Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (44 page)

N
APOLEON REMAINED OBSESSED
by his military might and saw his battle against Russia as the most important of his career so far. The students at military colleges were called up eighteen months early, and the German states were told to supply a hundred thousand men. His preparations were not in vain. On June 14, 1807, at Friedland, East Prussia, Napoleon and his men fought for nearly twenty-four hours straight to win a decisive battle over the Russians, a great victory although thirty thousand were lost across both sides.

The victorious emperor sent his faithful courier Jacques Chazal—nicknamed “Mustache” on account of his impressive facial hair—to give the news to the empress at Saint-Cloud. Mustache rode so hard that his horse dropped dead in the château courtyard. The French, weary of battle and afraid of losing more men, cheered for the win but hoped there would not be further fighting. Napoleon felt aggrieved by the lukewarm reaction and convinced himself that only Marie really cared for his victories. He could not resist dictating another aggrieved letter to Hortense. “I wish you were more courageous,” read the queen of Holland as she sat alone in her castle, still grieving. “Your mother and
I had hoped to take up more place in your heart. I won a great victory on June 14.” Josephine also failed to please him. “I have received your letter of June 25 and I am hurt to see that you are entirely selfish and that you appear to be uninterested in my military success,” he wrote to her. “I too long for our reunion, when destiny shall order it.”
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Marie Walewska, gracious and biddable, was delighted beyond measure about his victory over the tsar; by comparison, Josephine seemed like a monster of selfishness.

After Napoleon’s win, the tsar of Russia had requested an armistice, and the emperor agreed. He had no choice—his army was much depleted, and men had been fleeing the draft in Paris. Eager to style himself as a wondrous peacemaker, he set off to meet the enemy. The plan was that the tsar and the emperor would meet on a raft in the River Niemen, near the town of Tilsit in Prussia. “Sire, I hate the English as much as you do,” was Tsar Alexander’s first greeting to Napoleon. “In that case, peace is established,” replied the emperor.

“He is a pleasing-looking, young and kind-hearted emperor,” Napoleon wrote to his wife, “he has more intelligence than people usually give him credit for.”
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Thirty-year-old Alexander was nervous, afraid of fighting, prone to mood swings, and rather lacking in intellectual strength, although he made up for it with plenty of cunning. He was outrageously good-looking, and caricaturists painted him being admired by every lady from the queen of Prussia to Britain’s Lady Hamilton. Practiced in the art of deceit, he flattered Napoleon excessively. Dazzled, Napoleon began to ponder the tsar’s sister, twenty-year-old Grand Duchess Catherine. The sixth child and fourth daughter of Tsar Paul, she was vibrant, intelligent, and one of the most eligible women in Europe. Catherine was her mother’s pet and the tsar’s absolute favorite; he wrote her devoted letters full of affection and consulted her on political matters. If Napoleon seized such a prize, his position in Europe would be secure.

At the meeting, clever Napoleon asked for little from the tsar other than Russia joining the Continental Blockade, the ban on trade with Britain. But he was cruel to Prussia. The nation would lose half its territory, pay huge reparations, and accept a lengthy occupation. Queen Louise threw herself at Napoleon’s feet to beg for clemency, but he was
not a merciful conqueror. Instead, he looked down at her with disdain and asked if her dress was made from crepe or Italian muslin. Her great effort to flatter amused him but did not win her anything. “The Queen of Prussia is really charming, she wanted to make me her husband,” he wrote to Josephine. “I didn’t take any notice.”
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Napoleon, not yet thirty-eight, was all-powerful. Britain seemed only a pipsqueak island with a fading overseas empire. Russia joining the ban on trade was a blow for Britain, since their navy used Russian wood and supplies. The vast extent of the French empire presented a spectacle that rather resembled the “dominion of the Romans and the conquests of Charlemagne.”
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The emperor now had forty-four palaces, and Europe was subject to his whims. But even the rulers he scorned—deranged George III, the hated king of Prussia, and all the pusillanimous princes—had the one thing he did not: a legitimate heir. As he later said at St. Helena, he returned “so certain of his destiny” that he knew divorce was inevitable.
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CHAPTER 19

“Cold and Often Embarrassed”

“The Emperor since his return from campaign has behaved toward his wife in a cold and often embarrassed manner,” wrote the diplomat Prince von Metternich gleefully to Vienna. “They do not share a bedroom. Many of his daily habits have changed.” Napoleon was preoccupied with his own brilliance, resentful of Josephine for not having sufficiently celebrated his victories, and thinking more and more about his need for a son.

His time with Marie Walewska had proved to him that he could live with another woman in a domestic setting. He threw a magnificent party for his thirty-eighth birthday and picked out ladies of the court for affairs. Believing they might have a chance to seize Josephine’s position, the women jostled for his affections more intensely than ever. But Napoleon also wished his next wife to be a royal princess, with money, cachet, and blue blood (so Marie had no chance of being his wife). Marriage to an Austrian or a Russian would make an alliance between his two enemies much less likely, and a foreign princess would give him the regal status he craved, as well as the true grandeur that he felt the Tuileries lacked. The courtiers, eager to please him, turned secretively to pondering possible matches. Talleyrand, Josephine’s long-trusted ally, was now working against her. Her enemies’ reasons were simple: As Fouché put it, “Napoleon’s brothers are disgracefully incompetent and we must prevent the return of the Bourbons.”
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Lists were drawn up of viable royal brides, and ambassadors competed to push the advantage of their own princesses, showing lovely miniatures and talking of sweet tempers,
grace, good health, and fine accomplishments. Talleyrand was in favor of an Austrian princess, while Fouché voted for Grand Duchess Catherine of Russia.

