Читать книгу Napoleon: His Wives and Women - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 15

‘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 their tone. On a visit to Milan, he found that Josephine was not in the Serbelloni Palace. For over a week he waited in vain for her return, writing her a succession of letters by turn angry, self-pitying, mortified and disillusioned. ‘I long to hold you in my arms,’ he wrote. ‘The pain I feel is unbelievable…When I ask you to love me as I love you, I am wrong to do so…I am not worth it…When I am sure that she no longer loves me I will keep silent, wishing only to be useful to her…I will submit to all sorrows, all grief, if only the fates will grant Josephine happiness…Oh, Josephine, Josephine.’

In his grief and discontent Napoleon pursued a policy in Italy quite at odds with the wishes of the Directory in Paris. Having advanced to within sixty miles of Vienna, he signed a preliminary treaty with the Austrians at Leoben, where onlookers were struck by the brusque demeanour of the little man who spoke in strongly accented French, giving orders, making demands and granting few concessions with supreme confidence. Again ignoring the wishes of the Directory and arousing further annoyance in Paris he deposed the Doge in Venice and destroyed that most ancient republic.

Whilst waiting for the details of his Italian diktat to be settled, in May 1797 Napoleon moved his headquarters from Milan to the huge Baroque palace at Mombello. Josephine, who had again been protesting that her poor health demanded her return to Paris, now announced that she would, after all, remain at Mombello, a decision widely assumed to have been taken because Captain Charles’s duties would require his presence there for the whole of that summer.

They were pleasant months for her. She was able to indulge her passion for flowers, which were planted under her direction all over the gardens, as well as her fondness for birds, which fluttered and glided over the waters of the lake and chirrupped in cages ordered for her by her husband. By day, Josephine could be seen strolling in her graceful way down the gravelled paths and across the well-mown grass; by night, she presided over the dining-room table in her white muslin dress, with an ivy wreath in her hair, captivating men by the glances of her eyes, ‘dark blue,’ as one of her admirers described them, ‘always half closed under long lids, fringed by the longest eyelashes in the world’, sipping coffee after dinner on the terrace, her dog by her side.

This was not Fortuné, who had been so impertinent as to bite Napoleon’s leg the first time he shared a bed with the animal’s mistress. For this tiresome animal, to whom Josephine had been so unaccountably attached, had been killed by a dog belonging to the Mombello chef, much to the pleasure of Napoleon who expressed the hope that Fortuné’s replacement – a puppy secretly given to her by Captain Charles – would meet the same fate.

Content as she was to be under the same roof as Charles, even though the opportunities to be alone with him were not frequent, Josephine did not take kindly to the thought of being thrown into the company of several members of her husband’s family whom he now decided to establish at Mombello.

Among the first to arrive on holiday from the Irish college at St Germain, the Dermott Academy, were Josephine’s son, Eugène de Beauharnais, now fifteen years old, and Napoleon’s brother, Jérôme, aged twelve. Also there was Jérôme’s and Napoleon’s mother, Letizia: Napoleon had thought it as well not to inform her of his marriage to the widow Beauharnais until after it had taken place, and Letizia did not approve of it or of her. Although Josephine behaved towards her mother-in-law with the utmost courtesy and that charm of manner that others found so beguiling, Letizia never could bring herself to respond to her wayward daughter-in-law’s natural warmth. Nor could Laure Junot, who wrote of her: ‘Mme Bonaparte was an astonishing woman and must formerly have been very pretty…though no longer in the first bloom of youth.’ Had she but possessed teeth, ‘I do not say pretty teeth but only teeth’, she would have been ‘more attractive than most of her contemporaries’.

Nor could Letizia’s three daughters outgrow their initial wary diffidence in the presence of what seemed to them the assured sophistication of their sister-in-law. Their ill-concealed jealousy soon turned to active dislike.