Читать книгу Napoleon: His Wives and Women - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 11

‘How could you think I could cease to love you?’

DEPRESSED AS NAPOLEON HAD BEEN in Valence and frustrated as he had been while in Corsica, soon after his return to France he had begun to make a name for himself in the army. When his superior officer had been wounded during the siege of Toulon in 1793, Napoleon had been given command of the artillery there and, having handled it with exemplary skill, he had been promoted to général-de-brigade at the age of twenty-four. He had since been employed in preparing plans for the operations of the army which the government in Paris had sent against the Austrians in Italy; and, in October 1795, he had helped to defeat supporters of a counter-revolution in Paris by ordering his guns to fire upon the mob – the mob he always hated and feared – his famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’. ‘The enemy attacked us at the Tuileries,’ he had reported to his brother, Joseph. ‘We killed a great many of them. They killed thirty of our men and wounded another sixty. Now all is quiet. As usual I did not receive a scratch. I could not be happier.’ Four hundred men lay dead in the church of St-Roch; and Napoleon’s future was made. ‘I have lodgings and a carriage at your disposal,’ he told Joseph. ‘I have already sent sixty thousand livres in gold, silver and paper money to the family, so you need have no worries…You know I live only for the pleasure of what I can do for the family.’

Not long afterwards, he was appointed to the command of the Army of the Interior. For this rapid change in his fortunes he was much indebted to the support and patronage of the vicomte Paul de Barras, who had been entrusted with dictatorial powers by the National Convention.

Napoleon was now in a position to marry, and he turned his thoughts seriously to the choice of a bride, preferably a rich one. According to Barras, who wrote long after their friendship had been broken, he was not above dancing attendance, in a most uncharacteristic manner, on wealthy women who, or whose husbands, he thought might be in a position to advance him in his career. One such was the wife of a man of some influence – Mme Louise Turreau de Lignières, with whom, it was improbably suggested, he conducted a brief affair. Another was Mme Ricord upon whom ‘he heaped attentions, handing her her gloves and fan and showing her the deepest respect when she mounted her horse, taking her for walks hat in hand, and appearing to be in constant terror lest she should meet with some accident’.

It was Barras who introduced him to another rich woman, Mme Montausier, a woman who was said to be worth over a million francs and who owned a theatre which was also a brothel in the Palais Royal. She was very much older than Napoleon: this in itself did not much concern him; but for one reason or another the relationship did not prosper.

It was not only money and position he was after, as he told his brother Joseph; he ‘badly wanted a home’; and if he could find a young woman with a handsome dowry, of course so much the better. In the summer of 1794, while occupying lodgings in the house of the comte de Laurenti near Nice, he thought that he might have found such a bride in the person of the count’s sixteen-year-old daughter Emilie whose father, he had good reason to believe, was quite rich. He asked him, evidently without much hope of success, if he might marry Emilie. Her father, polite in his refusal, considered the proposal premature: the young general was about to embark on a campaign in Italy; there would be time enough to consider the matter when his daughter was older and Bonaparte had returned home. In the meantime, the count and his wife thought it as well to send Emilie to stay with cousins at Grasse.

Later on that year in Marseilles, Napoleon was introduced by his brother Joseph to the family of the rich textile-and-soap merchant, François Clary (the husband of one of their mother’s friends), who had two daughters, Julie, aged twenty-two, whom Joseph was to marry, and Bernardine Eugénie Désirée, aged sixteen. Julie was a plain young woman with big bulging eyes and a thick flat nose. Short and spotty, she was described in later life as ‘a perfectly vulgar little woman, very thin and very ugly’, ‘hideous’ even and ‘pimply to the last degree’.

Napoleon expressed the opinion that looks in a wife did not matter. ‘It isn’t necessary that our wives should be good looking,’ he said. ‘With a mistress it is different. A plain mistress is a monstrosity. She would fail in her principal, indeed in her only duty.’

It had to be conceded that Julie was extremely unprepossessing in appearance; but she was both good-natured and intelligent.

