Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (26 page)

T
HANKS TO HER
lavish lifestyle, the specter of money reared its ugly head once more. When he returned from Egypt, Napoleon instructed Bourrienne to investigate his wife’s debts. Bourrienne approached Josephine but found her reluctant to divulge the truth. Finally, after she became consuless, she admitted to him that she was in debt for 1.2 million francs (around $20 million in modern-day terms). Bourrienne was scandalized and terrified to give his master such awful news.

Josephine begged for Bourrienne’s help. He told Napoleon that the debts amounted to only 600,000 francs. Even that, for the first consul, was a shocking sum. He seized her bills and roared with fury. Why, Napoleon fumed, had she needed thirty-eight new summer hats, all purchased in the space of a month, when she was in retirement at Malmaison? There was a bill of 180 francs for feathers and 800 for perfume. It was an outrageous amount when the average Parisian worker supported a family on 600 francs a year. In one year alone, she bought 900 gowns, almost five times as many as Marie Antoinette. Josephine was spending hundreds of thousands of francs a year. Napoleon had already paid off the outstanding debt of about 300,000 francs for Malmaison, as well as funding the renovations for their old house in the rue de la Victoire, and his wife had spent twice that amount on fripperies.

As usual, Josephine wept and pleaded and threw herself at Napoleon’s feet. At last he declared he would pay the debts. He did have some sympathy for her, for it was clear to anyone that many invoices were wrong—she had been hugely overcharged for certain items. However, she had shown no interest in checking the bills for accuracy.

Bourrienne had some difficult maneuvering to do: He told the dressmakers, milliners, feather makers, perfumiers, and all the others that they should quietly take half of what they were owed; if they sued, he said, Napoleon might be forced from office, and then they would receive nothing. Grumbling, the owners of the finest shops in Paris agreed. But they could not resist the siren call of Josephine’s purse and
soon returned to present her with more tempting delights, such as jewels, shawls, fabrics, and trinkets. She had learned nothing from the debacle; she bought without asking the price and promptly forgot what she had purchased.
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Napoleon could compel “the toughest of characters, the most untameable of men” to do his bidding.
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Yet he was powerless to curb Josephine’s astronomical spending. Her debts were not limited to tradespeople; she also borrowed money from friends. “I have not forgotten your 50 louis,” she wrote to her friend and fellow Creole Madame de Krény in 1800, “you will have them the day after tomorrow.”
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As Bourrienne put it, her desperate need to spend money “was almost the sole occasion for her misery.”
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Napoleon loved people to be in debt, since it was a way of keeping them in a state of dependence, but Josephine went too far: She was addicted to shopping. Having lost so much in the Terror, she was always afraid of being deprived again. She was also looking for control and security and a way to forge an identity separate from Napoleon’s demands. She simply could not stop buying things she did not need.

After Napoleon had cleared her arrears, Josephine almost immediately lurched back into debt. She resorted to very unfortunate methods to make money, notably sharing political information with men such as Talleyrand and Fouché for a price, as well as delving back into black-market army supplies.
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She even revived her foolish contact with Hippolyte Charles, after trying to recommend his company for an army contract. “I regret very much that I have failed,” she ventured, “since I would have been so happy to prove to you that nothing will change my feelings of the tenderest and most lasting friendship for you.”

In writing to Hippolyte, Josephine took a terrible risk. Her motives were purely nostalgic; she yearned for the days when she was younger, more hopeful, and not confined to the restricted role of wife of the first consul. It is almost impossible that this contact went unseen, but Napoleon’s spymaster Fouché protected her, as he was wont to do. It turned out she was wasting her time trying to prove her “most lasting friendship.” As she confessed to Madame de Krény, Hippolyte was being cruel to her in an attempt to break it off for good.
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The relationship was over.
On Hippolyte’s deathbed in 1837, he asked that Josephine’s letters to him be burned. Five letters survived, and in them is the tale of the only woman who dared betray Napoleon.

Aside from spending her husband’s money, she devoted every hour to being the perfect wife. She ornamented her apartments with tributes to Napoleon’s glory, praised him excessively, and proclaimed herself distraught when he departed her rooms. He deputized to her the task of entertaining visiting statesmen and keeping his allies, particularly those of noble origin. Many years later, Napoleon would admit that his marriage “brought me closer to a group which I required for my plan of integration, which was one of the most vital principles of my government.” As he said, “Had it not been for my wife, I should not have had an easy means of approaching it.”
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The truth was, despite their tumultuous relationship, Napoleon loved her and could not be without her. As he had to admit, his life had changed beyond measure since he had met her. “To me, luck is a woman,” he said, and that woman was Josephine. “He became accustomed to associate the idea of her influence with every piece of good fortune which befell him,” her friend Madame de Rémusat marveled.
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As he saw it, he had gained majesty with her, and in order for his success to continue, he would have to keep her by his side. “I win battles,” he declared, “but Josephine wins hearts.”

^*1
Napoleon had forgotten Pauline, still in Egypt with the rest of his army. She later returned to Paris, and although he never saw her again, he did (with General Duroc) arrange her marriage to a retired officer in 1801.

^*2
Women of Josephine’s class ordinarily called their husbands by their surnames. Other family members would do the same, but Napoleon allowed only his wife to call him Bonaparte.

