Читать книгу Napoleon: His Wives and Women - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 20

‘I would rather die than lead a life

that cannot be devoted to you.’

A FREQUENT GUEST at the Bonapartes’ dinner parties, Barras was closer to Napoleon than ever, far closer than any of the other Directors (all of whom, in varying degrees, were wary of him). Barras was also as intimate as ever with Josephine: one evening, when she had planned to have dinner at his house, her husband returned unexpectedly early from a visit to the Channel ports. ‘Bonaparte came back last night,’ she wrote to Barras’s secretary. ‘I beg you, my dear Botot, to tell Barras how much I regret not being able to dine with him tonight. Tell him not to forget me! You know, my dear Botot, my delicate position better than anyone else.’

Josephine also wrote, and in far more intimate terms, to Hippolyte Charles:^*

Joseph [her brother-in-law] had a long conversation yesterday with Bonaparte and afterwards he asked me if I knew Citizen Bodin and if I had procured for him the purveyor’s contract with the Army of Italy and if it was true that Charles was living at Citizen Bodin’s house at 100 faubourg St Honoré and if I went there every day. I answered that I knew nothing at all of what he was talking about and that, if he wanted a divorce, he only had to ask me…Yes, my Hippolyte, I hate all of them [the Bonaparte family]. You alone have my loving tenderness…They must see my despair at not being able to see you as often as I would like. Hippolyte, I will kill myself. I would rather die than lead a life that cannot be devoted to you. What have I done to these monsters?…They must see how I abhor them…I hate them all…But however much they torment me, they shall never part me from my Hippolyte…You alone have my love…Please tell Bodin to say he doesn’t know me, and that it wasn’t through me that he got the Army contract…

I will do my very best to see you during the day. I will send Blondin [a trusted manservant] to tell you what time I can get away to see you in the Parc Monceau. Goodbye, my Hippolyte, a thousand kisses as passionate and loving as my heart…My life is a constant torment. You only can restore me to happiness. Tell me that you love me, that you love only me. Send me 50,000 livres by Blondin out of the funds in hand. Collot [ Jean-Pierre Collot, a corrupt banker] is asking me for the money. Adieu, I send you a thousand tender kisses. I am yours, all yours.

Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, was not the only member of his family who had come to Paris. His wife, Julie, had come with him from Rome, where he had served for a time as ambassador; so had Julie’s sister, Désirée Clary, and so had packing-cases full of treasures and money which enabled Joseph to buy a fine country estate, the Château de Mortefontaine, as well as a splendid house in Paris, designed by Jacques-Ange Gabriel, architect of the Petit Trianon at Versailles.

Joseph’s brother, Lucien, a tall, pretentious man equally antagonistic to Josephine, was able to buy an extensive estate in the country from which he wrote long letters to Napoleon detailing Josephine’s real and supposed indiscretions. All their three sisters were, and continued to be, equally antagonistic; Elisa and Caroline frequently expressing their dislike and spreading malicious gossip, Pauline displaying similar animosity between visits to Josephine’s couturíères and bijoutiers, and the occasional enjoyment of the ‘old woman’s’ former lovers.

Napoleon’s mother was now also living in comfort in France, having abandoned the family house in Corsica, which, after returning to the island for a time, she had rebuilt, redecorated and refurnished with money sent to her by her son. She did not speak against Josephine so openly as her daughters did; and, presumably at Napoleon’s behest and probably at his dictation, wrote to her to say, ‘My son has told me of his happiness, which is enough to secure my approval.’ In private, however, she referred to Josephine as ‘La putana’, ‘the whore’.

The Bonapartes were far from alone in endeavouring to make trouble between Napoleon and Josephine. One day, Louise Compoint, Josephine’s maid who had accompanied her from Italy, came to see the General. She had lost her place, she told him, because Mme Bonaparte had objected to her sharing a bed with General Junot when they stopped for the night at inns. This, she said, was most unfair since Mme Bonaparte herself had seen to it that Captain Charles was with her in her carriage and he had spent the nights at the same inns.

Bonaparte questioned his wife about this. In an attempt to get her to confess, he remarked that of course if a man and a woman slept in the same inn it did not necessarily follow that they shared a bed. ‘No, no,’ Josephine repeated, bursting into tears which, for the moment, ended the questioning. Her husband, who seems to have paid little attention to Joseph’s accusations, seems not to have pursued Louise Compoint’s either, turning his attention to the next step in his career, an invasion of Egypt, proposed by Talleyrand, as a means of striking at one of the main sources of England’s wealth and threatening her route to India.

