Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (51 page)

Across the empire, conscription was a source of widespread misery, increased to encompass men from twenty to sixty years of age. Towns became ghostly, with women forced to take on double the work because
their men were gone. The price of bread was soaring, there was widespread misery due to the Continental Blockade, and the thought of losing more men was almost too much to bear. The conscription notices posted on street corners filled towns with despair, as people gathered to look for the names of their husbands and sons.

Napoleon, the sun of his own world, thought himself immune to complaints. “I have three hundred thousand men to spend,” he said. The tsar recently had begun trading with Britain, and Napoleon saw the act as one of aggression. Determined to seize a significant military victory, he grew set on the ludicrous idea of invading Russia. He called up more than six hundred thousand men from all over his dominions, from Italy to Poland, Denmark to Switzerland. Fat, sickly, and pale, his huge torso balanced on tiny legs, suffering from a hacking cough and bladder problems, he dressed up in ermine and medals, styled himself as a leader, and demanded their allegiance.

Before departing for Russia, Napoleon visited Josephine for over two hours. She begged Constant to look after him, surprising the valet with her “care for the man who had abandoned her.”
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The emperor left for Dresden, accompanied by Eugène, three hundred carriages, and Marie Louise, his symbol of power and riches, his means of impressing his vassals. “I leave St.-Cloud and I go to Moscow, not out of inclination or to gratify myself, but out of dry calculation,” he said.
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He lied: He yearned for glory.

In his usual vain fashion, Napoleon announced that he would conquer Russia in twenty days. But he and his men battled with the rough terrain. “My health is fine,” he wrote to Marie Louise, and “it is very hot.”
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The heat of the plains was exhausting, and the troops quickly ran low on supplies. The Russian serfs had expected that Napoleon would liberate them, and when he did not, they actively tried to thwart him. As for the outnumbered Russian troops, they simply retreated and let the punishing landscape do their work for them. After two months, no battle had been fought, and 150,000 of the men had deserted, died of illness or heat exhaustion, or were too weakened to fight.

Napoleon pushed on. In September, the Russians and the French clashed at the village of Borodino. At the end, 44,000 Russians lay dead or wounded on the battlefield, and Napoleon lost around 30,000 of his
troops, including many generals. He declared himself the victor, and on September 15, he entered Moscow. The inhabitants had fled, aside from those too infirm to leave and the criminals and foreigners forbidden to do so. As Napoleon entered, the governor of Moscow put torches to his house and distributed explosives to gangs of citizens to set the rest of the city alight, sending several to destroy the firefighting equipment. Napoleon occupied the Kremlin and gazed at “the mountains of red, rolling flames, like immense waves of the sea. Oh, it was the most grand, the most sublime, the most terrifying sight the world had ever seen!”
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The fires eventually burned out. Certain the tsar would sue for peace, Napoleon wrote to Alexander demanding a treaty.

Alexander, squirreled away in St. Petersburg, did not reply. Napoleon sat in the Kremlin, dawdling over his meals, playing
vingt-et-un
with Eugène or trying to read novels to pass the dreary hours. For the first time in years, he was kept waiting. “I shall fight to the last man in my Empire,” pronounced Alexander. “Now it is Napoleon or me; we can no longer reign together.”
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Really, there was no need to fight at all. As the tsar knew, Napoleon could not remain in Russia forever, for he had a restive population in France who required attention, and it was now too cold to march to St. Petersburg. Under a month after they arrived, as the heavy snows began to fall, the French slunk out of the city.

“We seemed to be marching in a world of ice,” recalled one soldier. Temperatures fell to well below minus twenty degrees. Thousands of horses slithered on the snow and perished and the soldiers fell and died where they lay. “The ravages of cold were equalled by those of hunger,” wrote one Württemberg soldier. No food was too rotten or disgusting to be eaten, and no dead horse, cat, or dog was left untouched. Soldiers would watch a comrade grow weak, counting the hours until he fell to the ground and died. Then they would steal his belongings and eat his flesh. Men even gnawed on their own bodies. “All human compassion vanished,” one soldier recalled. The men’s minds were addled by the cold; “dull despair and raving madness had taken possession of many and they died muttering, with their last breath, the most horrible imprecations against God and man.”
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It was so cold that four hundred men might gather around a fire at night and three hundred would be dead in the morning. Those who did not die of hunger and despair were
picked off by the Russian troops, who followed them through the countryside. French soldiers were impaled on stakes and thrown alive into cauldrons of boiling water. The peasants, brutalized and angry, tortured them by beating them with hammers and pushing stakes down their throats. Napoleon was unruffled. “Small change,” he said, poking with his foot at the corpses on the ground.

Bonaparte left his army on December 5 and hurried on ahead. He arrived at the Tuileries just after midnight on December 19, slipping through a back door. He immediately ordered a round of balls and receptions to celebrate his return, paying no attention to the devastating dispatch sent by General Berthier, “Sir, your army exists no more.” Out of the 600,000 men who had traveled to war, only 93,000 would stagger home. Many were not in a fit state to fight ever again and barely able to return to normal life. Two hundred thousand horses had died. Napoleon’s insane plan to invade Russia was, as Talleyrand put it, “the beginning of the end.”

General Caulaincourt, who accompanied Napoleon to France, said—only half in jest—that the Prussians should take Napoleon prisoner and give him to the British to display in London like an animal in a cage. “A man such as I does not concern himself about the lives of a million men,” Napoleon said.
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The populace, by his estimation, needed to be forced to love him—just as he had always tried to force ladies to do the same.

