Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (42 page)

J
OSEPHINE
’
S FAMILY MEMBERS
were easily sated with presents of money. The same was not true for Napoleon’s. Nothing he gave them
was sufficient. He piled on the honors for his mother, giving her a court of two hundred, with nine ladies-in-waiting, a bishop, and two sub-chaplains as her confessors and a former page of Louis XVI as her equerry. As her country home, she had a wing of the Grand Trianon and later a huge château near Troyes. Napoleon’s sisters tried to outdo Josephine in their incredible spending. Pauline and Caroline would squander fifteen thousand francs on a gown and then spend more to embellish it with diamonds and pearls. When Napoleon entered the room, flanked by his shimmering sisters, his mother in court dress and his brothers in their rich uniforms, they gave the impression of a united front. The reality could not have been further from the truth. Napoleon’s family was a party of incompetents, schemers, and gangsters. They behaved as if Europe was theirs to carve up.

By 1806, Joseph was king of Naples and Sicily, Caroline and Joachim were grand duke and duchess of Berg in Germany, and Elisa was grand duchess of Tuscany. But Joseph desired a grander kingdom, and the sisters wanted to be queens. They were all poor rulers, although all rulers of Napoleon’s vassal states were in an impossible position, since they had to implement repressive measures and punitive taxation commanded from Paris. As viceroy, Eugène tried hard to defend the situation of the Italians, and they esteemed him for doing what he could to improve their lot. He buried himself in papers and meetings. “My son, you work too hard; your life is too monotonous,” Napoleon wrote to him. “You must have some more gaiety in your home; it is necessary for your wife’s happiness and your own health.”
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In 1806 Napoleon made Louis and Hortense king and queen of Holland. The Dutch throne was a bribe; Louis had been refusing to allow Napoleon to decree their son heir to the empire because he did not wish to be outranked. Given the present of a kingdom, he agreed. Hortense wept bitterly when she was told by her stepfather that she must leave Paris. Her health was not good, and she dreaded living outside of France with a husband whose hatred of her increased daily. She threatened that if the sufferings became too much, she would retire to a convent, for she would have no difficulty “relinquishing a crown of which she could already feel the thorns.”
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She set off to Holland as if she were a victim about to be sacrificed.

She was right to be afraid. Louis initially demanded that she should have a fabulous court. Then, envious of her popularity, he changed his mind and made her accept a life of isolation, surrounded her with spies, and continued to insult her. He expelled those from his court who he thought were friendly with his wife. Louis was a king endeavoring to be fair to his people, and he tried to refuse the oppressive dictates from Paris. But to Hortense, he was unremittingly cruel.

Hortense had nothing to console her but painting and music and the chance to lavish affection on her small sons. Her close bond with her eldest, little Napoleon Charles, made things worse for both of them: Louis was jealous and attempted to prise the child away from her, much to the boy’s distress. Hortense sank into a state of lassitude and was so desperate for escape that she actually hoped the British might invade and take her prisoner.

A
S
H
ORTENSE AND
Louis departed for Holland, Napoleon set to plotting again. After a long period of indecision, the king of Prussia had signed an agreement to ally with the tsar of Russia. They then threatened to join with Britain if the French did not withdraw from southern Germany. The French troops remained, so in August, the Prussians began to advance toward the French army. Napoleon again decided on subterfuge to gain the upper hand; he put about a story that he did not wish to go to war because he was so comfortable in his luxurious palace. In reality, he was making minutely detailed plans for conquest.

Josephine received the information that he was about to leave at four in the morning on September 24. She dashed down the stairs and threw herself on him, begging to be allowed to come. He ushered her inside his carriage, and they set off. Josephine’s ladies assembled her six carriages of clothes, equipment, and jewels and followed a few hours later. The plan was for her to remain at Mainz while Napoleon set off again. During the journey, he grew terribly dependent on her, and at Mainz, he parted from her reluctantly, weeping, convulsing, then beginning to vomit. He didn’t want to leave her, and he was feeling rather exhausted at the thought of fighting. He looked powerful in his uniform—Marshal Massena said that he looked two feet taller when he put on his general’s hat—but underneath he was suffering from an excess
of fine living, and the thought of marching out into the cold was daunting. Still, he was the emperor and was better and stronger than those weak kings who sent out their generals to do their dirty work.

Left behind, Josephine carried out her duties as empress. She opened balls and receptions, listened to pleas and hosted delegations, visited the wounded and entertained German princes. She spent nearly fifty-five thousand francs on gifts for the people she met. Napoleon sent frequent letters ending with “I love and desire you” and “I love and embrace you.” But Josephine was miserable and spent every evening with tarot cards, trying to see the future. “I can’t think why you weep, you do wrong to make yourself ill,” Napoleon wrote impatiently to his wife.
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But she had reason to feel insecure; she didn’t know it, but Napoleon’s young mistress Eléonore Denuelle was six months pregnant. Napoleon knew that Eléonore was pregnant, but it was not earth-shattering news for him. He had never been convinced of her virtue, and he suspected (correctly) that Joachim Murat had been seducing the teenager as well. And yet it
might
be his—which meant he had the ability to impregnate a woman and have an heir with a wife other than Josephine. He set out to seduce his mistresses with renewed confidence.

Josephine fretted and talked constantly of her husband. One night she called out to her ladies that the tarot cards had foretold a great victory. A few minutes later, the emperor’s page arrived with a letter bearing the news of the success: “Never was an army more thoroughly beaten.”
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Napoleon had won a decisive victory over the Prussians at Jena. The king and queen took refuge in the east of Prussia, and Napoleon entered Berlin in a show of splendor, surrounded by his marshals and the Imperial Guard. He was delighted to prowl about the palace and poke around the king of Prussia’s belongings. He sat at the king’s desk and took his sword and belt, as well as a very handy silver alarm clock, which he carried with him for years.

