Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (41 page)

The death of Napoleon’s great rival was small consolation for the French. For the British, Trafalgar and its near-decimation of the Franco-Spanish
enemy fleet was the most magnificent victory they had ever enjoyed. The entire population bought Trafalgar brooches and Nelson mourning jewelry; the dignitaries wept at his funeral at St. Paul’s. Villeneuve was taken prisoner by the English and kept at a pub in Hampshire, with the rest of the men living at nearby houses. While there, he was allowed a day release to attend Nelson’s funeral. When he was set free, he tried and failed to return to fight. He was soon found dead of stab wounds—a verdict of suicide was recorded, but the British press declared Napoleon had ordered it (unlikely, since Villeneuve was a disgraced man without power, and Napoleon tended to kill only those who were a threat).

Napoleon’s hopes of invading Britain were finally over. He tried to brush the defeat under the carpet, telling the French press to make only a brief reference to Trafalgar in their newspapers; instead, he trumpeted the cataclysmic surrender of the Austrian forces at Ulm on October 19. Neither did he write about Trafalgar to Josephine; he boasted about his successes in Austria.

On October 22, Napoleon asked Josephine to travel to him in Munich, stopping in Baden and Stuttgart on the way. He had planned her first lone imperial journey in typically exhaustive detail. Accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting, she rode in her grand carriage, followed by those carrying her chamberlains, her luggage and the imperial jewel case. She would ride his victory march through to Vienna, staying at the courts of the electors, princes, and dukes who were his vassals. Every time she arrived in a town, she should be greeted by fanfare, cannons, and the ringing of church bells. “Be civil to all of them,” he wrote, “but accept their homage as your due.”

Josephine charmed the conquered courts with gifts and seemingly heartfelt thanks for displays of singing or fireworks, triumphal arches, and odes in her honor. Napoleon was gratified by her success at smoothing over his hard-won victories. “Have the grand fetes at Baden, Stuttgart and Munich made you forget the poor soldiers who live covered with mud, rain and blood?” he teased.
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Napoleon and his army battled on through Austria, but the men were exhausted and supplies were low. He knew that the allies would see him as easy pickings, far from Strasbourg and leading a demoralized,
hungry army. He decided to pretend that he was about to withdraw his armies, hoping that surprise would allow him another victory. On December 1, the eve of the first anniversary of the day he was declared emperor, he waited in silence with his men at the village of Austerlitz, crouched in the freezing cold. The weather was on his side. Mist descended, and the French troops were hidden from enemy eyes. The Austro-Russian troops decided that the French were retreating, and bedded down comfortably, sure there was no need to prepare for war.

As the sun broke through at eight in the morning, the order was given and the French charged at the enemy. Within three hours, the enemy army was in tatters. The Austrian Imperial Guard was smashed, and by nightfall the Russians were retreating across an iced-over lake. Napoleon ordered his cannons to fire on the ice and declared that twenty thousand men were killed. “This is the happiest day of my life,” he told Méneval. He wrote to Josephine that it was “the grandest of all those I have fought … more than 30,000 dead, a horrible sight.” He was also tired, complaining that “my eyes have been rather bad.”
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Fourteen-year-old archduchess Marie Louise, daughter of the Austrian emperor, burst into floods of weeping when she heard the news and scribbled down that the French emperor was the “Beast of the Apocalypse” and she hoped he would die that year.

The Russians retreated and Napoleon pushed on to Vienna, taking up residence at the palace at Schönbrunn, gratified to occupy yet another royal residence. The occupation of Vienna was a terrible signal to Europe: The great Austrian empire had been humbled.

On December 5, Josephine reached Munich and heard of her husband’s great victories. She was caught up in a round of celebrations that left her no time for writing letters. “Mighty Empress! Not a single letter from you,” he complained. “Deign from the height of your splendour to concern yourself a little with your slave.”
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Though he was still reliant on her, the talk of separation had grown so intense that those close to him were emboldened to propose other wives. A general wondered if Napoleon might capitalize on his success in Austria by marrying an Austrian archduchess, but the hero refused: “The memory of Marie Antoinette is too recent.”
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Against the advice of Talleyrand, who recommended allying with Austria in order to intimidate Russia, Napoleon
broke Austria and those it had protected into pieces—to the benefit of his relations.