CHAPTER 12

“The Most Beautiful Thing in the World”

As consuless, Josephine was writing letters, charming politicians, and conforming herself to fit Napoleon’s moods. But her heart was often miles away in Malmaison. While the first consul was reconfiguring the very foundations on which the country rested, his wife began major restructuring and renovation of her country estate. In January 1800, the two young architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine were called upon “to rebuild a badly constructed house which is falling into ruin and which was only built for a very ordinary person.”
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Percier and Fontaine kept a detailed notebook in which they recorded the modifications. This invaluable document gives a sense of the scale. Entire sections of the house were demolished and rebuilt. As always, Napoleon grumbled that his wife was spending too much money but did little to stop her. She attempted to create an interior decor imitating military tents, but Napoleon judged it unappealing. He dubbed a tent-shaped vestibule designed to house the domestic staff “a fairground tent fit only for showing animals.”
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Malmaison was to be primarily a home for entertaining, so in her renovations, everything was sacrificed to these spaces. Josephine spent thousands on the salon, the dining room, the gallery, and the billiard room on the ground floor. The architects remodeled them along classical lines with stucco columns and decorative panels, the best means of display for statues stolen from Italy. They created a music room, which Josephine decorated with her incredible collection of art. The renovated
dining room was equipped with an ingenious underfloor heating system, and Louis Lafitte decorated it in Pompeian style. By July, Percier and Fontaine proudly noted, “the dining room, billiard room and vestibule are nearly finished. The First Consul, who is back again, is pleased with the changes.”
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Next to the dining room was another tentlike meeting room. Beyond this stood Napoleon’s office. Framed by imposing pillars (and a protruding kitchen pipe that severely annoyed the architects), the ceiling was decorated with a fresco of the figures of Minerva and Apollo and portraits of the hero. “Mme. Bonaparte desired to have paintings representing scenes from the general’s life,” Fontaine noted.
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Napoleon liked the paintings by Girodet and Gérard, especially since they were inspired by Ossian, the great ancient Gaelic bard. Ossian’s poems had taken Europe by storm after the Scots poet James Macpherson had published verses supposedly written by the bard, which he said he had found (in reality, the lines were written by Macpherson himself). Napoleon was less enamored by the pictures of him on the panels by Bidaut, Taunay, Dunouy, and Thibault, and he demanded their prompt removal. The whole home was a tribute to Napoleon, covered in Greek and Roman decorations and Egyptian trinkets. Josephine packed it full of heavy mahogany and gilt furniture made by Napoleon’s favorite, Maison Jacob. Everything was meant to give an aura of grandeur and opulence, and to underscore Napoleon’s message that he was a new force for good with connections to old traditions.

As with Percier and Fontaine, Napoleon’s patronage changed the lives of the Jacob brothers, the owners of the Maison Jacob atelier. The exquisite creations of their father, Georges Jacob, had adorned the royal palaces of the monarchs prior to the Revolution, and the aristocracy had all fought to buy his work. But after 1789 his workshop lay quiet. Under Thermidor, demand began to soar once more, and Georges’s younger son François took over, soon catching the attention of Barras and the directors. Josephine filled her home with his furniture, and by the time Napoleon was first consul, François Jacob had to tempt his father out of retirement to help with Napoleon’s demands for mahogany, gilt and bronze chairs, tables carved with his insignia, and chests and armoires so heavily laden with gold that they were wearing on the eye.

Despite Napoleon’s obsession with Versailles, in which bedrooms were public spaces as splendid as reception rooms, his home at Malmaison followed a bourgeois setup: Public rooms were resplendent and private rooms simple. Laure Junot, a regular guest at the château, was unimpressed, complaining, “Our apartments consisted of a bedroom, a cabinet and a room for our maid.” She also called the furniture “very plain.”
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Napoleon and Josephine didn’t mind; until the end of the consulate, they shared a bed under a fresco of clouds blowing across a blue sky in a simply furnished room.
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By 1802, the now-jaded Percier and Fontaine had done their work, and Malmaison had been transformed. Josephine turned her attentions to developing the grounds of her new home and buying more land. She had originally purchased a rather measly 150 acres, but by the end of her life, the land had increased more than ten times, with grounds stretching to the banks of the Seine. Percier and Fontaine created an area for sports and rebuilt the stables and outhouses. They erected extra buildings for staff and cottages for guests. Josephine had grand designs: She requested a pavilion and a roundabout to make it easier for dozens of coaches to attend at the same time. In 1801, after an attempt on Napoleon’s life, she added sentry posts.

Josephine longed to reproduce the lush landscape of Martinique in her home and bought books on horticulture as well as thousands of plants. “She wants us to work on the gardens, the waters, the conservatories,” Fontaine noted in 1800.
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He protested that her requirements were “without measure and without limits.”
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Josephine, transported by romantic desires for rolling hills and free-flowing beds of flowers, clashed with Fontaine, who preferred a classical layout. He was infuriated when she eventually hired the British gardener Howatson and then Jean-Marie Morel, both specialists in the
jardin à l’anglaise,
as she wished a wilder look for her grounds than Versailles.

On October 2, an alarmed Napoleon appointed a new superintendent for the gardens in an attempt to curb the expense. It was hopeless. Josephine had become a woman obsessed by plants. In a letter to her mother, she asked for “the trees and seeds of as many species as possible” (though Josephine had asked, her mother refused to come to France because she was a staunch royalist and was shocked by Napoleon’s desire
to rule alone, but she agreed to send over plants). Josephine filled the gardens with orchids and exotic magnolia trees from St. Lucia and also exploited her husband’s empire by collecting seeds from his representatives all over the world, including Africa, South America, and the Middle East.