Napoleon

HIS WIVES AND WOMEN

Christopher Hibbert

For Peter and Nanette

with love

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

The Bonaparte Family Tree

1 THE CREOLE

2 THE DOOMED MARRIAGE

3 THE CITOYENNE BEAUHARNAIS

4 THE CORSICAN BOY

5 A PROSTITUTE AND A PEST

6 THE ‘ADORABLE FRIEND’

7 CHEZ LES PERMONS

8 PARISIAN SALONS

9 ADVENTURES IN ITALY

10 THE SERBELLONI PALACE

11 THE FAVOURITE SISTER

12 CAROLINE

13 ‘PEACE À LA BONAPARTE’

14 LIFE IN THE RUE DE LA VICTOIRE

15 ‘LA PUTANA’

16 A CONVERSATION WITH JUNOT

17 ‘CLEOPATRA’

18 THE GENERAL’S RETURN

19 THE COUP

20 DAYS AT MALMAISON

21 ASSASSINS AND VICTIMS

22 MISTRESSES AT COURT

23 THE IMPERIAL HIGHNESSES AND MADAME MÈRE

24 CORONATION

25 ADOPTED AND NATURAL SONS

26 LIFE AT COURT

27 MARIE WALEWSKA

28 PRELIMINARIES OF DIVORCE

29 SISTERS AND SISTERS-IN-LAW

30 SEPARATION

31 MARIE-LOUISE

32 MARRIAGE AND HONEYMOON

33 THE KING OF ROME

34 DISASTER IN RUSSIA

35 FUGITIVES

36 THE AUSTRIAN EQUERRY

37 THE DEATH OF JOSEPHINE

38 EXILE ON ELBA

39 MADAME MÈRE

40 PAULINE BORGHESE

41 QUEEN CAROLINE

42 DEFEAT AND EXILE

43 ST HELENA

44 LONGWOOD HOUSE

45 ‘MACH’ AND ‘SULTANA’

46 SEXUAL ADVENTURES

47 DREAMS AND MEMORIES

48 DEATH OF THE EMPEROR

49 ELISA AND CAROLINE

50 PAULINE AND MADAME MÈRE

EPILOGUE THE RETURN TO PARIS

APPENDIX POST MORTEM

THE FATE OF CHARACTERS WHOSE END IS NOT RECORDED IN THE TEXT

CHRONOLOGY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Acknowledgements

About the Author

From the reviews:

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Bonaparte Family Tree

1 THE CREOLE

‘She longs to see Paris and has

a very sweet disposition.’

‘CONTRARY TO OUR HOPES, it has pleased God to give us a daughter,’ Rose-Claire Tascher de La Pagerie wrote after the birth of her first child on 23 June 1763. The baby’s father, Joseph Tascher de La Pagerie, had wished for a son who might, as he himself had done, obtain a post as a page at court at Versailles – far away from the family’s sugar plantation on the West Indian island of Martinique. The mother had hoped that the birth of a boy might reconcile her husband to a marriage which was not a happy one, and which led him to seek such pleasures as could be found in Fort Royal, the capital of Martinique, where he was known to spend much of the day playing cards and was believed to spend the nights in bed with his black mistress.

In his plantation he took scant interest. His father had sailed out from France in 1726, having high hopes of making his fortune as so many Creoles – West Indians of European descent – contrived to do. But he was not a successful planter. Nor was his son and, by the time his grandchild was born, the plantation’s profits had fallen sharply, while the number of slaves, once as many as 150, summoned to work at half-past five every morning, had fallen to less than fifty.

These slaves, and the La Pagerie family, had all sought shelter in a stone-walled wind-house on the night of 13 August 1766 when devastating gales and a tidal wave tore across the island, killing over four hundred people, sweeping away the family’s mill and slave quarters and all the other wooden buildings of the plantation, and flattening the sugar canes, the mangoes, custard apples, tamarisks and bread-fruit trees.

The La Pageries’ large wooden house was not rebuilt and the upper floor of the refinery, above the clanking machinery crushing the sugar canes, became the three-year-old Rose’s home. Seven years later, after her mother had given birth to three more girls, Rose was sent to a convent school in Fort Royal where she was taught how to behave as a young lady would have been expected to behave in France, how to dance and sing and play the piano, how to use a fan and conduct a polite conversation; but to academic instruction not so much importance was attached.

When she was fourteen, Rose left the school at Fort Royal, and eagerly looked forward to leaving Martinique for a more exciting life in France. The opportunity to do so had been given to her by her aunt, Désirée, the mistress of a soi-disant marquis, François de Beauharnais, who had been appointed Governor of Martinique and of several nearby islands. Having, for propriety’s sake, married one of François de Beauharnais’s aides, Alexis Renaudin – who had thrashed her savagely when he discovered her ‘notorious conduct’ with the Governor and who had returned home to obtain a legal separation – Désirée followed him to France in order to enter a counter-plea and obtain a share of his money. Soon afterwards, François de Beauharnais and his wife also sailed for France, where Mme de Beauharnais went to live in the country on her family’s estate while her husband settled down in Paris with his mistress, Désirée Renaudin.

Désirée now set about arranging a marriage between one of her nieces in Martinique and her lover’s son. She accordingly asked her brother Joseph and his wife to send over from Martinique at least one of their daughters as a bride for Alexandre, then sixteen and a half years old. Alexandre thought that the second of the La Pagerie daughters, Catherine, aged twelve, would probably suit him best after a suitable Paris education; but Catherine died of tuberculosis before this could be arranged. Since her sister Rose was considered, at fourteen and a half, too near Alexandre’s own age, the youngest daughter, Manette, was then proposed. To be overlooked in this way was too much for Rose to bear. Usually so biddable and languorous, so lazily placid, she burst into frequent floods of tears until her father wrote to Alexandre’s family:

The oldest girl, who has often asked me to take her to France will, I fear, be somewhat upset by the preference given to her younger sister. She has a very fine skin, beautiful eyes, beautiful arms and an unusual gift for music. She longs to see Paris and has a very sweet disposition. If it were left to me I would bring the two daughters instead of one, but how can one part a mother from both her remaining daughters when death has just deprived her of a third?

So, in September 1779, Britain having declared war on France the year before, Joseph Tascher de La Pagerie, his daughter Rose, and a freed slave named Euphémie, sailed for Europe in the Île de France. After a fearful, three-month-long crossing of the Atlantic in appalling weather, constantly threatened with interception by the English fleet and in danger of capture by pirates, M. de La Pagerie’s weary party landed at Brest, where he immediately went to bed to await the arrival of his sister, Désirée, who, accompanied by his future son-in-law, Alexandre de Beauharnais, set out from Paris as soon as she heard that the Île de France had docked.

Alexandre was not disappointed by the appearance of his intended bride, shaken though she was by the tossing of the Île de France in the Atlantic’s rough waters. ‘Mademoiselle de La Pagerie may perhaps appear to you less pretty than you had expected,’ Alexandre reported to his father, ‘but I think I may assure you that her amiability and the sweetness of her nature will surpass even what you have been told about her.’ He was not, however, so taken with the girl, now sixteen years old, as this description implied. She seemed good-natured, admittedly, but gauche and rather fat; and he might well have rejected her had it not been for the annoyance his rejection would cause his godmother, Désirée, who had been so kind to him since his mother’s death.

As for Alexandre himself, he was certainly a handsome young man, self-assured in his army uniform; proud of the title of viscount and of that of marquis which had by now been officially conferred upon his father; attractive to women, despite a pompous, sanctimonious manner; and already highly satisfied to have been the lover of several ladies of whose names and ranks he made lists to indulge his vanity – one of them, who bore him a son, being the satisfactorily aristocratic comtesse Laure de La Touche de Longpré.

As well as being socially pretentious Alexandre de Beauharnais was also an intellectual snob, inordinately proud of having shared a tutor with the nephews of the duc de La Rochefoucauld, the writer and social reformer, by some of whose views he had been influenced without sharing those which might have damaged his standing in society.

