Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (47 page)

Josephine kept up the tears and hysteria all the way down the stairs, except for one moment. She put her head close to the comte and hissed, “You are holding me too tightly.” The pair finally dropped her, none too gently, on the bed, and Napoleon pulled the bell for her ladies to come. He then made a hasty exit. Josephine passed a night of despair and misery. The humiliation of the preceding days had been awful, the anticipation painful, but receiving the news was not a relief. “With what eyes do courtiers look upon a repudiated wife! I was in a state of vague uncertainty worse than death until the fatal day when he at length avowed to me what I had long before read in his looks!”
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Napoleon summoned Hortense and told her to go to her mother. “Nothing will make me go back on it, neither tears nor entreaties,” he cried. Hortense responded with the calm dignity that he had always esteemed. “You are the master, Sire. No one will oppose you. If your happiness requires it, that is enough. She will submit and we will all go away, taking the memory of your kindness with us.” Napoleon looked at her in shock. He could barely speak. “What! You are all going to leave me?” he cried. “You are going to desert me? Then you don’t care for me anymore?” He had not truly accepted that he might never see them again. “We cannot live near you anymore,” said Hortense with grace. “It is a sacrifice that has to be made and we will make it.”
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Eugène arrived and agreed with his sister. “We will all go away quietly,” he said. He told the weeping Napoleon that his first loyalty was to
his mother. Devastated at the thought of losing all three, the emperor repined that Josephine should stay at court and even said the divorce should be stopped. Eugène disagreed, for “what was in his mind being known to us, the Empress could not live happily with him.” Napoleon then begged him to accept the kingdom of Italy, but Eugène refused—he did not wish to be rewarded for his mother’s despair.

“Alas! I had good reason to fear ever becoming an Empress!” Josephine cried.
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The princely kings and vassals of Germany were arriving for a celebration of Napoleon’s Austrian victories. So every night, she had to smile at receptions and dinners attended by hundreds, regard military performances, and host the ladies at her court. But in order to prepare the ground for the divorce, Napoleon decreed that she must come to all official functions alone, so she attended the fifth anniversary of the coronation but did not travel to Paris with Napoleon or sit by his side in the cathedral. At the gala banquet that evening, the emperor was escorted by one of his sisters. Josephine walked alone to the dais and sat quickly, her legs almost collapsing beneath her.

Josephine was at her most dignified in her final weeks as empress. Napoleon was less so, often in tears, declaring himself the plaything of fate, cruelly treated by his destiny—and yet under all the hysteria, he was rational, always attempting to get the marriage certificate from her. Many were on her side, most of all the shopkeepers and fine tradesmen of Paris. Josephine’s wild spending had single-handedly supported many of the city’s luxury goods makers.

Napoleon wished the ceremony of the divorce to be a court occasion; all the courtiers jostled for an invitation and fretted over what to wear. Josephine feigned calm. The night before the ceremony, when many were openly ignoring her, she gave a polite bow to those who came up to acknowledge her. “I doubt,” wrote Pasquier, the future chancellor, “whether any woman could have acted with such perfect grace and tact.”

The night of the divorce ceremony was the grandest social occasion the court had seen in months. On December 14, everyone flocked to the throne room, resplendent in jewels and finery. The Bonapartes, as Hortense noted, “betrayed their joy by their air of satisfaction and triumph.”
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Josephine entered in a plain white gown, supported by Hortense. Napoleon was waiting for her, trembling so hard that his valet thought he might faint. The emperor proclaimed the divorce. “God only knows what this resolve has cost my heart,” he said. “But there is no sacrifice beyond my courage if it is in the best interests of France … I have only gratitude to express for the devotion and tenderness of my well-beloved wife. She has adorned thirteen years of my life, the memory thereof will remain forever engraved on my heart.” He wept as he pronounced that he would wish her to retain the privileges of empress.

