Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (7 page)

In Fontainebleau, Marie-Josèphe had a small but pleasing social circle of minor aristocrats, and she spent her time at card parties, promenades, and the occasional ball. Eugène turned five and was sent to live with Alexandre; Marie-Josèphe had expected to lose her son and was stoic about it, but Euphémie mourned him. His tutor sent a letter to Euphémie, purported to be from Eugène (although it was hardly childlike language), saying “there was no need for six pages to express to you my eternal gratitude for the care and kindness you have shown toward me.”
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Marie-Josèphe’s debt collectors had left her alone for a time after the news of her marriage settlement, but in Fontainebleau they began to return. Alexandre did not pay her allowance. She begged her father for money, but he was barely able to pay any of the six thousand livres a year he had promised her on marriage. “You know me well enough, my dear Papa,” she wrote to him, “to be quite sure that if it were not for an urgent need for money, I would speak of nothing but my fondest sentiments for you.”
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The marquis de Beauharnais had installed Joseph as overseer of his properties in Martinique, and Joseph was failing miserably at turning them to profit or even keeping them running as they
were. The marquis sent letters instructing him and offering suggestions, but the revenue kept falling. And the marquis himself was no longer as rich as he once was, since his pension from the government had been reduced. There was little left for Marie-Josèphe and her daughter.

The king liked to hunt three or four times a week, and nobles from all over the country arrived in Fontainebleau to follow his procession. There were weeks of spectacles, games, and dancing. Marie-Josèphe badly wanted to find her way into the court. She immediately made sure to befriend François Hüe, chief clerk of the royal hunt, and was soon given the rare privilege of following the hunt, one that had not been permitted to her husband. She was not allowed to approach the king, but she could attend his sumptuous feasts and enjoy the games. The vicomtesse was on her way to social success.

The court Marie-Josèphe encountered during her first hunting season of 1786 was troubled. Marie Antoinette was thirty and had recently given birth to her fourth child, Princess Sophie Hélène Béatrice. The baby was fragile and Louis Joseph, the dauphin, was often ill. The queen was openly criticized for spending millions of livres on fripperies, as well as on a palace for her children at Saint-Cloud and on constructing a fantasy version of farm life at Petit Trianon at Versailles, complete with a model village of twelve houses, windmills and dovecotes, and a dairy made of marble with silver pails for the milk. There, she and her ladies could play at being country girls, flouncing in the fresh air, admiring perfectly groomed sheep.

Scabrous cartoons suggested that the Swedish nobleman Count Axel von Fersen—a frequent guest at Versailles—was Sophie’s father.
¹⁰
Parisians snapped up cartoons depicting Louis XVI as a fat, stupid cuckold, while his immoral queen manipulated France for Austrian gain. Marie Antoinette was shown surrounded by her sexual favorites, dallying with her lesbian lover, the Princesse de Lamballe, in a vitiated, spendthrift court.

The previous summer, Marie Antoinette had received a letter from a jeweler, Charles Auguste Boehmer, in which he proffered his gratitude and explained that the finest set of diamonds would soon be in her possession. Marie Antoinette asked Madame Campan, her lady of the bedchamber,
to interpret the meaning of this letter, but she could not. The queen decided it was irrelevant and discarded it.

Boehmer was referring to an impossibly ornate necklace of nearly 650 diamonds, which he had long been trying to sell for the astronomical sum of a million and a half livres. Cardinal de Rohan, who hoped to win the favor of Marie Antoinette, had advanced some of the money to Boehmer after Marie Antoinette had met him secretly outside the palace one night and told him he would indeed gain her favor if he secured the diamonds for her. And so the necklace was sent. But when Boehmer requested the rest of the money from Marie Antoinette, she said she did not have the necklace and had never asked for it.

