Excerpt from The Empress Josephine, Napoleon's Enchantress: Hutchinson's Library of Standard Lives

It would surely be impossible to find any passage in literature outside'these few lines from the early pen of Lafcadio Hearn in which a better suggestion is conveyed to us of the Josephine of romance, as opposed to the Josephine of history. And the Josephine of romance may be said to bear to the actual Josephine as we find her in history the same relation that the statue so lovingly described above bore to the real woman, the wife of the First Consul and the Emperor, who never appeared without her rouge and thick coating of powder, who spent at least three hours in her dressing-room every morning, and who felt so keenly the necessity, if not of suffering, at any rate of labouring hard, to be beautiful. Yet it may be that, just as the living woman was able to exercise upon those with whom she came in contact a fascination which no statue of her could inspire, so there is more absorbing interest in the true Josephine, seen as She existed from day to day, with her frivolity and her faults so little hidden, than in the merely lovely and benevolent Empress of legend. Whatever legend could do for the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, it could not invent for her a more curiously picturesque career than was hers in fact: on the con trary, in removing from its records so many of the actual incidents as not harmonising with the character which it was endeavouring to present, it removed also a great deal of the picturesqueness.

On June 23, 1763, there was born at trois-ilets, Martinique, the eldest child Of joseph-gaspard Tascher de la Pagerie, retired lieutenant of marine artillery, and Of his wife, formerly rose-claire des Vergers de Sannois. To this child were given the names of marie-joseph Rose Marie from her father's mother, Joseph from her father, and Rose from her mother. The name of Josephine was unknown until she met the young General Bonaparte in 1796. In her girlhood, up to the time when she first sailed for France, she was generally called by the pet-name of Yeyette, which sounds like an infantile mispronunciation or a negro corruption.

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