Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (16 page)

Napoleon was no fool, although people often took him for one. Usually correct in his judgments, he was hardly ever wrong about Josephine. “Our Lady of Victories” was indeed having an affair. In April, she had met a handsome soldier, Hippolyte Charles, when he had accompanied General Leclerc to call on her. Twenty-three and eager to please, a lieutenant in the Hussars, a gambler, a man-about-town, and a dandy, Hippolyte was rather small but extraordinarily good-looking, with a chiseled face, fine blue eyes, and dark hair. He was persnickety about his dress—men sneered that he was a coxcomb, a hairdresser dancing attendance on the ladies—but he was immediately part of the circle of victory heroines. “We are all smitten, Mmes Récamier, Tallien, Hamelin have all lost their heads, the man is so handsome,” Josephine wrote to Talleyrand. “I think that there is no one in the world who ties his cravat with more aplomb.”
²⁶
Few men could have provided a greater contrast to scruffy, ugly Napoleon. Hippolyte asked questions about
fashion and hairstyles and always knew the latest gossip. He reveled in jokes, never a forte of Napoleon’s, and played schoolboy pranks, pouring glue into the scabbard of Junot, Napoleon’s aide, and pretending to be a Creole in Josephine’s salon. As a young soldier at the Battle of Valmy, he had been nicknamed
l’Eveille
because of his talent to amuse: He woke everybody up.

Hippolyte pursued Josephine avidly, but with languid charm rather than the wild passion of Napoleon. Unlike her husband, who cheerfully rode roughshod over her opinions, Hippolyte was more deferential and liked to listen to Josephine converse. By the summer, they were lovers. The man all her friends wanted was too enticing a conquest to resist. Instead of writing to her husband, she was spending her mornings and afternoons with the best-dressed man in Paris.

Through Hippolyte, Josephine had also found a terribly risky way of making money. There was very little cash in the government coffers to fight the wars against Austria, so companies sprang up that would supply horses, uniforms, and weapons and accept payment much later, usually with interest added. One of these was owned by Louis Bodin of Lyon. All of the companies fleeced the government, but Bodin was one of the worst offenders; invoices were changed after submission, and men in the field would open boxes and find blunt, rusty weapons. Instead of horses, he sent donkeys seized from French peasants. Despite such shocking practices, Bodin continued in business because he paid bribes to the ministers and generals in charge. He used Hippolyte to pursue relationships with army paymasters—and his employee’s relationship with the wife of the man who made all the decisions was a gift to him (it is not impossible that Hippolyte chased her to further his career). Josephine began taking kickbacks from Bodin in return for smoothing relations with her husband’s colleagues. She earned money to pay off her debts and buy herself elegant outfits that she could wear at balls as the Lady of the Victories.

All the while, Napoleon called for her presence. Josephine was hesitant, and the government was still withholding permission for her to travel. Finally, in May, the Directory wrote to Napoleon: “It is with great reluctance that we yield to the desire of citoyenne Bonaparte to
join you. We were afraid that the attention she would give you would distract from the glory and safety of your country.”
²⁷
But the permission came too late; Josephine was in love with Hippolyte.

On May 15, Napoleon entered Milan in triumph. At a dinner on the previous night, the hostess had commented on his youth. He shrugged that he was indeed “not very old at present—twenty-seven,” but he would be much older in twenty-four hours, as he would gain Milan (or
mille ans
).
²⁸

