Napoleon: His Wives and Women

This letter was intercepted by a British cruiser in the Mediterranean, together with a letter from her son, Eugeèane de Beauharnais, to Josephine in which he wrote:

Bonaparte has been miserable since a conversation with Junot…I have heard that Captain Charles travelled in your carriage until you were within three posting stages of Paris, that you have seen him in Paris, and been to the theatre with him, that he gave you your little dog, and that he is with you now. I feel sure this is all gossip, invented by your enemies. Bonaparte loves you as much as ever and is as anxious as ever to embrace you. I hope that when you come here all this will be forgotten.

It was not to be forgotten, though; and while talking incessantly about Josephine’s betrayal, Bonaparte was ready to betray her, too.

Below deck in the French ships that had arrived in Aboukir Bay earlier that month were some three hundred women. Some – laundresses, cantinières and the like – were officially authorized to be there. But, although strict orders had been issued against the embarkation of other women, wives and mistresses, several had been smuggled aboard in the uniforms of their husbands’ and lovers’ regiments: General Verbier, for example, spirited aboard his attractive Italian wife; while Lieutenant Fourès of the 22nd Regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval also contrived to take with him his wife, Pauline, an exceptionally pretty, blue-eyed, twenty-year-old young woman who looked most attractive in the uniform of her husband’s regiment, blue jacket and tight, white breeches. Her fair hair, gathered tightly under one of her husband’s cocked hats, was said, when she was en déshabillé, to fall to her waist. She was the illegitimate daughter of a cook named Bellisle and was known to her friends as Bellilotte. Before her recent marriage to Lieutenant Fourès she had been employed as a vendeuse in a milliner’s shop in Paris.

Bonaparte caught his first glimpse of her on the first day of December 1798 when he and his staff gathered to watch the ascent of a balloon which, so the Egyptian spectators were assured, could fly through the air from one country to another. The display, however, was a disaster: the balloon caught fire and the basket crashed to the earth. ‘It was a mere kite,’ commented one of the Egyptian spectators whom it was intended to impress. ‘If the wind had driven it a little further, the trick would have worked and the French would have claimed that it had travelled to a faraway country.’

Amongst the witnesses to this fiasco was Pauline Fourès who soon caught the attention of one of Bonaparte’s aides-de-camp, his stepson, Eugeène de Beauharnais, who pointed her out to one of his companions. Overhearing their comments, Bonaparte looked at her, too. That evening he saw her again and spent minutes on end staring at her with that appraising, silent watchfulness which so often disturbed and embarrassed the objects of his attention.

Upon his arrival in Cairo, he had been presented with some becoming young women by the sheiks. There were rumours that he had also been offered young men and that he had accepted one of them and had indulged in a homosexual experience which he did not care to repeat. He fancied only one of the young women offered to him; the others were either too fat for his taste or their smell displeased him. Napoleon had a very keen sense of smell which, however, did not appear to disgust him on the battlefield. Later in Russia, when he entered Smolensk, the stench of corpses was so nauseating that even the most hardened and experienced soldiers were sick. But Napoleon appeared unmoved. ‘Isn’t that a fine sight?’ he said to Armand-Augustin-Louis, marquis de Caulaincourt, indicating the flickering glare of the burning buildings and the bodies of the Russian soldiers amidst the flames.

‘Horrible, sire,’ said Caulaincourt.

‘You must always remember,’ Napoleon told him, ‘the saying of one of the Roman emperors, that the corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.’

Yet, Baron Fain, Napoleon’s former secretary, said, ‘I have seen him move away from more than one servant who was far from suspecting the secret aversion his smell had inspired.’ And, in Madrid and on St Helena, he was to turn girls away because he could not stand their smell. In Spain, indeed, the smell of an actress to whom he was introduced so offended him that, so he said, ‘I very nearly fainted, I did indeed.’ Now in Egypt, however, the evidently odourless or fragrant Zenab, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the sheikh El-Bekri, did appeal to him; and, it being supposed that he took her to his bed, she became known as ‘the General’s Egyptian’.

Her father, it seems, raised no objection. A man who consumed stupendous quantities of brandy and burgundy every night, who was much occupied with a handsome slave boy, El-Bekri may well have believed that the liaison might be turned to his advantage. It was not, however, to benefit poor Zenab: when the French were about to leave Egypt, religious zealots set about punishing women who had consorted with the infidel foreigners.

