Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (50 page)

M
ARIE
L
OUISE HAD
begun to feel labor pains on the evening of March 19. The courtiers, Bonapartes, ministers, and grand officials had been waiting on standby, and the minute they heard the message from the empress’s lady-in-waiting, they donned their court dress and dashed to the appointed chamber.

At Marie Antoinette’s first accouchement in 1778, the room had been so full of dignitaries that, as Madame Campan said, “anyone might have fancied themselves in a place of public entertainment.”
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The poor queen fitted and fainted before a doctor demanded that space be made for her and the courtiers open the shutters. After such a fiasco, Louis XVI had ordered that most of the court wait outside to protect the queen’s health. Other royal consorts had rebelled against giving birth in public—Queen Charlotte in Britain allowed only members of the cabinet and the archbishop to wait in the adjoining room. But Napoleon, as ever, wished to return to the high point of Versailles; everything was theater for him. Marie Louise’s labor was as crowded with spectators as a court jousting match. Doctors and nurses flittered among courtiers, all standing at attention. Hortense was there as Marie Louise’s lady-in-waiting, and Eugène had been summoned by Napoleon.

The labor was hard, and the emperor was shocked by what he saw. The man who could shrug off the horrors of the battlefield found his wife’s sufferings in childbirth unbearable and dashed from the room. The doctor told him that the baby was breech, and it was possible the infant might be saved only by killing the mother (he meant by an ad hoc cesarean section; so far no section had been performed in which both mother and child lived). Even though the whole point of the marriage had been to provide an heir, Napoleon did not hesitate. “Save the mother,” he said. “It is her right. We will have another child.”

Despite the difficulties, at 9:20
A.M.
Marie Louise gave birth to a nine-pound boy. The doctors used forceps in the end, with Napoleon hiding in the bathroom, refusing to watch. After the birth, the child lay unmoving for seven minutes. The emperor gazed at his son, convinced he was dead. Finally, the child let out a noisy cry, and Napoleon took his son in his arms.

The Bonapartes were in an adjoining room, and Eugène watched with bitter satisfaction as Caroline and Elisa burst into despairing tears at their loss of influence when the news came that it was a boy. Outside, cannon fire was telling all Paris that Napoleon had a child. It was to be twenty-one rounds for a girl and one hundred for a boy. At the twenty-second, the people began dancing in the streets in the first spontaneous outpouring of enthusiasm for Napoleon since long before the coronation.
Bonaparte watched his people celebrate with tears running down his cheeks.

“My son is fat and healthy,” he wrote to Josephine. “I trust he will continue to improve. He has my chest, my mouth and my eyes. I hope he will fulfill his destiny.”
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Josephine pushed ahead with her plans for a huge ball at Navarre, ordering a re-laying of the floor and repainting of the rooms, as well as deliveries of ornaments, flowers, furniture, and food that kept the tradesmen of Navarre entirely afloat. Despite the extravagance, few would travel from Paris, and the guests were mainly the stolid burghers of Navarre. In a silver lamé dress and diadem of diamonds, Josephine greeted them as if they were the highest nobility. The burghers danced and ate until four in the morning, delighted by the unforgettable ball of the empress Josephine.

Again she begged Napoleon to return to Malmaison and sent Hortense to plead with him as well. He replied that he would offer her anything else. She could be governor of Rome or live in Brussels and hold a brilliant court. She was adamant; she wanted only Malmaison. Finally, he gave in and let her return to her adored house and garden.

But Malmaison was in the clutches of a financial crisis. Money had been embezzled from her accounts, and the son of the prince of Monaco, who was in charge of the stables, had sold off several horses far too cheaply. Napoleon was furious with her. “Consider how ill I must think of you, if I know that you, with 3 million francs a year, are in debt.” He told her to save as much as she spent every year. “Look after your affairs, and don’t give to everyone who wants to help himself.”
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He sent his treasurer to tell the empress that she must moderate her expenses and keep accurate accounts. Marie Louise, she was told, was skilled in economy and never went into debt. Josephine wept at the lecture, doubly pained to be reprimanded by an official rather than Napoleon. When the emperor heard that she had burst into tears, he was as moved as ever. “You mustn’t make her cry!” he said to the treasurer.

