Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (23 page)

In shock, mother and daughter turned the horses around and raced
through the night. The road back was nothing but a “series of ovations” for him, and each was a bitter pill for poor Josephine.

Her worst fears had come true. Lucien and Joseph had traveled to meet Napoleon at Lyon. All the way to Paris, his brothers talked to him of Josephine’s infidelity and her relationships with army profiteers.

Napoleon entered Paris to wild acclaim. The city sparkled with lights, bands played, and women—and even some men—fainted. But he wanted only to see Josephine. Even though he was angry with her, he longed for her soft embrace and her perfumed body, to hear her gentle voice, and to lie in her bed. He was ready to hear her defense. He expected a torrent of tears and then, when he deemed it fit, a passionate reconciliation.

But he arrived at their house at six
A.M.
and found her absent. Furious and miserable, Napoleon abandoned himself to melancholy in his lonely home. He believed that she must be with Hippolyte Charles, as everybody had said.

A
S SOON AS
he was able, Napoleon called on Paul de Barras and declared he would divorce Josephine. Barras counseled patience. He had his motives, of course; the Directory would only be further undermined if their favorite general embarked on the embarrassing course of divorce.

Then Gohier, who was desperately fond of Josephine, told Napoleon that divorce was a “black mark against the record of a man in public life.” He stressed how Josephine had rushed from their home to meet him, and said that the public was more likely to trust a married man.
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Napoleon, confused, turned to his family. Like vultures, they flocked to say that it was obvious she was away seducing her lover and he should be rid of her immediately.

The next day, Jean-Pierre Collot, a banker, visited rue de la Victoire and begged Napoleon to forgive Josephine, for the moment, at least. “Think of France!” he cried. Napoleon railed, “I will never forgive her! How little you know me!” Collot, like Barras, suggested that a public separation would expose him to ridicule—“You will be laughed at like one of Molière’s husbands”—and warned that he should not make any
hasty decisions.
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“All this violence proves you still love her,” he argued. “Do but see her, she will explain everything.”
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Napoleon would not listen, avowing that people would grow bored with gossiping about him and his wife. “My determination is fixed,” he said, “she shall never again enter my house.”
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Eugène, who had just arrived in Paris (he had traveled separately from his stepfather in a slower coach), attempted to speak to him, but Napoleon was adamant.

Bonaparte visited Fortunée Hamelin, who also recommended caution. If he wanted the public to focus on his military victories, he shouldn’t get hauled into a domestic drama—and many of his middleclass supporters would be shocked by a divorce. But Napoleon was a wounded bear; despite all the advice to have patience, he stormed home and told the maids to pack up Josephine’s huge wardrobes of clothes.

J
OSEPHINE ARRIVED AT
eleven that night, exhausted and covered in dust and dirt from the journey. The porter told her that Napoleon would not see her and gestured toward her boxes of belongings, packed and ready for her to take away. Josephine and Hortense dashed past him into the house. The servants did not dare stop them. A maid told them that Napoleon was in his dressing room and would not come out. Josephine wept and begged at the door. Napoleon finally said that he would not see her and he would never open the door to her again. She crouched on the last spiral of a narrow staircase, crying noisily and begging him to forgive her. She wept and pleaded for hours, her sobs echoing through the house. For the first time, Napoleon resisted her tears.

At nearly five in the morning, still weeping, Josephine stood, unable to believe that her tears had not succeeded. In a last-ditch attempt, she went to find Hortense and Eugène and implored them to assist her. They climbed the stairs in their nightgowns and wept outside Napoleon’s room with her, pleading for mercy. He flung open the door, and the tableau of his wife in tears with her two children, all three of them supplicating him for help, was too much to resist. Eugène and Hortense begged him not to break their mother’s heart: “Ought injustice to take from us, poor orphans, whose natural protector the scaffold has already deprived us of, the support of one whom Providence has sent to replace
him!”
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Napoleon relented. “I could not bear the sobs of those two children,” he later declared. “I asked myself, should they be made victims of their mother’s failings?”
⁷

Napoleon took Josephine to their bed, and the reconciliation was complete.