Zenab had been debauched by the French [the chronicler, Abd el-Rahman El-Djabarti recorded]. The Pasha’s emissaries presented themselves after sundown. They brought her and her father to court. She was questioned about her conduct, and made reply that she repented of it. Her father’s opinion was solicited. He answered that he disavowed his daughter’s conduct. The unfortunate girl’s head was accordingly cut off.

17 ‘CLEOPATRA’ (#ulink_de41d76c-153b-5c90-9956-39c675a7ba99)

‘Heavens! It isn’t my fault.’

IT APPEARS THAT Bonaparte’s brief supposed affair with the pitiable Zenab was petering out, or perhaps already over, when his attention was drawn to Pauline Fourès, whom he soon set about separating from her husband. He gave orders for the lieutenant to leave immediately by diligence for the coast at Rosetta. From there he was to take dispatches (all of no importance) to Paris by way of Malta. He was to remain in Paris for ten days and then – Bonaparte might well have tired of Bellilotte by then – Fourès was to return to Egypt ‘as quickly as possible’.

As soon as the unwilling Fourès had been dispatched on this assignment, Bonaparte sent General Andoche Junot to Mme Fourès to make his proposition. But Junot delivered his message in such a coarse and clumsy way that she indignantly declared that she would always remain faithful to her husband. Bonaparte thereupon sent a more reliable and tactful emissary in the person of General Geraud-Christophe-Michel Duroc to Mme Fourès with an apology for General Junot’s clumsy manner and the present of a valuable bracelet.

Soon afterwards, Bonaparte arranged for General Dupuy, the military commandant of Cairo, to give a dinner party to which Mme Fourès was to be invited with several other ladies. During the course of this party, Bonaparte subjected her to that intense observation with which he had examined her during the balloon fiasco.

Towards the end of the meal, when coffee was served, the officer sitting next to Mme Fourès upset his cup on her dress. Having apologized for the evident mishap, he offered to escort her to a bedroom where she might do her best to clean her skirt before rejoining the party. While she was endeavouring to remove the stain, General Bonaparte walked into the room. It was a long time before either of them reappeared.

The next day, Bellilotte was installed in a house next door to the Commander-in-Chief’s in Eskebiya square; and the young woman, by then known as ‘Cleopatra’, was often to be seen riding about the town in Bonaparte’s carriage attended by his aides-de-camp, a duty from which Eugène de Beauharnais was excused only after objecting that he could hardly be expected to perform it for his stepfather’s mistress.

No attempt was made to conceal the liaison which Bonaparte flaunted as a retaliation for Josephine’s affair with Hippolyte Charles. ‘Rumour has it that the young and pretty wife has caught the fancy of the Commander-in-Chief,’ wrote Major Detroye in his diary. ‘Details of his taking possession of her are openly talked about by everyone.’ ‘This liaison was soon the talk of headquarters and the subject of nearly every conversation,’ Bourrienne confirmed.

Lieutenant Fourès heard about it as soon as he returned to Cairo. This was sooner than anyone expected, since the courier ship, Le Chasseur, in which he was sailing was intercepted en route from Alexandria to Malta by H.M.S. Lion – whose captain behaved in a manner which seemed to suggest that he knew quite well why Lieutenant Fourès was aboard Le Chasseur. The French ship’s crew and her passengers were delivered up to the Turks, while Lieutenant Fourès, spared this fate and having given an undertaking not to serve against England for the rest of the war, was sent back to Alexandria where the officer in command, General Marmont, vainly endeavoured to delay his departure for Cairo where he was sure to discover what his wife had been doing in his brief absence.

It was not long before he did discover it and, when he did so, his behaviour was so violent that Bellilotte applied for a divorce which was granted her without delay; and so Mademoiselle Bellisle, as she now called herself, became the Commander-in-Chief’s maîtresse en titre. He intimated that he himself would obtain a divorce and marry her once she had given birth to his child. Yet, try as they would, pregnancy eluded her. The ‘stupid little slut’ wouldn’t make a child for him, Bonaparte complained to Bourrienne. When told of Bonaparte’s annoyance and pressed to consider how well her future would be assured if she did provide him with an heir, she responded, ‘Heavens! It isn’t my fault.’

Within a few weeks, Bonaparte left Cairo to lead an invasion of Syria as a means of preventing a Turkish incursion into Egypt. Mlle Bellisle would have liked to go with him; but neither now nor later did he permit a woman to accompany him in the field.

