Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (31 page)

On Christmas Eve 1800, Josephine was preparing to attend the premiere of Haydn’s
Creation
at the Opéra. It was the event of the season, and the performers had asked specifically that Napoleon be present. Fouché had passed on a rumor to the consul that there would soon be an attempt on his life, but he ignored it. He told Josephine that she must be at her most beautiful and awe Paris’s most fashionable elite. After dinner, at eight, the couple made their way outside to the carriages. Napoleon was to travel in one carriage, while Josephine, accompanied by Hortense, Caroline (who was eight months pregnant), and Napoleon’s aide-de camp, General Rapp, would follow in the second. At the last minute, Napoleon gazed at his wife’s outfit and decided it was not right. He declared the shawl from Constantinople did not suit her dress and hustled her off to change. The entire party had to wait while she hurried to her apartments to find a new shawl. By the time she returned, Napoleon had already left. She and her companions hastily boarded their carriage and set off for the performance.

As Napoleon’s coach entered the rue Saint-Niçaise, the coachman was puzzled by a cart blocking their passage. As he turned onto the next street, there was a horrific explosion not far in front of them. Napoleon later said that it felt as though the whole carriage had been swept up by the sea and was being carried along by the waves.
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Coming behind, Josephine and the other women were thrown to the floor of their carriage, and the windows were smashed. Josephine fainted in shock; fortunately, the heavily pregnant Caroline remained calm and took charge. The roofs of several surrounding houses caved in, glass windows shattered, and some of the horses pulled free and bolted.
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Accounts said as many as twelve civilians were killed and thirty people injured.
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One
contemporary illustration showed a small child being catapulted into the air and debris blown many feet high. In the second carriage, which was just a little way behind the first, glass lay all around, and Hortense’s dress was stained with blood from a cut to her hand caused by flying debris.

The first consul was the target of the bomb—and if he and his wife had left on time, they would have been killed. Josephine, Napoleon, Hortense, Caroline, and General Rapp were saved by an ill-matched shawl.

Napoleon continued on to the Opéra and, after hearing that Josephine was safe, calmly took his place in his box. “The rascals wanted to blow me up,” he shrugged.
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The women arrived, pale and red-eyed, trying not to tremble as the audience greeted them with cheers and applause.

Napoleon maintained his unruffled demeanor until the party returned home to the Tuileries. Once he was back in the palace, he demanded angrily that Fouché hunt down the Jacobins responsible and ordered that a number of them should be deported. The minister’s efforts to explain that intelligence suggested royalists had coordinated the attack fell on deaf ears.
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Josephine had to hide her distress, as Napoleon did not like cowards. He was delighted at the way the bomb had bolstered his popularity and prompted “extreme indignation in the populace.”
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He proclaimed that he had made a heroic escape.

A
FTER THE ATTACK
, Josephine worried even more about her future. True, she was the consuless, rich, celebrated, sought after, and beautiful, and she was Napoleon’s love, the talisman he credited with his military successes; as one of her friends put it, she was the “woman whom popular suspicion regarded as his good angel.”
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But the “good angel” was desperate to have a child. At thirty-seven, she was not too old. Letizia had given birth to Jérôme when she was thirty-four, and only her husband’s death the following year had prevented her from having more children. Thérésa Tallien would have her tenth baby at the age of forty-two. But in addition to the fact that Josephine’s body had been weakened by her period of imprisonment during the Terror, her fall at
Plombières had left her with a pelvic injury. It was unlikely that she would give the consul an heir.

Napoleon’s family continuously exploited Josephine’s inability to have a child. One minute they told him to discard her because she was barren, and the next they teased him that he was the infertile one. Notably, Pauline Fourès never became pregnant, and she blamed Napoleon. If any actress or courtesan mistress of his said she was with child, his brothers claimed that it was because they had seduced her. Josephine was not above suggesting that Napoleon was responsible for their lack of children. He responded by pointing out that her menses were irregular and not healthy, and she disingenuously replied that it made no difference.

Napoleon knew that he would be a laughingstock if he discarded Josephine and then failed to make a second wife pregnant. At the time, infertility was generally seen as the fault of the woman, though there was a strongly held theory that the more vigorous-looking the man, the better able he was to impregnate his partners. Despite the polish of power, Napoleon was still small, sallow, and sunken. He suffered from seizures thought to be due to an excess of nervous energy, and he fidgeted excessively. Riven by digestive difficulties and suffering from headaches, he was hardly an inspiring figure of French manhood, even at the age of thirty-two.

“It is the torment of my life not to have a child,” Napoleon told Bourrienne. “I plainly perceive that my power will never be firmly established until I have one.”
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And the majority of the population who still loved Napoleon wanted to see him with a son.

The rumors that he was having an affair with Hortense persisted. Now, the gossips declared, he might wish to have a child with her. Hortense wept bitterly over the cruel talk, but Napoleon was rather vain about the idea, saying the gossip only reflected the “wish of the public that he should have a child.”
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This only made Josephine feel more insecure.

She was distressed by the rumors and hated Napoleon’s unrelenting affairs. So when he decided she should travel to Plombières to attempt to renew her fertility in the waters, which he firmly believed had magic powers, she agreed. There was hard evidence for their effects: Joseph’s
wife, Julie, had failed to get pregnant for four years, but she had succeeded in late 1800 after a trip to Plombières.

