Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (12 page)

At one of Thérésa’s parties, Marie-Josèphe was introduced to the man who would change her life. At forty, Paul François, Vicomte de
Barras—former soldier and civil servant, and Tallien’s successor as president of the National Assembly—was Thermidor’s most powerful man and one of the wealthiest individuals in the country. Handsome, with dark hair and green eyes, he was clever and dishonest. After overthrowing Robespierre, he had the reputation of a hero, but his fellow politicians denounced him as untrustworthy, cruel, and a hypocrite for surrounding himself with “the most corrupt of aristocrats, lost women, ruined men, cheaters at cards, courtesans and speculators. He was like an exotic potentate: magnificent and dissolute.”
¹⁴
In attaching herself to Barras, Marie-Josèphe was aiming high.

After meeting him in the winter, she wrote asking for his help to assist a young
sans-culotte
man. It was a typical act of kindness to someone who once would have been her enemy. The request was also an excuse: She said she hadn’t had the pleasure of seeing him in a long time, reproached him for forgetting an acquaintance, and asked him to visit her in her apartment. The widow Beauharnais was issuing a clear invitation.

By the following spring, she was Barras’s established mistress, and her money worries were over. “Along with all that is seductive and captivating,” declared an anonymous pamphlet about her, probably written by the Marquis de Sade, Marie-Josèphe had “a usurer’s avidity for money, which she squanders with the alacrity of a gambler and a love of luxury grand enough to swallow up the revenue of ten provinces.”
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Barras paid the rent on her home, discharged her debts, and gave her everything she desired, including a country residence in Croissy. In return, she lavished him with attention. Since Eugène was with General Hoche and Hortense was staying with her aunt Edmée, Marie-Josèphe was free to direct her every waking hour to him. Barras wanted her to be complaisant, sexually adventurous, and an exhibitionist. She was expected to arrange parties for him where nothing was forbidden.

Less than a year after she had been released from prison, the widow of nearly thirty-two was presiding over the most powerful table in Paris. Once a week, she traveled to her country estate in Croissy, and the stage would be set for an incredible celebration. Her neighbors watched, astounded, as carts of meat, game, exotic fruits, and flowers arrived at her door, despite the food shortages. Soldiers arrived later, escorting Barras
himself.
¹⁶
He and his fellow heroes were behaving like kings, and they desired a harem to entertain them.

With the drink flowing and the
Merveilleuses
wearing barely any clothes, Croissy evenings sometimes degenerated into orgies. On one occasion, Marie-Josèphe, Thérésa, and Fortunée undressed during the soup course, and Thérésa dipped her breast into Barras’s champagne glass. While the guests were eating salad, Fortunée used a small napkin to perform an erotic dance. The dessert was handed around, and then Thérésa dropped to her hands and knees and imitated “the undulations of an African panther.” By the cheese course, Marie-Josèphe was on Barras’s knee and fondling him in front of everybody. The other guests tripped off with each other to the bedrooms.
¹⁷

In later life, consumed with bitterness against Marie-Josèphe and her husband, Barras declared her a “lewd Creole” and blustered that she “derived none of her attractions from nature, but everything from art, the most refined, the most provident” used by the courtesans of Greece and France. She was motivated only by money, he thought. She never loved “except from motives of interest,” even though she gave the impression to those who possessed her that “she was conquered by them and had freely given herself.” He wrote with a flourish that she would have “drunk gold from the skull of her lover.”
¹⁸
The truth was that Marie-Josèphe was hungry for both love and money.

After years of privation, she had finally found security. She reaped the rewards of her new life. She enrolled twelve-year-old Hortense in an exclusive girls’ school, the Institut National de Saint-Germain, run by Madame Campan. An enclave of aristocratic civilities, the school was a haven for refugees from Versailles, such as Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Marie Antoinette’s miniaturist, who was now the tutor in drawing. Madame Campan trained girls to be accomplished young ladies with perfect etiquette. There was no notion of learning a trade useful to the state, as there had been during the Revolution. Life, once more, was all about exquisite manners and show.

Unlike her mother, a lax pupil with the nuns in Fort Royal, Hortense was diligent and quick-witted (rather to the envy of some of the other girls) and excelled in the curricula of languages, history, geography, drawing, music, and dancing. Latin was not included, and math,
as in all girls’ schools, was an extra subject that parents had to request. Hortense had private harp lessons and was quite talented at drawing and painting, which she took with Isabey.

When Eugène returned from accompanying Hoche on tour, he was sent to an elite academy for young men (Hoche had largely returned to his wife, although Marie-Josèphe still held a flame for him). Marie-Josèphe then took a large house on 6 rue Chantereine, which she rented (with Barras’s money) from an actress friend, Julie Carreau. Developers had been buying up areas of the city and building brash new homes for the bankers, moneylenders, and speculators. Now the rue de la Victoire in the ninth arrondissement, the rue Chantereine had been converted recently from marshland into one of the most fashionable new districts. The house came with stables and a coach house, and Marie-Josèphe needed a staff of coachman, manservant, cook, chambermaid, and maid. Of course, Euphémie was with her, and she also retained Mademoiselle de Lannoy, governess to her children for their occasional visits. Only a few months after becoming Barras’s mistress, Marie-Josèphe was rich.

She dipped liberally into Barras’s pot of money for decorations. Sheer muslin curtains, typical of Martinique, adorned her dining room. She covered the chairs in pale blue nankeen and displayed classical ornaments, including an Etruscan silver urn, on her shelves. Excited by her decorating, she forgot to buy enough practical goods: There was a shortage of spoons, cups, and plates.

