Napoleon: His Wives and Women. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ He got up to see what it was and discovered Pauline, now seventeen, in flagrante delicto with one of his young staff officers, Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc. Concerned that his alluring and libidinous sister might well end up in the arms of a man like Fréron, and believing that she might do much worse than settle down with Leclerc, the small but not altogether unpromising twenty-five-year-old son of a well-to-do miller from Pontoise, Napoleon promoted him brigadier-general and, insisting that they get married without delay, arranged for her to be provided with a dowry of forty thousand francs.

      Having married Pauline, and proud to have the great General Bonaparte as a brother-in-law, Leclerc took it upon himself to behave as though to the manner born, adopting Napoleon’s way of walking with his hands behind his back and standing, as Jérôme Bonaparte also did, with his right hand tucked across his waist beneath his coat. Absurd as these mannerisms were considered to be, Leclerc was not an absurd man; and when Napoleon decided to send out a force of twenty-six thousand men to Saint-Domingue, the West Indian island now comprising the states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, to suppress a movement for independence led by Toussaint-Louverture, a former slave of remarkable military talent, General Leclerc was chosen to command it. His wife was by then the mother of a boy named Dermide Louis-Napoleon, Dermide being a name taken from the epic poems which were supposedly by the legendary third-century Gaelic warrior and bard, Ossian, whose works had not long since been translated into French and were so extravagantly admired by Napoleon.

      Pauline left France with her husband and young son for Saint-Domingue with the utmost regret, complaining to a friend, ‘How could my brother be so cruel as to send me into exile amongst savages and snakes?’ ‘Besides,’ she added in her hypochondriacal way without too strict a regard for truth, ‘I am very ill. I shall die before I get there.’

      She did not die; but she was profoundly unhappy on the island, dabbling in voodooism as a means of relieving her boredom. In the unhealthy tumbledown town of Cap Haïten, she was ill as well as miserable. Her skin turned yellow, she was listless and sick, and her face and beautiful body were covered with sores which had still not cleared up when at length she returned to Paris.

      Her husband reported, however, that her behaviour left nothing to be desired: ‘Realizing how dreadful it is for her to remain in a country where she has before her eyes only the sight of the dead and dying, I urged her to return to France, but she refused to do so, saying that she must share my fortunes, good or bad.’

      These fortunes were bad, indeed. ‘Since my arrival I have seen nothing but fires, insurrections, assassinations,’ he reported to Napoleon, ‘and nothing can expel these fearful images from my mind…I am fighting here against the blacks, against the whites, even against my army which has lost its courage…Madame Leclerc is ill, but she is a model of courage and really worthy to be your sister.’

      Leclerc was soon seriously ill himself and was nursed devotedly by Pauline who received a letter of encouragement and warning from Napoleon: ‘Remember that fatigue and difficulties are nothing when one shares them with one’s husband, and is useful to one’s country. Make yourself loved by your thoughtfulness, your affability and by conduct which is above reproach and never frivolous. We have some trunks of fashionable clothes packed up for you and the captain of the Syrene will bring them to you. I love you very much.’

      Leclerc died – as Fréron had done – of yellow fever in November 1802. His wife cut off some tresses of her hair to place in his coffin and sailed home to France, spending much of the voyage alone in her cabin, mourning her loss, writing to Napoleon on New Year’s Day 1803, after an eight weeks’ voyage across the Atlantic: ‘I have arrived at Toulon after an appalling crossing with my health ruined. This is the least of my sorrows. I have brought back with me the remains of my poor Leclerc. Pity poor Paulette. She is thoroughly miserable.’

      Her brother responded by granting her an allowance of sixty thousand francs a year which, together with the surprisingly large sum left by her husband, allowed her to live with satisfactory extravagance. On her return to Paris she stayed for some time convalescing in her brother Joseph’s house, before buying a neighbouring house, the Hôtel Charost in the faubourg St Honoré, for four hundred thousand francs. She was now also the owner of a château in the country, bought partly from the money she had persuaded her late husband to acquire, as opportunity offered in Italy, and she could be seen from time to time driving out from its porte-cochère in a flamboyant carriage, dressed in costumes as eccentric as her disjointed if amiable conversation. Once again she became the talk of the town: her rumoured venereal disease, her visits to clairvoyants, the interest she shared with her sister-in-law, Josephine, in tarot cards and in the interpretation of the patterns of egg whites dropped into glasses of water, the expensive clothes she bought from the dressmaker, Louis-Hippolyte Leroy, her dislike of Josephine, at whom she could be seen, as in the past, putting out her tongue, and the highly unusual remedies she employed for real, or more often imaginary complaints, including enemas containing the boiled intestines of farm animals – all these were favourite topics of Parisian gossip. So was her notorious reputation for sexual adventures with a variety of lovers who had included, even before her departure for Saint-Domingue, an actor at the Comédie Française, Pierre Lafon, and the marquis de Sémonville, a former Commissioner in Corsica. ‘I was one of her lovers,’ Sémonville told Baron Mounier, one of Napoleon’s secretaries. ‘There were five of us sharing her favours in the same house before she left for Saint-Domingue…She was the greatest hussy you can imagine, but also the most tempting.’ Jacques-Étienne Macdonald, an officer of Scottish descent who was to become a marshal and the duc de Tarente, certainly thought so: he spent three whole days with her in the bedroom of a house at Saint-Leu. He and two other officers all had affairs with her at the same time.

       12 CAROLINE

      ‘A small claw sometimes showed itself.’

      NAPOLEON’S YOUNGEST SISTER, CAROLINE, a girl of fifteen in 1797, was at first prepared to behave in a friendly way towards Josephine, so much older than herself, and so responsive. At this time Caroline was a bright and pretty girl who had received a sound education at a school also attended by Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, the Institut National de St-Germain-en-Laye which had been founded by Mme Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan, an impoverished lady who had been employed at court as a reader to the daughters of Marie-Antoinette. The pupils, instructed in a variety of disciplines, skills and accomplishments, wore uniforms the colour of which denoted the forms in which the girls were placed. The curriculum was more varied than was usual in such establishments, and included lessons in such subjects as geography and grammar taught by a clergyman, as well as music and dancing, drawing, deportment and polite behaviour such as that formerly to be observed at Versailles where ladies had curtseyed when anyone sneezed.

      ‘I must tell you that she knows absolutely nothing,’ Napoleon had told Mme Campan when making arrangements for Caroline to be taken at the school. ‘Try to make her as clever as our dear Hortense.’ It was an exhortation, if repeated to the girls, not likely to ease the relationship between them. Nor was Mme Campan herself at all pleased when four grenadiers came clattering up to the school door late one evening with a message for Mlle Bonaparte from one of her brother’s generals. This general was Joachim Murat, the handsome, swaggering cavalry officer, thirty-two years old, the man who had seized the cannon at Sablons and brought them to the Tuileries gardens, thus enabling Napoleon to save the Convention.

      He had been born on 25 March 1767 in a small village in the province of Guyenne, the youngest of the eleven children of a smallholder who also kept the village inn and posting station. He had been intended for the Church and had been granted a bursary to attend the Collège Saint-Michel. From there he had gone on to a Lazarist seminary at Toulouse, thus being given a far better education than had been available to his brothers. It was not long, however, before he decided that he had no vocation for the priesthood and, resolving СКАЧАТЬ