Bonaparte’s progress in the field was far from being as successful as it had been in Italy. The campaign had opened with a victory over the fierce and frantic Mamelukes in – as Bonaparte dramatically called it – the Battle of the Pyramids, and it ended with the defeat of a Turkish force – half the size claimed for it in Bonaparte’s report – in Aboukir Bay. Between the two engagements the French expeditionary force had not greatly distinguished itself.

Following the destruction of almost the entire French fleet by the ships of Admiral Nelson in the Battle of the Nile, Bonaparte’s troops suffered a series of setbacks – which were nevertheless transformed into victories in his reports to the Directory – and were involved in a succession of disgraceful atrocities. When the fortress of Jaffa surrendered, the place was sacked and looted and the garrison, including women and children, were slaughtered. Promised that their lives would be spared, three thousand Turks capitulated and were then drowned or bayonetted to death on the orders of Bonaparte who made the excuse that he could not spare the ammunition to shoot them, nor the supplies to feed them.

Bonaparte, still enraged no doubt by the knowledge that he had been so humiliatingly cuckolded by his wife, displayed similar ruthlessness at Acre where two thousand French soldiers lay wounded or suffering from plague outside its walls. The British naval commander offered to take the wounded on to his ships, but this offer was refused because Bona-parte declined to have any reason to be grateful to the enemy. ‘The heart of our army was pierced by our leaving our plague-stricken men behind,’ wrote an officer who was distressed to have to abandon them. ‘They pleaded with us not to forsake them…Their heads were cut off by the enemy as soon as we left.’

Other wounded men and those suffering from plague, whom Napoleon wished to have poisoned, had to be left behind as the rest of the bedraggled troops marched along the rough and seemingly endless roads back to Cairo. ‘I saw officers with amputated limbs thrown from the stretchers by their bearers,’ Bourrienne wrote. ‘I saw wounded men and those suffering from plague left by the roadside…We were entirely surrounded by the dying, by pillagers and arsonists…Our march was illuminated by towns and villages set on fire by our angry men…The whole countryside was on fire…The sun was hidden by palls of smoke…We had the sea to our right and, to our left and behind us, the desert we ourselves were laying waste as we advanced.’

The Directory was told none of this. ‘We want for nothing here,’ General Bonaparte reported in anticipation of his return. ‘We are bursting with strength, good health and high spirits.’ Any faults that might have been found in the conduct of the campaign were either glossed over or blamed on others. As Bourrienne said:

The full truth was never to be found in Bonaparte’s dispatches when that truth was even slightly unfavourable and when he was in a position to dissimulate. He was adept at disguising, altering, or suppressing it whenever possible. Frequently he even changed the dispatches of others and then had them printed, whenever their view differed from his own or might cast some aspersion on his reputation and actions…He never hesitated to disguise the truth when he could make it embellish his own glory. He considered it sheer stupidity not to do so.

Bonaparte’s intention to return to France was not divulged to Mme Fourès. Not long before he set sail, he had been in a light-hearted mood as he strolled in the garden of the palace of the Mameluke, Mohammed Bey el-Elfi, talking to his aides-de-camp and leaving them from time to time to give a playful but painful pinch to Mme Fourès who, dressed in the hussar’s tunic and tight trousers which so became her, was taking the air in a different part of the garden.

He had still not told her of his intention to leave Egypt when he bade her a brief farewell, gave her a hurried kiss, a pat and another of his sharp pinches and was gone, assuring her he would return in a few days.

General Kléber was left in command of the army. He much disliked Bonaparte and was only too ready to accede to Mme Fourès’s request and send her back to France where her presence would, no doubt, embarrass her former lover. She accordingly returned to France in 1800.

Bonaparte declined to see her upon her return, but he did give her several sums of money and a large house just outside Paris. Still a most attractive and enterprising young woman in her early twenties, she soon married a former major serving with the Turkish army, Henri de Ranchoup, with whom, however, she seems never to have been on very close terms. While he served abroad in various consular posts in Spain and Sweden, she remained in France, living at first in the house given to her by Bonaparte, then at Craponne in Haute-Loire. She occupied her time in painting, playing the harp and in writing novels; the first, a romantic historical novel entitled Lord Wentworth and then a second, in the same vein – Une châtelaine du douzième síècle