Napoleon_ A Biography_clone

flattered her by suggesting she go to Rome to see Cardinal Pesch and be presented to the Pope, but his real motive was to get rid of her. Napoleon scarcely fared any better with his three sisters. Caroline, whom Talleyrand described as having 'the head of Cromwell on the body of a pretty woman', acted treacherously towards Napoleon, to whom she owed everything, and schemed and intrigued constantly to further her own ambitions and those of her husband Murat. As a reward for his sterling performance in the Marengo campaign Napoleon at the end of r 8oo appointed Murat head of the elite Army of Observation - a kind of Praetorian guard - deliberately snubbing Bernadotte, Joseph's protege and candidate for the post. Bernadotte, incidentally, came close to forfeiting Napoleon's favour at this time. His farewell address to the Army of the West in r 802 contained coded criticisms of the First Consul, and he continued plotting with other discontented Jacobins. Exasperated, Napoleon threatened to have him shot if he did not mend his ways, but once again the tears of Julie and Desiree Clary saved the treacherous Gascon's skin. Appointed ambassador to the United States in r 8o3 he followed in the Lucien tradition of envoys by returning, unauthorized, to Paris when the Louisiana purchase was agreed. This led to another year in disgrace until, in r 8o4, he was made Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Hanover. In Germany he settled in to carve himself a share of the peculations of the corrupt intendant Michaux. Meanwhile Murat's lust for money soon saw him Commander-in­ Chief in Italy, looting in the grand tradition. He and Caroline were united by vaulting political ambitions and jealousy of Napoleon but in Milan, where they lived like royalty, they were habitually unfaithful to each other, Caroline discreetly, Murat less so. The driving force with Caroline was always power, not sex. The same was true of the cynical Elisa, the ugly sister of the family, who had been forced to marry an obscure Corsican officer, Felix Bacchiocchi, for lack of more impressive suitors. Madame de Remusat scathingly wrote of her: 'Those things we call arms and legs looked as though they had been haphazardly stuck on to her body . . . a most disagreeable ensemble.' Elisa always sided with Lucien in the family feuds, and she and Bacchiocchi went with him on his money-making exile to the embassy in Madrid in r 8oo--o r . The family bluestocking, she thereafter ran a salon at her house in the rue Maurepas, where the painters David and Gros were frequent visitors. She intervened with Napoleon on behalf of her friend Chateaubriand, staged theatricals, and ran a circle for literary women. The henpecked Bacciocchi was given a job as commander of a garrison town and 273

effectively expelled from her life. Elisa and Caroline Bonaparte were classic examples of what C.G. Jung called 'power devils' . But sexuality had its triumphant showpiece in the third sister, Pauline, a byword for nymphomania and lubriciousness. Incorrigibly frivolous, with a strong Italian accent, Pauline behaved in a vague and absent­ minded way as if not in full possession of her faculties. She spent vast sums on clothes and fortune tellers and was an embarrassment to Napoleon if she ever appeared at the Tuileries; she was not above sticking her tongue out defiantly at Josephine if the mood took her. In private she had a string of lovers and an unassuageable sexual appetite. As one of her studs remarked: 'She was the greatest tramp imaginable and the most desirable.' One of her early escapades was a 72-hour sexual marathon with the future Marshal MacDonald, for which she laid in a carefully prepared stock of food and drink. When her husband Leclerc was given command of the army sent to defeat Toussaint l'Ouverture in Haiti, Pauline was brokenhearted, for it meant saying farewell to her latest lover, Pierre Lafon, an actor at the Comedie-Franc;aise. To celebrate her unwilling exile, before she left she had an orgy, in which five different lovers shared her bed. On the voyage out to Haiti she made sure she was accompanied by three more, her first paramour Stanislas Freron, General Humbert the hero of the '98 in Ireland, and General Boyer, but these were not the only ones to share her bed in Santo Domingo. She sailed in December r 8o r , showed courage in Haiti, and dabbled in voodoo. When Leclerc died of yellow fever she returned to France (arriving New Year's Day, r 8o3). For 40o,ooo francs she bought the Hotel de Charost in the Faubourg St-Honore and was soon back to her promiscuous ways, embarrassing Napoleon at all points. Her career came to a brief halt when she had to seek a cure (successful) for gonorrhea. Then in r 8o3 Napoleon made one of those bizarre decisions that so baffle historians. Despite the fact that Leclerc was a nonentity, Napoleon ordered a ten-day period of mourning for his brother-in-law; he later conceded that this had been a great public relations error and blamed it on Josephine's poor advice. The period of mourning was turned to farce by Pauline who, despite her brother's urging that appearances should be kept up, remarried in August r 8o3, with the papal legate Caprara officiating. This time her husband was Prince Camillo Borghese, the richest man in Italy. Aged twenty-eight, diminutive, dapper and elegant, Borghese had embraced Republican principles to save the family fortune, but showed where his heart lay by becoming the first man to appear in court dress at the Tuileries since the days of Louis XVI. 274