He declared that he wished for Italian unification, but he presided over an orgy of looting. Carts of paintings, bronzes, statues, and jewels were packed up by his soldiers and sent back to France. On May 6, he had asked the Directory “for a few reputable artists to take charge of choosing and transporting all the beautiful things we shall see fit to send to Paris.”
²⁹
Artists and scholars, including Antoine Gros, arrived and drew up lists of prizes. Every conquered city and state surrendered its treasures. The pope handed over twenty-one million francs’ worth of gold, a hundred paintings and objets d’art, and eighty-three statues, including the breathtaking
Apollo Belvedere.
Napoleon also took five hundred manuscripts, including one by Virgil that had belonged to Petrarch and contained his notes (Bonaparte initially wanted two thousand, but the artists suggested he moderate his demands). The Duke of Parma gave up Correggio’s
Dawn
and fifteen other pieces, including the same artist’s
Madonna di San Geralamo,
much to the distress of the people of Parma. Napoleon personally demanded Raphael’s
Madonna di Foligno
from Perugia. Venice lost its bronze horses from the Piazza San Marco. Works by Giorgione, Raphael, Leonardo, Lippi, and Titian, among others, all created to glorify the Italian city-state, were seized by Napoleon and packed off to France. Even private citizens found their walls empty of paintings when they returned to the homes they had fled.

Nearly every week saw congratulatory articles in the French press, some written by Bonaparte himself, about the brilliant seizures of art in Italy. He and his soldiers claimed lofty ideals: True art belonged in France, the land of liberty and the home of man’s cultural patrimony, rather than in the corrupt Italian state. He had received a command from the Directory that he should send back art “in order to strengthen
and embellish the reign of liberty.”
³⁰
He knew that it humiliated Italy to lose cultural treasures to him—and he wanted some of the pieces for himself. Just as millions of the francs he stole went into his own pocket (possibly only a fifth of the money made its way back to the government), he was seizing works of art for the Louvre, the Directory, and most of all for Josephine. It was Italy that made her a true collector.

But still she did not write. Napoleon’s letters hurtled into the silence. “I received a courier who left Paris on 27 May, and I have had no response, no news of my
bonne amie.
Could she have forgotten me or forgotten that there is no greater torment than not to have a letter from
mio dolce amore
? They gave me a great party here; five or six hundred elegant and beautiful ladies tried to charm me; none had that sweet and harmonious face which I have engraved on my heart. I saw only you, I thought only of you!”
³¹
He asked after the progress of her pregnancy. “I imagine constantly that I see you, with your little round tummy.”
³²
Josephine read the letter and set it aside. He also wrote of his feelings to his brother Joseph. “You know that I have never been in love before, that Josephine is the first woman I have adored.” It was all dreadful. “If she doesn’t love me anymore, there is nothing left for me.”
³³

By June, Napoleon had endured enough. He said he would leave at once for Paris. Josephine ignored the letter, as she did most of his letters, and continued dallying with Hippolyte. Enraged, Napoleon threatened the Directory that he would return home. “I hate all women. I am in despair!” he roared to Barras. Barras needed Napoleon to win victories in Italy, so he swung into action. On June 24, Barras informed Josephine that she would have to travel immediately. She would have to leave her household—and her children—behind. He threw her a grand dinner at the Luxembourg Palace two days later, then pushed her into a carriage. Josephine wept and protested and wore the expression of someone about to be sent to the scaffold.

Still, she had one consolation. In the first carriage, along with her cross little dog, Fortuné, was Hippolyte Charles, resplendent in his powder-blue uniform and scarlet sash.

CHAPTER 8

A Million Kisses

“I have had the most difficult journey possible,” Josephine complained. “I had a fever on mounting the carriage and was sad besides.”
¹
As her six coaches of attendants, luggage, jewels, and dresses rumbled through France, Hippolyte was apparently her only consolation—he was returning as aide-de-camp to General Leclerc. By day, he and Josephine had to content themselves with smoldering looks and surreptitious touches of the hand, for they were escorted by Napoleon’s brother Joseph. By night, they took adjoining rooms at inns and slipped into each other’s chambers.

