After her release and recovery, she met Napoleon.

Rose survived several months imprisonment, but her health was broken. He temporarily rose with the Revolution, and then suffered an ignominious (and ultimately fatal) fall among the insanity and excesses of the Terror. Instead, the man she married turned out to be a bigger spender than her family (and with less excuse) and eventually lost his inheritance and forced his own parents into debt. Her parents sent her to France to marry a rich relative, in the hopes that her husband would then save the family’s finances. Even though this made her a member of the upper crust of Martinique society, the plantation was in debt and money was tight. She was a planter’s daughter in Martinique. Rose/Josephine’s early life makes a great novel all by itself, even before Napoleon appears on the scene. It is possible that he was more successful with France. He attempted to remake her just as he tried to remake France after the Revolution and the Terror. Napoleon is the one who named her Josephine until they met, she referred to herself as Rose. History refers to her as the Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. Her full name was Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie de Beauharnais.

In history, she’s the one we think of first when we hear the name Josephine. But Alexandre dashes her hopes and abandons her amid the tumult of the French Revolution. She arrives exultant to follow her dreams of attending Court with Alexandre, her elegant aristocrat and soldier husband. Rose Tascher sails from her Martinique plantation to Paris to trade her Creole black magic culture for love and adventure. Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository Format read: ebook borrowed from the library

Becoming Josephine by Heather Webb