this was the time of our greatest famine), and there was such a want of stewing-pans, glasses, and plates, that they had to come and borrow from our poor stock.” There was much about Josephine de Beauharnais to win the favor of such a man as Barras. A creole past the freshness of youth—Josephine was thirty-two years old in 1795—she had a grace, a sweetness, a charm, that made one forget that she was not beautiful, even when she was beside such brilliant women as Madame Tallien and Madame Récamier. It was never possible to surprise her in an attitude that was not graceful. She was never ruffled or irritable. By nature she was perfection of ease and repose. Artist enough to dress in clinging stuffs made simply, which harmonized perfectly with her style, and skilful enough to use the arts of the toilet to conceal defects which care and age had brought, the Viscountess de Beauharnais was altogether one of the most fascinating women in Madame Tallien’s circle. [Illustration: BONAPARTE, GENERAL OF THE ARMY IN ITALY.