Everyone in the world was saying that Josephine had been with a young man while Napoleon was away on his Egyptian campaign. But someone told Georgiana it was a rumor, that Josephine had done no such thing, and Lenormand could testify to it. That person was Josephine herself. The letter she had written to Georgiana had been burned, and aside from Lenormand's testimony, there was no other evidence to prove it.
In Napoleon's traditional, conservative view, men were responsible for supporting the family, while women stayed home and managed the household. It was very similar to Rousseau's view of the family.
French factories needed men, and war needed men too. That damned marriage law not only forbade divorce, but also exempted a husband from prosecution if he caught his wife with her lover in the act and killed them both. A woman, however, could not do the same. She could not kill the woman stealing her husband or her husband himself.
And even if she were allowed to, did a woman have the ability to kill two people?
No man would admit that he had problems in that regard. But if he found a wealthy widow, or another woman more to his liking, all he had to do was fake a scene of adultery and he could legally kill his wife. That was the predicament faced by the women in the women's shelter. Even women who never left their homes still had social dealings, and men would be present at those gatherings. The grocer, the deliveryman—anyone could become the "lover."
Where was she supposed to find proof that she had not committed adultery? The nineteenth century had no technology for testing whether a child was biologically related to the husband.
This was another power granted to men under the Civil