"
Josephine delayed not much longer in Paris, where the air was yet
damp with the blood of so many murdered ones; where the guillotine,
on which her husband had died, lifted yet its threatening head. She
hastened with her children to Fontainebleau, there to rest from her
sorrows on the heart of her father-in-law, to weep with him on the
loss they both had suffered.
The dream of her first youth and of her first love had passed away,
and to the father of her beheaded husband Josephine returned a
widow; rich in gloomy, painful experiences, poor in hopes, but with
a stout heart, and a determination to live, and to be at once a
father and a mother to her children.
BOOK II.
THE WIFE OF GENERAL BONAPARTE.
CHAPTER XVI.
BONAPARTE IN CORSICA.
The civil war which for four years had devastated France had also
with its destruction and its terrors overspread the French colonies,
and in Martinique as well as in Corsica two parties stood opposed to
each other in infuriated bitterness--one fighting for the rights of
the native land, the other for the rights of the French people, for
the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" which the Convention in
Paris had adopted for its motto, since it delivered to the
guillotine, on the Place de la Revolution, the heads of those who
dared lay claim for themselves to this liberty of thought so
solemnly proclaimed.
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