Napoleon: His Wives and Women. Christopher Hibbert

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       2 THE DOOMED MARRIAGE

      ‘Kindly take yourself off to a convent.’

      ROSE SEEMED QUITE CONTENT. She was as delighted as she had expected to be with Paris where she lived with her aunt Désirée and Désirée’s lover, the marquis, in the ancient part of the city in the rue Thévenot. Admittedly, it was a cold and draughty house, the rooms of which were cast into an unalleviated gloom by the tall houses on the other side of the narrow street, and often rendered noisomely offensive by the stench of the nearby tanneries and the effluent and pieces of skin and streams of blood from the butchers’ stalls pouring sluggishly down the kennel. But, in these early days of her marriage, Rose does not appear to have been distressed by the discomfort of the house in the rue Thévenot; and even when her ambition of going to court at Versailles was denied her because of the dubious nature of the title which her husband had assumed, it was he rather than herself who was the more indignant in their shared disappointment.

      He was rarely at home; and, when he was, he could not disguise the irritation which his wife’s gaucherie and lack of education caused him. He suggested that she should learn the text of contemporary plays, even study Roman history so that she could converse with the kind of people to whom he was ashamed to introduce her. As it was, she was ‘an object’ who had nothing to say to him.

      As time passed, however, and on those rare occasions when he returned from weeks spent away from the rue Thévenot on military duties or, more often, enjoying himself with other women, he did sometimes take his wife on excursions into Parisian society: to fashionable salons, to the receptions held by the duc d’Orléans’s attractive if rather precise mistress, Félicité de Genlis, at the Palais Royal, and to the salon at the Swedish Embassy, presided over by Germaine de Staël, daughter of Jacques Necker, the Swiss financier, wife of the Swedish Ambassador, and brilliant woman of letters and conversationalist before whom the Duke of Wellington, in an unaccustomed gesture of obeisance, was to stoop on bended knee, and of whom he was to say, ‘She was a most agreeable woman if only you kept her light and away from politics. But that was not easy. She was always trying to come to matters of state. I have said to her more than once, “Je dêteste parler politique”; and she answered, “Parler politique pour moi c’est vivre.”’

      In such company, Rose, vicomtesse de Beauharnais, was, at first, a fascinated observer rather than an example of the influence of women over men, irritating her husband by expecting his attention. ‘She has become jealous,’ he complained, ‘and wants to know what I am doing.’ Exasperated by what he described as her possessiveness and pettish outbursts, he accepted his godmother’s suggestion that he should make a tour by himself of Italy whence he wrote letters home expressing less enjoyment of his travels than envy of those who had been fortunate enough to have been left behind.

      When he returned to Paris to a new house near the faubourg St Honoré, he decided he must soon go abroad again – this time to the West Indies, to serve with his regiment in order to gain some experience of active service against the British as a preliminary to a higher command.

      Rose – who had borne him a son, Eugène, on 3 September 1781 and was now pregnant with their second child, Hortense – pleaded with him not to leave France again so soon; but he replied in peevish letters complaining of his lot and of a wife who did not, unlike the wives of other officers, write regularly to her husband. To Désirée he wrote to say that the comtesse Laure de La Touche de Longpré, the mother of his illegitimate child, would be sailing in the same ship as himself; so would she keep an eye on their son and the comtesse’s other child while they were away and would she also, as the comtesse suggested, send a set of the game of lotto to occupy the idle hours of the long voyage. To his wife he wrote: ‘I begin to fear that our marriage is turning out undeniably badly. You have only yourself to blame.’

      The letters that subsequently arrived in Paris from the West Indies were almost hysterical in their fury. Her husband told Rose, ‘the vilest of creatures’, that he had learned that her behaviour at Martinique had been outrageous, and that, on the very eve of her departure for France, she had been discovered in the arms of a lover. ‘What am I to think of this second child of yours,’ he asked, ‘born eight months and a few days after my return from Italy? I swear by heaven that it belongs to someone else. Kindly take yourself off to a convent as soon as you receive this letter. This is my last word on the subject and nothing in the world can move me to change it.’

      Other letters from him followed in the same vein, upbraiding his wife and pitying himself, protesting his ‘virtuous conduct’, even though a man in whose house he had stayed at Fort Royal had locked his own wife up in her room, convinced that the vicomte had seduced her.

      Self-righteous and indignant as ever, he returned to Paris, professing fury that Rose had not yet entered a convent as he had required.

      His own conduct, he declared, was in striking contrast to his wife’s unfaithfulness. His health was badly affected; his legs had become ‘extremely weak’; this was due to his fearful state of mind; he was ‘greatly to be pitied’. He was not, however, too ill to drive off with his son, Eugène, whom he was obliged to send back to the boy’s mother by order of the Provost of Paris. He then demanded the return of both the jewellery which he had given his wife and the furniture in their house.

      Since he could produce no proof of the wild accusations he made about his wife’s behaviour, he was eventually compelled to retract them, to accept paternity of their daughter, Hortense, and to pay Rose an allowance of five thousand livres a year. With all this settled to her satisfaction, Rose moved into the convent of Penthémont in a fashionable part of Paris, a comfortable establishment which provided rooms for upper-class ladies in need, for one reason or another, of a temporary retreat from the outside world. Here; at the age of twenty-one, she embarked upon her delayed education, watching and listening to the sophisticated young aristocrats in whose company she now found herself, taking note of the subjects and manner of their conversation, assuming their graceful movements and seductive gestures, cultivating a delightful and rather husky tone of voice made all the more alluring by its melodious Caribbean inflexion in which her Rs all but disappeared, contriving even to lose weight and the plumpness in her cheeks, and walking with that slightly swaying gait characteristic of the slaves of Martinique.

      After living at Penthémont for just over a year, Rose joined her son Eugène, her daughter Hortense, her aunt Désirée Renaudin, and her aunt’s lover, the marquis de Beauharnais, at Fontainebleau, where they were then living in rather straitened circumstances. Rose, extravagant and improvident, was also short of money, although those who met her at this time, and were struck by the elegance of her fashionable dresses, could not suppose that this was the case.

      It was generally believed that these dresses were not all bought with her own money. At Fontainebleau, it was rumoured that the alluring, provocative young woman, separated from her husband, was conducting an affair not only with the duc de Lorge, a СКАЧАТЬ