Eugène de Beauharnais

When news of the Rivoli's capture reached Paris, Napoleon was disappointed, but seems to have downplayed its significance.

He blamed his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, the Viceroy of Italy, for the loss.

End quote.

That turned out to be far too optimistic.

In espionage.

He approached General Alexandre de Beauharnais and suggested that Terras could be used as a courier.

He could smuggle secret messages across enemy lines by eating them and then retrieving them in due course.

Even if captured by the enemy, a search would do no good.

Two days later, nature took its course and the box reappeared.

The document within was safe and sound.

An impressed and presumably mildly disgusted Beauharnais signed off on the plan to make Tara a spy.

Tara's first mission was to sneak into enemy territory, to a place where a French colonel was being held prisoner by the Prussians and deliver a secret message to this officer.

Even before Napoleon became emperor, he was desperate for an heir, but by the turn of the century, his wife Josephine was in her late 30s and it seemed that no legitimate heir would ever result from the marriage.

While Napoleon adopted Eugene and Hortense, Josephine's children from her first marriage to the late Alexandre de Beauharnais, he was keen to continue the Bonaparte family name in one shape or another so that if no direct male heir arrived, he could establish a nephew to succeed him one day.

In January 1802, Napoleon arranged for his 18-year-old stepdaughter, Hortense, to marry his 23-year-old brother, Louis.

Napoleon could adopt the offspring from this union as his heirs in the event that Josephine could not provide him with a child.

He was allowed to conduct scientific experiments and was given permission to plant a small garden on the prison grounds.

By the middle of 1841, he was allowed to receive visitors, and his valet was given permission to come in and out of the prison as he pleased, bringing him vital updates about what was occurring in France.

He was even permitted to keep a mistress, a 20-year-old Eleonore Vergeot, who gave birth to a son named Eugene in February 1843, followed by a son named Louis two years later.

In the meantime, he became a prolific political commentator for various newspapers and wrote another political pamphlet, The Extinction of Pauperism, published in April 1844, in which he combined the socialist desire to improve the condition of the masses with Bonapartist statist ideas.

[chime] AI engineer Carter Church says GPT-6 Astra deciphered a 217-year-old military code in about six hours.

The message came from the headquarters of Eugène de Beauharnais, Napoleon's stepson and Viceroy of Italy.

It was addressed to French General Auguste de Marmont and conveyed orders concerning preparations for an Austrian invasion.

The cipher had remained unsolved since 1809 and contained 24 rows of numbers, letters, and invented symbols.