Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (32 page)

The Bonapartes were furious at Josephine’s successful maneuvering. But her position was not secure. She had told Napoleon that her great
wish had been to see their union blessed at the same time as that of Hortense and Louis and Caroline and Murat. A blessing, of course, would make it much harder to divorce her. Napoleon had flatly refused.

Hortense became pregnant quickly. Even that was not a joyous occasion, as she knew that behind her back, people were accusing her of being pregnant with Napoleon’s child. The British press mocked the marriage and implied that Bonaparte was keeping his stepdaughter close so he could continue the affair. In August, they speculated that she’d already had the child or was about to, suggesting it had been conceived before the wedding. Adamant to stop such “scandalous rumors,” Napoleon forced her to dance an energetic quadrille with him in public at an August ball to prove she was not in the late stages of pregnancy.
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From a man who hated the sight of pregnant women and thought the spectacle of them dancing one of the most disgusting things in the world, this was quite a gesture—although some said that the two of them dancing only fed the gossips.

To Josephine’s delight, on October 10, Hortense gave birth to a son, Napoleon Louis Charles (known as Napoleon Charles), just a few days past the nine-month term. Napoleon declared the boy his heir, although he did not give him any such official status. Josephine felt safe—at least for the moment.

Was he Napoleon’s son? Some thought him so, the British perpetuated the gossip that he was, and certainly Napoleon was much fonder of him than he was of Hortense’s second son, Napoleon Louis. But though the consul had long since given up being faithful to his wife and was fond of his stepdaughter, he was also loyal to Lucien, and to get her pregnant would have been a betrayal. And Josephine might have been desperate, but she never could have put her daughter in her husband’s bed to keep her position. Furthermore, if the child had been Napoleon’s, he would have been much less likely to still consider divorce—and to refuse Josephine her wish for a religious blessing.

N
APOLEON CONTINUED TO
wage war, threatening mainland Europe with his army and chasing the British with his navy. But as the French well knew, the British ships were much stronger than theirs—and they
kept losing territory to Nelson. Napoleon decided to counter by making it clear that he would agree to peace. In March 1802, he signed a treaty with Britain at Amiens. It proved a wise move; the British economy was weakening due to the ongoing conflict, Pitt’s government had fallen, and the king was suffering from delusions. Weary of war, the ministers gave great concessions.

Amiens returned Martinique and Guadeloupe to the French and gave back territories to Holland and Spain. The treaty was a triumph for France, and Napoleon’s popularity soared once again. Towns and villages across France had been sorely tried by losing their young men to the army, and the people were tired of war. They looked forward to dominating the world through economic might rather than bloody battle.

In under two and a half years, thanks to looted gold and brutal campaigns in Italy and Europe, France had thrown off the misery of the days of the Directory. Napoleon poured money into the reconstruction of Paris, improving the parks and building bridges and roads. As he later said, “I wanted Paris to become a town of two, three, four million inhabitants, something fabulous, colossal, unknown until our time.”
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Tourists marveled at the palaces, sampled the restaurants, and filled their trunks with souvenirs. After the imprisonment of the king, the royal collection had become public property (aside from the paintings taken by Napoleon and Josephine), and in 1793 the Louvre had opened with an exhibition of 537 paintings. The public crowded in to see the pictures once owned by the king, as well as those of the Church and nobility, and the Republic decreed that a hundred thousand livres a year should be set aside for expanding the collections. They had not reckoned on Napoleon and his avarice for art. The Louvre closed for renovations from 1796 to 1801, and when it reopened, Napoleon crammed it with his stolen booty. In 1803 it was renamed the Musée Napoléon.

The British had been banned from France since 1792, and after the Amiens treaty, they came in droves. When the British politician Charles James Fox visited in July, he declared one felt “almost breathless expectation at the thought of seeing so celebrated a city.”
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The luckiest might be presented to Josephine at one of her receptions or shown the art at Malmaison. There, they were often rather surprised. Men such as the stolid dramatist Edmund Eyre were mesmerized by the Parisian ladies
and their “state of undress really immodest” (Napoleon’s attempts to encourage higher necklines were not always successful).
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Josephine was thrillingly appealing to the British. Most queens were stolidly virtuous; she had been a kept mistress, veered close to being a courtesan, and been unfaithful to her husband. A British visitor said he had hardly arrived in the Palais de’Egalité—the traditional center of prostitution in the city—when a man sidled up to him. Would he care to buy
The Licentious Life of Madame Bonaparte
?
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Everyone was fascinated by the woman who held the mighty Bonaparte in her hands.

