Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (3 page)

The destruction was terrible—440 people dead, hundreds more injured, and close to fifty ships wrecked off the coast. The island’s crops of sugar, coffee, and cocoa had been wiped out and whole villages wrecked.
People had lost their lives, their homes, and their ambitions for the future. In nearby Trinité, the wind tore a church from its foundations, threw it into the air, and smashed it to the ground. During the storm, houses, trees, and cattle soared up toward the clouds, only to crash down into the wet soil or the raging sea. One family found themselves using the door of their house as a raft, clinging to it until they were rescued.

Joseph gazed at his home in despair. To rebuild it would be a daunting task, insurmountable to a man who was as impractical and lazy as he was. The family adopted the upper floor of the sugarhouse as their living quarters and built a veranda over the south side. It was meant to be their residence for six months or so. A few weeks later, Rose-Claire went into labor and they all prayed for a son. But the child was a girl, Marie-Françoise, or “Manette.” Joseph felt he had been saddled with another useless mouth and he railed at the poor hand life had dealt him.

The defeat of the island broke the heart of Rose-Claire’s father, and he died six months later. The family had expected to inherit great wealth from his will, but they were shocked to find there were only debts to be paid, and Joseph did not have the gumption to investigate any possible mistakes in the accounts. The young husband now had a family of dependent women—a mother-in-law, a sister-in-law, a wife, and three daughters—and no money. Fortunately, he had an efficient overseer in Monsieur Blanque, who ensured that the slave quarters were rebuilt and the sugar-processing buildings restored. Even though all the crops were replanted, the estate dwindled, and Joseph spent more time than ever gambling and squiring mistresses in Fort Royal. Soon there were only 150 slaves, and sugar production was under half what it had been. Angry, frustrated, and left alone for long periods, Rose-Claire watched her childhood home collapse into ruins.

Joseph never had the money or the energy to rebuild their wooden house, so the upper floor of the
purgerie
became their permanent home. No genteel family would ever live over the workrooms—and island society was shocked at the La Pagerie living conditions. With the hurricane, the death of grandfather Sannois, and the birth of a third daughter, the family’s situation was dire. Oblivious, Yeyette continued skipping
through the sugarcane, playing with her nurse under the breadfruit trees, and riding her pony.

Usually, the daughters of the great plantation families were sent to France at the age of six to be educated. Not only did their parents wish them to acquire polish, but it was a way to keep them from merciless tropical diseases that killed so many before the age of twelve. And indeed in 1770, at the age of seven, Yeyette caught a severe bout of smallpox—but luckily, she recovered and was left unmarked. In Paris, Joseph’s sister, Edmée, was eager to take Yeyette, but Joseph declared he could not afford to send her.

In the same year on the other side of the world, the dauphin, Louis-Auguste, was married to the fourteen-year-old Maria Antonia of Austria. She was met by officials on an island in the Rhine, stripped of her fine Austrian wedding clothes, re-dressed in French gowns, and sent to Versailles. “Meeting with Madame la Dauphine,” Louis wrote in his hunting journal of their first encounter at the Château de Compiègne. Two thousand people died in the fashionable avenue of the Champs-Élysées after a crush at a fete to celebrate their marriage.

The young princess was flung into a world of pomp, etiquette, formality, and treacherous courtiers. “Everything depends on the wife,” her mother, Maria Teresa, had told her, “if she is willing, sweet and
amusante
”—in other words, it was her fault if the marriage failed. Four years later, Louis XV died of smallpox, tears rolling down his cheeks after he sent away his favorite mistress, Madame du Barry. Then the palace resounded with a thunderous rushing noise as hundreds of courtiers left the king to hurry to Louis-Auguste and Marie Antoinette, now King Louis XVI and the queen of France.