Her sister was known in the family as Désirée but Napoleon, who was often in future to choose his own names for his women friends, called her Eugénie. She was rather fat and not particularly good-looking with large, slightly protuberant dark eyes; but she was an affectionate girl, kind-hearted like her sister, amenable and shy with a pleasant singing voice, the promise of a generous dowry, and what Napoleon described as ‘the most beautiful teeth imaginable’ as well as the ‘prettiest hands in the world’. A pretty hand and a pretty foot were always features upon which he was likely to comment. His own, so a future valet was to notice, were exceptionally well formed and his fingernails remarkably well cared for.

There could be no doubt that Désirée found him attractive; and he himself was sufficiently taken with her to carry about with him a few strands of her hair in a locket. Her father, however, was not inclined to encourage the friendship: the young Corsican might well have a bright future before him in the army; but he had little money and his character was not appealing. Introspective, unsociable and gloomy, he had been heard to speak of suicide.

Discouraged by her parents, Napoleon wrote to tell his dear Eugénie, after his departure from Marseilles, that, while her sweet nature inspired him with affection, he did not think that, being ‘so occupied with work’, he ought to allow that affection to ‘cut into [his] soul’. As for her, he went on to say, she had a talent for music: she should develop that talent, buy a piano of her own and engage a music teacher. Condescendingly he gave her peculiarly ill-informed advice about her singing technique.

In his next letter, not written until five months later, Napoleon returned to this musical theme: he would subscribe to a music magazine on her behalf and he sent her a list of books which he recommended that she should read. Four more months passed before Napoleon once again appeared in Marseilles and presented himself at the Clarys’ house.

Eugénie was now seventeen, less shy and reserved but as sweet-natured as ever. Before long, Napoleon fell in love with her; and now he made it clear that he would like to marry her and he evidently contrived to take her to bed. ‘You are always in my thoughts,’ he told her. ‘How can you think I could cease to love you?’ Mme Clary was deeply disturbed by this development: after all, her daughter was by now a most attractive girl with a dowry of one hundred thousand livres, whereas Napoleon was a gauche Corsican with no more to offer than his army pay. She already had one son-in-law who had no money of his own; and, for her, as she is supposed to have said, one Bonaparte in the family was quite enough.

Her mother’s reluctance to accept Napoleon into their family did not deter him in his pursuit of her. He wrote to her regularly after his return to Paris. He addressed her as his ‘adorable friend’; he was hers for life; he asked her to write to him at least once a day. Yet this ardour did not long survive his absence from her; soon he let days go by before bothering to go to the poste restante to fetch the letters, sad and expressive of longing and insecurity, which she wrote to him.

Away from Marseilles, he came across women from a different world. He met Victorine, comtesse de Chastenay, a clever young woman who was intrigued by the pallor of his gaunt cheeks, his long, unwashed hair, his extraordinary taciturnity. After dinner she sang a song in Italian and, when she had finished, she asked him if her pronunciation was correct. He answered her with the one word: ‘No.’ The next day he was more forthcoming, so much so, indeed, that they talked for four hours during which he elaborated his didactic views on all manner of subjects – from Shakespeare (whose plays were ‘pitiful’) and the poems of Ossian, exposed as forgeries by Samuel Johnson (and extravagantly admired by Napoleon), to the Parisiennes’ use of fans (which, so he said, betrayed their feelings as demonstrated by the actress Mlle Constant at the Com-édie Française).

Napoleon also met at this time another interesting young woman, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a rich physician’s flighty divorced Scottish wife whose illegitimate daughter may have been the Prince of Wales’s, as she liked it to be supposed, though the child might equally well have been fathered by one of her other lovers. One day she and Napoleon went for a walk together in the Tuileries gardens. It was not a success: he spoke of his dislike and distrust of the English and his wish to see the earth open and swallow up the whole race. She said that it was not very tactful of him to say so in her presence. To this he replied that he had always supposed that the Scots loved France and disliked the English. She said that she herself preferred England to Scotland.