Napoleon: His Wives and Women

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 (#ulink_3f06147c-2ad5-5833-b88c-4c8b001ce493)

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 (#ulink_cafafd2e-2872-5173-9dbe-2d00a02dccc0)

‘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: