Читать книгу Napoleon: His Wives and Women - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 16

‘How could my brother be so cruel as to

send me into exile amongst savages and snakes?’

DISTRACTED AS HE WAS by his passion for Josephine, Napoleon was at the same time deeply concerned by the behaviour of his sister Pauline, who at sixteen, was a sensual, wayward, high-spirited girl, ‘the prettiest and worst-behaved person imaginable,’ in the opinion of the poet, Antoine-Vincent Arnault: ‘She had the deportment of a schoolgirl, chattering away without pause, laughing at nothing and everything, contradicting the most eminent personages, sticking out her tongue at her sister-in-law behind her back, nudging my knee when I wasn’t paying her sufficient attention, and drawing upon herself from time to time the most terrifying looks of reproof from her brother…But, even so, a naturally good-natured child, if without any principle. She was someone capable of doing good from pure caprice.’

Metternich, the Austrian diplomatist and statesman, provided a shorter and less indulgent character sketch. The girl was admittedly ‘as pretty as it is possible to be’, but she was ‘in love with herself and her only occupation was pleasure’.

Pauline had fallen in love with Stanislas Fréron, an unscrupulous, heartless dandy twenty-six years older than herself, a man reputed to be suffering from syphilis and undoubtedly keeping a mistress, an actress, at the Théâtre des Italiens, who had borne two of his children and was shortly to have a third. It had been bad enough, in her mother’s opinion, when Pauline’s brother Lucien – described by Laure Permon as the ‘tall, ill-shaped and very short-sighted Lucien’ – married Catherine, the illiterate and distressingly shy daughter of an innkeeper without informing his mother; but, at least, Catherine was gentle and affectionate. This business of Fréron was much worse.

He had been one of the most outspoken deputies in the National Convention and a leading advocate of the September Massacres. He had been sent with Barras to suppress the counter-revolutionary revolt in the south of France where he had ordered the mass execution of hundreds of opponents of the Jacobin regime. Upon his return to Paris, he had been a leading participant in the conspiracy that engineered the downfall and death of Maximilien Robespierre, and had become a prominent supporter of the anti-Jacobin reaction, as well as a vigorous organizer of the gangs of long-haired jeunesse dorée who paraded intimidatingly through the streets in their outlandish clothes.

When her mother heard of Pauline’s attachment to the devious and dreadful Fréron and of her wish to marry the man – who was admittedly handsome and capable of exercising an undeniably ingratiating charm – Letizia put her foot down: she would not consider it; the girl was a mere child; the proposed marriage was out of the question. Napoleon thought so, too. ‘It is not my intention that she should marry Fréron,’ he told his brother, Joseph. ‘Please arrange the business of Paulette.’ He also wrote to Barras, one of Fréron’s colleagues, telling him to dissuade Fréron from endeavouring to marry ‘a child of sixteen of whom he is old enough to be the father. One does not try to marry when one has two children by a woman still living.’

Her family’s opposition to the match inflamed Pauline’s passion. ‘Ti amo sempre passionatissimamente,’ she wrote to Fréron, ‘per sempre ti amo…ti amo, amo, amo, si amatissimo amante.’

Well aware of the consuming fury of his sister’s passion, Napoleon decided that the girl, susceptible, passionate and ingénue, must be brought to the headquarters of the army in Italy where other more suitable young men would be likely to dampen her burning desire for Fréron, who was later posted to the Army of the North at Napoleon’s suggestion and, later, sent as a sub-prefect to the West Indies where he died within a few months.

A few months after Pauline’s marriage to Fréron had been prevented, Napoleon, while working in his study in the Villa Crivelli at Mombello, was disturbed by the sounds of some sort of activity in energetic process behind a screen. He got up to see what it was and discovered Pauline, now seventeen, in flagrante delicto with one of his young staff officers, Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc. Concerned that his alluring and libidinous sister might well end up in the arms of a man like Fréron, and believing that she might do much worse than settle down with Leclerc, the small but not altogether unpromising twenty-five-year-old son of a well-to-do miller from Pontoise, Napoleon promoted him brigadier-general and, insisting that they get married without delay, arranged for her to be provided with a dowry of forty thousand francs.

