La vie de josephine de beauharnais biography

There is very little of substance to be had on the life of Napoleon's Josephine. We possess some documents, register entries, dates of marriage and birth. We have the odd letter she wrote to a friend or to her children. (Both of her husbands complained vociferously over her failure to reliably correspond with them, her Corsican general destroying what she did manage to post as a matter of military security.) She kept no journal, composed no speech, contributed no article to the press. Her voice, in terms of posterity, is quite nearly silent. And while it is true that she features heavily in the legion of memoirs produced of her time, it is also true that she was often used merely as a tool to make a point. Few genuinely knew her, or viewed her as a person. And this is how she liked it. This is what she preferred.

In The Rose of Martinique, Andrea Stuart chooses to ignore her subject's elusiveness. Instead of embracing the void that is Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, and examining the craft it took to create such an absence - no small feat for the woman poised at the heart of the Napoleonic storm - Ms. Stuart opts for the predictable and far more irritating course: extending herself as an auth