Eugène, he decided, would be married almost immediately to Augusta, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the elector of Bavaria, who was, he noted to his stepson, “better looking than the portrait painted on the teacup I am sending you.”
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He put the announcement in the French newspapers and wrote to Josephine telling her to arrange the celebrations. Eugène obeyed the instruction to “set out at all speed” and galloped from Italy, carrying the cup bearing a picture of his fiancée. Josephine begged to invite Hortense to the wedding, but Napoleon was in too much of a hurry to wait for his stepdaughter to return to Paris.

The elector of Bavaria was very unhappy about the proposed marriage, and so was his young second wife, who once hoped to marry the Duc d’Enghien—the man Napoleon so ruthlessly executed. The elector complained that Eugène was a commoner and declared his daughter was already engaged to her cousin, the crown prince of Baden. If, he said, she had to marry another, the man should be no less than Napoleon himself. Of course, Napoleon ignored the elector’s plea that he should divorce Josephine and marry Augusta. He offered the now jilted prince of Baden Stéphanie Beauharnais, Josephine’s pretty niece, in Augusta’s stead. He bribed the elector by giving him the title of king of Bavaria at the end of 1805, and decreed Eugène an imperial highness as well as viceroy of Italy and his officially adopted son. The wedding took place three days after Eugène’s posthaste arrival on January 14, 1806. Fortunately, Eugène, a spirited but gentle man, was pleased by his princess, and the two soon came to love each other. At the wedding, Napoleon flirted with the elector’s wife and became convinced she was in love with him—a high state of delusion.

Josephine was too wise to complain that the decision about her son’s marriage had been taken from her hands. With Eugène as the emperor’s officially adopted son, he might be declared heir. It seemed impossible that Napoleon could divorce her after endowing her son so munificently. She spent the first weeks of 1806 with the emperor, celebrating his victories and cosseting his pride.

Bonaparte returned from Austerlitz in January 1806, puffed up with his invincibility. Even the fact that Paris was in the grip of a financial
crisis—after millions of government bonds somehow disappeared—could not dent his self-confidence. His solution was to suspend the minister of the treasury. Then he turned his attention to his favorite subject: his own glory. At thirty-six, he bestrode nations and ruled an empire of many millions of people. He possessed almost all of Europe, save a few countries that annoyingly had resisted—including Spain, Britain, and Sweden.
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He was bloated, exhausted, a martyr to stomach pain and headaches, but the most feared man in Europe.

T
HE
K
ING OF
Diamonds was full of ideas to make his court even grander after attending those of Austria and Munich. He decided that the court should rehearse the ceremony of presentation, in which aristocratic ladies were “presented” to the emperor and thus admitted to court. Josephine herself had not been presented, and now she was to preside over a presentation ceremony more tortuously detailed than that of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The emperor and empress settled on their gilt thrones, flanked by the Bonaparte family on stools. Court officials and ladies-in-waiting advanced, bowing and curtseying. A lady due to be presented curtseyed at the door, then again a few steps on, then a third time in front of their imperial majesties—and then had to walk out backward, with three further curtsies. Not long into the ceremony, Napoleon was bouncing on his throne with impatience and barely able to last to the end. Etiquette, he decided, was much better if carried out by somebody else. He was bored and purged his feelings by roaring insults at anyone he considered badly dressed.

It was all the emperor’s new clothes: Foreign courts mocked the imperial court for its gold-splashed brashness, citing Napoleon as the perfect example of a nouveau riche. Yet Napoleon, a brusque fighter who cared little for the French people, saw himself as a virtual deity. As in the time of Louis XVI and his predecessors, there was a convention that the emperor could make the sun shine if he wished, and so on fete days, even in the depths of winter, shivering courtiers in light dress would declare that it was not cold and it was not raining, even as their clothes and hair were soaked through. Everyone had to pretend around the fairy king Napoleon, including Josephine.

