Not tonight, Napoleon
JOSEPHINE: DESIRE, AMBITION, NAPOLEON BY KATE WILLIAMS
By JANE SHILLING
PUBLISHED: 18:15 GMT, 2 January 2014/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2532781/Not-tonight-Napoleon-JOSEPHINE-DESIRE-AMBITION-NAPOLEON-BY-KATE-WILLIAMS.html
...because you're short and fat and I'm having an
affair
At a dinner in Paris in October 1795, a 32-year-old widow,
Josephine de Beauharnais, was seated next to Napoleon Bonaparte, an obscure
Corsican soldier six years her junior.
He was short, fat, scruffy and rude, but when he met
Josephine, he was instantly captivated. ‘It was love... his first passion and
he felt it with all the vigour of his nature,’ said his friend, August de
Marmont.
Josephine, a mother of two who had been living on her wits
in revolutionary Paris for eight years, was less entranced. The prospect of
marriage to a penniless soldier was hardly glittering. Her friends thought
Napoleon a joke. Her daughter, Hortense, begged her not to marry him.
‘I find myself in a lukewarm state,’ Josephine wrote of her
suitor. But she wasn’t overwhelmed with prospective husbands so the wedding, a
sparse affair, went ahead.
The following day, Napoleon left for Italy without his wife,
setting a pattern of painful partings and blissful reunions that would last
throughout their marriage.
Nothing in Josephine’s earlier life had suggested that her
destiny was to become an Empress
She was born in 1763 on the French colony of Martinique, the
eldest child of a plantation-owning family, and named Marie-Josephe-Rose,
shortened to Yeyette.
Unencumbered by education, Yeyette and her sisters ran wild
with the house servants and slave children, sucking on the sugar-cane which
would rot her teeth so badly that a spiteful observer later described them as
looking like cloves. (The enigmatic, close-lipped smile seen in all her
portraits was her way of concealing her frightful dentition.)
When Yeyette was 15, her Aunt Edmee wrote from Paris
suggesting that one of the girls be sent over to marry her lover’s 17-year-old
son, the Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais. When Yeyette arrived, her bridegroom
was appalled by the plump, shy, unsophisticated girl with a thick Creole
accent.
He married her anyway, and sired a son and a daughter, but
swiftly returned to his married mistress and demanded a separation.
Yeyette - now Josephine - retreated to a fashionable Paris
convent, where she learned the art of seduction; losing weight and softening
her Creole accent to an attractive, husky murmur. She took a string of
aristocratic lovers.
When Revolution came in 1789, Josephine restyled herself as
Citizen Beauharnais, exchanging her silk gowns for muslin dresses. Her husband
was guillotined and she was imprisoned, but on August 6, 1794, the day she was
due to be executed, she was released. A year later she met Napoleon.
Napoleon adored his new wife, and wrote copious love letters
(‘I would be so happy if I could help undress you... Kisses on your mouth, your
eyelids, your shoulder, your breast, everywhere...’) but Josephine remained
lukewarm and began a wildly indiscreet affair with a Hussar lieutenant,
Hippolyte Charles.
Unluckily for her, letters revealing the affair fell into
the hands of the British editor of the Morning Chronicle, which published them
in November 1798. Having been defeated by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile,
Napoleon’s humiliation was complete. The world knew he was a cuckold.
Josephine retreated to her country house at Malmaison while
Napoleon raged about divorce and refused to see her, so she rounded up her
children and the three of them stood weeping outside his door at five in the
morning.
Napoleon relented: ‘I could not bear the sobs of those two
children,’ he later declared. But the balance of power in the relationship had
shifted. The scruffy little general was now First Consul of France and a
national hero. Josephine was merely his consort, vulnerable both to the hordes
of beautiful women who longed to seduce Napoleon.
Yet Napoleon could never resist her. ‘We were a very
bourgeois couple,’ he wrote, ‘sharing a bedroom and a bed’ - a most unusual
habit at the time. Even after Napoleon was crowned Emperor and divorced
Josephine for her inability to produce an heir, the love story continued.
Over the years, Josephine’s lazy affection for her husband
had bloomed into deep devotion. The day after the divorce, as she wept at
Malmaison, Napoleon went to console her and the couple walked hand-in-hand in
the rain.
Josephine’s attachment never wavered. His name was on her
lips when she died in 1814, aged 51 (her maid said that she died of grief). And
her name was the last that Bonaparte spoke on his own deathbed, in exile on St
Helena seven years later.
Kate Williams’s entrancing biography of Josephine is a
sparkling account of this most fallible and endearing of women. Lazy, extravagant and not especially faithful, she
was also kind, charming and possessed a quiet dignity.
