Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (24 page)

At three in the morning, Napoleon returned home, fretting to Bourrienne that he had said the wrong thing. “I like better to speak to soldiers than to lawyers. Those fellows disconcerted me. I have not been used to public assemblies; but that will come in time.”
¹⁵
Josephine was in bed when he arrived, but awake, and she begged his help for Gohier. Napoleon was not to be won over. As he saw it, he had given Gohier a chance to be part of the coup, and he had refused it. “What would you suggest, my dear?” he replied. “He is respectable, but a simpleton. He does not understand me!—I ought, perhaps, to have him transported.”
¹⁶

Bonaparte, clever as ever, lulled Sieyès into believing he would be first consul. Of course, he never would be. “The Revolution is finished,” Napoleon announced on the last day of the year. He wasted no time maneuvering himself into position as first consul, with two patsies, Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun, as his colleagues. Sieyès was unceremoniously packed off with a pension to the country.

The general was now a little king. Josephine, the Martinique widow, was the consuless. It had happened in the blink of an eye. Napoleon had achieved a shocking reversal of everything the French had fought for, and he had been allowed to do it because he had acted under the guise of liberty and peace. With bands of royalists and Jacobins stalking the streets and black marketeers making fortunes, the people were desperate for order. But they had traded one evil for another: With Talleyrand as the foreign minister and Fouché, brutal organizer of killings in Lyon under the Terror, as minister of police, the new regime was just as restricted and self-serving as the Directory. Lucien Bonaparte was appointed minister of the interior. Napoleon, the ruler of all France, cheerfully voted himself a salary of five hundred thousand francs.

The republicans were still afraid of a monarchist restoration and believed Napoleon was the man to save them. The royalists fooled themselves that he was simply taking temporary charge of the country before handing it over to the exiled Louis XVIII—they had been swayed by Josephine to believe this was the case (and by their own wishful thinking of restoration). Bonaparte’s strongman image pleased the middle classes, and he offered men of influence more power to ensure their support. He decided that the way to please the people was with grandeur and pomp; he demanded carriages and palatial settings and officially announced that the terms of address would no longer be
citoyen
and
citoyenne
but
monsieur
and
madame.
He believed the people would be pacified by pageantry and promises and would give up their hope of representation to a man who seemed to offer a secure government.

Napoleon decided the house in rue de la Victoire was too humble for the city home of the consul and set Josephine and the maids to packing up their belongings. They would move to the Luxembourg Palace. Josephine had often visited Gohier and Barras for dinners there. Her first meeting with Napoleon had been at an evening reception in one of its rooms. And yet she dreaded moving to its cold opulence. Built on the orders of Catherine de Medici, it held the ghosts of many who had come to power only to lose it all, and Josephine was already growing nervous about her husband’s wild ambition. To console herself, she spent excessively on dresses, jewelry, and furniture, and threw thousands of francs at Malmaison—still indulging her “love of luxury grand enough to swallow up the revenue of ten provinces.”
¹⁷
She had also become newly careful of her own reputation: She informed her agents that she would have no further dealings with companies selling army supplies.

Napoleon was delighted with himself. Despite the privations of his campaigns, he had filled out a little and lost some of the skinniness of youth. In the early days, his hands had been dirty and unkempt, but now they were rather beautiful (Josephine presumably used some of her potions on them). In conversation “he would often look at them with an air of self-complacency.”
¹⁸
Josephine had improved his dress, and his accent had softened. He was not handsome, but he was imposing, and the possession of power gave him a great charisma.

