Napoleon: His Wives and Women. Christopher Hibbert

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘felt sullied by a look from women of that sort’, but that this young woman’s pale cheeks and soft voice ‘at once overcame [his] doubts’.

      When, in June 1788, Napoleon had been posted from Valence to Auxon, he had, in order to ease the burdens imposed upon his mother, offered to have the eleven-year-old Louis, then his favourite brother, to stay with him; and he did what he could to help Letizia when, following the death of their friend Marbeuf and the establishment in Corsica of a new, stricter authority by officials of the Ministry of Finance, subsidies due to her for improvements carried out on the family’s land were withheld. He wrote letters of protest to the new authorities in Corsica; and he went to Paris to press in person his mother’s claims.

      After the outbreak of revolution in Paris the following year, Napoleon warmly welcomed the decrees of the Constituent Assembly and the formulation of a new constitution. Many of his fellow-officers went abroad in apprehension or disgust; but he remained to become Secretary of the local Society of Friends of the Constitution and to take an oath ‘to die rather than allow a foreign power to invade French soil’.

      He spent his leaves in Corsica. His mother, who had given birth to thirteen children, five of whom had died in infancy, was unwell, still suffering from the after-effects of puerperal fever and, occasionally, painful stiffness in her left side. He took her to Guagno for a course of the waters there; but she found them of little use. She was still a good-looking woman, though, and was always neatly dressed in her widow’s weeds. She had received two offers of marriage, but had declined them both for her children’s sake.

      When Napoleon went on leave in September 1791, Joseph was by then a lawyer – twenty-three years old, and a rising figure in local government. Lucien was sixteen, Louis three years younger; Jérôme, a rather tiresome, cheeky boy, was nine. Elisa, at fourteen the oldest of the three girls, was still at school at St Cyr; her sister, Pauline, Napoleon’s favourite, was eleven, and Caroline was nine.

      In caring for them their mother had the help of but one servant now, Severia, who was paid a mere pittance – all that the family could afford, since a contract entered into by Carlo with the French government for a plantation of ten thousand mulberry trees for the manufacture of silk had been cancelled.

      Carlo’s old uncle, Luciano, the Archdeacon, who now spent most of his time in bed nursing his gout, was known to have concealed in his mattress a large bag of gold, the profits from a number of most un-archdiaconal dealings in land, farm animals and wine; but he was unwilling to part with a single coin. An attempt by the beguiling Pauline, who was sent to his room to see if she could lay her hands on one or two while his attention was distracted, ended in rowdy failure when the whole bag tumbled to the floor. Alarmed by the old man’s cries, Letizia rushed downstairs to see what had happened. Uncle Luciano informed her that he was only looking after the gold for a friend. Letizia picked up the coins and handed them to him. He counted them carefully before replacing them in the bag and stuffing the bag back into the mattress.

      The old man now had but a short time to enjoy whatever comfort his hoard of gold could give him. In the hope of bringing him some relief from his gout and his other ailments, Napoleon, who still had a lingering affection for him, wrote to a Swiss doctor, Simon Tissot, for his advice. But Tissot, who had written a number of eccentric though celebrated books – in one of which he propounded the view that masturbation led inevitably to insanity – was not prepared to help. He endorsed the letter as of ‘little interest’ and did not trouble to send a reply.

      Soon afterwards, Uncle Luciano died, leaving his gold to his nephew’s sons and enabling Napoleon to take part in the expensive business of Corsican politics and to ensure his election to the command of a battalion in the Corsican National Guard at the age of twenty-two.

      Back in Paris, he was a witness of the growing violence of the Revolution, of the attack on the Tuileries and the events which led to the prison massacres of 7 September 1792. Three weeks before the massacres, his sister Elisa’s convent at St Cyr was closed and Napoleon, concerned for the fifteen-year-old girl’s safety, went to fetch her, bringing her back to Paris in her black school uniform and feathered taffeta bonnet.

      Elisa had left home soon after her eighth birthday and had received a rigorous education at the school which had been founded by Louis XIV’s mistress, Mme de Maintenon. Horace Walpole had seen the girls there marching off to chapel two by two in a most orderly fashion, ‘each band headed by a nun…to sing the whole service’. There were no signs then of the self-confident woman Elisa was later to become. On a previous visit, when Napoleon had visited the school with Mme Permon, Elisa had come into the room looking miserable and had burst into tears. When asked what the trouble was, she had said that she had no money to contribute to a farewell party which was being given for one of the other girls. Mme Permon gave her some.

      Promoted captain by now, Napoleon took her to the opera, an entertainment which the nuns at St Cyr had warned her to avoid as an indecent spectacle. Her brother noticed that, obedient to their admonitions, she sat at first with her eyes tight shut; but, shortly, unable to resist its allure, she sat in rapt attention.

      At Marseilles on her way back to Corsica, her uniform with the cross and fleurs de lys embroidered on the front of the black dress caught the attention of a threatening crowd who, pointing to this and her feathered bonnet, cried, ‘Death to the aristocrats!’ ‘We’re no more aristocrats than you are,’ Napoleon shouted back at them and, snatching the bonnet from his sister’s head, he threw it to them. One of them caught it and they all cheered.

      Back once more in Corsica, Napoleon – whom, so his brother Lucien said, no one now cared to oppose – was at loggerheads with the autocratic Paoli, who, having returned to Corsica, was intent upon separating Corsica from revolutionary France with which the Buonapartes were now identified. Napoleon, having decided to make an attempt to seize Ajaccio for France, sent a message to his mother telling her to take the family to a ruined tower at Capitello, east of the gulf of Ajaccio, and to remain there during the forthcoming bombardment of the town. Concerned that they might not be safe at Capitello, he followed them there in a small boat and sent them on to Calvi, a town which was held by the French.

      Having failed to take Ajaccio, he joined them at Calvi and with them set sail for Toulon. The family’s house was pillaged by the Paolists, and their farmhouses sacked and their mill dismantled. A Paolist congress condemned the Buonapartes to ‘perpetual execration and infamy’.

      Letizia was not happy living first in Toulon, then in primitive lodgings in the village of La Valette, afterwards in Bandol and later in Marseilles, where the family’s gloomy, ill-furnished fourth-floor rooms were in the rue Pavillon, a poor district little better than a slum. However, before long, thanks to Cristoforo Saliceti, a fellow-Corsican, a more comfortable house had been found for them, as well as a post as storekeeper for Lucien and an appointment as assistant to a war commissary for Joseph, while Napoleon continued to do well in the army.

      But Letizia missed her homeland. Her halting French, spoken with a strong Corsican accent, was scarcely comprehensible; while malicious stories were already being spread about her daughters who, so it was later alleged, were behaving in a scandalous manner, ‘walking the streets in the evening like certain young women who frequent the rue St Honoré and the Palais Royal’.

      Even when Napoleon, once he was in a position to help his family financially, had rented the Sallé château, a large country house near Antibes, for them, Letizia still behaved in a Corsican manner, and still insisted on doing her own washing. After all, as she, the most thrifty of women, was often to say in the future, who knew how long the family’s present fortune would last?

      Her daughters had no such apprehension as they bowled along the country lanes in a barouche provided for them by their brother, Napoleon, who by then was earning fifteen thousand livres a year.

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