Joseph did not notice the nighttime creakings. He was preoccupied with scribbling away on the draft of a novel and nursing a painful venereal infection. Josephine’s maid, Louise Compoint—one of the four servants accompanying her—did observe her mistress’s behavior, but she was distracted by a romance with the womanizing Junot, who was leading the escort. Certainly, it was clear to many that Hippolyte was in love with Josephine and that he sulked every time she talked to anyone but him. Antoine Hamelin, a friend of Napoleon, felt unhappy seeing Bonaparte, already “covered in a glory that he reflected on his wife,” becoming the “rival of a two-bit little man” who “had nothing to offer but a good figure and the elegance of a wig maker’s boy.”
²

Finally, two weeks after their departure, Josephine arrived at the gates of Milan. She was met by huge crowds, and she responded as well as she could to the wild applause, trying to hide her misery that Hippolyte was set to leave for the army headquarters of Brescia. Napoleon
was still away fighting, but he had decorated the Serbelloni Palace with flowers and filled the garden with new plants for her. The walls were decked with stolen Italian art.

A few days later, he arrived, and the pair spent the third night of their married life together. Josephine was elegant in her clinging dress, quite obviously not pregnant. The hero was so delighted to be in her arms again that he did not complain about her deception. She marshaled her charms to full advantage, flattering him, listening to his descriptions of military plans, and pretending to be jealous of the beautiful Italian women who came to Napoleon’s court. Napoleon was more obsessed than ever. He would often leap away from his papers and, as poor Hamelin blushed to report, play with her as if she were a child and “overwhelm her with such rough caresses that I would go to the window.”
³
But only four days after she arrived, Napoleon was off to battle again, and Josephine was left alone once more. “I am dying of boredom here in the middle of the superb parties given to me,” Josephine bemoaned, missing the Talliens, Barras, and her children.
⁴
Uncomfortable with the large household the Italians had given her, she discharged the staff and set up a much smaller establishment. Napoleon continued to send billowing letters of romance from the front line, ranting about men who might admire her and waxing lyrical over her bodily delights. “I thought that I loved you but now that I have seen you again, I love you a thousand times more,” he vaunted. “Your charms burn my heart and my senses.” He suggested she become more flawed, “less beautiful, less gracious,” and “never be jealous, never cry, your tears carry away all reason and burn up my blood.”
⁵

Napoleon’s hysterical passion was no comfort for Josephine. She wrote to her aunt: “My husband doesn’t love me, he worships me. I think he will go mad. I have seen him only briefly, he is terribly busy.”
⁶
On July 24, he finally gave Josephine her freedom from her gilded prison and instructed her to come to Cassano. On the way, of course, she would have to stop at Brescia, her chance to see Hippolyte Charles. Napoleon declared his jealousy: “I have been told that you have known for a long time and
very well
that gentleman you recommended to me for a business venture. If that was the case then you would be a monster.” But he did not really believe she had been unfaithful; he just enjoyed
creating a drama. He finished the letter, “a thousand kisses everywhere, everywhere.”
⁷

Josephine was on the way to Cassano when she and Hamelin spotted Austrian soldiers nearby. The commander overseeing her journey, General Guillaume, told her that he could not keep her safe and ordered her to leave immediately. She refused to do so until she had word from Napoleon. When he heard that the Austrians were moving toward the town, he sent Junot to tell her to travel to Castelnuovo, accompanied by dragoons. As they traveled, Junot saw an Austrian gunboat on a lake, turning to face its fire at them. He leaped from the carriage and pushed Josephine and her maid into a ditch. The two women had to crawl along under cover until the boat had passed. Hamelin was shocked that “this woman so futile, so occupied with pleasures,” could actually be courageous. “Madame Bonaparte did not display one moment of weakness. Her only thoughts and worries were for the life, the glory, of her husband.”
⁸
At Castelnuovo, she threw herself, weeping, into Napoleon’s arms. He then packed her and Hamelin off to Tuscany, again escorted by dragoons. On a stop in Florence, her house was invaded by eager locals, who had heard outlandish rumors that she was traveling with the dead body of her husband and wanted to see the corpse with their own eyes.