Not long after Rose’s arrival in France, on 13 December 1779, she and Alexandre were married. He than returned to his regiment in Brittany, came back to Paris for a few days and, later in the month, left Rose to go back to Brittany again.

2 THE DOOMED MARRIAGE

‘Kindly take yourself off to a convent.’

ROSE SEEMED QUITE CONTENT. She was as delighted as she had expected to be with Paris where she lived with her aunt Désirée and Désirée’s lover, the marquis, in the ancient part of the city in the rue Thévenot. Admittedly, it was a cold and draughty house, the rooms of which were cast into an unalleviated gloom by the tall houses on the other side of the narrow street, and often rendered noisomely offensive by the stench of the nearby tanneries and the effluent and pieces of skin and streams of blood from the butchers’ stalls pouring sluggishly down the kennel. But, in these early days of her marriage, Rose does not appear to have been distressed by the discomfort of the house in the rue Thévenot; and even when her ambition of going to court at Versailles was denied her because of the dubious nature of the title which her husband had assumed, it was he rather than herself who was the more indignant in their shared disappointment.

He was rarely at home; and, when he was, he could not disguise the irritation which his wife’s gaucherie and lack of education caused him. He suggested that she should learn the text of contemporary plays, even study Roman history so that she could converse with the kind of people to whom he was ashamed to introduce her. As it was, she was ‘an object’ who had nothing to say to him.

As time passed, however, and on those rare occasions when he returned from weeks spent away from the rue Thévenot on military duties or, more often, enjoying himself with other women, he did sometimes take his wife on excursions into Parisian society: to fashionable salons, to the receptions held by the duc d’Orléans’s attractive if rather precise mistress, Félicité de Genlis, at the Palais Royal, and to the salon at the Swedish Embassy, presided over by Germaine de Staël, daughter of Jacques Necker, the Swiss financier, wife of the Swedish Ambassador, and brilliant woman of letters and conversationalist before whom the Duke of Wellington, in an unaccustomed gesture of obeisance, was to stoop on bended knee, and of whom he was to say, ‘She was a most agreeable woman if only you kept her light and away from politics. But that was not easy. She was always trying to come to matters of state. I have said to her more than once, “Je dêteste parler politique”; and she answered, “Parler politique pour moi c’est vivre.”’

In such company, Rose, vicomtesse de Beauharnais, was, at first, a fascinated observer rather than an example of the influence of women over men, irritating her husband by expecting his attention. ‘She has become jealous,’ he complained, ‘and wants to know what I am doing.’ Exasperated by what he described as her possessiveness and pettish outbursts, he accepted his godmother’s suggestion that he should make a tour by himself of Italy whence he wrote letters home expressing less enjoyment of his travels than envy of those who had been fortunate enough to have been left behind.

When he returned to Paris to a new house near the faubourg St Honoré, he decided he must soon go abroad again – this time to the West Indies, to serve with his regiment in order to gain some experience of active service against the British as a preliminary to a higher command.

Rose – who had borne him a son, Eugène, on 3 September 1781 and was now pregnant with their second child, Hortense – pleaded with him not to leave France again so soon; but he replied in peevish letters complaining of his lot and of a wife who did not, unlike the wives of other officers, write regularly to her husband. To Désirée he wrote to say that the comtesse Laure de La Touche de Longpré, the mother of his illegitimate child, would be sailing in the same ship as himself; so would she keep an eye on their son and the comtesse’s other child while they were away and would she also, as the comtesse suggested, send a set of the game of lotto to occupy the idle hours of the long voyage. To his wife he wrote: ‘I begin to fear that our marriage is turning out undeniably badly. You have only yourself to blame.’

The letters that subsequently arrived in Paris from the West Indies were almost hysterical in their fury. Her husband told Rose, ‘the vilest of creatures’, that he had learned that her behaviour at Martinique had been outrageous, and that, on the very eve of her departure for France, she had been discovered in the arms of a lover. ‘What am I to think of this second child of yours,’ he asked, ‘born eight months and a few days after my return from Italy? I swear by heaven that it belongs to someone else. Kindly take yourself off to a convent as soon as you receive this letter. This is my last word on the subject and nothing in the world can move me to change it.’

Other letters from him followed in the same vein, upbraiding his wife and pitying himself, protesting his ‘virtuous conduct’, even though a man in whose house he had stayed at Fort Royal had locked his own wife up in her room, convinced that the vicomte had seduced her.

Self-righteous and indignant as ever, he returned to Paris, professing fury that Rose had not yet entered a convent as he had required.

His own conduct, he declared, was in striking contrast to his wife’s unfaithfulness. His health was badly affected; his legs had become ‘extremely weak’; this was due to his fearful state of mind; he was ‘greatly to be pitied’. He was not, however, too ill to drive off with his son, Eugène, whom he was obliged to send back to the boy’s mother by order of the Provost of Paris. He then demanded the return of both the jewellery which he had given his wife and the furniture in their house.

Since he could produce no proof of the wild accusations he made about his wife’s behaviour, he was eventually compelled to retract them, to accept paternity of their daughter, Hortense, and to pay Rose an allowance of five thousand livres a year. With all this settled to her satisfaction, Rose moved into the convent of Penthémont in a fashionable part of Paris, a comfortable establishment which provided rooms for upper-class ladies in need, for one reason or another, of a temporary retreat from the outside world. Here; at the age of twenty-one, she embarked upon her delayed education, watching and listening to the sophisticated young aristocrats in whose company she now found herself, taking note of the subjects and manner of their conversation, assuming their graceful movements and seductive gestures, cultivating a delightful and rather husky tone of voice made all the more alluring by its melodious Caribbean inflexion in which her Rs all but disappeared, contriving even to lose weight and the plumpness in her cheeks, and walking with that slightly swaying gait characteristic of the slaves of Martinique.

After living at Penthémont for just over a year, Rose joined her son Eugène, her daughter Hortense, her aunt Désirée Renaudin, and her aunt’s lover, the marquis de Beauharnais, at Fontainebleau, where they were then living in rather straitened circumstances. Rose, extravagant and improvident, was also short of money, although those who met her at this time, and were struck by the elegance of her fashionable dresses, could not suppose that this was the case.

It was generally believed that these dresses were not all bought with her own money. At Fontainebleau, it was rumoured that the alluring, provocative young woman, separated from her husband, was conducting an affair not only with the duc de Lorge, a well-known figure at court in the nearby royal château, but also with the chevalier de Coigny; and it was further supposed that her liaison with one or other, if not both of these men, was the reason why, taking her daughter with her, and leaving Eugène in the care of Mme Renaudin at Fontainebleau, she suddenly left one day in the greatest hurry for Le Havre, where she clambered aboard a merchant ship for the Atlantic crossing to Martinique.

Here she seems to have found other lovers among the officers at the naval base in Fort Royal, among them comte Scipion du Roure. ‘Without being exactly pretty,’ another naval officer wrote of her, ‘she was attractive because of her wit, gaiety and good manners…She cared nothing for public opinion…And, as her funds were extremely limited, and she was most extravagant, she was often obliged to draw upon her admirers’ pockets.’

She remained on the island for two years until, warned that rioting slaves as well as French soldiers, who had mutinied and joined forces with them, were threatening to attack Fort Royal, she and Hortense sought safety aboard comte Scipion du Roure’s ship, La Sensible, in which, in October 1790, after a voyage of almost two months, they managed to reach Toulon.

3 THE CITOYENNE BEAUHARNAIS

She confessed she was

‘too indolent to take sides’.

ROSE AND HER DAUGHTER found France in a mood of expectancy. The year before, a large crowd of assailants had attacked the Parisian prison, that symbol of repression known as the Bastille, and had released its four remaining inmates. Since then the attention of the country had been directed towards the National Assembly as the people waited for the next act in the drama to begin.

The President of the Assembly in October 1790, the month of Rose’s return from Martinique, was her former husband, relishing the opportunity now afforded him of making a series of sententious speeches.

Often to be seen listening to the deliberations of the Assembly in the gallery of the Tuileries Palace riding school, where their meetings were held, was Rose de Beauharnais, no longer vicomtesse, now citoyenne, in accordance with a decision taken by liberal French nobles to disclaim their titles. She also attended the salons of both Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis as well as the drawing rooms held in their houses by the radical German Prince Frederick of Salm-Kyrbourg and his sister, Princess Amalia.

