Читать книгу Napoleon: His Wives and Women - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 12

‘Napoleon, there are two men in you.’

AN UNCLE OF CÉCILE AND LAURE PERMON, the girls who had teased Napoleon in his absurdly big boots, found him ‘pretty morose’. This uncle, Demetrius Comnène, had first caught sight of the fifteen-year-old boy in the Palais Royal as he looked all about him, his ‘nose in the air’. He had invited him to dinner; but the occasion was not a success: the boy’s conversation was largely limited to condemnation of the extravagance of his fellow students, so much better off, so much more aristocratic than the little Corsican upstart.

Napoleon had created no better impression when subsequently he had gone for dinner and had been put up for the night by the Permons. But some time later, when Laure Permon saw him again, she felt that there was, after all, something peculiarly arresting about him. Through a window she watched him approach across the courtyard:

He was very careless of his appearance [Laure wrote]; and his hair, which was ill combed and ill powdered, gave him a slovenly look…He had a shabby round hat drawn over his forehead, and I recollect his hair hanging over the collar of his grey greatcoat, which afterwards became as famous as the white plume of Henri IV. He wore no gloves, because, as he used to say, they were a useless luxury. His boots were ill-made and unpolished…His complexion was yellow and seemingly unhealthy, his features angular and sharp.

He approached the house in a clumsy walk. Yet, when he was inside the house, Laure Permon was struck by ‘his face without being able to explain why’. When he smiled his features, which she had earlier thought ugly, were lent an undeniable charm.

He became a regular visitor to the Permons’ house; and, when in one of his happier moods, he and Laure, by then eleven years old, would dance together in the middle of the room while Cécile played tunes for them on the piano. Or he would sit by the fire after dinner, stretching his legs out on the hearth, crossing his arms on his chest, and call out to Mme Permon, asking her to come to sit by him to talk about Corsica and his mother. She would do so with reluctance for the smell of his dirty, wet boots drying by the flames was so nauseous that she was compelled to bury her nose in a handkerchief or make some excuse to leave the room until Napoleon, at last realizing what drove her away, would have the maid scrape the mud from his boots before entering the sitting room.

The more he saw of Mme Permon the more he admired her. She was an attractive woman, vivacious, amusing, elegant in her dress and, in Napoleon’s words, ‘very amiable’. ‘She loves her country dearly,’ he said, ‘and she loves the company of Corsicans.’ She claimed to have read only one book in her whole life, Fénelon’s didactic romance Télé-maque; but she was quick-witted and astute.

In common with most men, Napoleon found her alluring. One day he called at the house holding a bunch of violets and this gallantry, as her daughter Laure said, was ‘so unusual’ for him that they could not help laughing.

On another occasion, he found Laure and her mother in tears: Monsieur Permon was gravely ill and not expected to survive. He died two days later; and, not long afterwards, Napoleon astonished Mme Permon by proposing that, as soon as her widowhood would conventionally allow it, they should get married. Once again Mme Permon could not help laughing. ‘My dear Napoleon,’ she said, according to Laure, ‘do let us talk seriously. You think you know my age. But really you know nothing about it; and I shan’t tell you. That’s my secret; though I will tell you that I’m old enough to be your mother. So spare me this kind of joke. It upsets me.’ It was ‘a ridiculous proposal’.

‘I want to get married,’ Napoleon persisted with characteristic lack of tact, ‘and what I’ve suggested would suit me in many ways. Think it over.’ He had given the matter much careful thought, he said. He was clearly much disgruntled when he took his leave, and was never to forgive her for his rebuff.

Before he left, she reminded him of his undertaking to try to obtain a commission for a cousin of hers. Although he had seemed quite willing to do so when she had first broached the subject, Laure said that ‘he did not seem quite as willing’ now.

‘Napoleon,’ Mme Permon said, ‘there are two men in you. I beg you always to be the one I love and admire…Do not allow the other one to gain the upper hand.’ He did not reply.

Two days later, he called once more at the house, on this occasion taking with him several aides-de-camp. Mme Permon, so Laure said, once again brought up the subject of her cousin’s commission. Napoleon was now non-committal. She accused him of prevarication. He told her she was being unjust to him. He took her hand to kiss it in farewell; but she snatched it away so violently that she hit him in the eye. She did not apologize. Promises were nothing to her, she told him, ‘actions everything’.

‘These young men are laughing at us,’ he said to her quietly, indicating the aides-de-camp, as he tried to take her hand again. ‘We are acting like two children.’ She made no reply as she folded her arms across her chest so that he could make no further attempt to kiss her hand. He picked up his hat and left.

Some years later at a reception at the Tuileries, Laure Permon, by then married to Napoleon’s friend, General Andoche Junot, encountered Napoleon again.

‘Well, mam’selle Loulou – you see I don’t forget the names of old friends – haven’t you got a kind word for me?’

He had taken my hand [Laure Junot recalled] and, pulling me towards him, he looked at me so closely that it made me lower my eyes…‘General,’ I replied, smiling, ‘it’s not for me to speak first.’

He smiled and said, ‘Very well parried…She’s got her mother’s quickness…By the way, how is Mme Permon?’

‘Ill, General. She is very ill.’

‘Ah! Really, as bad as that. Please give her my kind regards.

She’s wrong-headed, damnably wrong-headed. But she has a kind heart and she’s very generous.’

A few days later, Mme Permon, by then feeling better, invited General Junot and her daughter to dinner. After the meal, she lay down on a sofa and informed them that she would give a dance to celebrate their recent wedding. Junot offered to make a list of the people who were to be invited. Mme Permon suggested Napoleon. The others expressed their astonishment; but Mme Permon said, ‘Why do you sound so surprised? Just because I’m a Corsican, do you think I want to indulge in a vendetta? I can’t be bothered with that.’

‘All right,’ said Junot, ‘I’ll come to fetch you.’

‘Come to fetch me! Why? Where do you want to take me?’

‘To go to the Tuileries, of course. To deliver the invitation.’

‘My dear Junot, you are completely mad!’

‘But 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.