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were having their lunch break, so the head and body of the queen were left lying on the damp grass.
    The city had become a terrible, ghoulish place, as ravaged and sick as if it had been hit by the Black Death. People denounced employees, neighbors, friends, and lovers and were constantly afraid of being accused of treason, plotting, or antirepublican feeling. Almost the entire company of the Comédie Française was imprisoned for suspicious behavior. Mothers were dragged to the guillotine from childbed, while men and women were so eager to save their skins that they cheered the deaths of their loved ones.
    The days of gay salons were over. Women dressed drably, all the better not to be noticed. Notre-Dame was renamed the Temple of Reason, the churches were destroyed, their statues of saints smashed intopieces, bronzes stolen and melted down. A new republican calendar was instituted at the end of 1792, which had a rest day every ten rather than every seven days. Robespierre declared there would be a new religion: the cult of the Supreme Being. Streets called after saints would be renamed—after vegetables, agricultural implements, or patriots of the past. The convention voted in the “Law of Suspects,” ordering the arrest of all those who had by remarks—or even connections—shown themselves “the partisans of tyranny.” Anyone who had traveled in aristocratic circles was at risk of arrest. Marie-Josèphe quickly left the rue Saint-Dominique for Croissy, a quiet town near Paris, where she hoped to keep a low profile. She and Madame Hosten took the Maison Rossignol, an elegant house decorated in Louis XIV style, formerly the home of Madame Campan, who still lived nearby. Marie-Josèphe declared herself a citoyenne of the Republic and arranged for Eugène to train as an apprentice with a local carpenter and for Hortense to practice dressmaking.
    Life at Croissy was calm and as safe as anywhere could be in the circumstances. When Marie-Josèphe gazed out her window, she could see a pretty château concealed by tall trees and parks. It was owned by local aristocrats, the Molays, and called Malmaison. She became close friends with Madame Campan, the former first lady of the bedchamber. She also met Jean-Lambert Tallien, the twenty-five-year-old radical deputy in the Committee of Public Safety, vulpine, clever, and always ready to change sides. Otherwise, Marie-Josèphe lived quietly.
    But Marie-Josèphe was too confident. The committee’s attentions had turned to the Beauharnais family, and it ordered the arrest of Alexandre’s intensely royalist elder brother, François. Marie-Josèphe wrote begging for clemency for François’s estranged wife, Marie—and, by extension, for herself and Alexandre. As she knew, once one family member was taken, the rest would usually follow. She proposed her revolutionary credentials. “If he [Alexandre] was not a republican, he would have neither my esteem nor my affection. I am an American and I know only him of his family … my household is a republican household; before the Revolution, my children could not be distinguished from sans-culottes and I hope they will be worthy of the Republic.” 10
    Marie-Josèphe’s description of herself as an American rather than aslave-owning Creole was almost ludicrous. “I write to you frankly as a genuine sans culotte ,” she wrote from her fine villa, her jewels stowed in boxes upstairs. Eugène and Hortense might have been plainly dressed, but they, like their mother, were a long way from sans-culottes —the often ragged people of the revolutionary mob. She received no reply to her letter. By March 1794, Alexandre had been arrested on suspicions of intending to undermine the state. He was taken to prison at the Luxembourg, then Les Carmes. Jacques-Louis David, painter and archrevolutionary, signed the warrant for his arrest. “Every day I was brought hundreds of them to sign and in the heat of the moment, I did not even read everything