“I was annoyed with you about your debts,” he wrote to Josephine. “Nevertheless, never doubt my affection for you, and don’t worry any more about the present embarrassment.”
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She did attempt to curb her expenses. Her comptroller rented out some of her land, tried to reduce the excessive spending on plants, and
attempted to claim some of her money from Martinique. But Josephine still spent wildly on clothes, hospitality, gifts, and bequests. When she discovered that one of her gentlemen, the flirtatious Monsieur de Pourtales, had been courting the naïve Mademoiselle de Castellane, she took the pair for a walk in the gardens. “You possess nothing but your name,” she said to Mademoiselle de Castellane, “M. de Pourtales is very rich; you cannot believe that he intends to marry you.” Confounded, Pourtales promptly announced that he would, and Josephine offered a dowry of a hundred thousand francs and the trousseau. She was very generous with her money and too old to change her ways. Napoleon had told her to set aside a million francs a year for her grandchildren. It was unlikely. She soon was in debt for over three million francs, despite her hefty allowance.
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“Tranquillity is such a sweet thing,” she wrote to Eugène. “Ambition is the only thing that can spoil it, and thank God I do not suffer from the disease.” She was attempting to put her son at ease, and she hoped he might tell Napoleon that she was content with her lot, though she still cried bitter tears over her loss. When Bourrienne came to visit her at Malmaison, she could barely speak. “I have drained my cup of despair. He has cast me off! Abandoned me! He conferred upon me the vain title of Empress only to render my fall the more marked.”
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She also told Bourrienne:

You cannot imagine, my friend, all the miseries I have suffered since that awful day! I cannot imagine how I survived it. You cannot conceive the pain I endure on seeing descriptions of his fetes everywhere. And the first time he came to see me after his marriage, what a meeting was that! I shed so many tears!

She was spending more than ever in an attempt to dull her pain. She shrugged when she was told to avoid milliners, dressmakers, and jewelers. “I ought, indeed to be indifferent to it all, but it is a habit.”
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She poured money into her home, and Malmaison was consequently at its most beautiful, a true
château-musée.
In June 1813, Josephine wrote again to Eugène from Malmaison: “The life I lead here is still the same, occupying myself only with my gallery and my plants.”
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Her new gallery,
built in the same year as the divorce, was, as Madame Ducrest said, “one of the finest sights imaginable,” and she had commissioned a proper catalog of her art collection. Foreign visitors would travel especially to see her paintings and sculptures.
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Josephine sent hundreds of letters pursuing the art she desired. Writing to Eugène’s minister, the general treasurer of the kingdom of Italy, she expressed thanks for advice he had offered on five paintings that he thought suitable for the gallery. “I will also buy the two paintings by Mme. Grimaldi,” she instructed.
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“All that I desire now is the painting [by Titian] which was shown to me on the evening of my departure. Be so good as to find out the asking price for me.”
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She busied herself launching the careers of lesser-known artists, suggesting to the directors of the yearly art exhibition in Paris, the Salon, that they display paintings by her favorite, M. Töpffer, “of whose work you have seen several examples at Malmaison.”
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Josephine, as a divorced woman, was denied entry to the Salon. She commissioned from her beloved Canova
The Dancer
and
Paris
but refused to allow
Paris
to go to the exhibition. If she could not go, why should her artworks?

In 1812 Josephine asked Canova to create a sculpture of the Three Graces for her. Euphrosyne, Aglaea, and Thalia, the three daughters of Zeus, presided over banquets for the guests of the gods, representing beauty, charm, and joy. Josephine, commissioning such a sculpture in the evening of her life, surely was remembering her days with Thérésa and Juliette, the three graces of Paris, and the time of wonder when all was freedom and anything seemed possible.

Carved from a single slab of white marble,
The Three Graces
is a masterpiece of softness and beauty. On a visit to Canova’s studio in Rome, the Duke of Bedford spotted the sculpture and fell in love with it. He was told there was no possibility of having it, for it was to go to the empress herself. Bedford was not the first art collector to be disappointed. To the chagrin of many collectors across Europe, Josephine tended to come first.

