Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (22 page)

T
HE
D
IRECTORY WAS
falling apart. In June 1799, the ruthless intellectual former priest Emmanuel Sieyès had allied with Barras to expel the directors he did not trust and brought in fifty-three-year-old Louis-Jérôme Gohier and two others in their place. Another rising star was Joseph Fouché, a former cleric, pale-eyed and pale-faced and utterly without morals; he, too, had dealt in army supplies. In July 1799, he became minister of police, tasked with quashing all criticism of the government.

Josephine marshaled her beauty and her redecorated salon at rue de la Victoire to win over the men who would control Napoleon’s career, and thus lure her husband back to her. Sieyès was dismissive of her, but Gohier was both eager to dine with her and sexually fascinated by her, although she was close friends with his wife.

Gohier advised Josephine that her relationship with Hippolyte compromised her in the eyes of the world, and she should either give him up or divorce Napoleon and marry him. She assured Gohier that they were just friends. She had no wish to divorce Napoleon or to be Hippolyte’s wife. As she knew, the little gallant would never marry her—there was no way he could afford to keep her.

The War Ministry had launched an inquiry into the Bodin Company and discovered the poor horses, various bribes, and numerous unpaid suppliers. Josephine was keen to save Hippolyte, now codirector, from disgrace. “A report on the Bodin Company is to be made today to the Directory, and I beg you to intervene for them,” she wrote to Barras. “The firm is in such a bad way that it needs powerful sponsorship.”
¹¹
Every time she gained her former lover’s sympathy with her vulnerability, she also drove him to exasperation with her pleas to favor Bodin’s dodgy dealings. He grew tired of her supplications. One evening at dinner in the Luxembourg, Barras turned his back on her and spoke only to Thérésa Tallien. Josephine departed in tears, convinced that he believed she would be divorced by Napoleon on his return from Egypt and thus was shunning her.

B
ONAPARTE SOON HEARD
of his humiliation in the British press and was bent on revenge. After attempting to amuse himself with dancers, he spotted pretty Pauline Fourès at a hot-air-balloon launch in the Ezbekiya
Gardens. The wife of a lieutenant, twenty-year-old Pauline was a cheery, accommodating soul who had the slender figure Napoleon liked and looked well in her disguise of the uniform of her husband’s regiment. She had long golden hair, a rose-petal complexion, a perky temperament, and an eagerness for adventure. Lieutenant Fourès had come across her working at a milliner’s shop in Carcassonne and married her just before setting off on campaign.

Napoleon ignored the balloon and stared at Pauline openly and without flinching, a tactic that many of his amours found disturbing. Junot was sent off to make a proposition to her; unfortunately, he did so in coarsely practical language, and Pauline was shaken. General Duroc was sent to make another attempt, bearing a handsome jeweled bracelet as a gift. This time the lady proved much more receptive.

On December 17, Lieutenant Fourès was assigned to take a letter to Admiral Villeneuve, who had been commanding one of the few ships to escape the Battle of the Nile but had been captured in Malta. He was also tasked with carrying letters to the Directory in Paris. Napoleon hoped the journey would take three months or so. Fourès was refused permission to take Pauline with him. As soon as the husband’s back was turned, Napoleon invited her and several other officers and their wives to a dinner at the palace. After dessert, an officer spilled coffee “by accident” over her gown. Napoleon leaped to her rescue, ushered her upstairs to change, and neither returned to the dinner. She was soon living in a villa on the palace grounds, and others dubbed her Napoleon’s “Cleopatra.”

Bonaparte treated the milliner’s apprentice as a true companion. He admired her staunch determination to travel through Egypt with her husband, and he was pleased by her vivacious personality. He flaunted her, hoping the news would get back to Paris. For the short period they were together, she presided at his dinner parties and accompanied him everywhere in his carriage. Napoleon even forced seventeen-year-old Eugène to escort him and his new mistress around the city, until the poor boy begged to be excused.

