But now he saw at that _salon_ a charming widow, Josephine de Beauharnais, whose husband had perished in the Terror.

The ardour of his southern temperament, long repressed by his privations, speedily rekindles in her presence: his stiff, awkward manners thaw under her smiles: his silence vanishes when she praises his military gifts: he admires her tact, her sympathy, her beauty: he determines to marry her.

The lady, on her part, seems to have been somewhat terrified by her uncanny wooer: she comments questioningly on his "violent tenderness almost amounting to frenzy": she notes uneasily his "keen inexplicable gaze which imposes even on our Directors": How would this eager nature, this masterful energy, consort with her own "Creole nonchalance"?
She did well to ask herself whether the general's almost volcanic passion would not soon exhaust itself, and turn from her own fading charms to those of women who were his equals in age.

Besides, when she frankly asked her own heart, she found that she loved him not: she only admired him.

Her chief consolation was that if she married him, her friend Barras would help to gain for Buonaparte the command of the Army of Italy.