Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (14 page)

“W
HEN
G
ENERAL
B
ONAPARTE
fell in love with Mme. de Beauharnais, it was love in all the power and strength of the term,” said his friend Auguste de Marmont. “It was apparently his first passion and he felt it with all the vigor of his nature.”
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Although he continued writing to his putative fiancée, Désirée, he was a man devoted. As with his fiancée, Napoleon decided not to address his lover by her given name, instead feminizing her middle name. He called her the name by which she would always be known—Josephine.

Now that Napoleon was the military hero of Thermidor, the newly
named Josephine became more enthusiastic about his advances. She wrote to him using the full force of her charm to seduce him.

You no longer come to see a friend who is fond of you. You have quite deserted her. This is a mistake, as she is tenderly attracted to you. Come to lunch with me tomorrow,
septidi.
I want to see you and talk to you about matters that will interest you. Good night,
mon ami, je vous embrasse
.
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Napoleon replied immediately. “I cannot imagine the reason for the tone of your letter. I beg you to believe that no one desires your friendship as much as I do, no one could be more eager to prove it.”
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Josephine held out against Napoleon’s pleadings for intimacy, but not for long. By December 1795, they were lovers. He scribbled his passion at seven o’clock in the morning, enraptured after their first night together.

I wake up filled with thoughts of you. Your image, and the intoxicating pleasures of last night allow my senses no rest. Sweet and thrilling Josephine, what strange power you have over my heart! Are you annoyed with me? Are you unhappy? Are you upset? My soul is broken with grief and my love for you denies me repose. But how can I rest any more, when I submit to the feeling that overwhelms my very self, when I drink from your lips and from your heart a soothing flame? Yes! One night has taught me how short your portrait falls short of the reality! You start at noon: in three hours I shall see you again. Till then, a thousand kisses,
mio dolce amore,
but give me none back for they set my soul on fire.
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Napoleon’s letter is a masterstroke of ardor—and somewhat different from the letters of his rival Horatio Nelson to his mistress Emma, Lady Hamilton, telling her he thought of her so much “I could not touch even pudding,” and that he had felt jealous and dreamed he had hit her with a “big stick.”
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In France, it was the age of the sentimental letter writer, of the outpouring of emotion, ruled by the fervent (although rather less explicit) letters in books such as Rousseau’s
La Nouvelle Héloïse.
Napoleon threw all his emotions into his letters, high on his sexual obsession. He scrawled hard, breaking holes through the paper with his pen, covering the words with blots because he was so impatient to write to her. Near-illegible and misspelled, his words burn with the fire in his soul for Josephine, her husky voice, clinging dresses, and boudoir promises.

Gone were all his notions that love was merely a “social passion.” With Josephine, he was overturned, consumed, and fascinated and could think of nothing but her. Poor Désirée wrote letters, but they languished unanswered on his desk.

Napoleon was immediately in thrall to Josephine’s small waist and high bosom, her fine skin and delicate movements. In bed, he was delighted by her, baffled and excited by her repertoire of techniques. Josephine recognized that Napoleon was a man who was excited by theater. She dressed up for him, doused herself in the scents he liked, and embodied the role of the temptress. She decorated her chamber with absolute care, covering the walls with gilt and mirrors. In the old days, she had learned the hard way how to be a perpetual mistress to a man: willing, inventive, compliant. Her early roués had been only too familiar with such tricks—mirrors and shadowy postures in candlelight, bedroom acrobatics (Napoleon praised her “zig-zags”), perfume in the hidden hollows of the body, and feigned pleasure. But Napoleon had never encountered these tricks and could not believe his luck. As he later wrote to her, he never “forgot those visits” to the “little black forest.”

Napoleon also had a fascination with makeup, partly because it was something his mother never would have used. Josephine, who bathed daily and whose dressing table groaned with pots of powder and skin whitener, was his ideal. She even made her own cosmetics—one she used in a “very secret” ritual in her daily toilette, perhaps a form of the “facial varnish” popular at the time to stretch out the skin and minimize wrinkles. Her small hands and feet were the most exquisite imaginable (he was obsessed with hands and feet and had become very vain about his own). To him, she was the ultimate in beauty.

Almost as soon as they became lovers, he was demanding that she marry him, throwing himself at her feet, and falling into rages when she
refused. Shy and nervous around women, conscious of his failings as a lover, he was convinced that only she could understand him. Josephine’s softness, her lack of education, her pliability, indolence, and excessive femininity all made her his dream lover. Even her failure to live within her means was erotic, yet another indication of how she needed the firm hand of a man. Her readiness to forgive slights and wrongs made her a good match for him. No woman who bore grudges could have lived with Napoleon.

He was also wildly jealous. One evening he announced he would use the cards to read the futures of the guests attending a party. He told Madame Tallien that she would experience “a thousand follies.” When he came to General Hoche, he delivered what was, for a soldier, the ultimate insult: “General, you will die in your bed.” He hated any man who admired Josephine—except Barras.

