Later biographers scout this story as a romance fashioned by Napoleon himself, and they say that (1) no disarmament took place; and (2) that if such disarmament did take place, Madame Beauharnais, a friend of Barras, would not have been molested. To say nothing of further proof, the contemporaneous letter of Napoleon to Joseph shows that the sections _were_ disarmed; and as to Madame Beauharnais being screened by her friendly relations with Barras, _that_ presupposes every soldier in the Convention army to have known all about Barras’s private affairs. How could the thousands of Convention troops, fifteen hundred of whom were democrats just out of jail, know who was or was not a personal friend of Barras? The Convention was in the minority; it had less than eight thousand troops: would it have left arms in the hands of the majority and the forty thousand National Guards? Captious critics call attention to the fact that Napoleon elsewhere stated that he met his future wife at the house of Barras. This assertion does not necessarily conflict with the other. A call at the office of an official does not constitute a social meeting. When Napoleon said he met Madame Beauharnais at the house of Barras, his meaning probably was that he there first knew her socially. And why should a man like Napoleon, who could lie so superbly when he tried, invent so bungling a hoax as one which involved a disarmament of Paris which did not take place, and the return of a sword which had never been seized? General Thiébault says: “A few days after the 13 of Vendémiaire I happened to be at the office of the general staff when General Bonaparte came in. I can still see his little hat surmounted by a chance plume badly fastened on, his tricolor sash more than carelessly tied, his coat cut anyhow, and a sword which did not seem the kind of weapon to make his fortune. Flinging his hat on a large table in the middle of the room, he went up to an old general, named Krieg, a man of wonderful knowledge of military detail and author of a soldier’s manual. He made him take a seat beside him at the table, and began questioning him, pen in hand, about a host of facts connected with the service and discipline. Some of his questions showed such complete ignorance of some of the most ordinary things that several of my comrades smiled. I was myself struck by the number of his questions, their order, and their rapidity, no less than by the way in which the answers were caught up, and often found to resolve themselves into new questions, which he deduced as consequences from them. But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander-in-chief perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of the business which the junior of them was supposed to know perfectly, and this raised him a hundred cubits in my eyes.”