Sixteen years earlier, Josephine had come from Martinique to Paris as bride of the Vicomte de Beauharnais, with whom she had led a more or less unhappy life, until the guillotine of the Revolution left her a widow, with two children and an empty purse. But even this crowning calamity was powerless to crush the sunny-hearted Creole, who merely laughed at the load of debts which piled themselves up around her. A little of the wreckage of her husband's fortune had been rescued for her by influential friends; but this had disappeared long before Napoleon crossed her path. And at last the light-hearted widow realised that if she had a card left to play, she must play it quickly. Here then was her opportunity. The little General was obviously a slave at her feet; he was already a great man, destined to be still greater; and if he was bourgeois to his coarse finger-tips, he could at least serve as a stepping-stone to raise her from poverty and obscurity. As for Napoleon, he was a vanquished man--and he knew it--before ever he set foot in Madame's modest dining-room. When he left, he "trod on air," for the Vicomtesse had been more than gracious to him. The next day he was drawn as by a magnet to the Rue Chantereine, and the next and the next, each interview with his divinity forging fresh links for the chain that bound him; and at each visit he met under Madame's roof some of the great ones of that other world in which Josephine moved, the old _noblesse_ of France--who paid her the homage due to a Queen. Thus vanity and ambition fed the flames of the passion which was consuming him; and within a fortnight he had laid his heart and his fortune, which at the time consisted of "his personal wardrobe and his military accoutrements" at the feet of the Creole widow; and one March day in 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte, General, and Josephine de Beauharnais, were made one by a registrar who obligingly described the bride as twenty-nine (thus robbing her of three years), and added two to the bridegroom's twenty-six years. After two days of rapturous honeymooning Napoleon was on his way to join his army in Italy, as reluctant a bridegroom as ever left Cupid at the bidding of Mars. At every change of horses during the long journey he dispatched letters to the wife he had left behind--letters full of passion and yearning. In one of them he wrote, "When I am tempted to curse my fate, I place my hand on my heart and find your portrait there. As I gaze at it I am filled with a joy unutterable. Life seems to hold no pain, save that of severance from my beloved." At Nice, amid all the labours and anxieties of organising his rabble army for a campaign, his thoughts are always taking wings to her; her portrait is ever in his hand. He says his prayers before it; and, when once he accidentally broke the glass, he was in an agony of despair and superstitious foreboding. His one cry was, "Come to me! Come to my heart and to my arms. Oh, that you had wings!"