Pauline, who always hated Josephine, rubbed her nose in her new­ found wealth by visiting her at St-Cloud wearing the entire Borghese collection of diamonds - the most beautiful in Europe - on a green velvet dress. But her madcap career did not end there. Discovering that Camilo Borghese was hopeless in bed - she told Cardinal Fesch she would rather have stayed Leclerc's widow on 20,000 francs than marry Borghese - and was in fact yet another repressed homosexual, Pauline again cut loose on a life of sexual adventure. Her most notorious exploit was the visit to Florence in r 8o4. Pleading ill-health, she commissioned the artist Canova to paint her as a naked Venus. When someone later asked whether she had posed nude in Canova's studio, she replied: 'Why not? There was a perfectly good fire in the studio. ' Scandalized by her behaviour, Borghese put her under house arrest in his palace, but Pauline responded by smuggling in a further raft of lovers. The distraught Borghese was forced to appeal to Napoleon, who warned Pauline that she could never be received at the Tuileries without her husband. Almost as though by a process of osmosis through contact with his hedonistic family, Napoleon in the latter years of his consulate seemed to take more interest in sex; indeed the evidence of the years r 802-4 points to a morbid craving or satyriasis of the John F. Kennedy kind. Perhaps as his appetite for Josephine waned, his attentions increasingly wandered; it is certain that at this time the Consul and his wife ceased to sleep in the same room and occupied separate apartments. In June r 8o2 he had an affair with the young actress Louise Rolandeau. This was no more than a 'fling' but in November the same year he began a more sustained liaison with another actress, the statuesque tragedienne Marguerite George, whose previous lovers had included Lucien and the polish Prince Sapiepha. With her the Consul was able to indulge his taste for buffoonery, schoolboy japes, practical jokes and general horseplay. Napoleon's affair with George soon became common knowledge. When she was playing Cinna at the Theatre Franyais, she reached the line: 'If I have seduced Cinna, I shall seduce many more.' The audience roared, rose in a body, turned to the Consul's box and applauded. Josephine, who was in the box with her husband, was distinctly unamused. By this time she was used to his infidelities. She vacillated between jealousy and indifference. One night she decided to catch the lovers red­ handed in Napoleon's apartment and began mounting the narrow staircase that led there, before taking fright at the idea that the faithful bodyguard Roustam might suddenly emerge from the shadows and behead her, mistaking her for an assassin. Yet on another night she found herself in the love nest willy-nilly. Piercing screams from Mile George 275

echoed round St-Cloud. Josephine and the consular valets rushed upstairs to find Napoleon in the grip of an epileptic-like seizure, and 'Georgina' (as Josephine dubbed her) in a state of undress, terrified that her lover was dead and she would be accused of murdering him. When Napoleon came to and realized the situation he fell into such a rage that onlookers thought he was going to have a second fit. Marguerite George's attraction dipped after this scandalous incident and for a while Napoleon kept her at arm's length. But he was always generous with his women and when he departed for Boulogne in r 8o3 to oversee the preparations for a descent on England, he shoved 40,000 francs down the front of her dress. By this time he was interested in a third actress, Catherine Josephine Raffin, known as Mlle Duchesnois. This was another brief affair, which ended when Napoleon insulted her as a woman. Busy with affairs of state, he asked his valet Constant to tell her to wait in a room adjoining his study. After an hour she knocked on his door and Napoleon asked Constant to tell her to get undressed. Duchesnois did so and shivered for another hour before knocking a second time. This time a disgruntled Napoleon barked that she should go home, thus making yet another unnecessary enemy. The final woman in the bevy of actresses 'entertained' by the Consul was Mlle Bourgoin, the mistress of Chaptal, Ministe� of the Interior. Indulging his taste for the humiliation of others, Napoleon arranged to have la Bourgoin brought to him while he was in conclave with Chaptal; he thus gratuitously made another mortal enemy. But this affair did not last long either, for Bourgoin had a taste for coarse jokes which Napoleon did not like in women. By the end of r 8o4 this liaison too had fizzled out. Bourgoin went on to a notable career as grande horizontale, specializing in sleeping with men in some way close to her greatest conquest: she was the mistress of Czar Alexander and also of Jerome, when he was King of Westphalia, in r8r2. Yet, despite his philandering, Napoleon's attitude to women was basically contemptuous and even boorish. He took the conqueror's line that women were there for him to avail himself of when the fancy took him, and became irritated if he encountered opposition. Laure Permon, who first observed Napoleon when she was eleven, married Androche Junot, the general who had been an early Bonaparte favourite but who never really came back into favour after his indiscretions in Egypt. In r 8o3 the Junots came to stay at Malmaison, and the First Consul decided that he did after all find Laure physically appealing. He sent Junot away on an errand. The sequel was bizarre. At 5 a.m. one morning Napoleon entered her 276