‘will conquer your illness…I have always been able to impose my will upon destiny…Without you I cannot be of any use here…There has never been a love like mine. It will last as long as my life.’
Their general’s threat to abandon his army, just as the Austrians were believed to be preparing a counter-attack, alarmed the Directory to such an extent that Josephine was dispatched forthwith to Milan. She left in tears, so her friend, Antoine Arnault said. ‘She looked as though she were going to a torture chamber.’ Clutching her dog, Fortuné, in his new leather collar, she was accompanied by Andoche Junot and his aide, Hippolyte Charles. Joseph Bonaparte, Désirée Clary’s brother, Nicolas, Josephine’s maid and two menservants also went with her.
Josephine, complaining of the heat and troubled by a persistent headache, was loath to leave Turin on the journey to Milan; and it was with evident reluctance that she entered the neo-classical Serbelloni Palace in Milan, which her husband had filled with flowering shrubs to welcome her. That night was only the third they had spent together.
But ‘what nights’, Napoleon wrote. ‘My happiness is being near you, ma bonne amie…Surely you must have some faults in your character. Tell me.’ She could not share his enthusiasm. ‘I am dying of boredom here,’ she told Thérésia Tallien. ‘My husband does not merely love me. He absolutely worships me. I think he will go mad.’
‘They are so regardless of convention as to dress in clothes
revealing legs and thighs in flesh-coloured tights.’
WHEN NAPOLEON DEPARTED from Milan to his army in the field, his wife evinced no distress. She sent for her friend Fortunée Hamelin to keep her company in the Serbelloni Palace, having borrowed from Mme Hamelin’s husband, the financier, a large sum of money before her departure from Paris; a debt, like so many in the past and future, never to be repaid. Other friends and acquaintances arrived in Milan where their ‘immodest behaviour’, as one newspaper put it, caused some offence. ‘Arms, bosoms, shoulders are all uncovered…Their hair styles are scandalous: their heads are crowned with little military helmets from which tresses of untidy hair escape. They are so regardless of convention as to dress in clothes revealing legs and thighs in flesh-coloured tights.’
As the days passed, Josephine began to enjoy herself, though she missed the diversions and pleasures of Paris and the friends she had left behind there, such as Barras and the Talliens. She was happy to be the centre of attention as the wife of the brilliant young general. She gave parties and dances, and graciously accepted the presents of jewellery and works of art which the heads of great Italian families brought to her in the hope of being spared the looting which Napoleon had specifically condoned. This looting led to the plunder and removal to France from Italian churches, palaces, ransacked cities and towns numerous pictures, sculptures, manuscripts, silver and all manner of other treasures, including – from the Venetian republic alone – the gilded leather hangings from the Doge’s Palace, Veronese’s central panel from the ceiling of the Hall of the Council of Ten in the Doge’s Palace, his Marriage at Cana from the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, and the four bronze horses from San Marco which were, for a time, to decorate the Arc du Carousel in the Tuileries. As well as the loss of such treasures, Italians also had cause to complain of French soldiers, officers and men alike, taking such opportunities as had been offered them to enrich themselves. Bonaparte’s family acquired their share and, on behalf of Bonaparte himself, his secretary, Louis de Bourrienne looked after a large coffer filled with gold and silver coins.
Flattered and indulged in the Serbelloni Palace, Josephine complacently accepted letter after passionate letter from her absent husband who assured her that, much as he had adored her in the past, he loved her now ‘a thousand times more than ever’. When he was with her, he wanted ‘it always to be night’ so that he could take her in his arms; he kept ‘remembering her kisses’. Her replies to these effusions were brief but he assured her that they gave him great pleasure, adding what he can scarcely have supposed to be true, that he was certain that she loved writing them.
He was sure that she was better now that her supposed pregnancy had come to nothing; so he hoped that, as soon as she was able to travel, she would join him. So, comforting herself with the thought that Hippolyte Charles was there, she left Milan for Brescia accompanied by Antoine Hamelin. Her journey proved a hazardous undertaking. At Verona, the sudden appearance of Austrian troops obliged them to drive off in great haste for the shores of Lake Garda under an escort of dragoons. Their coach came under fire from a gunboat on the lake; and they had to scramble out to seek the shelter of a ditch along which they crawled towards the carriage which had been driven off to the shelter of a sunken road. For over a week thereafter they drove about Tuscany, eventually arriving in Florence where they found shelter with the Grand Duke Ferdinand III who had signed a treaty with Napoleon. They remained here as guests of the Grand Duke until Pierre Augereau’s victory over the Austrians at Castiglione on 5 August 1796 enabled them to leave Florence and, at last, to reach Brescia.
Napoleon, however, was no longer there. He had gone to a newly established headquarters over twenty-five miles away, having left instructions for his wife to join him. Josephine protested that she was too tired to do so: she would go to bed in the rooms that Napoleon had just vacated and have supper there. She invited Hamelin to join her. When he arrived, Hamelin was surprised to see Hippolyte Charles and the table laid for three. They had supper there together and the two men then left. Some time later Hamelin, remembering that he had left his pistols in the room adjoining that in which they had had their meal, returned to fetch them. Outside the door he was stopped by a sentry who denied him entry.
Upon her return to Milan where her husband, who had given himself three weeks’ leave, had demanded her presence, Josephine was bored. She missed Captain Charles; she missed her friends in Paris; and she missed her children and the stimulating company of Paul Barras. ‘I do love him,’ she told her confidante, Mme Tallien. ‘I am devoted to him.’ It was all very well being fêted by ‘all the Italian princes, and even the Grand Duke of Tuscany’, she said: she would much rather be a private person in France.
Her husband remained ‘all day in admiration’ of her; he treated her as though she were ‘a divinity’; it would be ‘impossible to have a better husband’. There were, however, occasions when it was difficult for her to hide her irritation with his teasing of her, his habit of pinching her so hard it brought the tears to her eyes, his kissing her, fondling her breasts and hugging her so passionately and intimately, even when there were other people in the room, that Hamelin felt constrained to avert his eyes, to walk away and look out of the window as though ‘observing the weather’. Comte André Miot de Melito was equally embarrassed when he accompanied Bonaparte and Josephine on a journey by coach to Lake Maggiore during which, as he delicately put it, Bonaparte was ‘extremely attentive’ to his wife, frequently taking various ‘conjugal liberties’ with her.
The campaign against the Austrians was going badly, and there was even talk of a French withdrawal from Italy. But then came news of Napoleon’s victories, first on 15, 16 and 17 November 1796 at Arcola, then on 14 January 1797 at Rivoli Veronese, which ensured the fall of Mantua after a siege lasting well over six months.
Written in a state of euphoria in the aftermath of these decisive victories, Napoleon’s letters to Josephine became more passionate than ever. He wrote of his impatience to give her proofs of his ‘ardent love’, to be in bed with her, to see again her adorable face, her hair tied up in a scarf à la créole, her ‘little black forest’. ‘I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the time when I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian Fields.’
Soon, however, the letters changed