By February, he decided he and his wife should occupy the Tuileries Palace in the center of Paris. With three pavilions, nearly four hundred rooms, and a long gallery, built by Henry IV, that linked it to the Louvre, the Tuileries was grand but decayed. Cheap streetwalkers sheltered with their clients under the shabby hedges outside. After Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were taken away in 1792, the Tuileries had fallen into terrible disrepair, looted for its furniture and even the wood of the window surrounds. The stairs still bore spots of dried blood from when the Swiss Guards and courtiers had fought back against the coup. The dreaded Committee of Public Safety had met in the queen’s apartments. The main gate was inscribed with a warning, “On 10 August 1792 royalty was abolished in France and will never return.” The gardens were overrun with sellers of lemonade and hot pies, catering to all the gawping sightseers and petitioners waiting to plead with the officials. The residence of every monarch since the mid-seventeenth century, it was to the people the symbol of Bourbon privilege and oppression. But Napoleon did not care. He wished to be king.

Today the Tuileries is no more, destroyed in a huge fire in 1870, but ghosts remain in the buildings of the Louvre and the gardens on the Place de la Concorde. Napoleon and his wife occupied apartments once lived in by the Gohiers, surrounded by servants in uniforms embroidered with gold. Josephine sat on chairs owned by her old friends and dined off their tables. She walked through rooms once occupied by Barras. She was living in a goldfish bowl: The newly and fashionably landscaped gardens were opened to the public and had fast become a popular place for Parisians to take leisurely afternoon walks. They peered into the windows and knocked at the doors. Every time she went out, she was dressed in rich gowns befitting her new status, transported in a carriage driven by six horses and accompanied by an escort of cavalry. The formality made her uncomfortable; she missed the rue de la Victoire. But still, she had won—over all those who had tried to unseat her, over the Bonapartes, and also over her husband.

Four years previously, Napoleon had clambered up the steps to toil at the Topographical Bureau of the Committee of Public Safety, a position he had gained thanks to Paul de Barras. The Revolution was barely ten years old, but for Napoleon, it belonged to a different era. One of
his first acts was to have the revolutionary symbols daubed on the front of the palace painted over. “I don’t like to see such rubbish,” he said.
¹⁹

He ignored the derelict rooms and the patches of damp. On their first night in the Tuileries, he swept Josephine into his arms, crying, “Come, little Creole, get into the bed of your masters.”

N
APOLEON WAS OFFICIALLY
installed at the Tuileries on February 19. The carriages left the Luxembourg at one
P.M.
to the stirring sound of military music and the beating of drums. As Napoleon and his retinue passed by, more than three thousand soldiers lined the streets, and the crowds cheered. Josephine, in her customary flowing dress, had left the Luxembourg a little ahead of him, accompanied by Hortense. The populace gazed at their
Merveilleuse,
the wife of the man they hoped would bring peace. After them came the Council of State, forced to use cabs because so few carriages were available—they had been commandeered to load up the slaughtered dogs seven years earlier and then destroyed. The registration numbers on the cabs were crudely concealed with pieces of paper.

It seemed as if all of Paris had arrived to see Napoleon’s grandiose parade, along with swathes of tourists. Josephine was cheered enthusiastically, but her inferior position was drummed home, for she was not allowed to participate in the rituals. Instead, she was obliged to remain on a balcony to watch Napoleon conduct his military review. Accompanied by Hortense, Napoleon’s sister Caroline, and a few other ladies, she gazed from above as he took the salute of his regiments and then the cavalry in a great show of martial might. Among the plumes and the pomp, he was a tiny figure.

Napoleon beamed and waved joyfully at his wife. Josephine responded in kind, her handkerchief clasped in her hand. After the review, he clambered up the stairs to take possession of Louis XVI’s apartments on the first floor. “I watched the siege of the Tuileries from there and the capture of that good Louis XVI,” he said, pointing out a window to the house of Bourrienne’s brother, “but
I
will remain here.” That “good Louis XVI” was his new model for grandeur, if not governance. He was utterly convinced of his right to live in the palace.

Napoleon decreed that Josephine should have Marie Antoinette’s
rooms on the ground floor. The new first consul wished the rooms to be returned to their earlier resplendence. Decorators and designers draped the chamber in blue and white silk with gold trimmings. Josephine decked the salon with violet taffeta, arranged Sèvres vases and bronzes on the tables, hung the walls with paintings, and brought in woodwork repairers to beautify the queen’s enormous mahogany bed.