On December 24, 1798, barely a week after capturing Pauline, Napoleon set off for Suez. He wished her a touching goodbye and told her to make a son while he was away, always hopeful for the proof of his
virility. He came back briefly after Suez, only to set off again in February on a grandiloquent expedition to Syria. He meant eventually to take on the Turks, who had declared war on France.

Pauline’s husband was captured just outside Alexandria and was promptly returned to Cairo. Fourès was outraged when he learned of his wife’s betrayal, but he could do nothing. Napoleon pronounced the Fourès divorced (he saw himself as the de facto ruler of Cairo and so judged himself able to dissolve a marriage), which left him free to enjoy Pauline. Her only fault was that she would not get pregnant. “What’s to be done,” said the great hero, “the silly girl … can’t do it.” Pauline vehemently defended herself. “Good God!” she cried. “It’s not my fault.”
¹²
She presumably meant that his cursory technique made conception unlikely.

Napoleon soon set off again. He could not bring himself to stay in one place for too long (even if he had a pretty girl like Pauline waiting for him). “I saw myself on the way to Asia, riding an elephant, wearing a turban, attacking the English in India,” he later wrote.
¹³
The reality of the campaign was less romantic. The men hated the conditions of the desert and suffered in the heat. At Jaffa in Palestine (now part of Tel Aviv), they were plied with alcohol to give them courage and then sent to massacre all those who were in the enemy garrison, including women and children. In the morning, Napoleon dispatched Eugène and another young aide, Crosier, to call for peace. Turkish soldiers holed up in a citadel told Crosier they would come down if their lives were spared. He brought all four thousand of them as prisoners.

Napoleon was furious with Crosier and Eugène. “Have I any provisions to feed them?” he railed. “What the devil can I do with them all?”
¹⁴
It was impossible to expect them to become loyal members of the French army, and there were not enough troops to march them back. Napoleon ordered the men to be shot. For three days, his demoralized soldiers were forced to chase fleeing men into the sea and shoot them. Weeping children clung to the necks of their fathers as they, too, were killed, and the sea turned red with blood.

The following day, the army was hit by bubonic plague. Napoleon declared that any man who was afraid of the plague would catch it. To prove his point, he visited a hospital and touched some of the patients
and helped to reposition others. He believed that if one had control over the mind, the body would follow suit. The army progressed to Acre on the coast of Syria, but failed to take the garrison, which was protected by the British. Napoleon told his men to return to Cairo, after writing to the Directory that Acre was not worth seizing. He left behind two thousand wounded and plague-ridden soldiers. The British offered to take them on their ships, but Napoleon refused, and the men were beheaded by the Turks almost as soon as the French left.

He wrote missives to the French blowing his own trumpet, puffing his incredible victories, barely mentioning the plague. “We want for nothing here,” he exclaimed to the Directory, “we are bursting with strength, good health, and high spirits.” He had instructed that his men be welcomed in Cairo like conquering heroes, with grand ceremony and bands playing. Napoleon was good at assuming the mantle of a victor, even if he did not deserve it. He hoped that the news of his celebration would reach France. “We are masters of the entire eastern desert,” he wrote. “If you could send us excess of 15,000 men, we would be able to go anywhere.”

He hurried back to the arms of Pauline Fourès but was disappointed to find she was not yet pregnant. He dallied with her and planned more victories until the British cunningly sent him a set of recent newspapers.
¹⁵
Napoleon was shocked at the news they contained. France was under fire. Austria, Britain, and Russia had banded together; the Austrians had pushed the French back over the Rhine; and the French had been forced to withdraw from much of Switzerland. Malta was blockaded, and the French forces were being driven back through Italy. Most of the territory gained during the Italian campaign had been lost.