He did not write to Josephine from Russia, and she spent the campaign in an agony of panic over her former husband and her son. Eugène, she knew, had been wounded, but there was little news of him. Marie Louise took pity on her rival and gave Hortense some of her letters from Napoleon to read so she could pass on details to her mother. To Josephine’s great joy, Eugène survived—and unlike nearly every other man who had been on the campaign, he remained loyal to the emperor.

The emperor went to visit Josephine on his return, but he did not invite her to the celebrations. Even if it had been appropriate, she was a reminder of the military success of better days, which he could not bear. The first campaign he had undertaken since his marriage to Marie Louise had been a terrible, scandalous failure.

Josephine sat alone in Malmaison. Everyone else of fashion in Paris, it seemed, had been forced to attend what were nicknamed “the wooden leg balls,” because so many of those present were missing a limb. Those who went to the Tuileries found it a bitter diversion. “In the midst of the general consternation, people were shocked to see the Emperor entertaining at the Tuileries,” wrote Major Raymond de Montesquiou, Duc de Fezensac. “I shall always remember one of those dismal balls, at which I felt I was dancing on graves.”
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CHAPTER 21

“More Full of Charm”

By the beginning of 1813, the corpulent empire and its even fatter emperor were in severe trouble. Prussia had joined with Russia against France, and a campaign in Spain had been a failure. “The Emperor was invincible no longer,” the Duc de Fezensac rued. The emperor was weary. “The late hours, the hardships of war, are not for me at my age,” he said. “I love my bed, my repose, more than anything, but I must finish my work.”
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Napoleon’s enemies were not only external. Joachim and Caroline Murat, eager to keep their throne at all costs, had signed a pact with Vienna. Joseph had failed to impose order on Spain. Unlike his turncoat siblings, Louis was still faithful to the man who had given him power and position. He wrote to Napoleon offering to return to France and stand by his side. “My husband is a good Frenchman, he has proved it by returning to France at the point when all of Europe has turned against it,” said Hortense.
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She, too, despite everything that Napoleon had done to her, was still loyal to the emperor.

The allies could see chinks in Napoleon’s armor. On November 22, 1813, Eugène, who had survived the Russian campaign, was visited by an aide of the king of Bavaria, his father-in-law. He offered Eugène protection if he deserted Napoleon. Eugène refused. “It is not to be denied that the Emperor’s star is beginning to wane, but that is only another reason why those who have received so much from him should remain faithful.” He wrote to Napoleon to say he had told Bavaria that he
would not “commit such a despicable act; that I would, until my final breath, remain true to the oath that I made to you.”
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The enemy troops were drawing near Paris. Josephine’s guards at Malmaison had fled, and she had only sixteen wounded soldiers to protect her. She refused to quit the city. On March 28, 1814, Hortense sent her a message that Marie Louise was about to flee. With Napoleon outside Paris attempting to repel the invaders, Marie Louise had been left as regent, and she had been refusing to leave. The young empress was told that she and the court must leave for Blois and that the emperor would not wish her or their son to be captured by the enemy. “I would prefer my son to be killed rather than see him brought up in Vienna as an Austrian prince,” she said.
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She reluctantly agreed to depart, “very angry … especially when the Parisians are showing such eagerness to defend themselves.”
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The following day, Josephine traveled to Navarre, her diamonds sewn into her petticoat. “I don’t know if it is possible to express how unhappy I am,” she wrote. “I have had courage in the many sad situations in which I have found myself; I can bear these reversals of fortune; but I do not know if I have enough strength to bear the absence of my children and the uncertainty of their fate.”
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She did not have long to wait. Hortense and her children fled to her two days later with the news that Paris had surrendered. The emperor had been captured and was under house arrest at Fontainebleau.

In Paris, the Champs-Élysées was filled with bearded Cossacks dressed in blue trousers and tunics, squatting by the road as they mended their clothes or polished their weapons. They slept outside, their horses tethered to trees. Aside from a little looting, they behaved perfectly, and the citizens of Paris lined up to inspect their new visitors. Marie Louise begged her husband to let her join him in Fontainebleau, but, sunk into a depression, he wrote to her only to pay out a million francs each to his mother, Joseph, Jérôme, Pauline, Louis, and Elisa. Once they received the money, they hurried off. “No one loves you as much as your faithful Louise,” Marie tried again. When he would not direct her, she took matters into her own hands and set off to interview her father. She was soon seized and kept by the Austrians.

Josephine was heartbroken to hear the news that the emperor had signed an agreement of abdication on April 6. The long-exiled Louis XVIII would be king in his place. Her spies told her of Napoleon’s low spirits and inability to take action. “How I have suffered in the way in which they have treated the Emperor,” she wrote to her son. “What attacks in the newspapers, what ingratitude on the part of those upon whom he showered his favours! But there is nothing more to hope for. It is finished, he is abdicating.”
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I
N MID
-A
PRIL
J
OSEPHINE
returned to Malmaison, and the tsar paid a visit the following day. Hortense arrived and was shocked to see the courtyard full of Cossack soldiers and attendants. They told her that Josephine was out walking with the tsar of Russia. Hortense met them and was introduced, but she was cold with the tsar until Josephine reminded her of their precarious position. After the visit, the tsar wrote a warm letter and asked to come again. Josephine was unwilling, but Napoleon advised her to receive Alexander, for “the future of your children depends upon it.” Josephine ordered new gowns and set her household to polishing the furniture and arranging flowers.