Forceful as were the opinions expressed in these salons, Rose de Beauharnais gave no indication that she either approved or disapproved of them. As she herself confessed, she was ‘too indolent to take sides’; and, indeed, as a woman who knew her well was later to observe, her attention soon ‘wandered from any discussion of abstract ideas’. When it suited her to do so, however, she could readily feign an intelligent interest in what was said and knew well enough, as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the statesman and diplomatist, was to testify, when to keep silent rather than expose her ignorance or ingénuité.

As well as in the gallery of the National Assembly, Rose de Beauharnais was also to be seen at the exhibitions of the Academy where, among the portraits on display, was that of her husband, peering proudly from the canvas, his long Roman nose above an undershot chin.

From time to time, Rose came across him during her excursions about the town; and, in a quite friendly way, they discussed their children of whom he was certainly fond. But she could not persuade him to allow her an increased income of which she now stood sorely in need. Even so, she contrived to live well enough in her house in the rue St Dominique which she shared with a friend, Désirée Hosten, maintaining a household which included a valet, a governess for Hortense, and the freed slave, Euphémie, brought over from Martinique.

Adopting the ‘language and behaviour of the common people’, as one of her contemporaries put it, she cultivated sympathetic friends among the radicals, making use of the name of her former husband, who was twice elected President of the Jacobin Club, and, after his appointment to a military command on France’s endangered frontier, ending her letters ‘Lapagerie Beauharnais, wife of the Maréchal de Camp’.

Like the Abbé Sieyès, a leading member of the States General, who, when asked what he had done in the ensuing months of bloody revolution, replied, ‘I remained alive’, Rose de Beauharnais also survived. She lived through the attack on the Tuileries in the summer of 1792 and the subsequent September Massacres; she saw the erection of the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution which ended the life of the King on 21 January 1793; and she endured the days of the Terror during which the father of her children was also guillotined in 1794 after failing to prevent the fall of Mainz to the allied army which the excesses of the Revolution had provoked into existence.

When the Law of Suspects imposed the death penalty upon former nobles and their families who had not ‘constantly demonstrated their loyalty to the Revolution’ or who had been guilty of making remarks ‘debasing republican institutions and their elected representatives’, Rose thought it as well to leave Paris until she had obtained the Certificate of Good Citizenship for herself and her children which the new law required. Offered a house a few miles outside Paris by her friend Désirée Hosten, she left for Croissy with Hortense, her governess, Marie Lannoy, and Euphémie. Her son, Eugène, who had been sent to school at Strasbourg by his father, joined them there to be apprenticed – in accordance with a revolutionary decree – to a carpenter, while Hortense was apprenticed to ‘a dressmaker’ who was, in fact, her governess.

Although the blade of the guillotine was still falling and rising on the orders of the implacable Revolutionary Tribune in what Thomas Carlyle was to call relentless systole-diastole, Rose took her household back to Paris when, through her contacts with such influential friends as Jean-Lambert Tallien, a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety, she had managed to acquire Certificates of Good Citizenship.

She had, however, returned to Paris too soon. On the evening of 21 April 1794, three members of a revolutionary committee knocked on the door of her house in the rue St Dominique with an order for the arrest of the ‘woman Beauharnais, wife of the ci-devant General, and the woman Ostenn’. They searched the house for incriminating papers; but, finding none, they renewed their search the following night when in the attic they discovered various papers which Alexandre had sent to Rose to keep for him. She was arrested and taken to the prison known as Les Carmes where, during the September Massacres, prisoners had been dragged into foetid rooms lit by torches and candles, to face groups of judges wearing red caps and butchers’ aprons, sitting round tables littered with papers, prison registers, bottles, pipes and jars of tobacco, their bare arms streaked with blood and tattooed with the symbols of their respective trades. The walls of the prison still bore the marks of the splashed blood of their victims.

Rose was pushed into the prison, already crowded with seven hundred men and women awaiting execution. There were few nobles amongst them: most were tradesmen, a few professional men, a librarian, a musician and an apothecary amongst them. The handsome, dashing General Lazare Hoche was soon to join them.

Hoche, the son of a stableman in royal service, and himself a groom before enlisting in the Gardes Françaises, was one of the talented Revolutionary generals, inexperienced, impromptu and roturier, who commanded the levées en masse with such success. Hoche himself, then aged twenty-six, had been appointed by the Committee of Public Safety to command the army of the Moselle the year before; but he had been denounced as a traitor by his rival, General Charles Pichegru, a man of peasant stock who had been a sergeant-major in an artillery regiment at the outbreak of the Revolution. Arrested as a consequence of Pichegru’s denunciation, Hoche was awaiting his trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal with his customary cheerful demeanour; and, although he had been married for less than a month to a sixteen-year-old wife to whom he was devoted, it was not long before, in the atmosphere of sexual excitement which pervaded the prison, the attractive young general and the promiscuous citoyenne became lovers.

They were not to remain so for long. Within a week or two, Hoche was marched out of Les Carmes to face the Revolutionary Tribunal and by the end of November, released on its orders, was in command of the army of Brest.

Rose was left alone with her fear. For much of the time, unlike the other more stoical women in the prison, she was in tears or anxiously setting out her tarot cards in vain attempts to discover her fate.

Beyond the walls of Les Carmes the Revolution was reaching a climax. In the heat of the month known in the new revolutionary calendar as Thermidor, power was slipping from the hands of Maximilien Robespierre who had been elected President by the National Convention in June; and on 28 July 1794, his jaw shattered by a self-inflicted pistol shot, he and twenty-one of his supporters were guillotined before a cheering crowd in the Place de la Révolution. The Revolution was now about to take a sudden lurch to the right.

Rose emerged into startling sunlight, one of the first of the three thousand prisoners to be released by the end of August. Désirée Hosten being still in prison, Rose agreed with another Creole friend, Mme de Krény, to take an apartment in the rue de l’Université. Here she was soon once more deep in debt and borrowing money from anyone who would lend it to her, even from Hortense’s governess, who lent her a lifetime’s savings, and from General Hoche, who also sent her passionate love letters to which she replied in terms no less ardent, though she was not so exclusively devoted to him that she declined to submit, so it was said, to the rough overtures of one of his grooms.

It was not a time to be short of money in Paris. With the ending of the Terror the city had emerged suddenly from gloomy foreboding into bright and exciting life. Theatres reopened; cafés were thronged; dance halls and brothels sprang up everywhere. Profiteers and speculators, spending money as rapidly as they made it, sped through the streets with their women in ornately painted carriages to expensive restaurants, to gambling dens and to places of entertainment whose private rooms, in the words of a police report, were ‘absolute sewers of debauchery and vice’. The jeunesse dorée, young men of mostly middle-class and artisan background, marched about the streets carrying short sticks weighted with lead with which to intimidate sansculottes, wearing a kind of uniform of square-skirted coats, tight trousers and extremely high cravats, their hair in long locks over their ears and plaited at the back of their heads. Also dandies known as incroyables, affecting lisps and dressed in the most outlandish fashions, appeared in the Tuileries gardens and were seen enjoying boating parties on the Seine accompanied by merveilleuses whose scanty, revealing clothes were equally exotic and whose wigs were triumphs of the perruquiers’ art. At bals des victimes, entertainments at once riotous and ghoulish, guests whose near relations had perished in the Terror wore hair as though prepared for the blade of the guillotine and thin bands of red silk round their necks. They greeted each other by nodding sharply as though their severed heads were falling into the executioner’s basket.

In this society Rose de Beauharnais contrived to survive, even to flourish, borrowing money whenever she could, cultivating new and influential friends and taking care to keep old friendships in good repair. While many Parisians came close to starvation in the fearful winter of 1794 when the Seine froze over from bank to bank, people could be seen in the streets chopping up beds for firewood to cook what little food they could procure, and long queues formed outside the bakers’ shops to buy the rationed loaves of so-called bread, a soggy concoction made of bran and beans, which, spurned by Baron de Frénilly’s dog, stuck to the wall when his master threw a handful at it.