The next morning Lucien arrived, expecting to push forward the matter of the divorce. To his horror, he found the pair in bed together, his sister-in-law fully reinstated as the ruler of Napoleon’s heart.

Josephine had been forgiven, but the balance in the marriage had shifted, and she was no longer the all-powerful, dishing out her favors from a pedestal. Napoleon was now sure that she had been unfaithful to him. His success in Egypt, and his affair with Pauline, had made him more vainglorious and less dependent on her.
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He would never again worship at her shrine; she would never again treat him so cavalierly. Without a child, she knew she was weak, and her exposure as an adulterer had made her realize that men of power and her friends alike would turn their backs on her if they felt her hold over him was slipping. When they had married, she had been the sought-after woman, and few could understand why she had accepted Napoleon’s proposal. Now he was seen as the savior of France and she a mere wife. Her position could be taken from her at any time.

Unsurprisingly, his family was livid about the reconciliation. Her sister-in-law Pauline and the brothers were from then on “at open war with Josephine.”
⁸

N
APOLEON CLAIMED HE
had forgiven Josephine for the sake of her children. He was very fond of them. In Italy, not long after their marriage, he had written to her, “Be sure to tell them that I love them as if they were my own. What is yours or mine is so mixed up in my heart, that there is no difference there.”
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He told her that he thought Hortense “entirely adorable” and had come to see Eugène as his adopted son.
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It was hard not to admire the pair: Eugène was dutiful and steadfast and had served him well in Egypt; and golden-haired, graceful Hortense was
the jewel of Madame Campan’s school, about to graduate and make her debut with a set of accomplishments worthy of Versailles. She was also rather terrified of Napoleon and would tremble when she spoke to him, asking others to request favors on her behalf.
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Such a display of fear could hardly fail to endear her to him.

But Napoleon was driven by more than mercy. He was bent on political power, and for that he needed his wife. Having a wife and stepchildren made him look reliable; he also required Josephine’s quiet powers of influence, her ability to please and flatter, her talents as a hostess, and her continued hold over Barras, Gohier, Talleyrand, and the others. Most of all, as a survivor of imprisonment, she gave legitimacy to his claim of protecting the Republic, while at the same time her aristocratic title persuaded the royalists into believing that her husband would espouse their cause. As Barras had said, she made him seem
French.

Distracted as he was in the stormy days after his arrival, Napoleon saw that the words of the informers who had written to him while he was in Egypt were correct: The Directory was struggling. The populace of France, facing economic decline and distressed by the failures of the army in Europe, had lost faith in their government. The Directory was riven with personal rivalries and grudges. No one trusted anyone else, and each member was trying hard to hold on to his position by ousting his rivals. The door was wide open for Napoleon to step in, adored by the people and, as a general, seemingly unsullied by politics. As Hortense put it, “With Italy lost, the finances spent, the Directory devoid of energy and authority, the return of the General was seen as a favor from heaven.”
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The irascible Emmanuel Sieyès had been preparing a secret coup d’état to seize power by ousting his fellow directors—Barras, Gohier, and Jean-François Moulin. The fourth, Roger Ducos, Sieyès thought spineless enough to follow him. He gained the confidence of Talleyrand, Joseph Fouché, and Lucien Bonaparte. He needed only a general on his side to provide military might. General Bernadotte, minister for war, refused. General Joubert was killed in Italy, and both General Macdonald and General Moreau were reluctant to involve themselves in a political plot.

On October 14, Sieyès was awaiting Moreau in his office at the Luxembourg Palace. Moreau arrived at the same time as a messenger delivering the thrilling news that Bonaparte had returned and was nearly at Paris. “There’s your man,” Moreau said, and promptly departed.