The whole palace radiated splendor, but it was also rather dark, cold, and oppressively formal. Napoleon adorned it with statues of Hannibal, Demosthenes, Alexander, and other great men and was happy. But Josephine was miserable and ill at ease; she longed for the informality of Malmaison. “I was never made for so much grandeur,” she confided to Hortense. “I will never be happy here. I can feel the Queen’s ghost asking what I am doing in her bed.”
²⁰
Napoleon had no patience with her unhappiness. He wanted her to fall at his feet, proclaim his excellence, offer sensual delights. And after the debacle of his return from Egypt, Josephine, walking on eggshells, did exactly that, forced to keep her reservations to herself.

She was now the unofficial queen of France. Napoleon had strict rules on how he wished her to behave. Thérésa Tallien, Fortunée Hamelin, and all the others were banned. The first consul hated Thérésa’s flirtatious glamour and did not trust her or her husband—they were kept under permanent surveillance. He did relent for Madame Récamier, whose banker husband was too wealthy to alienate. He instructed his wife to spend her time with those of aristocratic origin such as the Ségurs, the Caulaincourts, and Madame de Rémusat.
²¹
On no account should she receive visits from men in her apartments; she was to dress far more modestly; and most of all, she should refrain from engaging in politics (rather rich, after he had used her diplomatic skills to gain his position). For Josephine, who was “the sworn enemy of all forms of etiquette,” life henceforth was to be fraught with strain.
²²

Napoleon was decided: Women had been possessed of too much power. “There is no feminine in the function of the Consul,” he said. “We need the notion of obedience, in Paris, especially, where women think they have the right to do as they like.” As a young man in Paris just after the Terror, he had been baffled by the conspicuousness of
women, their influence and conversation. One might say he was paying them all back for snubbing him.

But Bonaparte’s ambition to rule in a world without women did not last long. He relied on his wife too much. He could not manage without her at his side on social occasions, and he needed her diplomatic skills and her ability to manipulate others into doing what he wished. And when he was not in his office or at committees securing his position and drawing up laws, he wanted to be with Josephine.

She was constantly watched and always on show. As one courtier said, “We turned their eyes toward the rising sun, Mme. Bonaparte, who was installed at the Tuileries, where the apartments had been entirely refurnished as if by fairies.” She had “already put on the airs of a queen,” but a kind and gentle one.
²³
Her every minute was planned. They were always together, and when he was not with her, Napoleon expected Josephine to ready herself in case he arrived. In the old days, she had been free. Now life was rather as it had been in Mombello—always the same.

Napoleon slept in her bedroom, leaving at eight for his own chamber, where he would bathe as Bourrienne read him letters and telegrams. He liked his bath boiling hot and often demanded more hot water from his servants. Bourrienne sometimes had to open the door to let in fresh air because he could not see through the steam. While Napoleon was being shaved, Bourrienne would read him the newspapers, paying special attention to the news in the German and British papers but ignoring the French. “Pass over all that,” Napoleon would say. “I know it already.”
²⁴
He would eat a simple breakfast of chicken and onions before returning to drafting papers.

The consul would usually join Josephine for a speedy lunch of no more than twenty minutes, gobbling his food so fast that she had barely begun her first course by the time he had finished. He allowed more time for dinner but generally did not eat until most of his work was finished, which meant Josephine often waited until past midnight for his presence.

Napoleon never ate much. “I cannot help thinking that at forty I shall become a great eater, and get very fat,” he worried.
²⁵
He thought
excessively about his weight and tried to eat little (although he sometimes secretly stuffed himself with food). And he never stopped exercising. While dictating, he would sometimes walk back and forth for five hours, hardly noticing the time passing. As he walked, he stooped and clasped his hands behind his back. When he was deep in thought, he often gave a quick shrug of his shoulders, and his mouth would twitch from left to right as he came up with a new idea.