get his hands on sufficient money to pay his ever-mounting debts and who, while imprisoned with Aimée at St Lazare, contrived to have their names removed every day from the lists of those submitted to the Revolutionary Tribunal by offering extravagant rewards, which he was in no position to pay, to the official whose duty it was to compile them.
In this Thermidorian Paris where women held such sway, Napoleon Bonaparte, as he soon chose to spell his name as appearing less Italian, cut a poor figure. As though in deliberate provocation of his fellow guests in their high fashions and fastidious toilets, he would appear with his hair dirty and uncombed, his face scarred with scabies contracted at Toulon, his body evidently unwashed, and his French as yet so imperfect that other guests sometimes could not, or affected not to, understand him.
At La Chaumière, he was, according to the banker, Gabriel Ouvrard, the least impressive of all the men there. He was at an exceptionally low ebb, once more contemplating suicide. There was only one thing to do in this world, he decided, and that was to acquire money as Paris’s nouveaux riches speculators were contriving to do; and, having acquired money, to get ‘more and more power’. Joseph had money now through his family connections, and Napoleon advised his brother how to invest it; though he himself had neither money nor power. Nor did he attract women. His friend, Andoche Junot, later recalled how, during their rambles around Paris, Napoleon would speak angrily of the jeunesse dorée, the Muscadins, who enjoyed ‘all the luck’ with women, and how, when he saw them promenading in front of him as he and Junot sat in an open-air café, he would petulantly kick the chair in front of him. He was unlucky in love, he declared mournfully, referring, so some thought, to Mme Tallien who rejected a proposal he made to her with what the young banker Gabriel Ouvrard described as ‘an incredulous laugh’.
But then his career took a more hopeful turn. Obtaining the requisite medical report, he applied for sick leave so that he would be free to accept a more promising appointment than that of the command of the Army of the West should an alternative be offered him. This caused temporary difficulties: the Committee of Public Safety ruled that the doctor who had supplied the certificate was not qualified to do so and that Bonaparte was to be relieved of his command for insubordination in disobeying orders.
Napoleon turned for help to Barras, who did not disappoint him: he was soon offered an important appointment in an influential department of the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, a useful stepping-stone to the power he craved. ‘If I could be happy far from you, I would be now,’ he wrote to Désirée in an affectionate letter reflecting his sudden change of mood. ‘I am highly regarded here. I have friends, pleasures and parties…I kiss you a million times and am your loving friend for life.’ A new-found friend he did not mention was Paul Barras’s maîtresse en titre, Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Beauharnais, vicomte de Beauharnais’s Creole widow, whom he was to call Josephine.
‘He absolutely worships me. I think he will go mad.’
NOT LONG AFTER that ‘whiff of grapeshot’ on 5 October 1795 had helped to defeat the supporters of a counter-revolution and had secured his future, Bonaparte received a letter from Josephine de Beauharnais who assured him of her fond attachment to him, gently reprimanding him for neglecting her, and inviting him to lunch on the following day. ‘Good night,’ she ended her letter, ‘mon ami, je vous embrasse.’
Napoleon answered the letter immediately, begging her to believe that it was only his pressing duties which kept him away from her, that no one desired her friendship as much as he did.
He had often seen this alluring widow at Mme Tallien’s house, La Chaumière, at Barras’s house and at her small neo-Greek pavillon at No 6 rue de Chantereine, the rent of which, so it was widely supposed, as well as the wages of her gatekeeper, her coachman, her groom, her gardener, her chef and her four domestic servants, was paid by her lover, Paul Barras.
She herself gave the impression of being rich, in possession of extensive estates in the West Indies; and this was at least one of her attractions in the eyes of Napoleon who, before becoming too deeply involved with her, went to see her notary to make enquiries about this rumoured wealth – an indiscretion which naturally much annoyed Josephine when she heard about it.
But there was far more to her than her supposed riches. Although six years older than Napoleon and described by the disaffected as ‘decaying’, as sunk in ‘early decrepitude’, by no means clever or witty like her young and intimate friend, Thérésia Tallien, she was still a most attractive woman: elegant, beautifully dressed, simpatica, voluptuous, languorous, speaking softly in her pleasing voice with its attractive Caribbean inflexion. She had bad teeth; but she had learned to smile without showing them. Napoleon, as he himself admitted, was gauche and shy with women, professing a defensive contempt for them as not to be regarded as men’s equals, as ‘mere machines for making children’. Yet with Josephine he felt at ease: she gave him confidence; she flattered him, paid him, as he said, ‘all manner of compliments’. Besides, she was, so he believed, not only rich but a great lady of the ancien régime. He soon conceived thoughts of marrying her: she would – as Barras said, advising him to do so – help people to forget his Corsican name and make him ‘entirely French’.
She herself regarded a possible marriage to this young and rather uncouth general with misgiving. He was undeniably ‘passionate and lively’ yet still ‘awkward and altogether strange in all his person’, though admittedly not so unprepossessing as he had been in the recent past: he now brushed his hair properly and splashed himself liberally with eau de Cologne, and his features were occasionally transformed by a remarkably attractive smile. But, despite his undoubted promise, his future was far from secure, as hers might well be also if she married him. She was evidently concerned that, if she became Bonaparte’s wife, she might lose the protection of Barras who had already taken Thérésia Tallien as a supplementary mistress. Moreover, neither his family nor hers was in favour of such a match; nor was her notary, Raguideau, who told her she would do much better marrying an army contractor who would have the means to make her rich. Others proposed Gabriel Ouvrard.
Once he had decided that marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais might well promote his career, Bonaparte for his part had no doubt that he should make her his wife. Having come to that decision, he fell in love with her. After what was evidently their first night together, he wrote to tell his ‘sweet and incomparable Josephine’ that he drew from her lips and heart a flame that consumed him. He sent her ‘a thousand kisses’; and asked her not to send him any in return for they burned his blood. Less romantically, and much later, he told comte Bertrand, ‘I really loved Josephine, but I had no respect for her. She had the prettiest little cunt in the world…Actually I married her only because I believed her to be rich. She said she was, but it wasn’t true.’
It was not until the end of February 1796 that Josephine’s reluctance was at length overcome and she agreed to marry Napoleon, telling Grace Dalrymple Elliott that she did not really love him but that she thought he could be of service to her children. He had already written to Désirée, telling her that unless she could obtain her parents’ consent to an immediate marriage – consent which, as a minor, it was essential for her to obtain and which he presumed she would not get – he would be compelled to end their relationship. Her answer was contained in a sad little letter, wishing him well and assuring him that she could never love anyone else. He had destroyed her life, she told him, but she was ‘weak enough’ to forgive him. ‘May the woman you have chosen make you as happy as you deserve to be. In the midst of your present happiness do not forget poor Eugénie, and be sorry for her fate.’
Marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais, a civil ceremony, took place on 9 March. For a variety of reasons it was, in fact, invalid: the official who