Rose de Beauharnais did not go hungry. It became customary for guests to bring their own bread and wine and candles when they dined in other people’s houses; but it was accepted that Rose was not in a position to do so. Nor was she expected to keep a carriage to carry her about the town, so Jean-Lambert Tallien, who had played a prominent part in Robespierre’s overthrow, and Paul Barras, a charming, clever, unscrupulous former army officer of noble birth who had fought bravely before being cashiered, a cousin of the marquis de Sade and Tallien’s successor as President of the National Assembly, arranged for her to be provided with both a coach and a pair of horses.

Rose was on the best of terms with Tallien’s beautiful young wife, Thérésia, formerly Barras’s mistress, and she was often to be seen at the Talliens’ house, La Chaumière, where the women guests, adopting the neo-classical fashion of their hostess, appeared in Grecian tunics, scanty and almost as revealing as the dress in which the sensual and heavily scented Fortunée Hamelin paraded lasciviously bare-breasted down the Champs-Élysées.

At La Chaumière, Rose found just the kind of society which she relished, and in which she shone. It was here that she met a man described as ‘Barras’s little Italian protégé’, a twenty-six-year-old brigadier on half-pay, Napoleon Buonaparte.

4 THE CORSICAN BOY

‘He is most proud and ambitious.’

EVERY YEAR, on the Feast of the Assumption, High Mass is celebrated in the sixteenth-century cathedral in Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica. On the stiflingly hot day of 15 August 1769, there was an additional cause for celebration: it was the first anniversary of the island’s ‘reunion’ with France after having been a possession of the republic of Genoa for two centuries. In the cathedral’s congregation that sultry August day, as, indeed, for at least a short time on every day of the year, was Letizia Buonaparte, the small, nineteen-year-old wife of a lawyer, Carlo Maria di Buonaparte. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she felt the first, urgent pains of labour. She hurried from the cathedral and reached her large stone house in the nearby strada Malerba just in time for the baby, her second son, to be born on a sofa in a downstairs room. Later that day a priest called at her house and it was decided the delicate-looking child should be christened without delay. He was given the name of an uncle who had died recently, Napoleone, the name also of an obscure Egyptian martyr, Neapolus. In the family the boy was called ‘Nabulio’.

The mother was a frail-looking young woman, a wife since the age of fourteen, with a pale, eager countenance, dark hair, large dark eyes and a patrician nose, shy but determined and capable and extremely thrifty. One French observer described her as being ‘by far the most striking-looking woman in Ajaccio’. She did not often smile, and she spoke Italian in a Corsican dialect.

Her family, the Ramolini, originally came from Lombardy and were proud to number among their ancestors the counts of Coll Alto; but her more recent forebears had been settled in Corsica for some 250 years. Her father was a civil engineer who had died when she was a child. Soon afterwards, her mother had been remarried to a Swiss officer serving in the Genoese marines, Captain Franz Fesch, whose son, Joseph Fesch, was to become a cardinal and French ambassador in Rome.

The Buonapartes were also of old Italian stock, an ancestor, Guglielmo di Buonaparte, having been a distinguished councillor in Florence in the thirteenth century. ‘We thought ourselves as good as the Bourbons,’ Napoleon was to say, ‘and on the island we really were. There are genealogists who date my family from the Flood, and there are people who pretend that I am of plebeian birth. The truth lies between the two. The Buonapartes are a good Corsican family, little known since we have hardly ever left our island, but much better than the coxcombs who take it upon themselves to denigrate us.’ His enemy, the diplomatist and Romantic writer, François-René de Chateaubriand, was to comment sardonically that Napoleon was ‘so lavish with French blood because he did not have a drop of it in his own veins’.

A sixteenth-century member of their family had sailed for Corsica, when the island was being colonized by the Genoese, in the hope of fortune if not fame. His descendant, Letizia’s husband Carlo, was a tall young man, who had studied law at Pisa; charming in manner though vain and frivolous by nature, socially ambitious and compulsively intrigant. He was to become well-known for the elegance of his clothes and for the sword he wore as evidence of his noble rank: he was known on the island as ‘Buonaparte il magnifico’; he himself added to his name the aristocratic di. He took to wearing cerise jackets, buckled shoes, embroidered stockings, puce knee breeches and a powdered wig with a black ribbon. It meant much to him fare bella figura.

Two years after his marriage, he had taken his wife to meet Pasquale Paoli, the guerrilla leader whose life’s work it was to drive the Genoese from Corsica. It had been a long and hard journey on horseback to Paoli’s headquarters at Corte, a small town on high ground in the middle of the island. Letizia had clearly been intrigued and impressed by the great patriot who, in turn, had obviously been attracted by the sixteen-year-old girl whom he had asked to sit down to play cards with him and by whom he had been soundly beaten.

Carlo had also created a favourable impression upon Paoli, who had asked him to go to Rome on his behalf to do his best to ensure that, when an attack was made on the Genoese island of Capraia, in order to draw Genoese troops away from the Corsican ports still in their hands, there were no reprisals by the papacy which had given Corsica as well as Capraia to Genoa. The Vatican was disposed to listen sympathetically to Carlo’s submissions; but Genoa now offered to sell Corsica to the King of France, ten thousand of whose troops landed to take possession of the island.

Carlo, who had by now returned to Corsica, once more left Ajaccio to join Paoli, taking Letizia with him. In the tangled evergreen shrubs of the maquis, the Corsican guerrillas had defeated the French who retreated from the island with the loss of five hundred prisoners and their commander in disgrace. They came again next year, however, more than twice as many of them, under a more gifted and resolute commander.

Once again, Carlo – accompanied once more by Letizia, pregnant with Napoleone and carrying her first baby, Giuseppe, in her arms–had left Ajaccio for the maquis and had established his family in a cave on Monte Rotondo, the highest ground on the island. Whenever she had emerged from the cave, ‘bullets whistled past [her] ears,’ she wrote later. ‘But I trusted in the protection of the Virgin Mary, to whom I had consecrated my unborn child.’ In the middle of May, a French officer had clambered up Monte Rotondo under the protection of a white flag. He had brought a message from his general: following Paoli’s defeat at Ponte Nuovo, Corte had fallen to the French; the guns were silent; Paoli himself was sailing into exile in England; all Corsicans under arms were free to return to their homes.

Carlo had accepted the offer and had taken Letizia and Giuseppe back to Ajaccio where, by the time Napoleone was born, the Corsican flag had been replaced by France’s fleurs de lys on a blue ground.

Puny as Napoleone had seemed at first – born so suddenly before his time – and worried as his mother had been that he might die, as two of her babies had already done, he soon grew stronger, being fed at his mother’s breast as well as by a wet-nurse, a sailor’s wife named Camilla Ilari.

In contrast with his quiet, retiring elder brother, Giuseppe, Napoleone grew into a rather rumbustious boy, often provoking Giuseppe into rowdy wrestling matches on the floor until their mother took all the furniture out of one of the rooms and left the children there to be as noisy and rough as Napoleone liked. She was not, however, an over-indulgent mother, insisting on daily baths, regular attendance at Mass, and often giving them a sharp buffet when they were tiresome or naughty. Napoleon himself, so he later confessed, was particularly unruly and stubborn as a child. ‘I would hit Giuseppe,’ he said, ‘and then force him to do my homework. If I was punished and given only plain bread to eat I would swap it for the shepherd’s chestnut bread, or I would go to find my nurse who would give me some little squids I quite liked.’

He recalled one particularly severe beating:

My grandmother was quite old and stooped [he was to tell his natural son, Alexandre Walewski], and she seemed to me and my sister, Pauline [born in 1780], like an old fairy godmother. She walked with a cane; and, although she was fond of us and gave us sweets, that did not stop us walking behind her and imitating her. Unfortunately she caught us doing this and told our mother who, while loving us, would stand no nonsense. Pauline was punished first because skirts are easier to pull up and down than trousers are to unbutton. That evening she tried to catch me also but I escaped. The next morning she pushed me away when I tried to kiss her. Later that day she said, ‘Napoleone, you are invited to lunch at the Governor’s house. Go and get changed.’ I went upstairs and began to get undressed. But my mother was like a cat waiting for a mouse. She suddenly entered the room. I realized, too late, that I had fallen into her trap and I had to submit to her beating.