Josephine: Desire, Ambition, Napoleon, by Kate
Williams, review
When it came to the battle of the sexes, Empress Josephine
was in a league of her own, discovers Virginia Rounding
By Virginia Rounding7:00AM BST 26 Oct 2013 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/historybookreviews/10402795/Josephine-Desire-Ambition-Napoleon-by-Kate-Williams-review.html
In this new biography of the Empress Josephine, first wife
of Napoleon Bonaparte, Kate Williams (whose previous biographical subjects have
included Emma Hamilton and the young Queen Victoria) embarks on a whirlwind
tour of French history. She covers the conditions of slaves in Martinique, the
turmoil of the Revolution and subsequent Terror, and the rise, apotheosis and
downfall of Napoleon, in just over 300 pages. If the breathless pace of the
writing does not entirely lend itself to in-depth analysis, it does suit the
heroine of the tale.
For Josephine, like Napoleon, leaves one somewhat
breathless. As Williams summarises her existence, she was “a mistress, a
courtesan, a Revolutionary heroine, a collector, a patron and an Empress… in
the words of one of her friends, 'an actor, who could play all roles’.”
For all the tempestuousness of the relationship between
Napoleon and Josephine, they were a supremely well-matched couple – not only
physically (it was sexual love that really bound them together) but also in
their daring, their self-invention, their attainment of dazzling success out of
humble beginnings.
Williams has made extensive use of the voluminous
correspondence of both of these larger-than-life characters, from which it is
clear that part of their mutual fascination was indeed this similarity of
character.
Born Marie Josèphe Rose (it was Napoleon who later chose to
call her Josephine) in 1763, into the sugar-plantation-owning Tascher de la
Pagerie family, Josephine was no natural beauty nor endowed with any obvious
talents. Her education was desultory, and she appeared destined to stay on
Martinique and marry another plantation-owner. But Josephine had other ideas,
and opportunity presented itself in the shape of a young man three years her
senior, Alexandre de Beauharnais, the son of her aunt’s lover.
This turned out to be a hopeless marriage, but it did get
Josephine out of Martinique and into France and it produced two children
(Eugène and Hortense). After the collapse of the marriage, it was in the
unlikely environment of the Panthémant convent in Paris that Josephine refined
the arts of seduction, having realised that the exploitation of her sexual
allure represented her only real means of survival.
Williams describes the process: “She softened her voice and
lost her accent, practised the art of whispered suggestion and developed a
husky, slow tone of voice that became one of her chief attractions. She learnt
to cover her mouth with her handkerchief when she laughed, to hide teeth ruined
by too much sugar as a child. She lost weight and discovered how to enhance her
rather clumsy figure with clinging dresses, shawls and perfect carriage.”
Enormously adaptable, as well as often fortunate
(Robespierre’s timely fall saved her from the guillotine, whereas Alexandre de
Beauharnais was executed in July 1794), Josephine survived the Revolution and
embarked on a series of liaisons with influential men.
As Williams succinctly remarks, “Women pondered the nature
of her attraction. Men saw it immediately. She made them think of the boudoir.”
She met Napoleon in 1795; the conqueror was conquered, and they married early
the following year. And while Napoleon set out to build his empire and dominate
Europe, Josephine concentrated on amassing artworks and vast quantities of
jewellery.
It was Josephine’s failure to give Napoleon a son that led
inevitably to her downfall, Napoleon reluctantly divorcing her in 1810, with
her agreement, in order to marry Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria. Williams
brings out the sense of sadness on both sides over this decision.
Despite his determination to procure an heir, Napoleon did
not find it easy to abandon Josephine and insisted she continue to be known and
honoured as empress even after the divorce, while she sympathised with his need
for a son and thus with his action in divorcing her, even while lamenting her
fate.
Josephine died of pneumonia in May 1814, at the age of 50.
Napoleon, in exile in Elba, learnt of her death from a newspaper and locked
himself away for two days, refusing to eat. His last words, on his own deathbed
seven years later, were “France, armée, tête d’armée, Joséphine.”
Ironically, given her inability to provide Napoleon with a
son, Josephine’s descendants were prominent in French society. They included
the two sons of her daughter Hortense: one, legitimate, became the Emperor
Napoleon III; the other, illegitimate, was the redoubtable Duc de Morny
(referred to only briefly by Williams in her epilogue as “Charles Auguste… a
successful Paris businessman”.)
Morny’s ornate tomb in Père Lachaise encapsulates so much
about this time and the people who inhabited it, in all their showiness and
ersatz splendour. One can’t help admiring their sheer audacity while at the
same time finding them (to use a word Williams perhaps overuses) “incredible”.
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| KATE WILLIAMS |
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