Читать книгу Napoleon: His Wives and Women - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 21

‘I was astonished to discover, that he was capable

of the most bitter jealousy.’

A FEW DAYS AFTER SETTING SAIL, Bonaparte decided to make arrangements to send a frigate to fetch Josephine to join him. He was missing her, and she, so she told Barras, was missing him. ‘I am so distressed at being separated from him,’ she wrote to Barras, ‘that I cannot get over my sadness…You know him and you understand how upset he would be at not hearing from me regularly. The last letter I had from him was very affectionate…He says that I am to rejoin him as soon as possible and I am making haste to finish the cure [at Plombières] so that I can be with him again very soon. I am very fond of him despite his little faults.’

But then the balcony of the pension where she was staying at Plombières collapsed into the street and she fell with it, injuring herself badly. Compresses and leeches were applied; she was given enemas and soaked in hot baths; but for weeks she remained in severe pain – unable, so she said, to ‘remain standing or sitting for ten minutes’ without causing agony in her kidneys and lower back. She told Barras that all she did was cry, and that he had no idea how much she suffered.

There was even worse to come. On 19 July 1798, as they walked together beside an oasis in the desert, General Junot confirmed to Bonaparte that Josephine was having an affair with Hippolyte Charles. Bourrienne, who had overheard Junot’s confidences, saw Bonaparte’s already pale face turn almost white. ‘If you had cared for me,’ Bonaparte said, striding up to him, ‘you would have told me about this before now… Josephine!…Divorce, yes, divorce. I will have a public and sensational divorce. I will write to Joseph and have it arranged…I can’t bear to be the laughing-stock of Paris…I love that woman so much I would give anything to have what Junot has just told me pronounced untrue.’ For years afterwards, thoughts of Josephine’s infidelity returned to distress him:

Napoleon never uttered Monsieur Charles’s name [Laure Junot wrote in her Mémoíres]. And he never allowed anyone else to mention it in his presence. He hated Charles; and I was astonished to discover that he was capable of the most bitter jealousy…One day when he was out walking with General Duroc, he squeezed his companion’s arm. His face had paled even beyond its usual pallor. Duroc was about to fetch help when Napoleon silenced him: ‘There’s nothing wrong with me, be quiet!’ A carriage had overtaken them and Napoleon had glimpsed Monsieur Charles inside. It was the first time he had caught sight of him since the Italian campaign.

Soon after learning about Josephine’s betrayal, Napoleon wrote to Joseph, asking him to have a country house ready for him to move into upon his return. He intended to be shut away in seclusion there for the winter. He needed to be alone, he said. He was ‘tired of grandeur’; he no longer cared about glory. At the age of twenty-nine he had ‘exhausted everything’.

This letter was intercepted by a British cruiser in the Mediterranean, together with a letter from her son, Eugeèane de Beauharnais, to Josephine in which he wrote:

Bonaparte has been miserable since a conversation with Junot…I have heard that Captain Charles travelled in your carriage until you were within three posting stages of Paris, that you have seen him in Paris, and been to the theatre with him, that he gave you your little dog, and that he is with you now. I feel sure this is all gossip, invented by your enemies. Bonaparte loves you as much as ever and is as anxious as ever to embrace you. I hope that when you come here all this will be forgotten.

It was not to be forgotten, though; and while talking incessantly about Josephine’s betrayal, Bonaparte was ready to betray her, too.

Below deck in the French ships that had arrived in Aboukir Bay earlier that month were some three hundred women. Some – laundresses, cantinières and the like – were officially authorized to be there. But, although strict orders had been issued against the embarkation of other women, wives and mistresses, several had been smuggled aboard in the uniforms of their husbands’ and lovers’ regiments: General Verbier, for example, spirited aboard his attractive Italian wife; while Lieutenant Fourès of the 22nd Regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval also contrived to take with him his wife, Pauline, an exceptionally pretty, blue-eyed, twenty-year-old young woman who looked most attractive in the uniform of her husband’s regiment, blue jacket and tight, white breeches. Her fair hair, gathered tightly under one of her husband’s cocked hats, was said, when she was en déshabillé, to fall to her waist. She was the illegitimate daughter of a cook named Bellisle and was known to her friends as Bellilotte. Before her recent marriage to Lieutenant Fourès she had been employed as a vendeuse in a milliner’s shop in Paris.

Bonaparte caught his first glimpse of her on the first day of December 1798 when he and his staff gathered to watch the ascent of a balloon which, so the Egyptian spectators were assured, could fly through the air from one country to another. The display, however, was a disaster: the balloon caught fire and the basket crashed to the earth. ‘It was a mere kite,’ commented one of the Egyptian spectators whom it was intended to impress. ‘If the wind had driven it a little further, the trick would have worked and the French would have claimed that it had travelled to a faraway country.’

Amongst the witnesses to this fiasco was Pauline Fourès who soon caught the attention of one of Bonaparte’s aides-de-camp, his stepson, Eugeène de Beauharnais, who pointed her out to one of his companions. Overhearing their comments, Bonaparte looked at her, too. That evening he saw her again and spent minutes on end staring at her with that appraising, silent watchfulness which so often disturbed and embarrassed the objects of his attention.

Upon his arrival in Cairo, he had been presented with some becoming young women by the sheiks. There were rumours that he had also been offered young men and that he had accepted one of them and had indulged in a homosexual experience which he did not care to repeat. He fancied only one of the young women offered to him; the others were either too fat for his taste or their smell displeased him. Napoleon had a very keen sense of smell which, however, did not appear to disgust him on the battlefield. Later in Russia, when he entered Smolensk, the stench of corpses was so nauseating that even the most hardened and experienced soldiers were sick. But Napoleon appeared unmoved. ‘Isn’t that a fine sight?’ he said to Armand-Augustin-Louis, marquis de Caulaincourt, indicating the flickering glare of the burning buildings and the bodies of the Russian soldiers amidst the flames.

‘Horrible, sire,’ said Caulaincourt.

‘You must always remember,’ Napoleon told him, ‘the saying of one of the Roman emperors, that the corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.’

Yet, Baron Fain, Napoleon’s former secretary, said, ‘I have seen him move away from more than one servant who was far from suspecting the secret aversion his smell had inspired.’ And, in Madrid and on St Helena, he was to turn girls away because he could not stand their smell. In Spain, indeed, the smell of an actress to whom he was introduced so offended him that, so he said, ‘I very nearly fainted, I did indeed.’ Now in Egypt, however, the evidently odourless or fragrant Zenab, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the sheikh El-Bekri, did appeal to him; and, it being supposed that he took her to his bed, she became known as ‘the General’s Egyptian’.

Her father, it seems, raised no objection. A man who consumed stupendous quantities of brandy and burgundy every night, who was much occupied with a handsome slave boy, El-Bekri may well have believed that the liaison might be turned to his advantage. It was not, however, to benefit poor Zenab: when the French were about to leave Egypt, religious zealots set about punishing women who had consorted with the infidel foreigners.

Zenab had been debauched by the French [the chronicler, Abd el-Rahman El-Djabarti recorded]. The Pasha’s emissaries presented themselves after sundown. They brought her and her father to court. She was questioned about her conduct, and made reply that she repented of it. Her father’s opinion was solicited. He answered that he disavowed his daughter’s conduct. The unfortunate girl’s head was accordingly cut off.