make debts—in confidence in the future which in those strange days offered all kinds of possibilities to pretty and elegant women. All the large fortune of her husband in land had been confiscated when he was executed; her own fortune had existed rather on paper than in solid coin of the realm; her father was dead, her mother was very poor; and the English, in any case, had blockaded the island and stood between her and remittances. Even the furniture of her house had been pledged; in short, poor Josephine at this moment was at the very end of her tether. This was her position when the following scene took place. I trust the vividness of the description will make as profound an impression on others as it does on me.
IX.
BONAPARTE KNOCKS.
"Just then, to return the visit he had received from the Viscountess de Beauharnais, General Bonaparte rings at the entrance gate of the mansion in the Rue Chantereine. He does not know that the house belongs to Citizeness Talma, who, while she was Demoiselle Julie, got it from a man whose mistress she was. He does not see that the house, with one hundred metres of grounds, situated in a remote quarter, just at the extremity of Paris, a couple of steps from the Rue Saint-Lazaire, surrounded even still by gardens,