Napoleon wished to be the all-powerful man in every aspect of his life. Josephine looked up to him and asked for his advice. When he whipped himself into a rage with her, she acted out the supplicant, weeping and pleading for mercy. She was a naturally lachrymose woman in a sentimental age, sometimes weeping three times a day, and Napoleon was swept away by the erotic tableau of her in tears. “I keep remembering your kisses, your tears, your lovely jealousy,” he said.
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Tears were proof of her emotion and her femininity, and Josephine’s ability to turn on the waterworks was vital to her power over him. “I was not born with a heart that could bear the sight and sound of weeping,” he said.
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He found the image of her sobbing on her knees unbearably arousing. “Ah! Tears!” he said cynically. “Woman’s only weapon.”
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Josephine’s tears were a weapon he craved. He had a deep-seated need to watch her acting out the role of humiliated maiden; nothing bolstered his sense of masculinity more. With his instinct for drama, he loved to stir up terrible rows and push her to hysterical tears, then forgive her, the lovers clinging to each other in passionate reconciliation.

“Bonaparte is all day in adoration before me as though I was a goddess,” Josephine wrote.
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His sexual obsession with her was entrancingly novel, after a series of jaded men like Barras. But she had been broken in to the ways of love by her failed marriage. As a teenager on the ship
over from Martinique, she, too, had been alight with ideas about romantic destiny derived from books and the enthusiasm of youth. After the cruelties of Alexandre and her treatment at the hands of her often blasé lovers and keepers in the years after her separation, Josephine had become a woman who did not have the luxury of believing in love. To her, romance and sex were a path to status and security, the bargains that a woman had to make to survive. Over the years she had learned charm and sophistication, while forgoing her excitement, her joy in the new, and her desire to lose herself to another. She had not been looking to fall in love but for a man to support her and her children. Napoleon interested her and she loved him, in her way, but she no longer believed that passion could change her life.

Though Napoleon was sensual in his letters, in person he could be rough and abrupt. He knew virtually nothing of polite conversation and expected Josephine to listen to him describing military plans. Although he adored her and was entirely in thrall to her sexuality, he had little interest in her thoughts or opinions and did not wish for much repartee. He was the type of man with whom a woman could feel terribly lonely even as he caressed her.

Paul Barras encouraged Napoleon to ask her to marry him. “You have the rank, the talent to become a hero,” Barras said, “but you are poorly connected; without fortune, without relations.” Barras explained that, as Napoleon put it, Josephine was valuable because she was part of “both the old regime and the new” and would “make people forget my Corsican name, would make me wholly French.”
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To be “wholly French” was Napoleon’s ambition, and if he thought that Josephine could give him such a prize, he would have offered marriage even if she had been plain and twice his age. He promptly proposed.

She consulted her friends on whether to marry Bonaparte. Some of the ladies thought him a joke; others worried that a military life was insecure and that a financier or a statesman would be a better bet. Josephine’s lawyer was dismayed when he heard that her groom would offer her only the tiny sum of fifteen hundred francs a year. She was aware that Napoleon’s family did not approve of her. On top of it all, Hortense was unenthusiastic. She’d met Napoleon at a dinner at the Luxembourg
Palace—she was sitting between him and her mother and he was so desperate to talk to Josephine that Hortense had to give up, lean back, and listen to his trumpeted chatter flying over her head. Afraid of losing her mother, she begged her not to marry him.

Josephine wrote to a friend, probably Madame de Krény, in a state of indecision.

Do you like him? You will ask me.—But … No.—You feel cool about him then?—No; but I find myself in a lukewarm state which I do not like … Taking a side has always seemed tiring to my Creole nonchalance, I find it far easier to follow the will of others.

… I admire the general’s courage, the breadth of his knowledge of everything, of which he speaks equally well; the quickness of his mind, so he understands the thoughts of others almost before they have been expressed; but I am afraid, I admit, of the empire he seems to want over all those who surround him. His scrutinizing gaze has something strange about it which I cannot explain.

Finally, the thing that should please me, the force of passion, of which he speaks so much and which means one cannot doubt his sincerity, is exactly what stops me offering the consent that I am just as often on the point of giving.
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T
HE STRENGTH OF
“this affection which almost seems to render him delirious” discouraged her. She worried that if he fell out of love with her, he would resent her. She had, after all, seen so many men chase her desperately, then grow cold.

But the “Widow Beauharnais,” as she signed herself, could not remain single forever. Barras would not marry her. General Hoche had been visiting her over the winter but showed no signs of divorcing his wife.

Josephine made up her mind. She said yes to Napoleon, to his passion, to his obsession with her, to the small financial settlement and the role of a military wife. Napoleon, overjoyed, saw himself as beginning a
new life with his prize by his side. In a signed contract, both parties agreed that there would be no joint property or goods, and neither would be responsible for the debts of the other.

In his letters, Napoleon was the impassioned lover, but he had inquired into the status of Josephine’s accounts and decided the wedding was to be swift and practical. There could be no church service for the friend of the Directoire, but there would also be no dinner or reception, as Josephine would have had if she’d married a financier. A week previously, Napoleon had been made commander in chief of the French Army of Italy, and still he had no desire for a celebration. Josephine did not invite her children or the Marquis de Beauharnais and Aunt Edmée or her female friends. Napoleon’s family was also absent, disapproving from afar. Désirée heard the news and told him she was heartbroken. “You have made me unhappy for the rest of my life,” she wrote. “I shall never promise myself to another.”
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CHAPTER 7

“The Single Object in My Heart”

Josephine’s second marriage was a quiet affair in a dingy town hall.

Once stylish, the Hôtel du Mondragon was situated in a small road off the Avenue de l’Opéra and was serving as the town hall of the second municipal district of Paris. The grand paneling on the walls was faded, and the great chandelier had fallen into disrepair.