M
ALMAISON WAS A
wonderland of exotic animals, art, and plants, and it was expensive to maintain. Guests flocked there to sample the delights of the table, to peer at the menagerie, and most of all, to tour the
works of art. It was the height of fashion to partake of Josephine’s fabulous dinners, with bananas and pineapples from her greenhouses and her homemade ice cream. Josephine had brought from Italy a special ice cream maker who created the exquisite raisin- and liqueur-flavored “glacé Malmaison.” Cheerfully ignoring the ban on trade with Britain, she had a British attendant who served up Cheshire cheese and English muffins, which were rare treats for the French.

For the children of Hortense and Eugène, Malmaison was a marvelous playground. As Louis Napoleon, later Napoleon III, recalled, “I can still see the Empress Josephine in her salon on the ground floor, covering me with her caresses, and even flattering my vanity by the care with which she repeated my childish sayings.” For, he said, “my grandmother
spoilt
me in every sense of the word.” At Malmaison, “we—my brother and I—were at liberty to do just what we liked. The Empress, who was passionately fond of plants and conservatories, allowed us to cut the sugar canes to suck, and was always telling us to ask for whatever we wanted.”
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The sugar, the dinners, the muffins, and the ice cream had their effect on the empress—she was growing larger. Laure Junot recalled that “one special feature of her figure assumed really incredible proportions”; she was forced to wear boned corsets to keep her rapidly expanding bosom under control. “They say you are as fat as a good Normandy farmer’s wife,” Napoleon wrote cheerfully to her.
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Josephine’s chamberlain, Comte Turpin de Crissé, paid tribute to her hospitality, describing a court where “dignity, grace, wit, talents and good conversation made a seat of exile into a place of enchantment and a queen without a crown into a woman surrounded by real friends.”
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The comte was slightly biased. There was gossip that Josephine relied on him emotionally and in 1810 took a holiday with him, accompanied by only a single equerry and one lady attendant. If there was an affair, it was short-lived. The comte married in 1813 with Josephine’s blessing.

O
N
J
UNE
8, the baby king of Rome was christened at Notre-Dame. As Napoleon had planned, the ceremony was a version of the one that had been held for Louis, grand dauphin of France. Predictably, Napoleon
seized the limelight, twice taking the child from the arms of Marie Louise and raising him aloft to show the public.

Josephine desired above all to touch the child who had cost her so many tears. Napoleon was very resistant, but he finally allowed her an hour with his son in secret. The little boy was taken to play at the summer palace of Bagatelle on the outskirts of Paris, and his governess, Madame de Montesquiou, allowed Josephine to hold him and kiss him. When Marie Louise got wind of the meeting, she was furious and made Napoleon promise never to permit it again.

Napoleon was happy at the Tuileries, eating desserts with his wife and playing with his son. He had taken up with mistresses again, and brought Marie Walewska and her son, little Alexandre, to Paris. But as he dressed up as a shopkeeper to visit her, presided over celebrations, and watched the king of Rome play with gilded rattles, the empire was crumbling. The emperor had become plump and self-satisfied, indeed more like a contented shopkeeper than the obsessive military genius who once was able to ride for ten hours straight. Massively overextended, his empire was impossible to govern and police, and the resentments in the vassal states were growing. Thanks to the rapacious behavior of the French armies, states began their subordination full of grievances and distress, and matters only grew worse, with high taxes levied to pay for the price of occupation and to support Napoleon’s vast expenditure at home. His extravagant behavior (and that of Josephine) generated pure hatred in many subject states, as the people struggled to pay taxes in order to keep him and his huge court in pampered luxury in Paris. The people were also shocked by his treatment of the Church; he seized Church property and closed many of the orders, leaving monks and nuns no choice but to beg on the streets. France was no less restive than the vassal states. Scarred and traumatized after the Terror, the people had believed Napoleon would bring peace to the nation. Now they could not see where his ambition would end. “Soon Europe will not be enough for him,” wrote one, “he will wish for Asia.”
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