Josephine (1763 - 1814). Joséphine was the first wife of Napoleon and the first Empress of the French after he proclaimed himself Emperor. Her marriage to Napoleon was her second; her first husband, Alexandre de Beauharnais, was guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and she was imprisoned in the Carmes Prison until five days after his execution. Her two children by Beauharnais became significant to royal lineage. Through her daughter Hortense, she was the maternal grandmother of Napoleon III. Through her son Eugène, she was the great-grandmother of Swedish and Danish kings and queens. The reigning houses of Belgium, Norway and Luxembourg also descend from her. Because she did not bear Napoleon any children, he divorced her in 1810 to marry Marie Louise of Austria. Joséphine was the recipient of numerous love letters written by Napoleon, many of which still exist. Her Château de Malmaison was noted for its magnificent rose garden, which she supervised closely, owing to her passionate interest in roses, collected from all over the world. Although she is often referred to as Joséphine de Beauharnais, it is not a name she ever used in her lifetime, as Beauharnais is the name of her first husband, which she ceased to use upon her marriage to Napoleon, taking the last name Bonaparte while she did not use the name Joséphine before meeting Napoleon, who was the first to begin calling her such, perhaps from a middle name of Josephe. In her life before Napoleon, the woman now known as Joséphine went by the name of Rose, or Marie-Rose, Tascher de la Pagerie, later de Beauharnais, and she sometimes reverted to using her maiden-name of Tascher de la Pagerie in later life. After her marriage to the then General Bonaparte, she adopted the name Joséphine Bonaparte and the name of Rose faded into her past. The misnomer Joséphine de Beauharnais first emerged during the restoration of the Bourbons, who were hesitant to refer to her by either Napoleon's surname or her Imperial title and settled instead on the surname of her late first husband. Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie was born in Les Trois-Îlets, Martinique, to a wealthy French Creole family that owned a sugarcane plantation, which is now a museum. She was the eldest daughter of Joseph-Gaspard Tascher, knight, Seigneur de la Pagerie, lieutenant of Troupes de Marine, and his wife, the former Rose-Claire des Vergers de Sannois, whose maternal grandfather, Anthony Brown, may have been Irish. The family struggled financially after hurricanes destroyed their estate in 1766. Edmée, Joséphine's paternal aunt, had been the mistress of François, Marquis de Beauharnais, a French aristocrat. When François's health began to fail, Edmée arranged the advantageous marriage of her niece, Catherine-Désirée, to François's son Alexandre. This marriage would be highly beneficial for the Tascher family, because it kept the Beauharnais money in their hands; however, 12-year-old Catherine died on 16 October 1777, before she could leave Martinique for France. In service to their aunt Edmée's goals, Catherine was replaced by her older sister, Joséphine. In October 1779, Joséphine went to France with her father. She married Alexandre on 13 December 1779, in Noisy-le-Grand. They had two children: a son, Eugène de Beauharnais, and a daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais. Joséphine and Alexandre's marriage was not a happy one. Alexandre abandoned his family for over a year in a brief tryst and often frequented whorehouses, leading to a court-ordered separation during which Josephine and the children lived at Alexandre's expense in the Pentemont Abbey, run by a group of Bernardian nuns. On 2 March 1794, during the Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the arrest of her husband. He was jailed in the Carmes prison in Paris. Considering Joséphine as too close to the counter-revolutionary financial circles, the Committee ordered her arrest on 18 April 1794. A warrant of arrest was issued against her on 2 Floréal, year II, and she was imprisoned in the Carmes prison until 10 Thermidor, year II. During this time, Joséphine was only allowed to communicate with her children by their scrawls on the laundry list, which the jailers soon prohibited. Her husband was accused of having poorly defended Mainz in July 1793, and being considered an aristocratic suspect, was sentenced to death and guillotined, with his cousin Augustin, on 23 July 1794, on the Place de la Révolution in Paris. Joséphine was freed five days later, thanks to the fall and execution of Robespierre, which ended the Reign of Terror.