The king requested an explanation from Cardinal de Rohan, and he produced a note signed by Marie Antoinette accepting the jewels. It was found that the note had been forged by a con woman who had paid a woman of dubious virtue to imitate the queen at the nighttime rendezvous, and had then intercepted the necklace and kept it for herself. The cardinal was arrested and tried by the Parlements of Paris, which acquitted him on the grounds that he had been duped by the con woman. Marie Antoinette declared her innocence, yet even those who believed her were deeply troubled by the fact that a man could think the queen would stoop so low as to buy a necklace in secret—and meet to discuss it after dark, like a prostitute loitering in the shadows. The presses worked overtime, producing caricatures attacking the woman who was ruining the country with her demand for luxury above all else. She and her vast, bloated palace of Versailles became the scapegoat for France’s economic hardship and the excessive power of Austria and the German states. When Marie-Josèphe encountered the hunt, the Affair of the Diamond Necklace was still a divisive issue among the courtiers.

The French court was hated in Paris, but at Fontainebleau, the courtiers and their hangers-on forgot everything and abandoned themselves to celebration. There was much splendor, carefully observed ritual, and a tradition of courtship and gallantry to ladies. The huge caravan of the court was always eager for young, beautiful women, and the vicomtesse de Beauharnais fit the bill perfectly.

Marie-Josèphe was invited to soirées, balls, concerts, and parties
thrown by members of the court. She delighted in the glamorous company, the lavish breakfasts laid out under the trees, and the thundering rush of the horses. Exhilarated from following the hunt and excited by the proximity to royalty, she often came home drenched with rain, glowing with the exercise, and eager to return. It was her first chance for true pleasure since she had arrived in France, but such liberty came at a cost. She needed funds for dresses, jewels, and entertaining, as well as visits to Paris with her new friends. Without a husband or family, there was really only one way for a pretty woman to find money. As one friend wrote, since she was desperate to have the “luxurious enjoyments of her era,” she found that her “attractiveness gave her certain advantages.” She did not care about polite society and indeed “defied public opinion rather overtly.”
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The vicomtesse was playing a dangerous game.

She began to depend on the kindness of her older gentlemen friends, such as the banker Denis de Rougement, who invited her to stay with him in Paris. She befriended the Chevalier de Coigny, who was twenty years her senior, and the married Comte de Crenay. Men of her own age, she had found, were difficult and demanding. Older gentlemen petted her, appreciated her charms, gave her handsome presents of jewels, and paid her for her time.

I
N 1786,
M
ARIE
-J
OSÈPHE
was spending rich men’s money freely, but her newly adopted country was verging on bankruptcy. The government could not borrow any more. The controller general asked the king to call an assembly of notables—144 members of the aristocracy, Church, and government—and inform them that taxes must be raised. The assembly demanded that there be a supervisory commission of finance, and that it must be distinct from the royal government. The king responded by dismissing the assembly. The provincial governments and that of Paris declared that only the Estates-General, not called since 1614, could pass such demands.

In the midst of it all, the aristocracy continued gaily on their thoughtless, spendthrift, even debauched road. Marie-Josèphe was squarely on this path—until, in 1788, she made a snap decision to travel to Martinique. Denis de Rougemont lent her 6,000 livres, she borrowed more money from her aunt and sold some of her possessions, and with
the funds she bought passage on the
Sultan
for herself, Hortense, and Euphémie.

It was not a good time to leave France. Eugène was due to arrive for his summer visit, Edmée was unwell, and they would be traveling to Martinique during hurricane season, through seas thick with hostile British ships. Hortense later declared that her mother was thinking of her own “aging mother, who she hoped to see one last time.”
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Marie-Josèphe also wanted to secure funds from her estates. But there was more driving her voyage than money and familial feelings. She had been the mistress of various men and was most likely fleeing because the scandal had become heated and she thought it best to absent herself for a while. If Alexandre heard any unfortunate intimations, he might spread gossip against her or even try to take Hortense away. After a year of living on the periphery of the ruinously expensive French court, Marie-Josèphe was in debt and in trouble, and she needed to escape.

