The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (61 page)

His frantic search for a suitable wife finally ended when Count Paul Barras, seeking to rid himself of his expensive and aging Creole mistress Joséphine de Beauharnais, arranged for the two to meet. Relying on the count’s assurance that the match would have great benefits both monetarily and socially, on March 9, 1796 Napoleon married the “28-year-old.” (She knocked four years off her age on the marriage certificate and he added two to his to make the gap between them less obvious.) Their marriage night proved to be an unexpected shocker.

Engaged in vigorous intercourse, the bridegroom suddenly uttered a shriek as Joséphine’s pet pug, Fortuné, joined the act. Believing his mistress was being attacked, the dog had jumped on the bed and bitten
le petit général
on his bare left calf. Two days later the wounded warrior cut the honeymoon short and left for Italy, freeing the lusty Joséphine—who rarely slept alone—to resume her liaisons with standby lovers.

Irked by Joséphine’s constant unfaithfulness—a contemporary once smirked that the empress seemed to believe “farsighted nature had placed the where-withal to pay her bills beneath her navel”—Napoleon took Pauline Fourès as his mistress during the Egyptian campaign of 1798. He soon became smitten with the 20-year-old blonde, who had disguised her boyish figure in male attire to be with her soldier-husband. The cuckolded lieutenant was cunningly sent back to Paris with dispatches, and Pauline moved into a house near Napoleon’s Cairo headquarters. Nicknamed “Our Lady of the Orient” and “
Madame la Générale
,”

she heightened the general’s passion by wearing plumed hats, gold-braided coats, and skintight white pantaloons, which stoked his buttocks fetish into a near frenzy. (A lifelong connoisseur of bottoms and buttocks, he had once fondly described Joséphine’s rump as “the prettiest little backside imaginable.”) The notorious affair was spiked by the British, who captured the ship on which Lieutenant Fourès had sailed and maliciously returned him to Egyptian soil to play the role of outraged husband.

For Napoleon’s casual romps, Géraud Duroc, his chief aide-de-camp and intimate confidant for 15 years, served as pimp. The overnighters were brought to a bedroom adjacent to Napoleon’s study in the Tuileries. Duroc admitted the girls secretly and gave orders for them to strip and slip beneath the bedcovers, to be ready for instant sex once Bonaparte’s workday was over. Some intrigues of longer duration, like those with court ladies-in-waiting Eléonore Denuelle and Marie Antoinette Duchâtel, were deliberately arranged by conniving members of Napoleon’s family, eager to sponsor any mistress who could prove the hated Joséphine to be barren. They succeeded with Denuelle. In 1806 she gave birth to a son, Léon, and Napoleon proudly claimed credit as the father. Although Bonaparte preferred to keep his trysts secret, the affair with Mademoiselle George (real name: Marguerite Weymer, later called “the Whale” because of a huge gain in weight) erupted publicly, to his great embarrassment. An erotic book surfaced, with illustrations showing his mistress engaged in graphic homosexual acts with her lesbian lover, Raucort.

Napoleon’s favorite partner, Marie Walewska, was an unsolicited “gift” from her fellow Poles, who needed France’s might to achieve independence for their homeland. The liaison began unevenly. Taken to Napoleon’s private apartments in Warsaw, the nervous young countess fainted when he became sexually aggressive. Undeterred, Napoleon raped her. Regaining consciousness, she quickly forgave him, and the affair flourished for over three years. Her quiet charm and devotion captivated the emperor, and Marie left her mark on history as the only woman he ever really loved. In 1810 she gave him his second son, Alexander, further proving that he was far from impotent.

Meanwhile, the problem of producing legally acceptable offspring became of even greater concern. In 1809, after his tempestuous marriage to Joséphine failed to result in a much-wanted heir, Napoleon reluctantly annulled the union.

Out of political necessity, he chose as his second wife Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, an 18-year-old virgin so sheltered during childhood that all male animals were kept from her view. Checking over her prolific ancestors like a farmer seeking a prize brood mare, the heirless emperor concluded that she had “the kind of womb I want to marry.” Marie Louise proved true to her breeding and presented Napoleon with a son a year after their marriage in 1810. Both wives were showered by thousands of love letters while he was absent on campaigns during their marriages, letters worded so passionately that they seemed unreal.

