Napoleon: His Wives and Women

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 (#ulink_5aafc24b-1c65-5581-94c8-65c8fa6dbc7c)

‘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.