It was Josephine’s turn to speak. All the eyes of the court were upon her. “With the permission of my dear and august husband, I proudly offer him the greatest proof of attachment and devotion ever given a husband on this earth.” She could not go on. Her words choked her, and for the first time her courage failed her. After a minute of silence, she handed the speech to one of her attendants to complete. He, too, was tearful as he read out her words: “The Emperor will always be my dearest love,” she had written. “I know how much this act, demanded by politics and wider interests, has crushed his heart.”

Napoleon, Josephine, and members of the family signed the record of proceedings. Then, in front of everyone, Napoleon kissed Josephine, took her by the hand, and led her to the apartments. Hortense battled to control her tears. Eugène fainted as soon as he left the throne room. He later referred to the time of the divorce as “the most dreadful moment of my life.”
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That night, her hair untidy, her face in distress, Josephine arrived in Napoleon’s bedroom. She fell on the bed, put her arms around him and caressed him. He pressed her to him. “
Allons,
dear Josephine. I will always be your friend.” They wept together, and then he prompted her to leave. She spent the night alone.

Now that the deed was done, Napoleon offered a generous settlement. He initially worried that her presence in Paris would be unsettling to the people and the court. But she was horrified when he asked her to consider living in Italy, and he did not force the matter. He said she would keep the title of empress, retain Malmaison, be given the Élysée Palace in Paris, and receive an allowance of three million francs in gold. He had thought carefully about her household: She was to have
thirty-six attendants, including nine ladies-in-waiting, four ladies of the bedchamber, a doctor, and a knight of honor. He ordered her a Sèvres dinner service as a gift and gave her four thousand livres to “do as much planting as you like” at Malmaison.
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He pored over the inventory of her belongings, including a fourteen-page description of her wardrobe—ten pages full of details of court dresses, notes about 280 pairs of shoes, even lists of her chemises and camisoles and nightgowns. He did not demand from her any of the gifts he had given her, most notably the art collection at Malmaison. Josephine kept her spoils of war.

As quitting lovers tend to do, Napoleon pretended to himself that things could stay the same. He fussed over her title and asked archivists to search the royal records for answers on how to treat a divorced empress—which, of course, no previous court had entertained. He made the decision that in all functions, Josephine would sit on the right of his throne and his new wife would be positioned on the left.

“I
HAVE DRAWN
out the path that I must follow and I will not stray from it,” Josephine wrote. “The arts and botany will be my occupations.”
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Her departure from the Tuileries was a lengthy operation, packing her gowns, ornaments, books, pets, and other belongings into multiple carriages. On the morning after the ceremony, Napoleon came to embrace her and then hurried off, claiming he had to see to his duties. Accompanied by Hortense, the fallen empress was taken in the early-afternoon rain to Malmaison, with no emperor to see her go. Napoleon went straight to Versailles and shut himself away in the Grand Trianon. He tried to distract himself from grief by rehanging every painting. He was not so broken, however, to forget to demand Josephine’s marriage certificate. She declined to give it to him.

“We were sad and silent all the way to Malmaison,” recalled Hortense. “Her heart was heavy as she entered this place she loved so much.”
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The next day, Josephine walked around the grounds in tears. Napoleon, in the Trianon, was equally despairing and finally could bear it no longer. He drove to Malmaison, where he and Josephine walked hand in hand in the rain. Careful to keep up appearances, as he did not want any spies reporting to foreign courts that he still had relations with
his wife, he did not enter the house or embrace her but told her of his distress and described to her how lonely he was, dining on his own. That evening, he wrote to her, telling her to feel courage that he could not.

My dear, I found you today weaker than you ought to be. You have shown courage; it is necessary that you should keep it up and not subside into sadness. You must be contented and take special care of your health, which is so precious to me. If you are attached to me, and if you love me, you should show strength of mind and force yourself to be happy.
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However, he sent her letters about his unhappiness without her. Claire de Rémusat begged her husband to ask the emperor to “moderate his expressions of regret.” Josephine was crying so hard that her eyesight was troubled: Soon she could not bear any bright light and her vision was failing.