Josephine was terribly anxious about her fate—and she was worried about Napoleon without her. “If they should succeed in separating me from him, it is not the loss of rank I should regret,” she wrote to Eugène, “sooner or later he would discover that those who surround him are more interested in themselves than in him and he would know how he has been deceived.”
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Eugène replied that he had heard much about divorce in Munich and Paris, but he felt sure that the emperor would treat her kindly. “He must treat you well, give you an adequate settlement and let you live in Italy with your children,” he replied. “If the Emperor wishes to have children who are truly his there is no other way.”

After Mass one Sunday, Fouché told Josephine that she should begin the “inevitable sacrifice” of a divorce and allow Napoleon to have a legitimate son. Josephine was prepared. “Did the Emperor direct you to tell me this?” The minister refused to answer, and she responded with dignity. “I see my link with the Emperor as written in the record of the highest destinies. I will never discuss the matter with anyone but him and I will never do anything without his orders.” She went straight to Napoleon and—bravely—demanded whether he had directed his minister to speak. The emperor declined all knowledge. “You know very well I could not live without you,” he said. He then asked what she thought of the proposal and whether she might “take the initiative to help him make the sacrifice if he found it necessary.” Josephine told him she would not. “Our joint destiny has been too extraordinary not to have been decided by Providence. Only you must decide my fate.”
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She had thought carefully about what she would say. “I am too afraid of bringing us both bad luck if, of my own accord, I should separate my life from yours.” It was a brilliant strategy. Napoleon seriously believed she was his good-luck charm, and he dreaded losing his magic touch. He burst into tears at her words, and they embraced passionately. He returned to her bed once more.

He found it easy to consider the reasons for a divorce when he was apart from Josephine. But when he saw her again, he could not help
loving her. He watched her presiding gracefully over the court and doubted anyone could be a more befitting consort. “I would be giving up all the charm she had brought to my private life,” he said to Talleyrand. “She adjusts her habits to mine and understands me perfectly.” And even though he took his sexual pleasure elsewhere, he still needed her. “I truly loved her, although I didn’t respect her,” he said on St. Helena. “She was a liar and a spendthrift but she had something that was irresistible. She was a woman to her very fingertips.”
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Although Napoleon could still fall back into Josephine’s arms, he remained angry about what he saw as her and Hortense’s excessive grief over Napoleon Charles. When he first laid eyes on Hortense after his return, he was furious. She was nervous and emaciated, tears glimmering in her eyes. “Come, come, stop this childishness. You have wept enough over your son. It is becoming ridiculous … Be gay, enjoy the pleasures of your age and don’t let me see any more tears.”
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He soon dashed her remaining hopes that he would make her second child, Napoleon Louis, his heir, claiming that people would only think he was the father of this boy as well (really, of course, he was anticipating having his own son by another wife). Hortense wept at his words, and Napoleon was angered by her outburst when, once upon a time, he would have forgiven Hortense anything.

Although Napoleon could see the benefit in allying with Russia and marrying a grand duchess, he guessed his people might see it as betraying his duty to France. Most of all, there was no guarantee he could sire a child with another woman. One police report from December 1807 noted that the women of high society were saying that “the Empress’s sterility is not her fault, that the Emperor has never had any children; that his majesty’s relations with several women have never borne fruit but as soon as these ladies were married, they became pregnant.”
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The bottom line was that Napoleon was not in a position to do anything rash. His popularity was at its lowest ebb. The people were distressed by the huge loss of men in the recent wars. Theaters had stopped the custom of reading out army bulletins because too many people screamed and fainted when they heard the news of the fatalities. Men were doing everything they could to dodge conscription; unlike in previous years, their families and friends did everything they could to
support them. Some fled their homes, while others were so desperate that they purposely caught syphilis or cut off one of their limbs. There were huge riots protesting conscription. If the economy had been strong, the people may have been more forgiving, but the wars in the east had been expensive, and the ban on trade with Britain had taken a terrible toll. The French, so proud of their country and so delighted by their military strength, were beginning to curse their emperor. One in ten of all conscripts had deserted.

Napoleon’s response to the resistance was to put the divorce on hold and clamp down hard on his people’s remaining freedoms. He weakened the bodies left over from the consulate. The legislative body would meet only a few weeks a year, and the Council of State would be simply a sounding board for his lengthy monologues. He had long controlled the content of the newspapers; now he suppressed all but four journals. He wished to go even further—surely, he said, all the people needed were two papers: the official
Moniteur
and the
Journal des Dames
for the ladies. Spies were everywhere, intellectuals were censored, and the press was told firmly not to mention politics. The man who once tried to write a romantic novel now believed that the arts could undermine the state. “You can make politics by talking literature, morality, art, anything in the world,” he said.
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The emperor of the Republic was now in the position of a military dictator.

Obsessed with outdoing Russia, Napoleon had decided that his entire court would move to the hunting château of Fontainebleau that winter. While in Prussia, he had ordered the redecoration of the palace by his cherished Percier and Fontaine. No expense was spared: silk wall coverings, heavy furniture, ornate tapestries, and carvings. The throne room was entirely redecorated to promote the splendor of the empire. Napoleon wished to take the court hunting as a way to recall and outdo the ancien régime, although unlike the Bourbon kings, he was poor at shooting and struggled even to hit Josephine’s slow swans at Malmaison.