Napoleon wanted more than to be the strongman for another man’s political desires. He listened to Sieyès, nodded politely, and then made his own plans to launch a coup, hoping that Gohier and Barras would back him up. He employed Josephine to charm certain influential men and persuade them to espouse his cause—and to persuade Barras that he was still loyal. She obeyed gladly, keen to please, and planned dinners, receptions, and intimate meetings as required. Six rue de la Victoire was a revolving door of politicians, ministers, and generals all eager to sample Josephine’s delicate desserts and hear her flirtatious words, close in their ears. She flattered Barras and Gohier and lulled them all into a false sense of security about Bonaparte and his goals. As she did so, the Directory breathed its last.

Napoleon sounded out Barras, asking him what he would do if there were a coup to unseat the Directory. Barras refused to listen to the idea. He tried Gohier, who made it clear to Napoleon that he thought him too young to be involved in government. His plans for a coup in tatters, Napoleon was left with no choice but to throw in his lot with Sieyès, although he despised him.

On November 9, Napoleon got up at five
A.M.
and sent letters to favorable members of the Council of Elders, requesting their presence at the Tuileries at seven
A.M.
(the rest would receive their letters too late, long after the voting had ended). Four hundred dragoons were already assembling there. He set about trapping the other directors. “Will you, my dear Gohier, and your wife have breakfast with me tomorrow at eight o’clock in the morning,” Josephine had written to her friend the night before. “Do not fail: I must speak to you of interesting matters.”
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Gohier thought the hour suspiciously early for Josephine and sent his wife alone. She found Josephine’s house full of soldiers, ready to arrest her husband and force his resignation.

Napoleon arrived at the Tuileries at eight-thirty, surrounded by his generals. He addressed his troops, telling them the Directory had betrayed them. The Elders were essentially tricked into declaring that the
two legislative bodies—themselves and the lower house, the Council of Five Hundred—should move to Saint-Cloud. Napoleon thought it would be easier to pass a new constitution away from the center of Paris. He had Gohier and Jean Moulin arrested. Talleyrand went to Barras’s house and told him that the others had resigned and he had no choice but to do the same. Napoleon had given him two million francs to bribe Barras. When Barras gave in without a fight, Talleyrand kept the money for himself. At Saint-Cloud, Napoleon was criticized by the Elders, but the real violence came when he attempted to address the Council of Five Hundred, who were angrily questioning his actions. They grew so heated that he was forced to flee for his life, but then he sent in his troops, led by General Murat, to expel the council from the Orangerie. The council members were forced to submit to the soldiers and effectively gave over their powers to Bonaparte. “It didn’t go too badly,” he shrugged.
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That night, he and Josephine slept with loaded revolvers under their pillows.

On November 10, Napoleon asserted again that the Republic was in danger and he was the man to save it. He ensured that he was installed as a consul, along with Emmanuel Sieyès and Roger Ducos, both of whom Napoleon secretly planned to oust very quickly. Almost unbelievably, thanks to his might, his clever plotting, and the help of his wife, Napoleon had moved from feted general to the most powerful man in France. Barras kicked his heels in his country seat of Grosbois. “I see Bonaparte has tricked me,” he mourned. “And yet he owes me everything.” The same was true for Josephine. Barras had cared for her, protected her, and lent her money, and miserable exile was his reward.

“I found division reigning amongst all the authorities,” Napoleon declared, describing his return to France. “They agreed only on this single point, that the Constitution was half destroyed, and was unable to protect liberty!” He announced that the Council of Elders had begged him to help them, since the “men whom the nation has been accustomed to regard as the defenders of liberty, equality, and property,” or the directors, had been planning to restore the king. “I was bound, in duty to my fellow-citizens, to the soldiers perishing in our armies, and to the national glory, acquired at the cost of so much blood, to accept the command.”

All lies, but believed. The men and women fighting for the fall of Louis XVI had hoped for a representative government. In 1799 they were given a tyranny. There would be no elections but three consuls and four assemblies, and every member of the senate and the Council of State would be nominated by the first consul. Furthermore, Bonaparte declared that the first consul would be appointed for ten years, and he would choose the other consuls. The entire country, effectively, would be ruled by one man.