Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (28 page)

In the afternoons, Napoleon and Josephine would ride around in her barouche. “When I am outside in the fresh air my ideas take a higher direction,” Napoleon said. “I cannot understand how some men can work successfully if they are always inside, beside the fireplace, without communication with the sky.”
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Visitors to Malmaison often saw him working outside, papers on his lap. Talleyrand once arrived to find Napoleon had “established his office on one of the bowling greens.”

Everyone was seated on the grass which Napoleon did not mind in the least as he was wearing leather boots and kid breeches—and he is used to camping. But as for me in silk breeches and silk stockings—can you imagine me sitting on the lawn! I am full of rheumatism! What a man! It was as if he was in a camp!
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On warm summer evenings, Josephine would order dinner to be served outside, sometimes in tents to celebrate Napoleon’s victories.
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There would be hunts, and as Laure Permond, by then married to Junot, recalled, when Bonaparte “felt in the mood,” he would play games such as
barre,
“which he vastly enjoyed, taking off his coat and running like a hare.” The consul teased the animals, feeding the tame gazelle tobacco from his pouch and “encouraging it to run at us and the horrid animal tore our dresses and often our legs.”
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But his greatest pleasure was to see the younger ladies “running beneath the leafy arches of the trees, all dressed in white.” Nothing touched him like the sight of a graceful woman in a white gown.
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During the summer months, there were balls in the salons on Sundays, and guests in their finery spilled out onto the huge lawn of the property. There were concerts and games of blindman’s bluff, chess,
backgammon, cards, billiards, and charades, which Napoleon hated losing. The company was young, fun-loving, wealthy, and life seemed full of possibility. Romantic liaisons were made under the trees, pursued beside the Greek statues, and broken by the lake of black swans.

“It was not difficult to be entertained,” Hortense remembered.
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On Wednesdays, forty or fifty guests would be invited to dinner, and a hundred and fifty came for a theatrical performance overseen by the consul. He would have his courtiers, friends, and relatives rehearsing for weeks, supervised the casting, and spent thousands of francs on costumes and props. The theater manager came over from the Théâtre-Français, and drama coaches were hired in the form of the established actors Talma, Michot, Fleury, and Mademoiselle Mars. As in royal courts throughout history, the family members took the important parts and the courtiers had to applaud them, no matter how bad they were. Fortunately, Hortense, who usually took the lead female roles, had a sweet voice and a facility for acting, unlike the rest. Bourrienne was given the longer parts on account of his good memory, Junot often played drunkards, and stolid Eugène was landed with the footmen roles. Lucien declared the whole lot of them poor, but Bonaparte was delighted by their performances, writing to Josephine while she was in Plombières to inform her that Hortense was playing Rosina in
The Barber of Seville
.
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Napoleon initially told Fontaine to create “a sort of portable theatre, which can be set up in the gallery at Malmaison, near the drawing-room.”
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Then he ordered “as economically as possible, a small hall, entirely isolated, in the direction of the farm.” It was not an economic design. Fontaine drew up a plan and an estimate, handed it to Bourrienne for a performer’s view, and settled on a circular form, the seats divided into sections, with a pit, a row of boxes, a gallery, an orchestra, two small foyers, and “a smaller theatre with no machinery for intimate plays.”
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On May 12, 1802, the architect recorded in his journal, “the theatre of Malmaison has been used for the first time.”
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The actors played in front of consuls, minsters, senators, and generals—and Napoleon. “He would be there in his box, close beside us, and followed us with his eyes and at the same time with a more or less mocking smile, which terrified us all,” recalled Laure Junot.
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“After
the spectacle, there was a crowd in the ground floor apartments for brilliant refreshments.”
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The evenings ended at about midnight, when guests would clatter in their carriages back to Paris.

