![]() It wasn’t a happy marriage, writes Stuart, but it brought Rose into the best circles of aristocratic Paris, a dangerous place to be in revolutionary times-“it is hard to imagine that she escaped the profound disturbances which beset her contemporaries, many of whom reported a litany of psychological and physical disorders including nightmares, sleeplessness, anxiety and depression,” Stuart writes-but a good place to be noticed. The French decision was fateful, for it kept Martiniquaise society well within Paris’s orbit thus it was that young Rose came to France, “plump, provincial, and adolescent,” intended for the nobleman Alexandre de Beauharnais, whom students of French literature remember as the model for Valmont in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons. ![]() the French chose the latter,” writes Critical Quarterly fiction editor Stuart ( Showgirls, not reviewed). or to the commercially and strategically important ‘sugar islands’. Marie-Josèphe-Rose-Claire des Vergers de Tascher de la Pagarie was born on a plantation in Martinique, “a complicated place during a tumultuous time,” a voluptuous island that had just narrowly escaped becoming a British possession: “In a treaty concluded with Britain in 1763, when presented with the choice of holding on to Canada. A sometimes florid but engaging life of Napoleon’s true love, a woman ill served by circumstances. ![]()
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