Napoleon: His Wives and Women. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ when his enemies referred to him derogatorily as ‘the Corsican’, he was not ashamed of his origins and never attempted to conceal them, though he did once say, ‘I’m not a Corsican. I was brought up in France, therefore I am French.’

      His mother also persuaded him to believe in destiny and the power of providence and of spirits from another world. Whenever she heard surprising, unexpected news, she would suddenly cross herself and murmur under her breath, ‘Gesu!’

      Prospering as a lawyer under French rule and appointed to a seat in the Corsican States-General and to membership of the Council of Twelve Nobles, Carlo was now able to afford a nurse for the children and two maids for his wife. She felt in need of the help: another son, Luciano (Lucien, as he was to be known in France), was born when Napoleone was six years old, and, two years after this, a daughter, Maria Anna, later known as Elisa. Then there was a fourth son, Luigi (Louis), two more daughters, Maria Paula (Pauline) and Maria Annunziata (Caroline) and, lastly, a fifth son, Girolamo (Jérôme), born in 1784.

      Repeated pregnancies had not spoiled their mother’s good looks which were much admired by the French Governor of Corsica, Charles René, comte de Marbeuf, whose elderly wife had not accompanied him to the island and whose French mistress had returned home. He was said to be much in love with Letizia; but she, deeply religious and mindful of her duty to her husband, seems to have been content to enjoy his admiration without encouraging it, although there were those who believed they were lovers and that Luigi was his child.

      Both she and her husband eagerly accepted his offer when the comte undertook not only to find places for Giuseppe and Napoleone at educational establishments in France but also, having no children of his own, to pay the necessary fees. So the brothers were sent to a good school at Autun and from there, so it was planned, Giuseppe should go to the seminary at Aix with a view to entering the church, while Napoleone should train for a career in the army at the military academy at Brienne-le-Château.

      When this decision about his future was made, Napoleone was not yet nine years old; and Camilla, his former wet-nurse and still a family friend, wept to see him leave home so early. His mother displayed no such emotion. In accordance with Corsican custom, she took him and his brother Giuseppe to the Lazarists, a congregation of secular priests living under religious vows, to be blessed by the Father Superior, and then accompanied them across the high ground through Corte to the coast at Bastia to see them off on a ship bound for Marseilles. At the quayside, Napoleone seemed apprehensive: his mother bent down to kiss him and to whisper in his ear, ‘Coraggio.’ It was to be many months before she saw the boy again.

      It seemed that both needed courage again when Napoleon and Joseph, as they were now to be known, had to say goodbye to each other when the time came for Napoleon to leave the school at Autun to go to the military academy at Brienne. Joseph cried bitterly and, although not a single tear was seen to run down Napoleon’s cheek, one of the school’s masters later attempted to comfort Joseph by saying to him, ‘He didn’t show it, but he’s just as sad as you.’

      At Brienne, Napoleon was adept not only at mathematics but also at history and geography. A fellow pupil, however, said that ‘he had no taste for the study of languages and the arts’. His dancing and drawing were both described as being ‘very poor’, while his spelling was ‘erratic’. He was no good at German and he spoke inadequate French with a pronounced Corsican accent. He became renowned for a sharp temper, self-sufficiency, pride and arrogance, a rather priggish sense of decorum and a readiness to take offence. On one occasion, when he was about nine years old, having broken one of the school’s rules, he was ordered to wear a dunce’s cap, to exchange his blue uniform for an old brown coat, and to eat his dinner on his knees by the refectory door. Outraged by this indignity, he was suddenly sick on the floor and then, stamping his foot, he refused to kneel down, crying out, ‘I’ll eat my dinner standing up. In my family we kneel only to God, only to God! Only to God!’

      Such outbursts naturally led to much teasing, but not, it seems, to bullying, since he was only too capable of responding furiously to provocation of that sort. When some boys, frightened by an explosion in a box of gunpowder during a display of fireworks on the King’s birthday, rushed headlong into his garden plot, his retreat from the other boys on holidays, knocking down the fence and trampling over his mulberry bushes, he attacked them and drove them off shouting threats and brandishing a hoe. To taunts about his diminutive size or his strange accent he would often react in this violent way, rushing at his tormentors, crying, ‘I’ll make you French pay for this.’ One of his reports described him as being, ‘imperious and stubborn’; another adverted to his ‘lack of social graces’. His only friend, Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne, who was later to become his secretary, wrote of him:

      Bonaparte and I were eight years old when our friendship began…I was the only one of his youthful comrades who could accommodate themselves to his stern character…His ardent wish to acquire knowledge was remarkable even then. When he first came to the college he spoke only the Corsican dialect and the vice-principal gave him lessons in French…[He was very bad at Latin] but the facility with which he solved mathematical problems absolutely astonished me…

      His conversation almost always bore the appearance of ill-humour, and he was never very amiable…His temper was not improved by the teasing he frequently experienced from the other boys who were fond of ridiculing him because of his odd Christian name and his country…He was certainly not much liked and rarely took part in the school’s amusements. During play-hours he used to withdraw to work in the library where he read with deep interest books of history. I often went off to play with my friends and left him to read by himself in the library.

      One day his parents came to see him. His father, wearing a smart, new wig, was an embarrassing sight, bowing in an extravagantly polite way when he stood aside to allow the headmaster to pass first through a door. But his mother was all that a boy – a Corsican boy in an academy attended by so many French cadets from upper-class families – could hope to have. Her long dark hair was tied back in a chignon and covered by a lace headdress, and her dress was of white silk with a pattern of green flowers. She was not feeling well, however, having recently suffered from puerperal fever. She still had cause to complain of intermittent pain on her left side, an ailment which her husband hoped would be alleviated by a course of the waters at Bourbonne.

      She heard with dismay that Napoleon had now set his heart on going into the navy and, as a preparation for life at sea, had taken to sleeping in a hammock in his cubicle. She anxiously pointed out the twin dangers of a life at sea: the chances of being killed on board and of being drowned if thrown into the water. When she returned to Ajaccio she asked the comte de Marbeuf to do all he could to dissuade her son from fulfilling his youthful ambition.

      Letizia was also worried by the state of her husband’s health: he had lately lost much weight and had little appetite; he looked exhausted and his skin was discoloured by blotchy patches. Carlo was persuaded to go to Aix, then to Montpellier, to seek specialist advice. None of any use was given him: he died of cancer of the stomach in February 1785, a month before his thirty-ninth birthday, seized at the end, so Napoleon was later to say, with a passion for priests: ‘There were not enough for him in all Montpellier…He ended his life so pious that everyone there thought him a saint.’

      Napoleon had by then left Brienne and, no longer set upon a career in the navy, had gone on to the École Militaire in Paris, an establishment which set almost as much store by religious observances as by military training: attendance at Mass was compulsory; so were confirmation and confession.

      Napoleon was distressed to hear of his father’s death and worried that his mother, a widow with eight children, would find it hard to get by in her straitened circumstances. When someone offered to lend him money, he declined the offer with the words, ‘My mother has too many expenses already, I must not add to them.’

      He was as proud and as priggish as ever, just СКАЧАТЬ