She kept Napoleon’s study exactly as it always was. She dusted it herself daily and showed her visitors everything, even the old armchair that he had cut with his penknife. She kept, as one put it, “a veritable cult of the Emperor” and would not allow so much as a chair to be moved. It was a shrine to him; everything was left as it had been when he was last there, right down to a book of history open at the page he had been reading.
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His bed was there, his coat of arms hung on the walls, and items of his clothing were scattered around, just as if he were about to return. Josephine always wore full dress, in case Napoleon arrived.

She could not be consoled. “Sometimes it seems as if I am dead and all that remains is a sort of faint sensation of knowing that I no longer exist,” she wrote. Napoleon chastised her. “Savary tells me that you are always crying: that is not good,” he wrote. “I shall come to see you when you tell me you are reasonable, and that your courage has the upper hand.”
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He was angry that the servants had seen her weeping. Malmaison, he wrote, “is full of our happy memories, which can and ought never to change, at least on my side.”
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On Christmas Eve, he visited
there, and on Christmas Day, he invited her, Hortense, and Eugène to dine with him at the Trianon.

On January 1, she called Madame de Metternich, wife of the diplomat, to meet her at Malmaison. Josephine suggested that only a marriage with an Austrian princess would make her sacrifice worthwhile. She hoped to prove to Napoleon that she only wished to help. He relented to her pleas to live at the Élysée Palace, where she would be nearer to him. Indeed, they were probably still intimate. Even in February, Napoleon was pondering a meeting with Josephine at the country house of a friend—a more private place for them to rendezvous than Malmaison. In the end, he decided they should not be under the same roof for the first year after the divorce.

On January 9, 1810, the religious marriage between Napoleon and Josephine was declared void, on the grounds that it had not been witnessed properly, the parish priest had not been present, and Napoleon’s full consent had not been obtained. The last was a provision in the law for young girls forced into marriage against their will, not a great general on the brink of crowning himself emperor of France, but Napoleon used it anyway. Though they were both free, the emperor still could not put aside his former wife. He noted that there were few other visitors at Malmaison and promptly went around his court, asking everyone if they had visited the empress. In response, carriages rumbled off, packed with courtiers eager to pay their respects to Josephine. Laure Junot visited and saw the drawing room, billiard room, and gallery thronged with people. To reach Josephine in her gallery, guests had to pass through an antechamber filled with thirty footmen and a salon of four valets with swords, as well as ladies and attendants.
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Josephine herself was sitting by the fireplace, under a portrait of Napoleon. She wore a simple dress and a green hood that she drew over her face when she needed to hide her tears.

Napoleon might have been regularly popping over to see his former wife, but at court, he was fully engaged in pushing forward the matter of his second marriage. In early February, Napoleon’s ambassador in St. Petersburg wrote describing the prevarications of the tsar over giving his sister Anna to be the second empress. As he subtly hinted, the tsar was
unlikely to come around. Realizing that a Russian wife was impossible, Napoleon hastily sent Eugène to the Austrian embassy to ask for the hand of the eighteen-year-old archduchess Marie Louise. Eugène, performing a task that weighed heavy on his soul, informed the ambassador that he must receive an immediate answer and the contract should be signed the following day. There was no time to consult Vienna. The ambassador had to accept. A jubilant Napoleon announced the news to the nation. He sent a missive to the tsar, informing him that he no longer required his sister’s hand. At the same time, the tsar wrote to Napoleon that Grand Duchess Anna was too young for marriage.

Marie Louise was given the shocking news: She was to be married to the man who had brutally attacked her country, who was divorced and twice her age. Only five years earlier, she had written in her diary how much she wished him to die. Like Marie Walewska, she was told to sacrifice herself for the good of the state. Her father ordered a splendid trousseau of clothes and jewels while fretting that the marriage was bigamous in the eyes of the Church, since the pope had not annulled Napoleon’s union with Josephine. Cardinal Fesch assured him that the pope was irrelevant and the decision of the French clerical authorities was sufficient.