Napoleon scoured the newspapers, madly reading of the failures of his country. “Italy is lost!!!” he cried. “All the fruits of our victories have disappeared! I must depart.” France needed a savior, and he was the man to do it. By August 11, Napoleon was preparing to leave, abandoning his ill and exhausted Army of the Orient under the command of Kléber, telling everybody but Bourrienne and his chief of staff that it was just another expedition. He took Eugène with him but left Junot, still unable to forgive him for telling the truth about Josephine. He refused to let Pauline Fourès come, in case the British took the ship. “You
should think of my reputation; what would they say if they found a woman on board?”
¹⁶
He suggested to Kléber that he take her as a mistress.

Once Napoleon had left Egypt, he was eager to get to France. At Corsica, the ships were stalled owing to a lack of wind. He stayed in his childhood home, saw relatives and his old wet nurse, and raged against the weather. “I will be there too late,” he moaned. On October 10, 1799, he finally landed in France and was greeted by delighted crowds. The cannons fired in Paris to announce the news. People wept with joy, and the theaters had to interrupt performances so people could sing patriotic songs.

In Cairo, governing from a palace, issuing edicts that had to be obeyed by a subject people, Napoleon had discovered a taste for tyranny and ruling over an empire. But he no longer wished to be emperor of Africa. In place of Alexander, his new hero was Julius Caesar, conqueror of Europe.

T
HROUGHOUT
1799, J
OSEPHINE
became increasingly nervous and unhappy. Exposed and guilty, she was afraid of Napoleon’s return and began to doubt that the purchase of Malmaison would win him over. She told her old friends that she was retiring, shunning social life. “I came to Paris, my dear Barras, meaning to see you, but I was told when I got there that you had a large party today,” she wrote. The woman who once thrived on admiration and reveled in society now wished to be private. “Since moving to the country, I have become such a recluse that social occasions frighten me,” she told her former lover. “Besides, I am so miserable that I do not wish to be an object of pity for others.”
¹⁷

“Mama has bought Malmaison,” Hortense wrote to her brother in October 1799. “She lives a very reclusive life there.”
¹⁸
She meant the letter to be read to Napoleon and for him to understand how quietly Josephine was behaving.

She has only given two big dinner parties since you both departed. The Directors and all the Buonoparte family were invited, but the latter always decline to come … Maman is, I assure you, very distressed that the family won’t live on friendly
terms with her, which must vex her husband whom she loves very much. I am certain that if Maman could have been sure of reaching him, she would have gone, but you know how impossible that would be.

Josephine herself, after presumably overseeing the letter, wrote that she wished for Eugène’s return and that of Napoleon, “especially if I find Bonaparte as he was when he left me; then I will be able to forget all I have suffered as a result of your absence and his.”
¹⁹
She was making a counterstrike: accusing her husband of neglect and absence. Luckily for her, Napoleon did not see the letter. He and Eugène were already on their way home.

CHAPTER 11

“He Owes Me Everything”

On the night of October 10, Josephine was dining with Gohier and his wife, discussing politics and Paris gossip. The cutlery and glasses clinked, the candles cast soft light, she smiled at Gohier’s jokes and talked about dresses with his wife. Then an urgent message came through from Eugène that he had landed at Fréjus with Napoleon. Josephine leaped from her chair. “I must reach him before his brothers can talk to him,” she cried. She made her hasty goodbyes, collected Hortense, and hurried into her carriage. She told her driver to speed south in the hope of catching Napoleon at Lyon.

She did not know which route he would take and so took her chances on the route via Châlons, begging the coachman to push the horses as fast as he could. As she sped south, she saw that every village and coaching inn had been speedily decorated for the returning hero, with triumphal archways erected over the roads and illuminations strung across the houses. Each time they stopped to change horses, people crowded around their carriage, imploring Josephine to tell them “if it was really true that the savior (for that was the name that all France had given him) had returned,” as Hortense recalled.
¹
Finally, they reached Lyon, only to be told that the general had already left and was traveling to Paris on a different road. Napoleon had remained briefly in Lyon to bask in the people’s praise, and the city had produced a quickly written new play,
Bonaparte at Lyon,
for him. Josephine had just missed him.