The
Sultan
arrived in Martinique on August 11, 1788. Marie-Josèphe was delighted to see her family and the slaves waiting for her at La Pagerie, and initially she remained quietly at the plantation. Little Hortense took easily to the role of
grande dame.
One day she found some copper coins to distribute among the slaves, and was chastised by her grandmother for playing at being superior when she was only a child. After a few months, Marie-Josèphe began to spend more time at the balls and receptions of Fort Royal, riding high on the cachet gained from Fontainebleau. She wrote to Aunt Edmée, asking her to send a dozen fans and a muslin ball gown.

But on Martinique, as in Paris, social unrest was growing. The slaves saw newspapers, listened to the talk of the freed slaves, and overheard the huddled conversations of their masters; they learned that America was in the process of abolishing slavery, and that across Europe there were fierce debates about emancipation. Soon anti-slavery literature was circulating throughout the Caribbean. The freed Martinique blacks were forming committees and demanding parity with the whites.

On August 31, 1790, a slave rebellion began in Saint-Pierre and turned into a full-fledged revolt when underprivileged whites and dispossessed soldiers joined the ranks of the protest. The turbulence spread and soon Fort Royal was in an uproar. Marie-Josèphe’s family was very
afraid. Her uncle was seized, and the slaves took over the fort. She decided that she and Hortense should leave at once. Along with Euphémie, they hurried to the port and embarked on
La Sensible.
As they ran, a cannonball landed a few feet from them.

Marie-Josèphe set off on her long journey back across the Atlantic, forced to wear makeshift clothes sewn from material in the ship’s store. The slaves were defeated not long after she left. The ringleaders were beaten to death in public, and their heads were propped on posts around the island. Nevertheless, the seeds of change had been sown. Martinique would never be the same.

CHAPTER 4

Revolution

While Marie-Josèphe danced at Fort Royal balls, Versailles had been struck with gloom. “Death of my son at one in the morning,” Louis XVI wrote in his diary on June 4, 1789. The seven-year-old dauphin died of a form of tuberculosis, emaciated and covered in sores. His younger sister, the king’s fourth and youngest child, had died at eleven months in 1787. By the end of the year, the king was a man besieged. The winter of 1789 had been the most severe in living memory. Marie-Josèphe’s friends skated on frozen ponds and enjoyed hot drinks in front of their fires while the poor suffered, scrabbling for firewood and eating scraps of stale bread in desperation. Over twenty thousand beggars wandered in search of food in the area around Versailles. The government gave twelve thousand of them work laboring on the hill at Montmartre, for the tiny sum of twenty sous a day.

On May 4, 1789, the first meeting of the Estates-General had been held: It was composed of the Church, the nobility, and the third estate—lawyers, merchants, and professional men. Alexandre de Beauharnais became the representative for Blois, his ancestral town. When the Estates-General was reconstituted into the National Assembly on June 17, he became a key player, allying himself with the group of liberal nobles petitioning for reform. Aggrieved at his previous exclusion from court, he threw himself into his role. Finally, he felt, somebody was listening to him.

On July 11, the king dismissed Jacques Necker, court financial adviser and father of the great
saloniste
and intellectual Germaine de Staël.
When the news reached the streets, the theaters closed and armed men marched through the city, chanting Necker’s name in protest against his discharge. The anger did not calm, and crowds began to fill the streets. Fights broke out, buildings were attacked, and the king’s name was insulted and mocked across Paris. On July 14, the king wrote “
rien
” in his hunting journal, meaning he had failed to catch any prey that day. In Paris, an armed crowd of more than a hundred thousand attacked the Bastille, freeing the prisoners and killing the governor. The Duc de Liancourt came to Versailles to report the news to the king while he was in bed. “Is it a revolt?” asked the king. “No, Sire,” replied the duc. “It is a revolution.” Alexandre and his fellow deputies were delighted by the fall of the Bastille, for it meant that revolution was truly coming. The next day, some of the most hated courtiers—such as the queen’s confidante, the Duchesse de Polignac—agreed to flee for the country, but the king and queen refused to leave. Against a summer of bread riots and bloody demonstrations, the king and his courtiers continued to hunt and feast on champagne breakfasts.