Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (18 page)

In October, Napoleon confirmed the peace with Austria. Terrified of the combined might of the French and the Austrians, the Republic of Venice invited Bonaparte to visit in the hope of winning his protection. Unbeknown to them, France had secretly offered to cede Venice to Austria in return for Belgium and Lombardy. Aware that his visit would seem to Venice like tacit protection and that a refusal to go would pitch them into panic, Napoleon sent Josephine as his diplomatic representative.

The woman who once was an uncouth Martinique girl set off in style, after demanding a splendid collection of gowns paid for by army funds. The cost of her wardrobe could have financed two or three months of the campaign. Her huge entourage rumbled off to Venice
and was met with an ecstatic welcome. A hundred and fifty thousand people hung out of windows, throwing flowers to her and waving banners. To them, she was as grand as Cleopatra. The following day, in a procession of hundreds of boats decorated with flowers, she went to dine in the open air at the Lido. The city authorities had spent weeks on the preparations. The highlight was a majestic evening of fireworks and another procession along the canal, followed by a grand ball at the Doge’s Palace, where she was the guest of honor. On her return to Passirano, a delegation came to offer her a hundred thousand ducats if she could persuade Napoleon to favor Venice. Josephine even received a handsome diamond ring for a speech she gave in their support. She smiled and nodded, accepted their offerings, entirely aware that Napoleon had already sold the city to Vienna.

In November, Napoleon departed Italy to debate the fate of Germany at Radstadt, and Josephine returned to Paris. Throughout France, she received tributes to Napoleon as towns cheered her arrival and threw magnificent receptions in her honor. She smiled graciously, but her mind was ever elsewhere. Hippolyte Charles galloped after her and joined her at Nevers, his pockets stuffed with smuggled diamonds. He vowed to her that there had been no Italian woman—and now that he was no longer expected to fight in Italy, he could attend Josephine’s whims as they idled across the countryside.

Napoleon arrived in Paris on December 5, exhausted by his victories. He was shocked by his newly renovated home, and not in a pleasant way. Josephine had sent further orders from Italy asking the painter Jacques-Louis David to create a frieze in the salon, and she had been buying more mahogany furniture. The bill reached a huge 300,000 francs, scandalous when the house itself was worth only 40,000. It was fortunate that Napoleon had stolen millions of francs’ worth of gold from Italy. His general’s income was a mere 15,000 francs a year, barely enough to fund Josephine’s makeup.
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All Paris wished to celebrate him. Their street was renamed rue de la Victoire in his honor, and when Hortense arrived to see him, she found “people thronged in such vast numbers to cheer ‘The Conqueror of Italy’ that the sentries stationed in the gateway of the house on the rue de la Victoire could hardly hold them back.”
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Like many women, Madame
de Staël had convinced herself that she was the hero’s ideal companion. She wrote him gushing letters comparing him to Scipio and Tancred, described him as “the most extraordinary genius ever seen,” and complained he was married to an “insignificant little Creole, quite incapable of understanding or appreciating his heroic qualities.”
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The last thing Napoleon wanted was a strident, conspicuously clever woman such as Madame de Staël appreciating his heroic qualities, for he found the idea of women meddling in politics simply unbearable. Unfortunately, the more he ignored her, the more she swamped him with letters and, later, waylaid him at balls. When she first heard that Napoleon had returned, she dashed to his house. On being told that she could not enter because he was in the bath, she tried to push her way past, crying, “No matter, genius has no sex!”

Four days after the hero arrived, he was welcomed in a huge ceremony at the Luxembourg Palace. In front of crowds of spectators, Talleyrand presented “the son and hero of the Revolution” to the Directory, declaring him a simple soldier who was uninterested in power. Barras thanked Napoleon for his presence and urged him to go on to conquer Britain.

Talleyrand intended one day to install himself as ruler, and he hoped to use Napoleon as the military ballast to shore up his regime. He decided to cement his association with Napoleon by throwing a scandalously expensive ball to celebrate him, designed and overseen by Bélanger, a fashionable architect, who directed teams of carpenters and painters to remodel and decorate the Hôtel de Galliffet on the rue de Grenelle. Five hundred people were invited, all instructed not to wear any items of clothing from Britain. The ball was due to be held on December 25 and was to be dedicated to Josephine—but by the twenty-fourth, she still had not arrived.

She was spending her time with Hippolyte Charles, traveling slowly so that she could dine intimately with him and sleep longer in the mornings after their nights of passion. More in love with her handsome dandy than ever, she dreaded drawing close to the capital, where she would be separated from him and he would fall prey to other women.

Talleyrand postponed the ball until the twenty-eighth. The food and flowers had to be disposed of and reordered and hundreds of blossoming
trees sent away, as they would not last. Servants gleefully pocketed fine breads and desserts from the untouched buffet. By the twenty-seventh, Josephine still had not appeared, and Talleyrand postponed the ball once more.

On January 3, she finally returned. Napoleon was furious, but she wept fetchingly, and as always he forgave her. The ball proceeded. In the first courtyard, the guests saw a great re-creation of a military camp, with soldiers from every regiment in the Army of Italy gathered around a fire. The reception rooms were decorated with stolen Italian art, and Talleyrand himself stood at the center of a staircase draped in myrtle. Napoleon and Josephine entered with Hortense, all plainly dressed, in stark contrast to the magnificent costumes of the other guests. The crowd fell silent at the sight of them. And just before the ball, fireworks shot into the sky and painted “Vive la République” in flaming colors.

