Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (17 page)

On August 5, Josephine traveled through Tuscany and at last reached Brescia. After a decisive battle at Castiglione, Napoleon sent word for her to meet him at his base in Cremona. Josephine pleaded that she was exhausted, unable to travel the twenty-five miles to her husband. She asked for one night in Brescia. That evening she had an intimate dinner with Hamelin and Hippolyte Charles. When the men were about to depart, she called Hippolyte back to attend to her. Hamelin later returned to retrieve his hat, and a grenadier refused him entry. Josephine was back in Hippolyte’s embrace.

One night was barely enough, but Josephine had to continue her journey. The next day, she and her husband met at Cremona and she was once more subjected to his passionate caresses. When he set off again, he was not reassured. She returned to the palace in Milan, and he accused her of writing to him as coldly “as if we had been married for fifteen years.”
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When no reply came, he spiraled into a predictable rage.
“You are mean and ugly, very ugly, above all you are shallow. It is evil to deceive a poor husband, a tender lover!”
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Josephine may have been a poor correspondent and dawdling with another man, but in Milan she played the wife of the great conquering Frenchman to perfection. She presided over balls and receptions and received delegations. They showered her with gifts, hoping she would win over her husband. The king and queen of Naples sent a set of flawless pearls, and the Duke of Modena offered gold worth thirty million francs if he were permitted to keep one Correggio painting. The pope addressed her as his “daughter in God” and gave her cameos.

Josephine still longed for Paris. “All the Princes of Italy give me parties,” she wrote to her aunt. “Well I would rather be a private citizen in France. I care not for honours bestowed in this country.” And yet she knew she was ungrateful in her hankering to be elsewhere. “My husband is all day in adoration before me as if I were a goddess and there could not possibly be a better husband.”
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She wrote often to Barras, ending most of her letters, “Bonaparte sends you many messages; he still adores me.”

Two days after his majestic victory at Arcola, Napoleon wrote to his wife. “I am going to bed with my heart full of your adorable image,” he scribbled. “I would be so happy if I could help undress you, small shoulder, small white breast, supple, very firm, the pretty little face and the hair tied up in a scarf
à la créole.
You know that I always remember the little visits, you know, the little black forest … I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields.” He finished with “Kisses on your mouth, your eyelids, your shoulder, your breast, everywhere, everywhere!”
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On November 23, he wrote again. “I hope that in a few days you will be in my arms, and I will cover you with a million kisses, flaming like the equator.” Josephine did not receive the letter. Napoleon didn’t know it, but she had gone to Genoa to see Hippolyte Charles. On November 27, Napoleon arrived at the Serbelloni Palace and dashed up the stairs to see his beloved. The bedchamber was empty. He was so shocked he almost fainted. When he came around, the servants told him she was in Genoa.

“I get to Milan, I fling myself into your room; I have left everything to see you, to hold you in my arms … You were not there, you were off somewhere or other in town,” he wrote. He declared his heart was broken. “The unhappiness I feel is incalculable.”
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The next day, he wrote once more.

While I give to you all my desires, all my thoughts, every second of my life, I submit to the power that your charms, your character, and your whole person have over my poor heart. I am wrong if nature, unkind to me, has not given me the attraction needed to captivate you, but what I deserve from Josephine is respect, esteem and compassion.
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N
APOLEON GAVE FULL
rein to his dramatic spirit, but there is no mistaking the sincerity of his feeling. Although he was too proud to believe that she would betray him, his painful cry that nature “has not given me the attraction needed to captivate you” was a difficult admission for a man of his vanity. His despair was writ large on his body. A young general arrived in Milan and was shocked to find him “haggard, thin, the skin sticking to his bones, the eyes shining with a constant fever.”
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On December 7, Josephine finally returned. Once she was in front of him weeping on her knees, insisting she was true, he forgave her in an instant. He could not seriously believe she would be unfaithful. She threw a grand ball for him, and mollified, he turned his mind back to military planning. “The army is without shoes,” Napoleon wrote heatedly, “without pay, without clothes, the hospitals lack everything, our wounded are lying on the floors.”
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It was the consequence of using companies like Bodin’s: There was no flour, and men were scouting in the hedges for food.