Martinique paid for Josephine’s grandeur. The conquered European countries suffered huge taxes, but perhaps the biggest toll was levied on the newly regained Caribbean islands. In 1799 the Republic had ended slavery in Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), but by 1802 Napoleon was reintroducing it, allowing more African slaves to be brought to the islands. Politically, he knew he could not push the French much harder; it was far easier to oppress colonies overseas. He wanted more money for his coffers and did not care how it was brought in. “Bonaparte is very attached to Martinique and is counting on the support of the planters of that colony; he will use all means possible to preserve their position,” Josephine wrote to her mother in 1803.
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“You will like Bonaparte very much,” she assured her royalist mother. “He is making your daughter very happy.”
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Still horrified at Napoleon’s failure to reinstall the king, her mother refused once again.

In August 1802, Napoleon was elected “Consul for Life” by a massive majority. Only around nine thousand of the three and a half million men who voted had not plumped for him. He had become a king, with more power than a Bourbon had ever enjoyed, thanks to his direct control over the army. He steered his way between the republicans and the royalists, offering concessions, promising favors, and flattering everyone. As he said, “There was not a party in France which did not build some special hope upon my success.”
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For him, his people were children who could always be pacified with the promise of presents. And they rewarded him, putting as much faith in their consul as if he were a miracle worker. He was so convinced of his position that he had his birthday, August 15—a date that in Catholic countries was the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin—declared Saint Napoleon’s Day and
celebrated as an annual public holiday. Within a few months, the mint was producing gold coins stamped with “Napoleon Bonaparte: First Consul.”

Malmaison, he decreed, would no longer suffice for him. There had been hurtful suggestions that it was shabby and small. One British visitor declared it “a poor old affair, washed yellow and backed by a good square patch of wood and planted without the least taste.” Bonaparte rejected Versailles as “monstrous” and instead chose the Château de Saint-Cloud as his new country seat.

Only fifteen minutes by carriage from the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud was a splendid château, with extensive grounds overlooking the Seine. Marie Antoinette had bought it from the Duc d’Orléans, for she thought the fresh air would be good for her children and wished for a property to leave them after her death. She had transformed it into her own pastel, feminine vision of beauty, with pale blue and green walls, drapes of white muslin and gilded sphinxes in her private apartments, golden furniture, and bronze decorations. At the time, the idea of the queen having her own palace was terribly shocking to the people, and there were rumors that she was planning to give it to the Austrian royal family. Overdecorated, overcolored, and spattered with gilt, Saint-Cloud had been for the French people yet another symbol of the corrupt and lavish Bourbon monarchy.

The contents of Saint-Cloud had been sold off after the Revolution. Now Napoleon reclaimed it for the nation, covered all the pastel colors with heavy gold wooden panels and imperial colors, and filled the place with the air of court formality Marie Antoinette had been trying keenly to escape. He stuffed the rooms full of Maison Jacob furniture, gilded ornaments, luxurious hangings, and ornate mirrors. Napoleon’s eyes could not stand bright lights or gaudy colors, so he had the mirrors draped in soft material and the lights shielded with gauze. Josephine had decorated Malmaison to pay tribute to him, with Egyptian figures and statues inspired by the Greeks and Romans. Saint-Cloud was similarly adorned with sphinxes, statues of Napoleon as a Roman hero, and giant “N”s on the doorknobs and plates. As with Malmaison, Napoleon set his beloved Percier and Fontaine to work on plans for renovations. He spent six million francs on the building and huge sums on landscaping
the gardens, adding fountains and cascades that rivaled those of Versailles.