His mother was, Napoleon said of her, ‘both strict and tender’; and he readily acknowledged the influence she had over the development of his character. ‘I was very well brought up by my mother,’ he was to say. ‘I owe her a great deal. She instilled pride.’ The children’s father sometimes worried that his wife was too strict with them; but she insisted that bringing up the children was her business, not his. She was masterful in her way.

All in all, Napoleone’s was a happy childhood, and a very familial one. The big, dark house was large but fully occupied behind its shuttered windows. Napoleone, his parents and siblings lived on the first floor. The ground floor was occupied by Letizia’s mother-in-law and an uncle, Luciano, Archdeacon of Ajaccio, who was often incapacitated by gout; while, on the second floor, lived various cousins who were, on occasions, a quarrelsome lot of whom Carlo would have been pleased to be rid had he felt able to turn them out. Relations between the two families went from bad to worse after a tub of slops was thrown out of a second-floor window on to one of Letizia’s dresses hanging out to dry below. Although Letizia saw to it that they did not live extravagantly, the Buonapartes did live quite well. Carlo had inherited two good vineyards and both pasture and arable land from his father, while Letizia had brought to the marriage over thirty acres, a mill and a large oven in which bread was baked from corn ground in the family mill. Milk and cheese came from the family’s goats, oil from their olives, tunny from the fishermen trawling the Golfe d’Ajaccio. Uncle Luciano was proud to say that the Buonapartes had ‘never paid for bread, wine or oil’. Napoleone, however, was not much interested in food – except for cherries, which he consumed with relish. Otherwise, he ate what was put before him without enthusiasm or comment.

When he was five years old, he was sent to a kindergarten kept by nuns at which he would arrive, despite his mother’s care, with his clothes awry and his stockings crumpled round his ankles, holding hands with a little girl named Giacominetta. This gave rise to a verse with which the other children would taunt him, deriding him for the stockings that fell down to his ankles and for his love for Giacominetta:

Napoleone di mezza calzettaFa l’amore a Giacominetta

Provoked by this, he would throw stones at his tormentors or charge at them with fists flailing.

From the kindergarten he was sent to a school for boys where he learned to read and write both French and Italian and was given lessons in arithmetic which he enjoyed and at which he excelled. In the hot summers of the holidays, his parents took their children to one or other of their farmhouses up in the hills or to a house near the sea, their mother putting them on horseback as soon as they could walk. Napoleone would be taken for rides by his aunt, Galtruda, who told him what she knew about horticulture and agriculture, showed him how to prune a vine, and pointed out to him the damage done to the olive trees by his uncle Luciano’s goats. He received a different kind of instruction from his mother, who sent Giuseppe and Napoleone to bed without supper from time to time so that they should ‘bear discomfort without protest’. She also told them that although they came of noble stock, they would have to make sacrifices in order to appear before the world as a nobleman was expected to do.

‘When you grow up, you’ll be poor,’ she said to Napoleone one day. ‘But it’s better, even if you have to live on dry bread, to have a fine room for receiving guests, a fine suit of clothes and a fine horse.’ She urged her children to be proud of their ancestry; and while Napoleon was always to bridle when his enemies referred to him derogatorily as ‘the Corsican’, he was not ashamed of his origins and never attempted to conceal them, though he did once say, ‘I’m not a Corsican. I was brought up in France, therefore I am French.’

His mother also persuaded him to believe in destiny and the power of providence and of spirits from another world. Whenever she heard surprising, unexpected news, she would suddenly cross herself and murmur under her breath, ‘Gesu!’

Prospering as a lawyer under French rule and appointed to a seat in the Corsican States-General and to membership of the Council of Twelve Nobles, Carlo was now able to afford a nurse for the children and two maids for his wife. She felt in need of the help: another son, Luciano (Lucien, as he was to be known in France), was born when Napoleone was six years old, and, two years after this, a daughter, Maria Anna, later known as Elisa. Then there was a fourth son, Luigi (Louis), two more daughters, Maria Paula (Pauline) and Maria Annunziata (Caroline) and, lastly, a fifth son, Girolamo (Jérôme), born in 1784.

Repeated pregnancies had not spoiled their mother’s good looks which were much admired by the French Governor of Corsica, Charles René, comte de Marbeuf, whose elderly wife had not accompanied him to the island and whose French mistress had returned home. He was said to be much in love with Letizia; but she, deeply religious and mindful of her duty to her husband, seems to have been content to enjoy his admiration without encouraging it, although there were those who believed they were lovers and that Luigi was his child.

Both she and her husband eagerly accepted his offer when the comte undertook not only to find places for Giuseppe and Napoleone at educational establishments in France but also, having no children of his own, to pay the necessary fees. So the brothers were sent to a good school at Autun and from there, so it was planned, Giuseppe should go to the seminary at Aix with a view to entering the church, while Napoleone should train for a career in the army at the military academy at Brienne-le-Château.

When this decision about his future was made, Napoleone was not yet nine years old; and Camilla, his former wet-nurse and still a family friend, wept to see him leave home so early. His mother displayed no such emotion. In accordance with Corsican custom, she took him and his brother Giuseppe to the Lazarists, a congregation of secular priests living under religious vows, to be blessed by the Father Superior, and then accompanied them across the high ground through Corte to the coast at Bastia to see them off on a ship bound for Marseilles. At the quayside, Napoleone seemed apprehensive: his mother bent down to kiss him and to whisper in his ear, ‘Coraggio.’ It was to be many months before she saw the boy again.

It seemed that both needed courage again when Napoleon and Joseph, as they were now to be known, had to say goodbye to each other when the time came for Napoleon to leave the school at Autun to go to the military academy at Brienne. Joseph cried bitterly and, although not a single tear was seen to run down Napoleon’s cheek, one of the school’s masters later attempted to comfort Joseph by saying to him, ‘He didn’t show it, but he’s just as sad as you.’

At Brienne, Napoleon was adept not only at mathematics but also at history and geography. A fellow pupil, however, said that ‘he had no taste for the study of languages and the arts’. His dancing and drawing were both described as being ‘very poor’, while his spelling was ‘erratic’. He was no good at German and he spoke inadequate French with a pronounced Corsican accent. He became renowned for a sharp temper, self-sufficiency, pride and arrogance, a rather priggish sense of decorum and a readiness to take offence. On one occasion, when he was about nine years old, having broken one of the school’s rules, he was ordered to wear a dunce’s cap, to exchange his blue uniform for an old brown coat, and to eat his dinner on his knees by the refectory door. Outraged by this indignity, he was suddenly sick on the floor and then, stamping his foot, he refused to kneel down, crying out, ‘I’ll eat my dinner standing up. In my family we kneel only to God, only to God! Only to God!’

Such outbursts naturally led to much teasing, but not, it seems, to bullying, since he was only too capable of responding furiously to provocation of that sort. When some boys, frightened by an explosion in a box of gunpowder during a display of fireworks on the King’s birthday, rushed headlong into his garden plot, his retreat from the other boys on holidays, knocking down the fence and trampling over his mulberry bushes, he attacked them and drove them off shouting threats and brandishing a hoe. To taunts about his diminutive size or his strange accent he would often react in this violent way, rushing at his tormentors, crying, ‘I’ll make you French pay for this.’ One of his reports described him as being, ‘imperious and stubborn’; another adverted to his ‘lack of social graces’. His only friend, Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne, who was later to become his secretary, wrote of him:

Bonaparte and I were eight years old when our friendship began…I was the only one of his youthful comrades who could accommodate themselves to his stern character…His ardent wish to acquire knowledge was remarkable even then. When he first came to the college he spoke only the Corsican dialect and the vice-principal gave him lessons in French…[He was very bad at Latin] but the facility with which he solved mathematical problems absolutely astonished me…

His conversation almost always bore the appearance of ill-humour, and he was never very amiable…His temper was not improved by the teasing he frequently experienced from the other boys who were fond of ridiculing him because of his odd Christian name and his country…He was certainly not much liked and rarely took part in the school’s amusements. During play-hours he used to withdraw to work in the library where he read with deep interest books of history. I often went off to play with my friends and left him to read by himself in the library.