Despite the poor supplies, Napoleon’s winter campaign was successful, and the Corsican turned his attention to Austria. The Directory wished him to invade the country from the south, in order to meet the French Army of the Rhine. While Josephine remained in Milan, he advanced quickly toward Vienna and was within a hundred miles of his target by the end of March. On March 26, he offered an armistice to the
Austrians. He signed a treaty the following month without writing to the Directory.

In May, keen to celebrate his victories, Bonaparte moved his war court from Milan to the castle of Mombello, ten miles away. In Mombello, a castle handsomely decorated with frescoes and luxuriously furnished, he instituted his own court, a carnival of Napoleon. His military success had cast a spell over his supporters, who had become convinced he was all-powerful. As one put it, they thought he gave them “a future without limits.” His reception rooms were always crowded with generals, nobility, and merchants from Italy, begging for the favor of a glance or a brief interview. He dined in public like a king, allowing people to gaze on him from afar. Josephine was always at his side, and he delighted in her knack for performing the role of queen. She took the tributes with grace, led the ladies in the dancing, and won over the enemy and the Frenchmen alike. Every week saw balls, receptions, dinners, and hunting outings, as well as theatrical performances, operas with stars such as Madame Grassini, prima donna of La Scala, and boat outings on Lake Maggiore.

Napoleon spent some of the millions he had stolen on indulging Josephine at Mombello, and he encouraged her to employ gardeners to lay out the grounds. To outsiders, they seemed the perfect couple. Napoleon took “conjugal liberties” with his wife on journeys and jokingly threw “pellets of bread at her during dinner.”
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Josephine, noted a visiting poet, “frequently caresses her husband and he seems devoted to her.”
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All the while, Madame Bonaparte was yearning for Hippolyte. The pint-sized dandy was often at Napoleon’s side, as he had been promoted to captain, and even Josephine did not dare conduct an affair while her husband was present. There were occasional surreptitious kisses and gifts, but these only made the pain of separation worse.

She was more than happy to spend money keeping up the appearances Napoleon desired. Her debts ran into the hundreds of thousands as she patronized the best dressmakers and bought nearly everything offered to her, too lazy and softhearted to haggle.

Josephine was loved, but her pug, Fortuné, had been barking at and threatening the other dogs at Mombello. “I never knew a more horrible
animal,” said Josephine’s friend Laure Permond.
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The little dog eventually picked a fight with the cook’s mongrel, and the bigger animal savaged Fortuné to death. Josephine was distraught. It was a sad fate for the heroic pet who had run into Les Carmes prison to find his mistress. Napoleon was exultant at the death of his enemy, but sympathetic Hippolyte secretly bought her a replacement dog, a soft bundle she could embrace while she thought of her lover.

Napoleon hated the new animal. One day while out walking, he saw the cook trying to hide in the bushes. When he asked the reason for the man’s bizarre behavior, he was told that the cook was ashamed of his dog’s crime and afraid that Napoleon might castigate him. Napoleon asked after the dog and was told it had been banned from the grounds of the palace. “Bring him back, perhaps he will rid me of the new one too,” said Napoleon.
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Worse for Josephine, the Bonaparte family had arrived, and proximity was not breeding love. “I have for him the most lively affection,” Napoleon wrote to her of his brother just after their marriage. “I trust he will obtain yours, he merits it.”
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Poor Napoleon was ever hopeful; but though they were divided over so much, the Bonaparte family was united in reviling Josephine. Joseph led their resentment, furious that her spendthrift ways drained Napoleon’s purse. Hundreds of thousands of francs’ worth of confiscated gold and funds ended up in the pockets of the Bonapartes, but still they complained. When Napoleon was made commander in chief in 1795, he had sent sixty thousand francs to his mother and made Joseph consul in Italy and Lucien commissary with the Army of the North. His uncle Cardinal Fesch (only six years Napoleon’s senior, the child of the remarriage of his grandmother) left the priesthood to become a commissary, and in Mombello he was seizing artworks galore.