M
ALMAISON WAS
J
OSEPHINE
’
S
crown, and Hortense, fresh from Madame Campan’s, was its jewel. As Napoleon wrote to his wife in Plombières, “your charming daughter does the honours of the house with perfection.”
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She had inherited her mother’s grace and elegance, along with her father’s magnificent looks. Unlike her mother, she read widely, wrote poetry, and played the piano well, particularly her favorite sonatas by Haydn and Mozart and pieces by Gluck and Dalayrac. So accomplished were her musical compositions—which included “Le Bon Chevalier”—that they were performed and appreciated in other salons.
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One of her compositions, “Va T’en Guerrier,” was even turned into a military march at Napoleon’s request.
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Josephine had been lazy at music, and Napoleon could no sooner play than stand on his head, but they encouraged Hortense and Eugène to perform. Hortense sang beautifully, putting great expression into the words, and her voice blossomed under the guidance of her Italian singing tutor, Signor Bonesi.
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Napoleon was always alert to improving his stepdaughter. On one occasion as she read aloud, he stopped her in midsentence and corrected her loudly.
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But most of the time she needed little coaching. She was also a talented artist and had benefited greatly from Isabey’s tutoring. On one occasion at Malmaison, Hortense failed to make an appearance at dinner. When Josephine went to her daughter’s room and found her drawing, she asked whether she was hoping to earn a living from her hobby. Astute for her age, Hortense replied: “Mama, in the century in which we are living, who is to say that that might not happen?”
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Everyone thought Hortense was destined for an auspicious marriage. Like Josephine, she was very affectionate and quite attached to her mother and brother. “She is really angelic in disposition,” thought Madame de Rémusat.
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She had inherited her mother’s talent for flirting. Madame Campan worried for her as she embarked on her new social life as Napoleon’s stepdaughter. She warned that it would be a “dangerous whirlwind,” since many people wished to be friends only
“for their own advantage” because she was “the person of the moment, with an awe-inspiring title.”
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Madame Campan was right: Hortense was quickly surrounded by soldiers, ministers, and diplomats eager for her attentions. She fell in love with Napoleon’s former aide-de-camp, General Duroc. A romance blossomed—but Josephine had greater plans for her daughter, and Napoleon disliked the idea of such a powerful son-in-law. Napoleon declared that they could marry, with a dowry of five hundred thousand francs, but Duroc and she would have to leave for Toulon immediately after the wedding: “I do not want any sons-in-law in my house,” Napoleon said.
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Duroc refused to agree to the terms, and Josephine sent her despairing daughter back to the round of dancing and balls.

W
HEN THEY WERE
not entertaining, Josephine’s routine at Malmaison seldom varied: She would spend the day corresponding about plants, surveying the house and the grounds, receiving visitors, and dining alone with Napoleon in the evening. He neglected his work to walk around the property and supervise the improvements, and amused himself by calculating the income from the grounds, including even the vegetables in the kitchen garden. “That’s not bad,” he said, looking at the profit of 8,000 francs, “but one needs a yearly income of 30,000 francs to live here.”
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“Napoleon loved Malmaison with a passion!” said one visitor.
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“Nowhere, except on the battlefield, have I seen Bonaparte happier than in the gardens at Malmaison,” wrote Bourrienne.
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The consul looked forward to his weekends there as eagerly as “a schoolboy to his holidays.”
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In a world where he was always afraid of uprisings or rebels hungering for his blood, the consul felt safe in Josephine’s palace. Even when he was seriously entertaining plans to leave her, he still thought fondly of Malmaison. In August 1809, while in Austria, he wrote, “the pleasures of Malmaison, the beautiful greenhouses, the beautiful gardens cause the absent to be forgotten.”
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If the gardens were Josephine’s display case for exotic and rare plants, the house was her frame for the art she purchased at a cost of millions. She had the pictures, statues, and mosaics that Napoleon had taken for her during his campaigns, some so exquisite that it was little wonder
many had been locked up in the secret closet of the pope. And even during the period of the Directory, she was an influential patron. From 1799, she had amassed over 450 paintings, drawings, and miniatures. By the time she died, there were more than three thousand objets d’art at Malmaison (including works by old masters and contemporary artists, sculpture, furniture, and other decorative objects). Josephine became one of the most important collectors of her age.

