that she could not do so because of the British occupation of the Windward Islands, failed to produce her birth certificate and took the opportunity of reducing her age by four years; while Napoleon, also claiming to be unable to produce his own birth certificate, gave his date of birth as Joseph’s and place of birth as Paris rather than Ajaccio.
The bride, wearing a white muslin gown with a tricolour sash and an enamelled medallion engraved with the words ‘To Destiny’ – a present from the bridegroom – waited for the appearance of Napoleon, with the Talliens, Paul Barras and her notary sitting by her side. They waited in the cold room by the light of a tin lantern for an hour, then two hours, then three before Napoleon burst into the room, shook the sleepy official by the shoulder, told him to get on with it, and, within a few minutes, was driving back with his wife to her house.
Four days before, to the annoyance of more senior officers and particularly of Lazare Hoche, under whom he had declined to serve in Vendée, Napoleon had been appointed commander of the Army of Italy, an appointment described maliciously as ‘Barras’s dowry’; and, two days after the wedding, he left Paris for the Army’s headquarters in Nice. Here he encountered the major-generals who were, with varying degrees of reluctance, to serve under him: Louis Desaix, Pierre Augereau and André Masséna. They were all tall men, powerfully built, towering over Napoleon whom Masséna later described as ‘puny and sickly looking’, a man who had got his command through the influence of Barras and Barras’s women.
Within weeks, their opinion of the pale little Corsican had been transformed. Napoleon found the army under strength, badly equipped and poorly paid. In one of those inspirational addresses which were to exhilarate his soldiers in campaign after campaign, he is said to have promised to lead them into the ‘most fertile plains in the world’, through rich provinces and great cities where they would find ‘honour, glory and riches’. True to his word, he succeeded in splitting the forces of the Austrian Emperor and of the King of Sardinia which outnumbered him. He won a succession of astonishing victories, news of which were sent to the government in Paris, the Directory, by relays of couriers galloping across the plains of Lombardy.
These couriers also took with them not only trophies of victory–flags and standards – but a series of scribbled letters addressed to 6 rue Chantereine for Mme de Beauharnais who had not, as yet, adopted her husband’s name. He wrote every day, sometimes twice a day, his pockets stuffed with unfinished, scarcely coherent letters never sent to his ‘adorable Josephine’, his ‘sweet love’, the ‘pleasure and torment of his life’. Not a day went by, he told her, without his loving her, not a night without his longing to hold her in his arms. He loved her more each day; he longed to kiss her heart and then lower on her body, much, much lower, underlining the words with such force that the point of his pen struck through the paper. ‘Never has a woman been loved with more devotion, fire and tenderness,’ he told her. If she were to leave him he would feel that, in losing her and her ‘adorable person’, he would have lost everything that made life worthwhile.
Preoccupied with parties, subscription balls, receptions, shopping, fittings at her dressmaker’s, visitors who crowded into her boudoir, and relishing the credit she enjoyed at the most expensive shops as the wife of the brilliant young general, the reception accorded to her at the theatre where audiences stood up to applaud her as she entered her box, the shouts of welcome in the streets, and the cheers of fishwives in Les Halles, Josephine did not find time to read all these letters on the days of their arrival. Occasionally, she would pick one up to read an extract or two to a visitor. Once, she read one to the poet and playwright, Antoine Arnault. In this Napoleon had written of his jealousy of other men who could be with her as he could not, and had added, ‘Beware of Othello’s dagger.’ She laughed and commented, ‘Qu’il est drôle, Bonaparte.’
‘Josephine, no letter from you,’ he complained on 24 May. ‘No news from my good friend…mi dolce amore…Has she forgotten me already?’ Couriers arrived from Paris, but brought no letter from her. He was consumed with anxiety and jealousy. He began to think she must have resumed her liaison with Barras, or perhaps found another lover. He could never bear that, he said, sending ‘a thousand kisses on your eyes, your lips, your tongue, your cunt’. ‘Obviously your pretended love for me was but a caprice.’ Then he relented. ‘Drowning in my sorrow, I may have written too harshly.’
‘I had not believed it was possible to suffer so deeply, so much pain, such awful torment,’ he told her in another letter. ‘I send you a million kisses. Remember there is nothing so strong as my love for you…It will last for ever…The flame that comes from your lips consumes me…My emotions are never moderate…I am in an indescribable state…The ardent love which fills me has, perhaps, unbalanced my mind.’
Frustrated by the few, short letters she sent in reply to his frantic effusions, he sent Andoche Junot to Paris with enemy flags for the Directory and a peremptory order not to return to Italy without his wife. ‘You will come, won’t you?’ he begged her. ‘You must return with Junot, do you hear, my adorable one?’
He sent Colonel Joachim Murat with, similar orders and a fateful question: ‘There’s no one else, is there?’ He later heard with great distress that the big, handsome, buccaneering Murat had boasted of a gross intimacy with Mme Bonaparte, giving ‘barely decent details, fit only for a hussar officers’ mess’. On the day that Murat had arrived in Paris, wearing out numerous post-horses on the way, the glass of the miniature of Josephine which Bonaparte wore on a ribbon around his neck, and which he had shown with such pride to the disapproving major-generals on his arrival in Nice, cracked and shattered. According to his aide-decamp, Auguste Marmont, Bonaparte had turned deadly pale and, giving way to characteristic superstition, had said, ‘Marmont, either my wife is very ill or she is being unfaithful.’
She was being unfaithful.
Captain Hippolyte Charles was a short, lively young man, by no means handsome but attractive, cheerful and amusing, an adept lover, nine years younger than herself. He made her laugh, Josephine said, something quite beyond the ability of Napoleon – whose occasional enforced guffaws were irritating rather than infectious. With his shiny black hair, blue eyes and eager, good-humoured expression, Captain Charles looked very well in his Hussar uniform with its pelisse cast over his shoulder. Men found him a delightful companion; women were entranced by him. Josephine was in love with him.
When Murat delivered Bonaparte’s instructions for her to return to Italy, she told him to tell her husband that she could not undertake so trying a journey: she was too ill; she was pregnant.
When Napoleon received this news, he was about to enter Milan, the capital of Lombardy. His military triumph was complete. He felt, he said, as though the earth were flying beneath him, as though he were being ‘carried to the sky’. Yet, so he told Josephine, he thought of nothing but her illness night and day, ‘without appetite, without sleep, without interest in glory or country’. He ‘longed to see her little tummy’ which must surely give her a ‘wonderfully majestic appearance’.
To Lazare Carnot, the ‘Organizer of Victory’ who had taken to wearing a miniature of Bonaparte beneath his coat as a badge of loyalty, as well as to his brother Joseph and to Barras, Napoleon revealed his agitated concern. Having received a brief note from Josephine to say that she was still ill and that three doctors were in attendance, he told Joseph, ‘I am in despair. Reassure me about my wife’s health. You know that Josephine is the first woman I have ever adored…I love her to distraction. I cannot stay here any longer without her.’ ‘I am in despair,’ he wrote to Barras. ‘My wife won’t come. She must have a lover and that keeps her in Paris.’
The days and weeks passed and still Josephine did not write to him and sent no word that she might come to him. His thoughts turned again to suicide: he wrote of lying for just two hours in her arms and then dying with her. If she were to die he would die himself, ‘a death of despair’.
He