The flaming prose often closed with such provocatives as “I kiss your breasts, and lower down, much lower down!” or “I kiss the little black forest.”

Napoleon not only tolerated homosexuality among his associates but also refused to permit punitive legislation against its practice. His habit of caressing his soldiers intimately while tweaking noses or pulling ears hinted strongly at his own homosexuality. Aides were often chosen for both their youth and their effeminate behavior. To one, Napoleon himself gave the nickname “Miss Sainte Croix.” Another, Baron Gaspard Gourgard, was the emperor’s personal orderly for six years. Gourgard was furiously jealous of any who dared to pay undue personal attention to “Her Majesty,” his affectionate name for the master he curried. After age 42, the question of Napoleon’s true gender did not matter. He became impotent, fulfilling Joséphine’s derisive charge of earlier years that “
Bon-a-parte est Bon-à-rien
” (“Bonaparte is good-for-nothing”).

MEDICAL REPORT:
Napoleon’s known loss of sexual potency, combined with a pronounced lemon-yellow cast to his skin in his last years, hinted at a progressively fatal malfunctioning of the endocrine glands. The medical examination and autopsy performed by Dr. Antommarchi, witnessed by several English doctors, provided further evidence that Napoleon’s pituitary, thyroid,
renal, and gonad glands had been rapidly failing and were almost certainly tumorous. A huge gastric ulcer and extensive calcium deposits throughout the urinary system were found to be the primary causes of his lifelong indigestion and painful urination. The urethral obstruction probably was responsible for his complaint of being afflicted by
la chaude pisse
(“burning urine”). The ulcer was seen to be cancerous, although it had not yet spread elsewhere in the body.

Napoleon’s penis had shrunk to an inch in length and both testicles were minuscule, showing an advanced case of hypogonadism. The body hair was almost nonexistent, and the pubis was feminine in appearance. Glandular changes had produced softly rounded, creamy-textured breasts that many women would have envied, and had reduced the hands and feet to an abnormally small size.

Napoleon’s final height, as recorded in the autopsy, was 5 ft. 2 in., perhaps reduced several inches because of the ravages of his multiple ailments.

—W.K.

Reclining Venus

PAULINE BONAPARTE (Oct. 20, 1780–June 9, 1825)

HER FAME:
Pauline Bonaparte belongs

to history mainly because she was

Napoleon’s favorite sister, one of the classical beauties of her time, an unremitting

nymphomaniac, and the model for

Antonio Canova’s most popular sculpture.

HER PERSON:
Pauline came from

Ajaccio, Corsica, the sixth of her parents’

13 children. When she was 12, her family

moved to Toulon, France. As her older

brother moved up in the world, she was

right behind him, transformed from a

peasant to a princess. When Napoleon

graduated from general to emperor, his

pet sister, Pauline, also stood in the

limelight of Parisian society.

Men of the top rank constantly pursued her. According to the French dramatist Antoine Arnault: “She was an extraordinary combination of perfect physical beauty and the strangest moral laxity. If she was the loveliest creature one had ever seen, she was also the most frivolous.” After she was married, Napoleon wrote her: “Love your husband, make your household happy, and above all do not be frivolous or capricious. You are 24 years old, and ought to be mature and sensible by now.” Of her, Countess Anna Potocka wrote: “With the finest and most regular features imaginable she combined a most shapely figure, admired (alas!) too often.”

Pauline loved fornication and luxury. She owned 600 dresses and millions of dollars’ worth of jewels and traveled in a carriage drawn by six horses. In a time when most French women did not bathe frequently, Pauline made a fetish of cleanliness because her body was constantly exposed. She bathed every morning in a tub filled with 20 liters of milk mixed with hot water. After disrobing, she had her young black servant, Paul, carry her to the tub. When onlookers were scandalized, Pauline said, “But why not? A Negro is not a man. Or are you shocked because he is unmarried?” To remedy this, she married Paul off to one of her white kitchen maids—and he continued to carry her to the tub. To immortalize her perfect body, Pauline commissioned Antonio Canova, the Italian sculptor who had done statues of Pope Clement XIV and Napoleon, to do her in marble as a nude Venus. Afterward, when someone asked how she could pose naked, she answered, “It was not cold. There was a fire in the studio.”