Marie Antoinette, barely seven years older than Yeyette, became the primped young queen of Versailles, surrounded by dozens of servants and her favorites, the dizzy, softhearted Princesse de Lamballe and the sensual Comtesse de Polignac. Her tiny figure was swamped by heavy brocades, hooped skirts, and trains, and she piled her hair three feet high and topped it with feathers, ribbons, and diamonds. Her mother chastised her for “following fashion to excess.”
⁷
But the queen could not stop powdering her hair, decking herself with precious stones, and covering
her face with lead paint and rouge. She ordered four new pairs of shoes a week and three yards of ribbon every day so that her
peignoir,
or dressing gown, was always tied with fresh ribbon. A palace of exquisite, exotic desserts that no one ever ate, hairstyles that took days to perfect, and courtiers bent obsessively on guessing the queen’s every whim, Versailles was a labyrinth, the jewel in the French crown—and much of the money to pay for it came from the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

France at the time was riven by inequality. Peasants and laborers worked with little respite and for a few coins. Life expectancy across the board was very low thanks to the appalling rate of child mortality, and the average age of death was around twenty-five—the same as that of the slaves in the Caribbean. At the top were the nobles living in grand style through the rents from land tilled by peasants and tenant farmers; above the nobility was Versailles, a great iced palace built from the toil of thousands of hands. Martinique was nothing but a name to Marie Antoinette, choosing shoes and demanding that her maid adjust the position of her ribbons. But Martinique thought obsessively about her. Society gossip on the island was all about Versailles, the fashions of Paris, and the favorites of the queen.

Yeyette turned ten in 1773, and Rose-Claire decided to send her to boarding school in Fort Royal. After a long journey by canoe, she arrived at her new home, accompanied by Marion, her nurse. They took a carriage past brothels, slums, and shebeens, soon reaching the grandeur of colonial buildings and the Governor’s House. In the midst of it all was the Maison de la Providence, a convent school for young ladies, founded in 1763 in an attempt to instill proper morals in the lax girls of the island and prepare them to be “wives, mothers and mistresses of plantations” who would embed proper Christian tenets in their husbands and children.

Yeyette awoke at five, dressed herself in the red-and-blue-striped cotton uniform, and began two hours of supervised prayers. Then teachers from France, under the beady eye of the Mother Superior, instructed the girls in arithmetic, drawing, embroidery, penmanship, and geography. Rose-Claire had ambitions for her daughter, and the girl was given extra lessons in dancing and painting. She had Wednesday and Saturday afternoons off for gossiping and giggling with the other
filles de la Providence,
and one day in town per month, when she usually visited her grandmother. The main idea was that a young lady would befriend a circle of other girls and thus be introduced to their brothers or male relations—and find herself a plantation husband. Fortunately for Yeyette, who had little interest in applying herself, the education was light. “Her voice is sweet, she plucks prettily at the guitar, and, showing a general aptitude for music, she could with proper instruction perfect her singing, playing and dancing,” her father wrote—but her music remained a mere “aptitude.”
⁸

Yeyette left school at the age of fourteen, knowing little more than when she had arrived. She began to attend gatherings at other plantations and the balls at the Governor’s House in Fort Royal. Attended by their house slaves, young ladies gowned in white and finely dressed gentlemen paraded on the lawn before entering the humid ballroom to dance to the music of the slave orchestra under bouquets of flaming tropical flowers. Yeyette was a popular girl to flirt with but not to marry, for, in the words of one man, she was “fused with grace, more seductive than beautiful,” entrancing and magnetic, but “the family in real life lives in mediocrity.”
⁹
Without a large dowry, she was not sought after. But Yeyette wished for more than marriage to a plantation son. Seduced by her father’s nostalgic stories about Paris and Versailles, she wanted to go to France.

Yeyette was fifteen when she and two friends decided to visit the local witch. Euphémie David lived in the hills near La Pagerie, mixing potions, telling stories, and promising to cure all ills. She kept a healthy trade—in a world of disease and sudden violence, few could resist the pull of the occult. The old woman clutched the hand of each girl in turn. The first, she said, would marry a planter and live a contented life. The second, a distant cousin of Yeyette’s, would live a scandalous life and be captured by pirates. Yeyette was destined to marry one man in France, but unhappily, and then wed a “dark man of little fortune” who would “cover the world with glory” and make her greater than a queen. Even so, she would die unhappy and often yearn for the ease of life on Martinique.
¹⁰
It seems too convenient to be plausible, but Josephine would later refer to it intently, and even brought it up in newspaper interviews long before she became empress.
¹¹
Most likely, the sorceress
saw her yearning for adventure and guessed that she was destined for a new life in France—one that would not necessarily bring happiness.