Joseph acted as the family banker and was obsessed by money. His wife, Julie Clary, was a simple, modest woman, but unfortunately, as Désirée’s sister, she could hardly be Josephine’s ally—although she was pleased by Josephine’s concession of always allowing her to enter a room first. The Bonaparte matriarch, Letizia, spoke Italian all the time and rarely managed a few words of French. Brought low by years of hardship, she was also preoccupied by money. When Napoleon complained,
she would shrug: “If ever all of you fall on my hands again, you will thank me for saving now.”
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Elisa was the least troublesome of the sisters, a plain woman whose desperation for power was not as naked as that of her siblings. She had been forced to marry a Corsican officer, thanks to an absence of other suitors, but was little ruffled by her unhappy marriage. She tended to side with Lucien, but she was reasonably harmless, running an intellectual salon in Paris and supporting the author Chateaubriand against Napoleon’s attempt to banish him. She hated Josephine but contented herself with sniping and complaining rather than attempting to overthrow her.

For Letizia and the younger Bonapartes—Louis, Pauline, Caroline, and Jérôme—life had been a struggle, especially after the death of Carlo. Those early years of poverty had scarred them all and made them greedy for money. Louis was sickly, lazy, and in the throes of gonorrhea: Paranoia, sores, and delusions made him a man of “harsh melancholy,” as Josephine’s lady-in-waiting put it.
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Jérôme was the worst of all, a spoiled spendthrift who expected his brother to pay the bills. And then there was Napoleon’s beautiful and aggressive sixteen-year-old sister, Pauline, Josephine’s sworn enemy. Sensual and flirtatious, with a thick Italian accent and a frustratingly vague air, Pauline left a trail of chaos behind her. She loathed Josephine, stuck her tongue out at her in public if she felt like it, and tried to outdo her in diamonds and dresses. Pauline called her sister-in-law “
la vieille
” (the old lady) behind her back, and every word about Josephine’s beauty grated on her sensibilities. She tried to steal her patterns for gowns from the dressmakers and also attempted to find out her boudoir secrets. “I am as good as she is,” she claimed. “She is only more experienced than I am.” She was obsessed with the politician Louis Fréron, who was heavily associated with Thermidor, twenty-four years her senior, and famous for his mistresses. On June 14, Pauline was married off to the somber General Leclerc, twenty-seven and very responsible. Napoleon hoped he might keep her out of trouble and away from Fréron. It made Pauline dislike Josephine even more, as she believed her sister-in-law to be behind the plan.

By September, Josephine was suffering and even spending was no respite. She was told that Lazare Hoche had died of consumption at
only twenty-nine. Hippolyte Charles had gone on campaign with General Leclerc, and she heard that he had begun an affair with an Italian woman. She was very worried, for he still had her love letters. He had the power to expose her to Napoleon, the gloating Bonapartes, and a French public keen to hear scandal.

Back in France, the people were avidly following Bonaparte’s victories. He was still their hero, but the Directory was deeply unpopular. The royalists had won a majority in the assembly of 1797, and the aristocrats were flocking back to the city and talking of restoring the king. Conspirators hung around corners and in clubs, wearing black velvet collars or wielding knotted handkerchiefs to show their allegiances.

Barras knew he was in a vulnerable position. Along with Talleyrand, he suggested that Napoleon might consider a coup d’état to show the Parisians who was in charge. The general shied from suppressing the popular will again, and gave the task to one of his generals, Pierre Augereau. The Directory spread rumors that a monarchist coup was imminent, and on September 3, Parisians awoke to find they were under military rule. Augereau’s troops had laid siege to the assembly, which was being held at the Tuileries. The next day, the deputies were arrested, the newspapers were shut down, and the elections were annulled. It was the end of the idealism of representation that had founded the Revolution of 1789. Over 160 captives described as “enemies” were shot or deported. Ordinary Parisians cowered in their houses, shopkeepers refused to unfasten their shutters. The bloodletting was back.