Just before Josephine departed, Lucien Bonaparte took her for a private conversation. “You are going to the waters,” he said. “You must get a child by some other person since you cannot have one by him.” She was utterly shocked. “Well,” he blithely continued, “if you do not wish it, or cannot help it, Bonaparte must get a child by another woman, and you must adopt it, for it is necessary to secure an hereditary successor. It is for your interest; you must know that.” “What, sir!” she replied. “Do you imagine the nation will suffer a bastard to govern it? Lucien! Lucien! You would ruin your brother! This is dreadful! Wretched should I be, were anyone to suppose me capable of listening, without horror, to your infamous proposal! Your ideas are poisonous; your language horrible!” “Well, Madame,” he retorted, “all I can say to that is, that I am really sorry for you!”
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In anguish, Josephine set off to Plombières, escorted by a grand entourage of cavalry and aides. General Rapp, Hortense, Madame de Lavalette, and, less comfortably for Josephine, Napoleon’s mother were accompanying her. Miserable Josephine wept continuously, and soon everyone was suffering from either a headache or travel sickness. Nothing went well. The inns were awful, and their dinner on one night was “spinach dressed with lamp-oil and red asparagus fried in curdled milk.”
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Fortunately, matters improved when they arrived. The town was illuminated, all the dignitaries were assembled, and the cannons fired for them. Plombières was no longer a social desert. Josephine’s visit in 1798 had made it fashionable and frequented by many, and Napoleon urged her to give balls and receptions and to continue nurturing social relations there. No wonder the local doctor, Grosjean, who published a study on the medicinal properties of the baths in 1803, praised the “salutary waters which Providence has bestowed upon our commune”—thanks to Josephine’s attempt to get pregnant by visiting the baths, everyone was getting rich in Plombières.
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Napoleon was elated upon her return, for she told him that her menses had returned. But his elation was short-lived. She failed to get pregnant. When Napoleon’s sister Elisa hinted subtly that Josephine was
the one at fault, Josephine reminded her that she already had two children, Hortense and Eugène. “But, sister, you were younger then,” Elisa answered. Napoleon arrived in the room just as his wife burst into tears. “There are some truths better left unsaid,” he remarked.

Josephine’s many enemies were constantly plotting her downfall—and hissing to Napoleon that he should get a divorce. And so she embarked on the most ruthless act she had ever committed. In a desperate attempt to keep her husband to herself, she decided to sacrifice her daughter.

CHAPTER 14

“My Stepfather Is a Comet”

“I am his superstition rather than his love,” Josephine told a friend. “He considers me one of the rays of his star.”
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But wives needed to breed. So she conjured up a plan. If eighteen-year-old Hortense married Louis Bonaparte, they could have a child, and that child would be the heir to Napoleon and Josephine, a sharer in the blood of both of them.

She told Napoleon, and he was delighted by the idea. Bourrienne was sent to break the news to Hortense. “You know it is her great sorrow no longer to have a child,” he said to the teenager. “I assure you intrigues are constantly being formed to persuade the First Consul to obtain a divorce. Only your marriage can strengthen the bonds on which depends your mother’s happiness.”
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He praised Louis, told her that otherwise she would have to marry “some foreign prince,” and talked of her debt to her mother.

Hortense was shocked. Like most girls of her age and class, she had expected her parents to arrange a marriage for her but believed they would also allow her a say in the matter, even though they had blocked her marriage to Duroc. She knew how highly Napoleon esteemed her, and she could not imagine that he would ever give her to Louis. At twenty-three, he was ugly, prone to wild paranoia, and already tormented by gonorrhea. He suffered cruelly from curvature of the spine and was often ill. When he was well, he was idle, violent, and neurotic.

All this might have been leavened if he were as dazzled by Hortense as every other man, but he barely acknowledged her. She believed he
hated her because he despised her mother. He was interested in books and good with money, but that was little comfort.

Hortense pleaded with her mother and stepfather to no avail. Eugène sympathized, but there was nothing he could do. “It was a question of sacrificing my romantic fantasies for my mother’s happiness,” Hortense said.
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As a child, while playing with jewelry with Madame de Rémusat, she had declared that she wished to be the owner of hundreds of diamonds one day. Now she would be wealthy, a princess, even a queen, but her heart was broken.

Josephine moved fast. She had to marry Hortense to Louis before the Bonapartes threw their customary spanners in the works. Though the family had to admit that Hortense was gentle, beautiful, and accomplished, they had no desire to link themselves further to Josephine.

Within a few months, on January 4, 1802, the entire clan was in the drawing room in the Tuileries, watching a white-faced and sick Hortense say her vows to Louis by a makeshift altar. Josephine had given her daughter a splendidly embroidered gown and a necklace and headpiece of diamonds, but Hortense insisted on wearing a simple white dress and a string of pearls. She did not look at her groom, and he avoided speaking to her. Pale and dignified, she received a religious blessing with her new husband. Caroline and Joachim Murat, who had married two years earlier, were also blessed.

The wedding night was dismal. Lucien had told Louis that the marriage was rushed because Hortense was already pregnant with Napoleon’s child. That night, Louis tormented Hortense by reciting a list of her mother’s lovers and criticizing Josephine’s behavior. He then told her that if she gave birth to a child before the allotted nine months, he would banish her and never see her again. Hortense had to bear her situation. “My stepfather is a comet of which we are but the tail,” she said. “We must follow him everywhere without knowing where he carries us—for our happiness or for our grief.” She later received a beautiful gold and enamel watch from Josephine as a thank-you present. It was scant consolation.