“The life I lead here is as fatiguing as it possibly can be, never a moment
to myself,” Josephine wrote to Eugène. “I go to bed very late and wake up early. The Emperor, who is very strong, copes very well with this busy life, but my health and my soul are suffering a little.”
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The etiquette was punishing, “a daily slavery.”
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Napoleon was obsessed with precision, and any movement too quick or aspect of costume out of place could prompt a furious dressing-down.

Josephine later told her lady-in-waiting Madame Ducrest how much “pleasure” she felt when anything interrupted “the chains of court ceremony.”
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Napoleon demanded a court of ostentatious ritual and procedure but had no patience for it; he interrupted receptions, fidgeted through balls, and hated attending plays in the brand-new theaters in his palaces. The best actors, the most beautiful scenery, the funniest comedies, and the most mellifluous music were brought out to please him, but he sat hunched through each performance, refusing to laugh. He would then blame the play for being a failure, and attack his courtiers for not finding something truly amusing for him to watch.

“Pleasure does not inhabit palaces,” wrote Madame de Rémusat. Napoleon’s youthful court struggled with the dictates of raiment and behavior. Some of the younger wives became so confused that they barely spoke to anybody, and girls fainted with fear at the thought of being presented to the emperor. His habits of shouting at women and criticizing their attire publicly were terrifying. A woman without rouge was asked if she was just “up from childbed”; he noted the “red elbows” of one and mocked another for her ugly face.
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The emperor, so powerful, ruler of millions, still took petty satisfaction from playground-style humiliation. Everything turned on the minutiae of etiquette—“a ribbon, a slight difference in dress, permission to pass through a particular door,” as Josephine’s lady-in-waiting put it.
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Those who had been at Versailles or in royalist company were much more at ease and made a performance of laughing, smiling, and behaving in an unaffected fashion. The Jacobins and republicans were nervous and stiff, unaccustomed to court life and finding the ritual rather dreadful. Life was much easier for everyone when Napoleon galloped off for another military victory and Josephine presided in his stead. At the very least, they could all start playing cards for money.

The man who pored over army lists at night had little real interest in
his courtiers. He hardly ever remembered anyone’s name and would stomp up to guests at receptions, demanding, “And what do
you
call yourself?”
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Luckily, Josephine smoothed things over in his wake. She remembered names, the details of people’s health, families, and homes, and always had a kind word—she was the soft power. Thanks to her, Napoleon felt even more emboldened to be rude.

Josephine herself was growing ever more uneasy. She thought that her rivals were whispering about her in corners and making plans to undermine her in front of Napoleon. She was also convinced her life was under threat. She would never be left alone and each time she fell ill with indigestion, she was sure she was being poisoned.
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“It is much to be hoped that the Empress will die,” the dreaded Fouché pondered when he thought the emperor wasn’t listening. “It would remove many difficulties.”
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J
OSEPHINE DID FIND
consolation in the forthcoming marriage of her seventeen-year-old niece, Stéphanie. Napoleon’s passion for her had given his wife much pain. But Stéphanie found the stout, sleepy prince of Baden very unappealing and demanded a king instead. Napoleon was rather delighted by her rebellion, and the two were often seen giggling together at court; but the prince could not be jilted for a second time, and so the emperor reluctantly pushed the marriage on, giving Stéphanie the territory of Breisgau, a necklace worth a million and a half francs, and a huge trousseau, as well as calling her “my daughter” before handing her over. The wedding was one of the grandest the Tuileries had ever seen. A forty-person procession approached the altar; the bride was resplendent in a silver-embroidered gown decorated in roses; hosts of ladies-in-waiting were crowned with diamonds and flowers. Napoleon wore Spanish costume, and Josephine glittered in a gown covered in different shades of gold embroidery, along with the imperial crown and pearls worth a million francs. As the fireworks exploded that night over the palace, Josephine congratulated herself on ridding herself of another rival.