When Napoleon fell, Pauline was the only one of his siblings to join him in exile—for four months—on the isle of Elba.

SEX LIFE:
At 15 she fell in love with 40-year-old Louis Fréron, an intelligent but unscrupulous political adventurer who was called the “king of the dandies.”

He gave up his mistress, a Parisian actress, to devote himself to Pauline. “I swear to love but you alone,” Pauline promised in return. Napoleon was ambivalent about the match, but their mother, Letizia, was certain Fréron was wrong for her daughter and he was sent away. With Fréron eliminated, Pauline began to flirt with most of Napoleon’s general staff. In order to end this, Napoleon sought a husband for Pauline. He found one in an army comrade. Charles Victor Leclerc was blond, clean-cut, and serious, the son of a wealthy miller. Napoleon handed him Pauline
and
a promotion to brigadier general. Pauline accepted Leclerc’s proposal amiably, and they were married in June, 1797. While she had no great passion for Leclerc, he satisfied her in bed and that was enough. The next year, when she was 17, Pauline bore her husband a son, whom Napoleon named Der-mide. (The child would die in his sixth year.) In 1801, when the rich French colony of St. Domingue—now Haiti—in the Caribbean was threatened by the Spanish, the English, and soon enough by the independence-minded Toussaint L’Ouverture, Napoleon sent Leclerc at the head of 25,000 troops to restore order. Pauline was forced to accompany her husband. Just as Pauline was beginning to enjoy the social amenities of Haiti, her husband came down with yellow fever and died in November, 1802.

Back in Paris, Pauline’s mourning was shortlived. She wanted to play. To prevent this, Napoleon found her a second husband. He was 28-year-old Prince Camillo Borghese, an attractive, dark-haired, empty-headed, elegant Italian who owned one of the world’s biggest diamond collections and countless properties, including the art-laden Villa Borghese in Rome. Pauline was not terribly interested in Borghese, but she liked the wealth and the title that came with him. A papal cardinal officiated at their wedding in August, 1803. From the wedding night on, their sexual union was a disaster. What ruined their coupling for Pauline, as one biographer put it, was that Prince Borghese “somewhat disappointingly had a very small penis. Pauline, whose nymphomania was periodic but intense, scorned all but very large ones.” Disgusted, Pauline wrote an uncle, “I’d far rather have remained Leclerc’s widow with an income of only 20,000

francs than be married to a eunuch.”

After that, she separated herself from Prince Borghese and went on a hunt for men of the proper proportions. By 1806 she had found what she wanted in Paris. A tall, muscular, society painter, Louis Philippe Auguste de Forbin was 30

years old and mightily endowed. Pauline made him her royal chamberlain and copulated with him daily—endlessly. This ceaseless fornicating at last began to affect Pauline’s health, and at the urging of her doctors and mother, Forbin left to enlist in the French army. Long after, he became director of the Louvre.

Despite her physical exhaustion, Pauline’s sexual activity rarely abated in the next 15 years. In Nice she took up with a mild-mannered young musician, Felix Blangini. She hired him to “conduct her orchestra.” She had no orchestra, but she had her bed, and there they enjoyed duets. In 1810 she tried out an aide to Napoleon’s chief of staff, a sensual ladies’ man aged 25. Her affair with Col.

Armand Jules de Canouville was passionate and wild. To nip any potential scandal Napoleon had the colonel transferred to Danzig. In 1812 he was killed near Moscow, a locket containing a miniature of Pauline pressed against his chest. For days Pauline sobbed with grief. Finally, she distracted herself with other affairs, including a loveless one with the celebrated actor François Talma. After Waterloo and St. Helena, she had a brief reconciliation with Prince Borghese, and in the Villa Borghese, mirror in hand, she died of cancer at 44. Her last wish was that her coffin not stand open at her funeral, but that the Canova nude be brought out of storage to represent her.