France seemed like an impossible dream. But then Yeyette’s aunt Edmée wrote to suggest that one of the La Pagerie girls be sent over to marry her lover’s son, Alexandre. He was seventeen, born just over three years before Yeyette, handsome and eager for a Creole bride. As the eldest, Yeyette was the obvious choice.

The Tascher de La Pagerie family already had a poor reputation, and Joseph’s sister, Edmée—whose real name was Désirée—was a scandalous figure. In 1757, in the midst of battles between the French and British for control of the island, François de Beauharnais arrived on Martinique as the governor. His wife, a wealthy Saint-Domingue heiress, took an immediate fancy to the nineteen-year-old Edmée and moved her in as a companion. The forty-two-year-old governor fell passionately in love with Edmée and made her his mistress. Ambitious and amoral where her brother was quiescent and parasitic, she did as she liked. In order to hide their liaison, Beauharnais (who had declared himself a marquis), found her a husband, Alexis Renaudin, a handsome young king’s musketeer. He had been recently released from prison for the attempted poisoning of his wealthy plantation father, but Beauharnais was impatient, and the marriage was arranged in 1758.

The governor was so obsessed with ensuring the wedding of his lover that he ignored the plight of the nearby island of Guadeloupe. The British attacked, and Beauharnais delayed for three months before responding to the requests of the lieutenant in command for assistance. He was lazy, too cautious, and preoccupied with enjoying Edmée (for now he could take her freely, since if she fell pregnant, the child would be seen as her husband’s). By the time his fleet reached Guadeloupe, the British had won. For such appalling dereliction of duty, he was called back to France. He refused to leave immediately and instead whiled away his last months on the island fondling Edmée. Finally realizing that he was a cuckold, Renaudin angrily abandoned his wife and hurried to France to arrange a legal separation. She followed after him in an attempt to seize a financial settlement, though she did ensure that her brother’s marriage to Rose-Claire was arranged before she left. Beauharnais and his wife returned to France, leaving their three-month-old son,
Alexandre, with Edmée’s mother (the journey was seen as too risky for an infant).

In France, the discarded Madame de Beauharnais retired to a country estate. The marquis wangled a generous pension from the king and set up home in Paris with Edmée, who was now separated from her husband. When Alexandre was five, he was sent to Paris to live with his father and Edmée, and he became as fond of her, he said, as if she was his own mother. Parisian society despaired—adultery was all very well, but it was immoral to live together in sin. Still, the marquis adored his much younger lover, and his wealth protected them from cruel comments, in public, at least.

When Edmée was thirty-eight, after nearly twenty years with her lover, she began to think about securing her future. The marquis was sixty-two and sickly, and she would be left virtually penniless on his death, as his estate and that of his wife would go to Alexandre. She wanted to keep this money for herself and suggested Alexandre marry her niece, in the hope that the couple would care for her after her husband’s death. Alexandre agreed, for he needed to wed in order to come into his inheritance. It was entirely acceptable to marry a Martinique girl; the French thought them wildly rich, and they had a reputation for beauty and sensuality. Although Alexandre knew the La Pagerie sisters were not incredibly wealthy, he thought they were comfortably off, and that was satisfactory enough. He had only one proviso: He wished his wife to be very young.

The marquis wrote to Joseph de La Pagerie telling him that Alexandre did not want Yeyette, since “my son, who is only seventeen and a half, finds that a young lady of fifteen is too close in age to his own.”
¹²
He asked for Catherine, not knowing that she had recently died from a strain of yellow fever. Instead, Joseph offered eleven-year-old Manette, a girl equipped, he cheerfully wrote, with health, gaiety, and “a figure that will soon be interesting.”
¹³

The family fell into uproar. Manette was hysterical at the thought of leaving her home, and her mother felt she could not permit her to marry so young. Yeyette was tearful and furious. She had dreamed of Paris for as long as she could remember—and now Manette was taking her place. She begged her father to send her instead. Otherwise, she had nothing
to anticipate but a dreary future as a planter’s wife. Yeyette, normally pliable and indolent, was so passionately set on traveling to France that her father relented.