how are you going to get him to come otherwise?’
‘Well, really! How do you suppose? I shall send him an invitation like everyone else.’
Junot’s mouth fell open, as it often did when he was surprised, Laure continued her account. ‘He walked about in silence, looking in consternation at my mother…who with great gravity took a pinch of snuff.’
The following day, General Junot, Laure and Laure’s brother, Albert, went to the Tuileries where Napoleon greeted them ‘smiling good-naturedly’. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘What does this family deputation mean? Only Madame Permon is missing. Do the Tuileries frighten her? Or do I?’
‘Madame Permon wanted to come with us,’ Junot replied. ‘But you know how ill she is and it was impossible for her to leave her room.’
When the invitation was proposed to him, he immediately accepted it, merely asking why they all looked as though they expected him to refuse it.
‘Oh! I quite understand Madame Permon is ill,’ he added. ‘But there is laziness, too, also something else that I don’t want to talk about. Isn’t that so, Madame Loulou?’
And then he pulled Laure’s ear; and, not troubling to control the impulse that so often overcame him, he pulled it so hard that the tears came into her eyes, as they did on another occasion when he pinched her nose so tightly that he made it bleed.
This was rough treatment to which his servants were often to be subjected. ‘I can confirm that he used to pinch not merely the tip but the whole of the ear, sometimes catching hold of both of them at once in quite purposeful fashion,’ one of his valets was to write. ‘Sometimes when I came in to dress him he would rush at me, crying, “Hello, you rascal!” and pinch both my ears at once so hard it made me scream. Quite often he also slapped my face several times, after which I was sure to find him good-tempered for the rest of the day.’
Not only servants but generals, women and children were all subjected to this treatment. General Junot’s ear was once pinched so hard that it bled, while ladies at court were reduced to tears. One of his nephews was also once reduced to tears by an exceptionally painful pinch and was then punched hard for making a fuss.
Having altered the proposed date for the dance at the Permons to an evening more convenient to himself, Napoleon arrived at the appointed time in his grey overcoat which he declined to take off even though the house was stiflingly hot. Mme Permon greeted him formally with ‘one of her most graceful curtseys’.
‘Madame Permon,’ he rebuked her, ‘is that the way you receive an old friend?’ and he held out his hand towards her. He was perfectly agreeable, though his hostess, while remaining polite, was far from friendly towards him. Her daughter, urging her to be more cordial, later persuaded her to go into the room where their guest had established himself.
‘He came straight up to my mother,’ Laure recalled and said to her ‘Eh bien, Madame Permon, what have you got to say to an old friend? It seems to me you forget them easily.’
She answered him in Italian: ‘I cannot forget, dear Napoleon, that you are the son of a friend, brother of my good Giuseppe, of dear Luciano, and of Pauletta.’
‘So then,’ Napoleon replied, ‘if I hold any place in your regard, I owe it to my mother, my brothers and sister.’
He then strode towards the fire while Mme Permon sat on a sofa opposite him, her foot shaking as it was inclined to do when she was annoyed and likely to lose her temper.
‘Really,’ she said, returning to the contentious matter of Napoleon’s prevarication in the granting of a commission to her cousin which had come between them at their previous meeting. ‘One may forget something after an interval of some years. Do you mean to tell me that it was difficult for you to remember, after a few days, something that may have affected a young man’s whole career?’
‘Ah, so that’s it,’ said Napoleon, walking up and down the room with his hands clasped behind his back. Then, overcoming his annoyance, he took one of Mme Permon’s hands as though to kiss it, observing as he pointed to her bitten fingernails, ‘It does seem that you don’t correct any of your faults.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘They and I have grown old together.’
It was now two o’clock. Napoleon sent for his carriage. Madame Permon asked him if he would not stay for supper. ‘Impossible,’ he said abruptly but as though with regret. ‘However, I will come to see you again.’ He never did.
‘I am highly regarded here.
I have friends, pleasures and parties.’
AS A PROTÉGÉ OF BARRAS, Buonaparte who, in his own words, ‘knew no one else there’ was introduced into the salons of Mme Tallien, Mme de Staël, Mme Récamier and of several other hostesses in Paris. Such women, he told his brother Joseph, appeared to ‘hold the reins of government’, while the men ‘made fools of themselves over them’ and lived ‘only for them’. They were, he told Désirée Clary thoughtlessly, beautiful as the female characters in old romances and ‘as learned as scholars’. They were all, indeed, remarkable women.
Thérésia Tallien, wife of Jean-Lambert Tallien, one of the leaders of the Thermidorian reaction after the fall and death of Robespierre, a woman of outstanding beauty and wit, still presided over her salon at the Chaumière from which she would emerge in wigs of astonishingly unnatural colours to act as referee in games of bowls, clothed, so one witness testified, ‘à la Diane, her bosom half naked, sandals on her feet and dressed, if one can use the word, in a tunic above her knees’. Indeed, so Talleyrand was to say of her, Thérésia was usually ‘as expensively undressed as it is possible to be’.
Germaine de Staël, the wife of Baron Eric de Staël-Holstein – the Swedish Ambassador in Paris – and mistress of Louis, comte de Narbonne, held Thursday soirées at the Swedish embassy. She greatly admired the young Napoleon, calling him ‘Scipio and Tancred, uniting the simple virtues of the one with the brilliant deeds of the other’. It was considered characteristic of her irritatingly fulsome admiration of the general that once, on approaching a drawing-room door, she drew aside to let Colonel Lavalette precede her with the words, ‘How could I venture to walk in front of one of Buonaparte’s adjutants?’ But Napoleon felt no admiration for the woman in return, finding her exasperatingly pretentious and impertinent. She once burst in upon him when he was in his bath with the announcement: ‘Genius has no sex.’
Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adelaide Récamier, the alluring eighteen-year-old, white-clothed, virginal wife of an extremely rich and elderly banker, an enticing, narcissistic girl who was to give her name to the day bed upon which she so elegantly reclined, held sway in a salon as vivacious as any of her rivals.
Among these rivals was Fortunée Hamelin, a sprightly, amusing young woman of about the same age who, despite an appearance rather too plain to be pronounced jolie laide, attracted a succession of lovers, including the high-spirited adventurer, Casimir de Montrond, whom, so she claimed outrageously, she had discovered in a lascivious embrace with Mme Récamier. Mme Hamelin herself was far from averse to such embraces and her appearance in a ballroom, heralded by the heaviest and most liberally applied of scents, was sure to be welcomed by numerous would-be partners eager to be clasped against her inviting breasts. Another of Mme Récamier’s
