Napoleon: His Wives and Women
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
‘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:
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.