When dinner was called at eleven
P.M.
, Talleyrand announced that he would revive, for a single night, the old custom in which the women were seated at the table while the men remained behind them, serving them food and wine. Napoleon gallantly took up his position and impressed the company with his solicitousness. The meal’s toast was to the “Citoyenne who bears the name most dear to glory!” After dinner, Josephine was celebrated in a song as the “dear companion” of the “conquering hero.” Standing, cold and tired, next to her already impatient husband, she had to smile beatifically as she listened to the voices proclaim “By tending to his happiness / You acquit the obligation of France.”

Try as he might, Napoleon could not escape Madame de Staël. She captured him after dinner and demanded, “Which woman in history do you most admire?” He retorted, “The one who has borne the most children,” and marched abruptly away. “Extraordinary man,” she exclaimed, undeterred.

The ball was unforgettable, even for blasé Parisians used to inventive entertainments. The tableaux were beautiful and the food divine, and it was the first night when the company danced the new and risqué waltz. Napoleon, Josephine, and Hortense departed at one
A.M.
, though the party was intended to continue until dawn. Poor Talleyrand was then presented with hundreds of bills, inflated by Josephine’s nonarrival.
Bélanger “begged the Minister to observe that the various delays occasioned by the late arrival of Madame Bonaparte caused a very large extra expense for items twice replaced like the 930 trees.” He also had to pay twice for painters, carpenters, masons, candlestick makers, engravers, and gardeners, as well as massive sums for the buffet and musicians.
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Underneath her veneer of graciousness, Josephine was deeply unhappy. She was uncomfortable with her new celebrity, missing Hippolyte Charles and suffering from Napoleon’s fury over the bills for the renovations, as well as her lateness. She was worried about losing his favor—despite her infidelity, she was fond of Napoleon and wished to remain his cherished wife. When she learned that her maid Louise Compoint had been continuing her affair with Napoleon’s aide Junot, she took out her temper on the girl. Josephine was very fond of Louise, and the two had dined together more like companions than mistress and servant. But the news that she was Junot’s lover was too much to bear, and Josephine dismissed her.
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Distraught, Louise began to plot her revenge.

CHAPTER 9

“I Am So Distressed at Being Separated from Him”

As his fame grew, Napoleon became increasingly convinced that he would be poisoned. He employed someone to taste his food at all public events, took his own plate and glass to dinners, and kept a horse saddled and ready at the back of 6 rue de la Victoire in case he needed to flee. His friend Bourrienne declared that Napoleon had received a letter from a woman informing him that he would be killed. The woman was later found with her throat cut and her body mutilated.
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Napoleon seemed to believe the threats to his life came from members of the Directory. In spite of all the pomp and glory of the ball they had thrown for him, he was afraid of them.

“My health is ruined,” he complained to Joseph. “I can barely get into the saddle and need two years’ rest.” He was exaggerating—his health was fine. He was in fact living quietly in an attempt to win over the five directors. They were teetering on a political knife-edge and might turn against him at any moment. When he had boasted to Barras that the Italians wished to make him their king, he received a sharp response. “You are right not to dream of any such thing in France, for if the Directory was to send you to the Temple [the jail where King Louis and Marie Antoinette had been imprisoned before execution] tomorrow, you would not find four people who opposed it.”
²
Barras had no qualms about threatening his protégé when he thought him too big for his boots.

The Directory was distrusted by much of the population. Inflation was rising, and the directors were seen as wealthy and corrupt, taking
from the people for their own gain. Napoleon despised them as weak, “disturbed by the passions of the women, the children, and the servants,” but he had to pretend to be subservient to them.
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He could not glory in his success, as he had done in Italy. He refused invitations, sat in the shadows at the theater, and declined tributes. He also presented himself as a scholar, attending the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts. “I shall bury myself in a retreat,” he declared. Talleyrand had pressed the Institut to accept him as a member, and Napoleon was delighted to be recognized as an intellectual rather than a military bruiser. He put it about that he and Josephine had become retiring scholars. But ultimately, Napoleon was biding his time. As he said to Bourrienne, “I should overthrow them and be crowned king, but it is not yet time for that.”
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Josephine tended Napoleon’s salon and invited poets, writers, and scientists to the rue de la Victoire in order to bolster his pretense of being retired. In public, she played the consort so effectively that everyone was taken in by her husband’s act. He “shuns anything which might draw attention to himself,” one newspaper noted. Meanwhile, his mind was working obsessively on his next conquest. “This little Europe is a pinprick,” he wrote. “I must go to the Orient, all great reputations have been won there.”
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At the tender age of eleven at Brienne, he had read of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, who had embarked to the Orient at twenty. In 1789 Napoleon had been gripped by
Voyage en Egypte
by Constantin de Volney, a young Frenchman who had spent three years wandering the country in native dress; when he met Volney on Corsica in 1792, he had questioned him intensely. In Italy at Mombello, inspired after dining with the French ambassador to Constantinople, Napoleon had dashed off a letter to the Directory declaring that it was time to take Egypt. He received no reply, but he was not discouraged.

In July 1797, Talleyrand gave a speech before the Institut proposing an invasion of Egypt. A fortnight later, he was appointed to the role of foreign minister. Unaware that Talleyrand had raised Egypt in his lecture, Napoleon wrote to him. “We must take Egypt,” he proposed. “This country has never belonged to a European nation.” He asked for twenty-five thousand men and eight or ten ships of the line.

France needed a conqueror of international might. The empire she had gained throughout the seventeenth century had been gradually taken by the British. Pondicherry and trading posts on the east coast of India were lost in 1761, Louisiana had been claimed by the Spanish, and Britain took the Canadian colonies in 1763. And of course, Britain and France had fought a long and continuing battle over the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue. France wished for an empire—and Egypt was a great prize. Napoleon planned to continue from Egypt to India, following in the footsteps of Alexander. He would take scientists and philosophers and lead a voyage of discovery and cultural enrichment, as well as adding to France’s imperial might.