One day his parents came to see him. His father, wearing a smart, new wig, was an embarrassing sight, bowing in an extravagantly polite way when he stood aside to allow the headmaster to pass first through a door. But his mother was all that a boy – a Corsican boy in an academy attended by so many French cadets from upper-class families – could hope to have. Her long dark hair was tied back in a chignon and covered by a lace headdress, and her dress was of white silk with a pattern of green flowers. She was not feeling well, however, having recently suffered from puerperal fever. She still had cause to complain of intermittent pain on her left side, an ailment which her husband hoped would be alleviated by a course of the waters at Bourbonne.

She heard with dismay that Napoleon had now set his heart on going into the navy and, as a preparation for life at sea, had taken to sleeping in a hammock in his cubicle. She anxiously pointed out the twin dangers of a life at sea: the chances of being killed on board and of being drowned if thrown into the water. When she returned to Ajaccio she asked the comte de Marbeuf to do all he could to dissuade her son from fulfilling his youthful ambition.

Letizia was also worried by the state of her husband’s health: he had lately lost much weight and had little appetite; he looked exhausted and his skin was discoloured by blotchy patches. Carlo was persuaded to go to Aix, then to Montpellier, to seek specialist advice. None of any use was given him: he died of cancer of the stomach in February 1785, a month before his thirty-ninth birthday, seized at the end, so Napoleon was later to say, with a passion for priests: ‘There were not enough for him in all Montpellier…He ended his life so pious that everyone there thought him a saint.’

Napoleon had by then left Brienne and, no longer set upon a career in the navy, had gone on to the École Militaire in Paris, an establishment which set almost as much store by religious observances as by military training: attendance at Mass was compulsory; so were confirmation and confession.

Napoleon was distressed to hear of his father’s death and worried that his mother, a widow with eight children, would find it hard to get by in her straitened circumstances. When someone offered to lend him money, he declined the offer with the words, ‘My mother has too many expenses already, I must not add to them.’

He was as proud and as priggish as ever, just as intolerant of criticism and of what he took to be slights to his amour propre, furious when he was made to feel foolish – as, for instance, when, never having seen ice before, he demanded to know who was putting glass in his water jug.

Stories were told of his throwing his musket at the head of a senior cadet who, having noticed a mistake in Napoleon’s drill, had rapped him over the knuckles, and of his rejecting the overtures of a former friend, Pierre François Laugier, son of a baron, whom he had criticized for associating with young men of homosexual tendencies. ‘Your new friends are corrupting you,’ he told Laugier. ‘So make a choice between them and me.’ Later he said, ‘You have scorned my advice, and you have renounced my friendship. Never speak to me again.’ Laugier’s response was to creep up behind him and push him over, upon which Napoleon ran after him and, grabbing him by the collar, threw him to the floor on which he hit his head against a stove.

‘I was insulted,’ Napoleon told the captain on duty who came up to admonish him. ‘I took my revenge. There is nothing more to be said.’ He then strode off in a manner which by then had become characteristic, his arms folded, his head bent forwards, taking long steps.

The sexual proclivities of Laugier induced Napoleon to write a paper to be sent to the Minister of War on the subject of the education of the young men of Sparta which, he thought, should be applied in the École Militaire and other French academies. He sent a draft to the headmaster of the school at Brienne who, having read it, advised him not to pursue the matter further.

A report on the Corsican cadet at the École Militaire described him as ‘solitary, haughty, egotistical…Reserved and studious, he prefers study to any kind of amusement…He enjoys reading good authors and has a sound knowledge of mathematics and geography…He is most proud and ambitious.’

5 A PROSTITUTE AND A PEST

‘A woman who is feared has no charm.’

NAPOLEON WAS NOW SIXTEEN YEARS OLD. His relations with women had, up till now, been largely limited to those with members of his own family and their friends; and he had had little opportunity of coming across girls of his own age. On holiday in Paris, however, he saw something of the two daughters of Panoria Permon, a Corsican of Greek descent, the attractive wife of an army contractor and the mother of two young daughters, Cécile and Laure. When Napoleon was commissioned soon after his sixteenth birthday, he called at the Permons’ house in the Place de Conti in his new officer’s uniform and long black boots which looked far too big for his painfully thin legs. The girls laughed at the sight of him; and since he was obviously put out by this unwelcome reception and seemed unable then, as always, to tolerate a joke at his own expense, Cécile told him that, now he was entitled to wear an officer’s sword, he must use it to protect the ladies and not mind if they teased him.

‘It’s obvious you’re just a little schoolgirl,’ Napoleon said grumpily.

‘What about you?’ the ten-year-old girl replied. ‘You’re just a puss-in-boots.’

In an attempt to show there was no ill feeling, however, the next time he called at the house, Napoleon brought with him a copy of Puss-in-Boots for one of the sisters and, for the other, a model which he had had made, though he could ill afford it, of Puss, running in front of the carriage of his master, the marquis de Carabas. Their mockery was not forgotten, however: for years thereafter Laure Permon was known by Napoleon as his ‘little pest’ and, a whole decade later, when she made some reference to the Puss-in-Boots episode, Laure said she would never forget Napoleon’s expression, as he came up to her to pinch her nose so hard that she cried out in pain. ‘You’re witty, you little pest,’ he said, ‘but you’re malicious. Don’t be that. A woman who is feared has no charm.’ Napoleon neither then nor later ever forgot a slight. Nor could Laure Permon ever forget the disdainful twist of his mouth when he was angry, nor yet his charm when he chose to exercise it.

Equipped with his sword and his boots, Napoleon had now to decide which regiment he should apply to join. He selected La Fère, a well-regarded artillery regiment stationed at Valence on the Rhône between Marseilles and Lyon, the nearest garrison town to Corsica.

In Valence he lived in a first-floor room in a house belonging to a fifty-year-old woman, Mme Bou. It was a small and by no means quiet room in which could clearly be heard the click of billiard balls in the room next door, the saloon of the Café Cercle. But he liked Mme Bou, who did his washing for him and mended his clothes, and life in Valence was generally pleasant enough: together with his fellow young officers he was invited to the houses of the local gentry. He rarely accepted these invitations, though, feeling he would be out of place, de trop. He found the money for a course of dancing lessons. He also scraped together the money to reimburse his mother for the postage of the clothes she sent him. He had little money to spare, however; and he would always borrow a book if he could, rather than buy one.

In the loneliness of his room, he was often desperately unhappy, even suicidal. ‘Always alone,’ he wrote, ‘in the throes of my melancholy my thoughts dwell on death…What great rage brings me now to wish for my destruction…I see no place for me in this world…As I must die sooner or later, why should I not kill myself?’

He read a great deal, mostly history and political theory, the works of Machiavelli, accounts of the religion of the Aztecs, the government of India, of ancient Rome, and books about England, being struck by the ascendancy of Parliament and the decline of the monarchy whose power and the power of whose ministers in France must, he decided, be limited. He also wrote a great deal, papers on the handling and uses of artillery, essays on Plato’s Republic, on the ancient Greeks and Persians, on modern England and ancient Greece, on Marigny’s History of the Arabs under the Caliphs. He wrote hurriedly and far into the night and was often unable to decipher what he had written in the morning.

He made précis of passages that interested him, lists of words hitherto unfamiliar to him and curious facts from books which caught his fancy – such as Jean Gaspard Lavater’s The Art of Judging Character from Men’s Faces. Having read Marigny’s History of the Arabs he noted, ‘Soliman is said to have eaten 100 pounds of meat a day…Mahomet did not know how to read or write. I find this improbable. He had 17 wives.’ From Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle he copied out, with evident fascination, long passages about castration and about testicles – ‘Some men are born with only one, others have three; these men are stronger and more vigorous.’ His interest in such matters was at this time largely academic.

