Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (4 page)

“The oldest girl, who has often asked me to take her to France, will I fear be somewhat affected by the preference which I appear to give to her younger sister,” he wrote. He continued that Yeyette had “very fine skin, lovely eyes, good arms, and a surprising gift for music. She longs to see Paris and has a very sweet disposition. If it were left to me, I would bring the two daughters instead of one, but how can one part a mother from both her remaining daughters when death has just deprived her of a third?”
¹⁴

Back in Paris, Edmée was growing desperate. She wanted the marriage agreed to quickly, before Alexandre’s guardians could dissuade him. “We must have one of your children,” she wrote. “Come with one of your daughters or with both of them, but hurry.”
¹⁵
The marquis sent a letter authorizing the publication of the marriage banns on Martinique. Alexandre’s name had been added, but the space for the bride’s name was blank. By the time the letter arrived, Joseph’s decision had been made for him. Poor Manette had so exhausted herself from crying that she fell ill with a fever, and her mother refused to let her go. When Alexandre heard the news, he was not ecstatic. “Surely it is not your intention to have me marry this young lady if she and I should feel mutual dislike for each other?” he wrote to his father. Still, he was obedient. “I feel sure after the description that has been given that she will charm me.”
¹⁶

Yeyette was to be married. But having won his battle, her torpid father dragged his feet. It was not until six months later that the priest stood in the church of Notre-Dame de la Martinique and announced the forthcoming marriage between Alexandre-François, chevalier de Beauharnais, and Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie. Then Joseph again delayed over the journey. For years, he had said he longed to return to France—and now he did not wish to go.

He ignored his sister’s pleas for urgency. He was ill, the journey was expensive, and travel was growing more dangerous by the day. After the uneasy truce shortly before Yeyette’s birth, hostilities between Britain and France had begun again, and Martinique was under siege. Moreover,
the hurricane season was approaching, making it unsafe to travel by sea.

Edmée pushed and demanded until finally, accompanied by her father, her aunt Rosette, and her maid Euphémie, Yeyette embarked for France in September 1779. Sixteen, barely educated, pretty, and thoughtless, Marie-Josèphe was bound for a new life in Paris.

CHAPTER 2

Sophistication

Alexandre de Beauharnais was slender, strong-jawed, and handsome. As languidly aggressive as a character in the forthcoming novel
Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
he was already an arch-seducer by the age of seventeen. He felt the world was his for the taking. In August 1779, just before Yeyette departed from Martinique, he wrote to his stepmother that he was “going into the country” with a “wife of a sub-lieutenant in the navy, a charming woman.” He was not planning on conversation. “I count on spending two days there, and in that short space of time I shall do everything possible to succeed.”

He won his prize. His new mistress, Marie Françoise-Laure de Girardin de Montgérald, Madame de Longpré, was from a Martinique family, twenty-nine, and the mother of a child. Stylish and temperamental, she had captivated her youthful lover. “Yes indeed, the chevalier has tasted happiness. He is loved by a charming woman who is the object of all the aspirations of the garrison of Brest and the district.”
¹
He expected Edmée to congratulate him. Entranced by Laure’s conversation, enthralled by her sexual experience, he barely gave a thought to the girl who was traveling thousands of miles to marry him. To Alexandre, love meant sex and conquest, and life was about enjoying himself.

A spoiled, much beloved child, Alexandre had been raised to believe he was destined for greatness. Until the age of five, he had lived on Martinique, then was sent to his indulgent father and his mistress in France. In 1775, his tutor, Patricol, was offered a position in the household of the two nephews of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. A leading figure of
the Enlightenment, the duc was friends with Voltaire and Lafayette and a fervent abolitionist. Patricol took Alexandre (and his elder brother, François) with him—it was not uncommon for aristocratic children to be sent off to live in grander households—and the boys grew up in the duc’s Parisian palace and his country château, listening to debates about freedom. He also grew up excessively reserved, cloaking his feelings in elegant diffidence. “What astonishes me most in him, and greatly displeases me, is the extreme care that he takes to hide, and the ease with which he disguises, the feelings of his heart,” rued Patricol.
²
A modern teacher might say Alexandre was deceptive and shallow.

At sixteen, Alexandre achieved a commission in the Sarre Infantry Regiment, which was commanded by the duc. There, his passion for women hit new heights. They were to him “trophies of war.”
³
He wrote lists of all the women he had ensnared, comparing their various features and titles. Stationed with the unit, he seduced ladies of the town and regimental wives, always eagerly acquainting his stepmother, Edmée, with his every success. By the age of seventeen, having long lost his innocence, he preferred older, married women, since they were more nonchalant and skilled at verbal sparring. Laure—bored, sensual, teasing, and glamorous—was perfect.

M
EANWHILE
, Y
EYETTE WAS
en route to France. She had expected her journey to be terrifying; only a year before, her cousin Aimée had disappeared while traveling on a ship, and her family in Martinique believed she had been kidnapped by pirates. Yeyette and Joseph had taken places on a naval store ship,
Île de France,
headed to the mainland in a convoy led by the
Pomone.
The weather was rough, and the storms were so bad that the passengers believed they would die. Joseph and his daughter were hopelessly seasick and terrified of battle at sea, for they were repeatedly followed by British ships.

In spite of their troubles, the family made it to the large naval port of Brest, on the west coast of France, on October 12, 1779. Overwhelmed by the bustle, the cold and the dreary autumnal skies, the family retrieved what remained of their baggage and took lodgings in town. But the French sophistication Yeyette had dreamed of was nowhere to be found. Brest was one of the two major naval bases, a practical town of
bars, brothels, and supply shops. Worse still, her father was ill and exhausted, and he had forgotten to write to his sister before departing to say they were coming. He didn’t even manage to send the letter to tell her that they had arrived until October 20.