Napoleon blamed the queen of Prussia for encouraging her husband to aggression. “How unhappy are those princes who permit their wives to interfere in affairs of state,” he wrote to Josephine. Stung, she wrote back, expressing hurt. He replied, “You seem displeased by my speaking ill of women. It is true that I detest scheming women. I am accustomed
to ones who are kind, sweet and persuasive. It is your fault—you have spoiled me.”
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Perhaps buoyed by his victories, he offered more sympathy than usual for her worries. “Talleyrand tells me you are always in tears,” he wrote after the arrival of his foreign minister in Berlin. “You must be brave and remember you are an Empress.”
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In November, he closed the Prussian ports to British trade—a decree he would extend to all France’s allies and vassal states. His hope was to starve Britain into surrender. His plan would bring poverty and privation to an already battered Europe, but he did not care. He was determined to be master of the continent and thus the world.

Bonaparte did not stay long in Berlin. News came through that the Russians were marching through Poland toward him. He decided to set off into Poland and crush the Russian army there, a daring plan considering his men were weary and homesick and had no greatcoats for the freezing Polish weather. When Josephine heard that her husband was advancing to battle once more, she was plunged into gloom. He sent her letters suggesting she might join him and then changed his mind. By December, she was imploring him to allow her to come. “I see that you have lost your little head. I wrote that you could come as soon as our winter quarters were decided,” he replied. “The greater one’s position, the less one can choose and the more one must depend on events and circumstances.”
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Josephine was growing frantic. “There is only one woman for me. Do you know her? I could paint her portrait for you but it would make you conceited,” he wrote. “The winter nights are long, all alone.”
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She replied, desperately pained because she had dreamed he had found a woman he could love. Napoleon responded sympathetically. “You say that your dream does not make you jealous, I think therefore that you are jealous and I am delighted. In any case you are wrong. In these frozen Polish plains, one dwells little on beautiful women.”
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Josephine pleaded with him to let her join him at Warsaw, fretting about all the beautiful girls in Poland who were desperate to please the conqueror. “Your letter made me laugh,” he wrote to her on New Year’s Eve, traveling fast toward the capital. “You idealize the females of Poland in a way they don’t deserve.”
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Later that day, he received a message
telling him that Eléonore Denuelle had given birth to a son, Charles. Convinced that Joachim had also been sleeping with the girl, he merely read the note and put it aside.

Unlike the rest of Europe, who saw Napoleon as a terrifying oppressor, the Polish saw him as a potential rescuer who would secure their independence from the Russians. The people had been dancing in the streets at the news that the French were drawing near; the ladies of influence established hospitals for the French wounded and made the palaces ready for the generals. On the approach to Warsaw, Napoleon’s carriage was surrounded by a crowd of people cheering for the French. A beautiful young woman with fair hair and blue eyes approached the carriage after begging Duroc for help through the throng. “We have been waiting for you to save us,” she gasped in perfect French. Touched by her beauty and innocence, the emperor gave her a bouquet of flowers from the coach. He kept waving his hat at her as the carriage drove away.

CHAPTER 18

“I Wish You Would Be More Reasonable”

Newly arrived in Warsaw, Napoleon wrote a letter to Josephine. He no longer wished for her presence. “I am inclined to think you should go to Paris where you are needed,” he told her. “The roads are bad and not at all safe; I cannot expose you to so many fatigues and dangers. Go back to Paris for the winter.”
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Josephine was miserable in Mainz, but Napoleon did not care. When he was not planning battle, he was thinking obsessively about the woman who had accepted his bouquet.

At home with her baby son, the beautiful nineteen-year-old countess Marie Walewska was visited by a Polish dignitary who told her he had heard of her triumph in grasping Napoleon’s attention. He invited her to a ball held in the emperor’s honor. Her husband, a nationalist count fifty-two years her senior, pressed her to attend.

In Countess Walewska, Napoleon had met his match. Even though her husband was over seventy-two, she fully believed in the sanctity of her marriage vows. Young and idealistic, she had no desire to be a tyrannical emperor’s fleeting sexual conquest. She was intelligent and highly educated—her tutor was Nicholas Chopin, father of the future composer—spoke fluent French, and was gifted at music, geography, and history.

Marie’s father had died when she was a child. At sixteen and a half, she returned home from school to find that mother had accepted on her behalf the suit of Anastase Walewski, the richest landowner in the area.
Marie had little wish to marry him (his youngest grandchild was six years older than she was), but she had no choice. In June 1805, she gave birth to a son.

Count Walewski was delighted by the attention his wife had received from Napoleon. She herself was rather afraid of the emperor’s intense response. At the ball, she wore a simple white gown, looking more like a peasant than a countess. Napoleon took her as a dancing partner, enthralled by her beauty, thrilled by her seeming virtue, and stimulated by her obvious lack of interest in him. Next morning, he woke preoccupied by Marie. He scribbled off a letter. “I saw no one but you, I admired only you; I want no one but you; I beg you to reply promptly to calm the ardour and impatience of N.” He sent the missive with General Duroc, along with a large bouquet of flowers.

When Marie received the note, she told Duroc—who was awaiting a response—“There is no answer.” The emperor was shocked to receive no reply. As his valet recorded, “he simply could not understand it; he considered himself irresistible to women, and I really believe that his
amour-propre
had been hurt.”
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