In the summer of 1795, the convention put Barras in charge of the troops engaged to defend it. He decided that he needed to win over the army and that he should pick out a pet to foster, in order to have someone to use to his advantage in the future. He especially liked to find people down on their luck and vault them into privilege, for he thought doing so gave him more control over them. This time he chose an obscure and poor young Corsican general by the name of Napoleon Buonaparte.

^*
In 1795, the livre was replaced by the franc, worth seven livres, three deniers. The new currency added to the financial chaos. Indeed, many people continued to refer to money as “livres,” especially when referring to large sums or property transactions.

CHAPTER 6

“What Strange Power You Have over My Heart”

It was the early autumn of 1795. The chandeliers glowed above a table heavy with food, perfumed flowers adorned the vases, and wine flowed into crystal goblets. Barras seated Napoleon next to Marie-Josèphe, who appeared at her best in the soft candlelight, her gown clinging to her bosom. The two fell deep into conversation. Unlike every woman the young soldier had met, she neither mocked nor ignored him. Instead, she listened to him talk of his military victories and praised his successes. Napoleon was dazzled by her sophistication. “I was not immune to the charms of women,” he said, “but I had not had good fortune with them; and my character rendered me shy before them. Madame de Beauharnais is the first to have reassured me. She said flattering things about my military talents one day when I found myself seated next to her. Her praise intoxicated me; I addressed myself only to her.” Impulsive and decisive, he had fallen in love, and after that evening, “I followed her everywhere; I was passionately in love with her.”
¹
Ill at ease in society and without an object of devotion, Napoleon had found an ambition and a goal: to seize his patron’s mistress.

That night was his first meeting with Marie-Josèphe, but he had seen her from afar and, like everybody in society, knew of her reputation. Marie-Josèphe, the exotic Creole, the survivor of Les Carmes, was discussed in the salons and feted in the newspapers. From a distance, she was a glittering prize; close up, she was gentle, seductive, and elegant. Her days as a gauche bride long behind her, she was the epitome of delicacy and mystery, her smile suggesting sensual delights. Napoleon
was immediately her slave. “It was chez Barras that I saw my wife for the first time,” Bonaparte later recalled.
²

In his attempt to keep the little Corsican on his side and thus have someone under his thumb in the army, Barras had enlisted his secret weapon: Madame de Beauharnais.

Anyone could understand Napoleon’s attraction to her. Marie-Josèphe was a real Parisienne (if not by birth), an aristocrat who had everything he wanted: position, social cachet, sophistication, and a true revolutionary past. As his friend from the military academy at Brienne, Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne, put it, she would “aid him in achieving his ambition,” since through her, he would have access to the most influential people in society.
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And, simply, he was captivated. “She was a real woman,” Napoleon said, enthusiastically praising her rear end.
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B
ORN ON
A
UGUST
15, 1769, six years Marie-Josèphe’s junior, Napoleon was a fighter from the cradle. Named for an uncle who had died in the battle for Corsica against the French, he was the second child of his parents’ marriage to survive. In 1764, handsome eighteen-year-old Carlo Buonaparte had married Maria Letizia Ramolino, aged thirteen and intelligent, though entirely uneducated and very strong-willed. Initially Corsican nationalists, the Buonapartes changed sides when the French took over the island a year before Napoleon’s birth. Carlo changed his name to Charles de Bonaparte and, as overdressed as a peacock, befriended the Comte de Marbeuf, the commander in chief of the French forces on Corsica. He later traveled to France to wait around at Versailles for favors and money. Letizia, virtually alone on Corsica, raised her eight children with a strict hand. “To the manner in which she formed me at an early age,” Napoleon said, “I principally owe my subsequent elevation.”
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Severe on laziness and venality, she had no compunction about whipping her offspring. Napoleon prided himself on never crying out.

In later years, he talked up his poverty. “We never bought anything except what was absolutely necessary, such as clothes and furniture,” he said.
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He was not entirely truthful: His mother’s dowry was thirty-one acres of land, a mill, and a bake house, and his father was successful at
gaining favors from the elite for the family. By the rough and ready standards of Corsica, they were wealthy, with a shuttered stone house on the route to the port, shared with other Bonaparte family members, and a small country home, as well as the mill and the bake house. They spent a lot on appearances: As Napoleon’s mother said, “Better to have fine clothes and a grand salon and to eat dry bread in secret.”
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Napoleon did not learn French until he was nine, as Corsica was linguistically, culturally, and historically Italian. Letizia resented speaking French, and her son would always pronounce certain words in the Italian fashion. “I have a presentiment that one day this small island will astonish Europe,” declared Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
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He meant that its compact size and isolation made it the ideal laboratory to try out his social theories of the primitive man. Corsica was mocked, looked down on as a humble farming island with meager culture.

Napoleon was a tough, assertive, aggressive child, intelligent and with a temper that always threatened to boil over at any provocation. At the age of seven, he was sent to a Jesuit school where he learned to read, write, and add, as well as a little Latin and ancient history. He spent his time there destroying his surroundings, pulling out the stuffing from chairs, scratching tables, and tearing leaves off plants. Marbeuf encouraged Charles to put his children forward for a scheme in which the offspring of impecunious members of the elite could apply for scholarships at French schools. In 1778 Napoleon won a place at the Military School of Brienne, the lowest-ranked of the ten military academies where noble sons were trained for the army. Charles took his son to Brienne while on his way to pay his respects—alongside other Corsican nobles—to the new king, Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette. Napoleon’s elder brother, Joseph, bound for the priesthood, wept copiously at their parting, but Napoleon let slip only a single tear.