Napoleon: His Wives and Women

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’ (#ulink_91cf3d2f-9cfd-5b06-8f2b-e44d882089d9)

‘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.

7 CHEZ LES PERMONS (#ulink_c19b1e16-326b-5a40-8267-8513ce857a5d)

‘Napoleon, there are two men in you.’

AN UNCLE OF CÉCILE AND LAURE PERMON, the girls who had teased Napoleon in his absurdly big boots, found him ‘pretty morose’. This uncle, Demetrius Comnène, had first caught sight of the fifteen-year-old boy in the Palais Royal as he looked all about him, his ‘nose in the air’. He had invited him to dinner; but the occasion was not a success: the boy’s conversation was largely limited to condemnation of the extravagance of his fellow students, so much better off, so much more aristocratic than the little Corsican upstart.

Napoleon had created no better impression when subsequently he had gone for dinner and had been put up for the night by the Permons. But some time later, when Laure Permon saw him again, she felt that there was, after all, something peculiarly arresting about him. Through a window she watched him approach across the courtyard:

He was very careless of his appearance [Laure wrote]; and his hair, which was ill combed and ill powdered, gave him a slovenly look…He had a shabby round hat drawn over his forehead, and I recollect his hair hanging over the collar of his grey greatcoat, which afterwards became as famous as the white plume of Henri IV. He wore no gloves, because, as he used to say, they were a useless luxury. His boots were ill-made and unpolished…His complexion was yellow and seemingly unhealthy, his features angular and sharp.

He approached the house in a clumsy walk. Yet, when he was inside the house, Laure Permon was struck by ‘his face without being able to explain why’. When he smiled his features, which she had earlier thought ugly, were lent an undeniable charm.

He became a regular visitor to the Permons’ house; and, when in one of his happier moods, he and Laure, by then eleven years old, would dance together in the middle of the room while Cécile played tunes for them on the piano. Or he would sit by the fire after dinner, stretching his legs out on the hearth, crossing his arms on his chest, and call out to Mme Permon, asking her to come to sit by him to talk about Corsica and his mother. She would do so with reluctance for the smell of his dirty, wet boots drying by the flames was so nauseous that she was compelled to bury her nose in a handkerchief or make some excuse to leave the room until Napoleon, at last realizing what drove her away, would have the maid scrape the mud from his boots before entering the sitting room.

The more he saw of Mme Permon the more he admired her. She was an attractive woman, vivacious, amusing, elegant in her dress and, in Napoleon’s words, ‘very amiable’. ‘She loves her country dearly,’ he said, ‘and she loves the company of Corsicans.’ She claimed to have read only one book in her whole life, Fénelon’s didactic romance Télé-maque; but she was quick-witted and astute.

In common with most men, Napoleon found her alluring. One day he called at the house holding a bunch of violets and this gallantry, as her daughter Laure said, was ‘so unusual’ for him that they could not help laughing.

On another occasion, he found Laure and her mother in tears: Monsieur Permon was gravely ill and not expected to survive. He died two days later; and, not long afterwards, Napoleon astonished Mme Permon by proposing that, as soon as her widowhood would conventionally allow it, they should get married. Once again Mme Permon could not help laughing. ‘My dear Napoleon,’ she said, according to Laure, ‘do let us talk seriously. You think you know my age. But really you know nothing about it; and I shan’t tell you. That’s my secret; though I will tell you that I’m old enough to be your mother. So spare me this kind of joke. It upsets me.’ It was ‘a ridiculous proposal’.

‘I want to get married,’ Napoleon persisted with characteristic lack of tact, ‘and what I’ve suggested would suit me in many ways. Think it over.’ He had given the matter much careful thought, he said. He was clearly much disgruntled when he took his leave, and was never to forgive her for his rebuff.

Before he left, she reminded him of his undertaking to try to obtain a commission for a cousin of hers. Although he had seemed quite willing to do so when she had first broached the subject, Laure said that ‘he did not seem quite as willing’ now.

‘Napoleon,’ Mme Permon said, ‘there are two men in you. I beg you always to be the one I love and admire…Do not allow the other one to gain the upper hand.’ He did not reply.

Two days later, he called once more at the house, on this occasion taking with him several aides-de-camp. Mme Permon, so Laure said, once again brought up the subject of her cousin’s commission. Napoleon was now non-committal. She accused him of prevarication. He told her she was being unjust to him. He took her hand to kiss it in farewell; but she snatched it away so violently that she hit him in the eye. She did not apologize. Promises were nothing to her, she told him, ‘actions everything’.

‘These young men are laughing at us,’ he said to her quietly, indicating the aides-de-camp, as he tried to take her hand again. ‘We are acting like two children.’ She made no reply as she folded her arms across her chest so that he could make no further attempt to kiss her hand. He picked up his hat and left.

Some years later at a reception at the Tuileries, Laure Permon, by then married to Napoleon’s friend, General Andoche Junot, encountered Napoleon again.

‘Well, mam’selle Loulou – you see I don’t forget the names of old friends – haven’t you got a kind word for me?’

He had taken my hand [Laure Junot recalled] and, pulling me towards him, he looked at me so closely that it made me lower my eyes…‘General,’ I replied, smiling, ‘it’s not for me to speak first.’

He smiled and said, ‘Very well parried…She’s got her mother’s quickness…By the way, how is Mme Permon?’

‘Ill, General. She is very ill.’

‘Ah! Really, as bad as that. Please give her my kind regards.

She’s wrong-headed, damnably wrong-headed. But she has a kind heart and she’s very generous.’

A few days later, Mme Permon, by then feeling better, invited General Junot and her daughter to dinner. After the meal, she lay down on a sofa and informed them that she would give a dance to celebrate their recent wedding. Junot offered to make a list of the people who were to be invited. Mme Permon suggested Napoleon. The others expressed their astonishment; but Mme Permon said, ‘Why do you sound so surprised? Just because I’m a Corsican, do you think I want to indulge in a vendetta? I can’t be bothered with that.’

‘All right,’ said Junot, ‘I’ll come to fetch you.’