On a personal level, she loved the chase of collecting. Her gallery featured the finest paintings in Europe, taken by the brute force of her husband. “I would have respected Mme. Bonaparte more if she had simply said all these works of art were taken by force at the end of a sword,” said Madame de la Tour du Pin.
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Catherine the Great had amassed art as an aggressive strategy, creating a collection that saluted Russia’s power and wealth. With every painting she took from a vassal state, an enemy, or a rival, she proved her country’s magnitude. Famous French consorts previously patronized French artists, from Watteau and Boucher, beloved of Madame du Pompadour, to the Sèvres porcelain admired by Marie Antoinette. Josephine saw herself as the patroness of an empire. As the wife of Napoleon, she knew it was her role to create a fabulous art collection to showcase his power. The collection was also testimony to her independence, dedication, and negotiating skills.

She kept up with trends in the art world and subscribed to a variety of journals. She used the most knowledgeable advisers in France, such as Dominique Vivant de Denon, director of the Musée Napoléon; the archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir; the curator and merchant restorer Guillaume Constantin; and the artists Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Jean-Baptiste Isabey, and Lancelot Turpin de Crissé. Crissé even became her chamberlain. She made the careers of many artists. “How many she helped! How many received her support!” said her maid, Mademoiselle Avrillion.
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Once she had bought their works, commissions from Napoleon often followed, and everybody at court wished to use the same painters as Josephine.
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The consuless did not always pay her bills. She asked Antoine Hamelin, who was in Rome, to spend a hundred thousand francs on art for her, suggesting he could spend more if he saw items he liked. Two years later, he was still plaintively asking for his money.

Josephine owned great works from Italy, many French pieces, a good haul of Dutch and Flemish canvases, and a few by Spanish and German painters. She had pictures by Rembrandt, Rubens, Metsu, Van Dyck, Ruysdael, Poussin, Lorrain, Bellini, Correggio, Raphael, da Vinci, Titian, Veronese, and a number of marbles, bronzes, mosaics, and antique vases from Egypt. She had family portraits, historical subjects, works inspired by Napoleon’s military conquests, scenes from everyday life and mythology, still lifes, and animal paintings. One of the most significant additions to her gallery—Rembrandt’s
Descent from the Cross
—came from the collection of the Hesse-Cassel family following the battle of Jena in 1806 (the owners had tried to hide the art in a woodshed, but Napoleon’s soldiers hunted it out).

The one glaring absence in her assortment was British paintings. Napoleon simply would not allow it—London plants were bad enough.

Josephine initially planned to hang her paintings in the
salon de musique
(sometimes called the
galerie française
). She soon ran out of space. In 1806 Berthault designed a gallery of at least sixty-five feet in length; its construction was completed in 1808. She threw a ball to celebrate the opening of the most magnificent room in all Malmaison. It was, said one visitor, “so well built, so well painted and with such taste, so perfectly lighted from above, so well proportioned that one could not hope to see a more beautiful room.”
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Two glass doors led to a huge double archway, and works lined the walls, with vases and bronzes arranged over the tables, alongside busts of Napoleon and herself.
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Mme. Bonaparte was a ruthless collector, yet the works she was most drawn to, as in her garden, were often romantic or sentimental about nature and rustic life, rather than congratulatory of Napoleon. She had emotive paintings by popular female artists and more than thirty troubadour paintings—small, highly finished portraits of courtly love, such as François Fleury Richard’s
Valentine of Milan Mourning the Death of Her Husband, the Duc d’Orléans
(1802). Displayed at the Paris Salon of 1802, it reflected a craze for the medieval style that was all the rage. One reviewer called it a “triumph of marital love,” and Josephine snapped it up.
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