At Valence, he made the acquaintance of the family of a Mme Colombier whose daughter was named Caroline; but, as he later commented, ‘It will be considered scarcely credible, perhaps: our whole business consisted of our eating cherries together.’ On a brief visit to Paris in November 1787, when he was eighteen, he encountered a young prostitute in the Palais Royal one cold evening and took her to bed; but the experience seems to have made no deep impression upon him. He recorded in detail the conversation he had with her, the questions he asked: how could she bear to walk about in the arcades in such bitter weather? Was she not exhausted by such a life as hers? Was there not some other work which would be better suited to her health? She must come from the north to brave such cold as this? How did she lose her virginity? Was she angry with the army officer who took it? How did she come to Paris?

She told him another officer had brought her there. ‘He deserted me also,’ she said. ‘Now I have a third. I have been living with him for three years. He’s French, but has business in London. He’s there now. Let’s go to your place.’

‘What will we do when we get there?’

‘We’ll get warm. Come on. You’ll have great pleasure.’

Whether he did or not Napoleon did not say. He did say, however, that ‘more than most people’, he hated prostitution and always ‘felt sullied by a look from women of that sort’, but that this young woman’s pale cheeks and soft voice ‘at once overcame [his] doubts’.

When, in June 1788, Napoleon had been posted from Valence to Auxon, he had, in order to ease the burdens imposed upon his mother, offered to have the eleven-year-old Louis, then his favourite brother, to stay with him; and he did what he could to help Letizia when, following the death of their friend Marbeuf and the establishment in Corsica of a new, stricter authority by officials of the Ministry of Finance, subsidies due to her for improvements carried out on the family’s land were withheld. He wrote letters of protest to the new authorities in Corsica; and he went to Paris to press in person his mother’s claims.

After the outbreak of revolution in Paris the following year, Napoleon warmly welcomed the decrees of the Constituent Assembly and the formulation of a new constitution. Many of his fellow-officers went abroad in apprehension or disgust; but he remained to become Secretary of the local Society of Friends of the Constitution and to take an oath ‘to die rather than allow a foreign power to invade French soil’.

He spent his leaves in Corsica. His mother, who had given birth to thirteen children, five of whom had died in infancy, was unwell, still suffering from the after-effects of puerperal fever and, occasionally, painful stiffness in her left side. He took her to Guagno for a course of the waters there; but she found them of little use. She was still a good-looking woman, though, and was always neatly dressed in her widow’s weeds. She had received two offers of marriage, but had declined them both for her children’s sake.

When Napoleon went on leave in September 1791, Joseph was by then a lawyer – twenty-three years old, and a rising figure in local government. Lucien was sixteen, Louis three years younger; Jérôme, a rather tiresome, cheeky boy, was nine. Elisa, at fourteen the oldest of the three girls, was still at school at St Cyr; her sister, Pauline, Napoleon’s favourite, was eleven, and Caroline was nine.

In caring for them their mother had the help of but one servant now, Severia, who was paid a mere pittance – all that the family could afford, since a contract entered into by Carlo with the French government for a plantation of ten thousand mulberry trees for the manufacture of silk had been cancelled.

Carlo’s old uncle, Luciano, the Archdeacon, who now spent most of his time in bed nursing his gout, was known to have concealed in his mattress a large bag of gold, the profits from a number of most un-archdiaconal dealings in land, farm animals and wine; but he was unwilling to part with a single coin. An attempt by the beguiling Pauline, who was sent to his room to see if she could lay her hands on one or two while his attention was distracted, ended in rowdy failure when the whole bag tumbled to the floor. Alarmed by the old man’s cries, Letizia rushed downstairs to see what had happened. Uncle Luciano informed her that he was only looking after the gold for a friend. Letizia picked up the coins and handed them to him. He counted them carefully before replacing them in the bag and stuffing the bag back into the mattress.

The old man now had but a short time to enjoy whatever comfort his hoard of gold could give him. In the hope of bringing him some relief from his gout and his other ailments, Napoleon, who still had a lingering affection for him, wrote to a Swiss doctor, Simon Tissot, for his advice. But Tissot, who had written a number of eccentric though celebrated books – in one of which he propounded the view that masturbation led inevitably to insanity – was not prepared to help. He endorsed the letter as of ‘little interest’ and did not trouble to send a reply.

Soon afterwards, Uncle Luciano died, leaving his gold to his nephew’s sons and enabling Napoleon to take part in the expensive business of Corsican politics and to ensure his election to the command of a battalion in the Corsican National Guard at the age of twenty-two.

Back in Paris, he was a witness of the growing violence of the Revolution, of the attack on the Tuileries and the events which led to the prison massacres of 7 September 1792. Three weeks before the massacres, his sister Elisa’s convent at St Cyr was closed and Napoleon, concerned for the fifteen-year-old girl’s safety, went to fetch her, bringing her back to Paris in her black school uniform and feathered taffeta bonnet.

Elisa had left home soon after her eighth birthday and had received a rigorous education at the school which had been founded by Louis XIV’s mistress, Mme de Maintenon. Horace Walpole had seen the girls there marching off to chapel two by two in a most orderly fashion, ‘each band headed by a nun…to sing the whole service’. There were no signs then of the self-confident woman Elisa was later to become. On a previous visit, when Napoleon had visited the school with Mme Permon, Elisa had come into the room looking miserable and had burst into tears. When asked what the trouble was, she had said that she had no money to contribute to a farewell party which was being given for one of the other girls. Mme Permon gave her some.

Promoted captain by now, Napoleon took her to the opera, an entertainment which the nuns at St Cyr had warned her to avoid as an indecent spectacle. Her brother noticed that, obedient to their admonitions, she sat at first with her eyes tight shut; but, shortly, unable to resist its allure, she sat in rapt attention.

At Marseilles on her way back to Corsica, her uniform with the cross and fleurs de lys embroidered on the front of the black dress caught the attention of a threatening crowd who, pointing to this and her feathered bonnet, cried, ‘Death to the aristocrats!’ ‘We’re no more aristocrats than you are,’ Napoleon shouted back at them and, snatching the bonnet from his sister’s head, he threw it to them. One of them caught it and they all cheered.

Back once more in Corsica, Napoleon – whom, so his brother Lucien said, no one now cared to oppose – was at loggerheads with the autocratic Paoli, who, having returned to Corsica, was intent upon separating Corsica from revolutionary France with which the Buonapartes were now identified. Napoleon, having decided to make an attempt to seize Ajaccio for France, sent a message to his mother telling her to take the family to a ruined tower at Capitello, east of the gulf of Ajaccio, and to remain there during the forthcoming bombardment of the town. Concerned that they might not be safe at Capitello, he followed them there in a small boat and sent them on to Calvi, a town which was held by the French.

Having failed to take Ajaccio, he joined them at Calvi and with them set sail for Toulon. The family’s house was pillaged by the Paolists, and their farmhouses sacked and their mill dismantled. A Paolist congress condemned the Buonapartes to ‘perpetual execration and infamy’.

Letizia was not happy living first in Toulon, then in primitive lodgings in the village of La Valette, afterwards in Bandol and later in Marseilles, where the family’s gloomy, ill-furnished fourth-floor rooms were in the rue Pavillon, a poor district little better than a slum. However, before long, thanks to Cristoforo Saliceti, a fellow-Corsican, a more comfortable house had been found for them, as well as a post as storekeeper for Lucien and an appointment as assistant to a war commissary for Joseph, while Napoleon continued to do well in the army.

But Letizia missed her homeland. Her halting French, spoken with a strong Corsican accent, was scarcely comprehensible; while malicious stories were already being spread about her daughters who, so it was later alleged, were behaving in a scandalous manner, ‘walking the streets in the evening like certain young women who frequent the rue St Honoré and the Palais Royal’.

Even when Napoleon, once he was in a position to help his family financially, had rented the Sallé château, a large country house near Antibes, for them, Letizia still behaved in a Corsican manner, and still insisted on doing her own washing. After all, as she, the most thrifty of women, was often to say in the future, who knew how long the family’s present fortune would last?