The time had not yet come, Bonaparte thought, to take steps nearer to power in France. He had attempted to enlist Barras’s help in getting himself elected a Director and then mounting a coup d’état, but Barras had not been encouraging. At the same time, Bonaparte was beginning to believe that an invasion of England was not practicable, while to remain in Paris, where many of those who had formerly been so ready to praise his achievements were now openly expressing the belief that he wished to make himself a dictator, was not a course to be recommended either.

He had also begun to fear that his life itself was in danger from an assassin’s knife in Paris. It was noticed that, as though in readiness for flight, he never took off his spurs, and that at public dinners his own servant kept a careful eye on the food he ate and the wine he drank.

He was depressed by the lack of encouragement received for Talleyrand’s proposal for a campaign in Egypt. Of the Directors only Barras supported him and he did so without enthusiasm. There was a risk, it was argued, that it might entail a war with Russia, as well as with the Ottoman Empire of which Egypt was a province. When Bonaparte gave his opinion to the Directors that the French navy was not strong enough for an invasion of England and that the great sum of money needed for it was not available, the Directors promised him more money. Exasperated by their reluctance to consider an invasion of Egypt, he threatened to resign. The Director, Jean-François Reubell, offered him a pen, inviting him to write there and then his letter of resignation. But the Directors well knew that he would not resign and, in the end, they submitted to his demands for the Egyptian adventure which he himself hoped would end in a speedy and decisive victory and enable him to return home with his reputation even further enhanced and the time ripe for the next step towards the fulfilment of his destiny.

While the preparations for the campaign were being made with the secrecy which was essential if Admiral Nelson’s fleet were to be kept in the English Channel, and while a Commission of Arts and Sciences, including artists and all manner of scholars from astronomers to cartographers and geologists, was being formed to accompany the expedition, Napoleon took Josephine to look for a suitable country house to which they could return when the campaign was over.

He could well afford to buy one. He protested publicly that, while commanding the Army of Italy, he had nothing but his general’s pay. But in addition to the large dowries he had given his two elder sisters and the money for the purchase of the rented house in the rue de la Victoire, he had found the means for the education of his youngest sister as well as his youngest brother at schools which were among the most expensive in France. Yet, even so, when Josephine was much taken with one of the country houses they saw, the Château de Malmaison – a house built on the bank of the Seine just outside Paris near Bougival in the early seventeenth century on the site of one burned down by the Black Prince, son of King Edward III – Napoleon decided he could not afford the price asked for it.

He had not yet made up his mind whether or not to take Josephine to Egypt with him. There were those who thought she did not want to go, that her professed desire to accompany him was characteristic make-believe. Yet there were also those who supposed that she was beginning to realize what a remarkable man her husband was and what a splendid future lay in front of him, even that, since she had grown to know him better, she was growing fond of him. Certainly, she pressed him to allow her to go with him to Egypt, all the more insistently when she saw how well his flagship, the Orient, had been fitted up and supplied (even to the extent of having his bed provided with casters so that he should not be troubled by the mal de mer from which he habitually suffered when at sea); and when General Alexandre Dumas called to see Bonaparte one morning while he and his wife, obviously naked beneath the sheet, were still in bed, he found her in tears. Bonaparte explained that she was upset because he had still not made up his mind whether or not to take her with him. In the end, he decided not to do so, at least until the convoy had managed to evade the enemy fleet: in the meantime she was to go to Plombières in Lorraine, to take a course of the waters of the spa which were said to be efficacious in cases of sterility.

Her husband set sail on 19 May 1798. The crossing to Egypt was expected to take about six weeks, allowing for the acquisition of the island of Malta and the treasure of the Knights Hospitallers on the way. For most of that time, Bonaparte rarely left his cabin. He did not suffer from seasickness as badly as he had feared he might; but most of the soldiers cramped below did so, their plight made worse by the stale water and weevil-infested biscuits of their daily fare.

He had brought an extensive library with him, and on most days his friend and secretary, Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne, read to him, generally from books of history, particularly of the history of the Islamic world. One day he asked Eugène de Beauharnais and General Berthier what they themselves were reading and was annoyed to discover they were both enjoying a novel. ‘Reading fit for chambermaids!’ he told them angrily. ‘Men should only read history.’ In the evenings, he talked about all manner of other subjects with his senior officers, discussing politics and French foreign policy, warfare and religion, the interpretation of dreams, the age of the world and how it might be destroyed, and whether or not there was life elsewhere in the universe.

When not talking of such matters, reading, or being read to he spoke about Josephine. ‘Passionately as he loved glory – both France’s and his own,’ Bourrienne commented, Josephine was almost constantly in his thoughts. ‘His fondness for her was close to idolatry.’