Edmée had expected much more warning and had to rush to depart, seizing Alexandre and hurrying him to Brest. The young soldier was furious about the lack of notice. From the start, he was ill disposed and ready to find fault with the Creole girl he thought too old to be properly biddable. Moreover, he was deeply in love with Laure. She had recently told him she was pregnant with his child, and he wished to be constantly by her side.

Though she was sick and suffering from the journey, Yeyette readied herself to meet her fiancé. Euphémie dressed her mistress’s hair and pinched her cheeks for color. Yeyette thought she looked enchanting, and remembered how men had admired her at the governor’s balls. As soon as she saw Alexandre, she was delighted. Nineteen and very handsome, he was superb in his uniform of white with silver buttons and facings. Unlike her shabby father, he was precise in his appearance, with hair perfectly powdered and drawn back at the nape of his neck. She admired his piercing blue eyes and prominent nose. Everything about him corresponded with the strictures of male beauty at the time—except for the fact that he was of rather less than average height.

Yeyette held out her hand, her face bright with excitement. Alexandre looked at her in shock. He was obsessed by appearances and already a little jaded by too much experience with women, and Mademoiselle de La Pagerie was not what he had expected at all. He had anticipated a dusky beauty, all languorous grace, with a sensual smile and an air of French sophistication. He got a plump girl with a thick Creole accent and a clumsy manner. Yeyette barely understood fashion, and she was ill at ease with the heavy brocade gowns and elaborate coiffeurs she was expected to wear. She looked like a child in her mother’s clothes.

Alexandre could hardly smile. It was even worse when Yeyette spoke. Lightly educated, lacking in elegance, and without style, it was clear the girl who had run wild in the baking sun belonged in the schoolroom, not at a soirée. She was a poor comparison to his glamorous mistress,
Laure—Yeyette had neither beauty nor accomplishments, and her deportment was terrible.

The young soldier was used to women practically swooning at his smile, so Yeyette’s fascination with him had no novelty. It was obvious that the girl was eager to please and that she was a virgin. But he had little desire to take her to his bed. Still, he respected his stepmother, Edmée, so there was no turning back. Over their following days together, he tried hard to love Yeyette. Certainly, she was so in love with him that it seemed she would be docile. Perhaps, he thought, some schooling in manners from Edmée, and time spent with a dressmaker, might shroud her rougher edges. “Mademoiselle de La Pagerie may perhaps appear to you less pretty than you had expected,” he wrote to his father, “but I think I may assure you that her amiability and the sweetness of her nature will surpass even what you have been told.”
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Alexandre also thought Yeyette was a ridiculous name. He declared she must henceforth be known only as Marie-Josèphe-Rose.

Marie-Josèphe was too blinded by infatuation to understand that her fiancé was immune to her charms. Seeing this, Edmée took whirlwind charge. She told her niece that all was proceeding marvelously, then whisked her brother to visit a notary in Brest. She encouraged him to sign a document agreeing to the marriage and ceding all control to her. Ill and lazy, he agreed, even though his sister now had the right to decide the dowry and could mortgage all the La Pagerie property in order to fulfill it.

On November 2, the party set off for the three-hundred-mile journey to Paris. Marie-Josèphe was in love. She had, Edmée wrote to the marquis, “all the feelings that you could wish her to have toward your son, and I have observed with the greatest satisfaction that she suits him.”
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The young bride-to-be gazed from the carriage window at countryside that was so unlike Martinique, and imagined her life with her new husband.

As they traveled, the route began to fill up. Carriages of fine ladies, soldiers on horseback, farmers driving their livestock, and laborers looking for work all crammed onto the bumpy road toward the great gated city. An unthinkably huge, bustling place of six hundred thousand
souls, a place of incredible luxury and awful poverty in one, Paris was an eye-opener for anyone, let alone a plantation girl from far-off Martinique.

Finally, Marie-Josèphe arrived at the city she had dreamed of with such fervor. Elegant houses bordered the streets, servants trotted along with messages, ladies descended from carriages to enter the shops or the homes of their friends. The smell of the streets was so intense that visitors often fainted on their first visit. Marie-Josèphe, hardened against fetid conditions by her awful sea journey, stared through the window, gathering in every sight until they arrived at their destination, the family house in the rue Thévenot.

Her new home was a thin two-story building near modern-day Les Halles. Once fashionable, the area was now rather down at the heels. Formerly the home of the marquis’s grandmother, the house had fallen into disrepair, and it had not been renovated for the young couple because no one realized they were coming. Still, it was grand and imposing, with reception rooms hung with heavy chandeliers and tapestries. It all seemed a long way from the rooms in the sugarhouse at La Pagerie.

The marquis and Edmée had quit their stylish apartment in the rue Garancière to live with the newlyweds, all of them crowding into the narrow, gloomy house. Despite the grandeur of Paris, Marie-Josèphe missed the beautiful scenery of Martinique—when she opened the window, she could smell the pungent stench of the tanneries. On nearby streets, butchers set up open stalls and threw their waste meat into the middle of the road.

Edmée was determined not to lose any time. She put out orders for the wedding trousseau and arranged for the banns to be read in three different churches, and on December 10 the marriage contract was signed. In the house on the rue Thévenot, Joseph agreed to give his daughter the incredible dowry of 120,000 livres (money he didn’t have), a sum chosen by his sister. The bride offered presents and furniture given to her by friends and relations on Martinique—generously valued at 15,000 livres. Edmée donated a summerhouse at Noisy-le-Grand and all its furnishings, as well as a sum of money due to her from the will of a relative. Alexandre brought an annual sum of 40,000 livres from the family estates in France and Saint-Domingue.