Her daughters had no such apprehension as they bowled along the country lanes in a barouche provided for them by their brother, Napoleon, who by then was earning fifteen thousand livres a year.

6 THE ‘ADORABLE FRIEND’

‘How could you think I could cease to love you?’

DEPRESSED AS NAPOLEON HAD BEEN in Valence and frustrated as he had been while in Corsica, soon after his return to France he had begun to make a name for himself in the army. When his superior officer had been wounded during the siege of Toulon in 1793, Napoleon had been given command of the artillery there and, having handled it with exemplary skill, he had been promoted to général-de-brigade at the age of twenty-four. He had since been employed in preparing plans for the operations of the army which the government in Paris had sent against the Austrians in Italy; and, in October 1795, he had helped to defeat supporters of a counter-revolution in Paris by ordering his guns to fire upon the mob – the mob he always hated and feared – his famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’. ‘The enemy attacked us at the Tuileries,’ he had reported to his brother, Joseph. ‘We killed a great many of them. They killed thirty of our men and wounded another sixty. Now all is quiet. As usual I did not receive a scratch. I could not be happier.’ Four hundred men lay dead in the church of St-Roch; and Napoleon’s future was made. ‘I have lodgings and a carriage at your disposal,’ he told Joseph. ‘I have already sent sixty thousand livres in gold, silver and paper money to the family, so you need have no worries…You know I live only for the pleasure of what I can do for the family.’

Not long afterwards, he was appointed to the command of the Army of the Interior. For this rapid change in his fortunes he was much indebted to the support and patronage of the vicomte Paul de Barras, who had been entrusted with dictatorial powers by the National Convention.

Napoleon was now in a position to marry, and he turned his thoughts seriously to the choice of a bride, preferably a rich one. According to Barras, who wrote long after their friendship had been broken, he was not above dancing attendance, in a most uncharacteristic manner, on wealthy women who, or whose husbands, he thought might be in a position to advance him in his career. One such was the wife of a man of some influence – Mme Louise Turreau de Lignières, with whom, it was improbably suggested, he conducted a brief affair. Another was Mme Ricord upon whom ‘he heaped attentions, handing her her gloves and fan and showing her the deepest respect when she mounted her horse, taking her for walks hat in hand, and appearing to be in constant terror lest she should meet with some accident’.

It was Barras who introduced him to another rich woman, Mme Montausier, a woman who was said to be worth over a million francs and who owned a theatre which was also a brothel in the Palais Royal. She was very much older than Napoleon: this in itself did not much concern him; but for one reason or another the relationship did not prosper.

It was not only money and position he was after, as he told his brother Joseph; he ‘badly wanted a home’; and if he could find a young woman with a handsome dowry, of course so much the better. In the summer of 1794, while occupying lodgings in the house of the comte de Laurenti near Nice, he thought that he might have found such a bride in the person of the count’s sixteen-year-old daughter Emilie whose father, he had good reason to believe, was quite rich. He asked him, evidently without much hope of success, if he might marry Emilie. Her father, polite in his refusal, considered the proposal premature: the young general was about to embark on a campaign in Italy; there would be time enough to consider the matter when his daughter was older and Bonaparte had returned home. In the meantime, the count and his wife thought it as well to send Emilie to stay with cousins at Grasse.

Later on that year in Marseilles, Napoleon was introduced by his brother Joseph to the family of the rich textile-and-soap merchant, François Clary (the husband of one of their mother’s friends), who had two daughters, Julie, aged twenty-two, whom Joseph was to marry, and Bernardine Eugénie Désirée, aged sixteen. Julie was a plain young woman with big bulging eyes and a thick flat nose. Short and spotty, she was described in later life as ‘a perfectly vulgar little woman, very thin and very ugly’, ‘hideous’ even and ‘pimply to the last degree’.

Napoleon expressed the opinion that looks in a wife did not matter. ‘It isn’t necessary that our wives should be good looking,’ he said. ‘With a mistress it is different. A plain mistress is a monstrosity. She would fail in her principal, indeed in her only duty.’

It had to be conceded that Julie was extremely unprepossessing in appearance; but she was both good-natured and intelligent.

Her sister was known in the family as Désirée but Napoleon, who was often in future to choose his own names for his women friends, called her Eugénie. She was rather fat and not particularly good-looking with large, slightly protuberant dark eyes; but she was an affectionate girl, kind-hearted like her sister, amenable and shy with a pleasant singing voice, the promise of a generous dowry, and what Napoleon described as ‘the most beautiful teeth imaginable’ as well as the ‘prettiest hands in the world’. A pretty hand and a pretty foot were always features upon which he was likely to comment. His own, so a future valet was to notice, were exceptionally well formed and his fingernails remarkably well cared for.

There could be no doubt that Désirée found him attractive; and he himself was sufficiently taken with her to carry about with him a few strands of her hair in a locket. Her father, however, was not inclined to encourage the friendship: the young Corsican might well have a bright future before him in the army; but he had little money and his character was not appealing. Introspective, unsociable and gloomy, he had been heard to speak of suicide.

Discouraged by her parents, Napoleon wrote to tell his dear Eugénie, after his departure from Marseilles, that, while her sweet nature inspired him with affection, he did not think that, being ‘so occupied with work’, he ought to allow that affection to ‘cut into [his] soul’. As for her, he went on to say, she had a talent for music: she should develop that talent, buy a piano of her own and engage a music teacher. Condescendingly he gave her peculiarly ill-informed advice about her singing technique.

In his next letter, not written until five months later, Napoleon returned to this musical theme: he would subscribe to a music magazine on her behalf and he sent her a list of books which he recommended that she should read. Four more months passed before Napoleon once again appeared in Marseilles and presented himself at the Clarys’ house.

Eugénie was now seventeen, less shy and reserved but as sweet-natured as ever. Before long, Napoleon fell in love with her; and now he made it clear that he would like to marry her and he evidently contrived to take her to bed. ‘You are always in my thoughts,’ he told her. ‘How can you think I could cease to love you?’ Mme Clary was deeply disturbed by this development: after all, her daughter was by now a most attractive girl with a dowry of one hundred thousand livres, whereas Napoleon was a gauche Corsican with no more to offer than his army pay. She already had one son-in-law who had no money of his own; and, for her, as she is supposed to have said, one Bonaparte in the family was quite enough.

Her mother’s reluctance to accept Napoleon into their family did not deter him in his pursuit of her. He wrote to her regularly after his return to Paris. He addressed her as his ‘adorable friend’; he was hers for life; he asked her to write to him at least once a day. Yet this ardour did not long survive his absence from her; soon he let days go by before bothering to go to the poste restante to fetch the letters, sad and expressive of longing and insecurity, which she wrote to him.

Away from Marseilles, he came across women from a different world. He met Victorine, comtesse de Chastenay, a clever young woman who was intrigued by the pallor of his gaunt cheeks, his long, unwashed hair, his extraordinary taciturnity. After dinner she sang a song in Italian and, when she had finished, she asked him if her pronunciation was correct. He answered her with the one word: ‘No.’ The next day he was more forthcoming, so much so, indeed, that they talked for four hours during which he elaborated his didactic views on all manner of subjects – from Shakespeare (whose plays were ‘pitiful’) and the poems of Ossian, exposed as forgeries by Samuel Johnson (and extravagantly admired by Napoleon), to the Parisiennes’ use of fans (which, so he said, betrayed their feelings as demonstrated by the actress Mlle Constant at the Com-édie Française).

Napoleon also met at this time another interesting young woman, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a rich physician’s flighty divorced Scottish wife whose illegitimate daughter may have been the Prince of Wales’s, as she liked it to be supposed, though the child might equally well have been fathered by one of her other lovers. One day she and Napoleon went for a walk together in the Tuileries gardens. It was not a success: he spoke of his dislike and distrust of the English and his wish to see the earth open and swallow up the whole race. She said that it was not very tactful of him to say so in her presence. To this he replied that he had always supposed that the Scots loved France and disliked the English. She said that she herself preferred England to Scotland.

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