Josephine was depressed by the move to Saint-Cloud. She loved Malmaison and found the new palace forbidding and gloomy. But to Napoleon, it enshrined intimidating glory. The informality and lazy summer evenings of Malmaison were about to be a thing of the past. For Josephine, life as Napoleon’s wife was soon to be all ritual and formality, as stiff and gilded as their new furniture.

Bonaparte saw no irony in occupying a folly of Marie Antoinette’s that once incensed the French people to a murderous pitch. Instead, he began planning a court that outdid that of Louis XVI for splendor. Monarchs across Europe now prided themselves on their simplicity and lack of pomp. King George III in Britain was nicknamed “Farmer George” for his humble interest in plants and his plain court at Windsor Castle. Napoleon, conversely, believed that the lessons of Marie Antoinette’s fate were irrelevant to him; he thought the populace was more likely to pay tribute to the man who appeared in front of them adorned in gold. He began to wear a uniform of a red velvet coat embroidered with gold and a sword inlaid with some of the crown jewels. As far as he was concerned, his people would be won over easily with the cheap gift of fancy dress. Even the former Jacobins on his staff had not complained when he suggested they wear red velvet coats with a blue sash. “I have only to gild the court dress of my virtuous Republicans for them to belong to me,” he crowed.

Napoleon felt that the naturally nostalgic French would welcome a new court and that it would encourage the royalists and aristocrats to his side. Unfortunately, he had little interest in the minutiae of courtly life. He left that to Josephine, who in turn consulted Hortense’s old headmistress, Madame Campan. Jeanne-Louise Campan had been first lady of the bedchamber to Marie Antoinette from 1786 until the storming of the Tuilieries in 1792, and thus was an expert in etiquette. Bows, curtseys, court dress, and precedence became the hot topics of conversation. Napoleon took four prefects, and Josephine had to appoint four ladies-in-waiting from aristocratic backgrounds. She chose Madame de Luçay and Madame Lauriston, whose husbands worked for Napoleon, and Madame de Talhouët, who probably gave information to the royalists.
The fourth woman, twenty-two-year-old Claire de Rémusat, an old friend of Hortense, would appear to be the most loyal of all—although she wrote her memoirs of the court, published by her son in 1880, in which Josephine’s failings were laid bare.

Visitors were properly awed by the gilt, the excess, and the fine liveries of the footmen. “The household of the First Consul is increasingly taking on the appearance of a court,” said the Prussian ambassador. Swedish count Armfelt decided the “grandiose public splendor” hardly less lacking than Versailles. Napoleon was sometimes so confident that he simply wore his uniform waistcoat, sword, breeches, stockings, and boots. He looked ridiculous amid all the luster and rich dress, but nobody dared laugh.

Goldsmiths and jewelers worked day and night to keep up with orders from the new court. The needles of fine dressmakers and the brushes for painting gilt onto carriages were working overtime. In the winter of 1801, more than one million yards of satin and tulle were bought for ball gowns and receptions. Napoleon encouraged dances and masques and reinstated the tradition of balls at the Opéra. It was good for trade, but also, as he put it, when people were dancing, they were not “poking their noses into politics.”
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Despite his affairs, Napoleon was still fascinated by his wife. “Bonaparte’s superstition about his wife is very extraordinary,” commented one British visitor. “When he came from St. Cloud, though quite ill, she came with him to satisfy his feelings, and went to bed as soon as she arrived at the Tuileries.”
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He depended on her as a lover, a companion, and an adviser, though he was growing more impatient with her as he grew more irascible with age and power. He shouted at her in public as freely as he once caressed her. On one terrible occasion, he drove her to inspect a property he had acquired. On the way, Josephine saw a great ditch ahead. Already suffering from a migraine, she begged him to allow her to descend and make her way over the ditch on foot. Napoleon roared at her not to be such a child and whipped the horses to make them jump the ditch as fast as possible. The horses just made it, but the carriage shuddered and almost broke in half. Josephine burst into hysterical tears while Napoleon reproached her wildly for not trusting him. Such violent outbursts were becoming ever more common—but they
were always followed by ardent sexual reunion. Josephine was often resentful of his anger during these reunions, but she knew not to turn him down.