Having married Pauline, and proud to have the great General Bonaparte as a brother-in-law, Leclerc took it upon himself to behave as though to the manner born, adopting Napoleon’s way of walking with his hands behind his back and standing, as Jérôme Bonaparte also did, with his right hand tucked across his waist beneath his coat. Absurd as these mannerisms were considered to be, Leclerc was not an absurd man; and when Napoleon decided to send out a force of twenty-six thousand men to Saint-Domingue, the West Indian island now comprising the states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, to suppress a movement for independence led by Toussaint-Louverture, a former slave of remarkable military talent, General Leclerc was chosen to command it. His wife was by then the mother of a boy named Dermide Louis-Napoleon, Dermide being a name taken from the epic poems which were supposedly by the legendary third-century Gaelic warrior and bard, Ossian, whose works had not long since been translated into French and were so extravagantly admired by Napoleon.

Pauline left France with her husband and young son for Saint-Domingue with the utmost regret, complaining to a friend, ‘How could my brother be so cruel as to send me into exile amongst savages and snakes?’ ‘Besides,’ she added in her hypochondriacal way without too strict a regard for truth, ‘I am very ill. I shall die before I get there.’

She did not die; but she was profoundly unhappy on the island, dabbling in voodooism as a means of relieving her boredom. In the unhealthy tumbledown town of Cap Haïten, she was ill as well as miserable. Her skin turned yellow, she was listless and sick, and her face and beautiful body were covered with sores which had still not cleared up when at length she returned to Paris.

Her husband reported, however, that her behaviour left nothing to be desired: ‘Realizing how dreadful it is for her to remain in a country where she has before her eyes only the sight of the dead and dying, I urged her to return to France, but she refused to do so, saying that she must share my fortunes, good or bad.’

These fortunes were bad, indeed. ‘Since my arrival I have seen nothing but fires, insurrections, assassinations,’ he reported to Napoleon, ‘and nothing can expel these fearful images from my mind…I am fighting here against the blacks, against the whites, even against my army which has lost its courage…Madame Leclerc is ill, but she is a model of courage and really worthy to be your sister.’

Leclerc was soon seriously ill himself and was nursed devotedly by Pauline who received a letter of encouragement and warning from Napoleon: ‘Remember that fatigue and difficulties are nothing when one shares them with one’s husband, and is useful to one’s country. Make yourself loved by your thoughtfulness, your affability and by conduct which is above reproach and never frivolous. We have some trunks of fashionable clothes packed up for you and the captain of the Syrene will bring them to you. I love you very much.’

Leclerc died – as Fréron had done – of yellow fever in November 1802. His wife cut off some tresses of her hair to place in his coffin and sailed home to France, spending much of the voyage alone in her cabin, mourning her loss, writing to Napoleon on New Year’s Day 1803, after an eight weeks’ voyage across the Atlantic: ‘I have arrived at Toulon after an appalling crossing with my health ruined. This is the least of my sorrows. I have brought back with me the remains of my poor Leclerc. Pity poor Paulette. She is thoroughly miserable.’

Her brother responded by granting her an allowance of sixty thousand francs a year which, together with the surprisingly large sum left by her husband, allowed her to live with satisfactory extravagance. On her return to Paris she stayed for some time convalescing in her brother Joseph’s house, before buying a neighbouring house, the Hôtel Charost in the faubourg St Honoré, for four hundred thousand francs. She was now also the owner of a château in the country, bought partly from the money she had persuaded her late husband to acquire, as opportunity offered in Italy, and she could be seen from time to time driving out from its porte-cochère in a flamboyant carriage, dressed in costumes as eccentric as her disjointed if amiable conversation. Once again she became the talk of the town: her rumoured venereal disease, her visits to clairvoyants, the interest she shared with her sister-in-law, Josephine, in tarot cards and in the interpretation of the patterns of egg whites dropped into glasses of water, the expensive clothes she bought from the dressmaker, Louis-Hippolyte Leroy, her dislike of Josephine, at whom she could be seen, as in the past, putting out her tongue, and the highly unusual remedies she employed for real, or more often imaginary complaints, including enemas containing the boiled intestines of farm animals – all these were favourite topics of Parisian gossip. So was her notorious reputation for sexual adventures with a variety of lovers who had included, even before her departure for Saint-Domingue, an actor at the Comédie Française, Pierre Lafon, and the marquis de Sémonville, a former Commissioner in Corsica. ‘I was one of her lovers,’ Sémonville told Baron Mounier, one of Napoleon’s secretaries. ‘There were five of us sharing her favours in the same house before she left for Saint-Domingue…She was the greatest hussy you can imagine, but also the most tempting.’ Jacques-Étienne Macdonald, an officer of Scottish descent who was to become a marshal and the duc de Tarente, certainly thought so: he spent three whole days with her in the bedroom of a house at Saint-Leu. He and two other officers all had affairs with her at the same time.