Napoleon A Biography

flattered her by suggesting she go to Rome to see Cardinal Pesch and be
presented to the Pope, but his real motive was to get rid of her.

Napoleon scarcely fared any better with his three sisters. Caroline,
whom Talleyrand described as having 'the head of Cromwell on the body
of a pretty woman', acted treacherously towards Napoleon, to whom she
owed everything, and schemed and intrigued constantly to further her
own ambitions and those of her husband Murat. As a reward for his
sterling performance in the Marengo campaign Napoleon at the end of
r 8oo appointed Murat head of the elite Army of Observation - a kind of
Praetorian guard - deliberately snubbing Bernadotte, Joseph's protege
and candidate for the post.

Bernadotte, incidentally, came close to forfeiting Napoleon's favour at
this time. His farewell address to the Army of the West in r 802 contained
coded criticisms of the First Consul, and he continued plotting with
other discontented Jacobins. Exasperated, Napoleon threatened to have
him shot if he did not mend his ways, but once again the tears of Julie
and Desiree Clary saved the treacherous Gascon's skin. Appointed
ambassador to the United States in r 8o3 he followed in the Lucien
tradition of envoys by returning, unauthorized, to Paris when the
Louisiana purchase was agreed. This led to another year in disgrace until,
in r 8o4, he was made Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Hanover. In
Germany he settled in to carve himself a share of the peculations of the
corrupt intendant Michaux.

Meanwhile Murat's lust for money soon saw him Commander-in­
Chief in Italy, looting in the grand tradition. He and Caroline were united
by vaulting political ambitions and jealousy of Napoleon but in Milan,
where they lived like royalty, they were habitually unfaithful to each
other, Caroline discreetly, Murat less so. The driving force with Caroline
was always power, not sex. The same was true of the cynical Elisa, the
ugly sister of the family, who had been forced to marry an obscure
Corsican officer, Felix Bacchiocchi, for lack of more impressive suitors.
Madame de Remusat scathingly wrote of her: 'Those things we call arms
and legs looked as though they had been haphazardly stuck on to her
body . . . a most disagreeable ensemble.' Elisa always sided with Lucien
in the family feuds, and she and Bacchiocchi went with him on his
money-making exile to the embassy in Madrid in r 8oo--o r . The family
bluestocking, she thereafter ran a salon at her house in the rue Maurepas,
where the painters David and Gros were frequent visitors. She
intervened with Napoleon on behalf of her friend Chateaubriand, staged
theatricals, and ran a circle for literary women. The henpecked
Bacciocchi was given a job as commander of a garrison town and

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effectively expelled from her life. Elisa and Caroline Bonaparte were
classic examples of what C.G. Jung called 'power devils' .

But sexuality had its triumphant showpiece in the third sister, Pauline,
a byword for nymphomania and lubriciousness. Incorrigibly frivolous,
with a strong Italian accent, Pauline behaved in a vague and absent­
minded way as if not in full possession of her faculties. She spent vast
sums on clothes and fortune tellers and was an embarrassment to
Napoleon if she ever appeared at the Tuileries; she was not above sticking
her tongue out defiantly at Josephine if the mood took her. In private she
had a string of lovers and an unassuageable sexual appetite. As one of her
studs remarked: 'She was the greatest tramp imaginable and the most
desirable.' One of her early escapades was a 72-hour sexual marathon
with the future Marshal MacDonald, for which she laid in a carefully
prepared stock of food and drink.

When her husband Leclerc was given command of the army sent to
defeat Toussaint l'Ouverture in Haiti, Pauline was brokenhearted, for it
meant saying farewell to her latest lover, Pierre Lafon, an actor at the
Comedie-Franc;aise. To celebrate her unwilling exile, before she left she
had an orgy, in which five different lovers shared her bed. On the voyage
out to Haiti she made sure she was accompanied by three more, her first
paramour Stanislas Freron, General Humbert the hero of the '98 in
Ireland, and General Boyer, but these were not the only ones to share her
bed in Santo Domingo. She sailed in December r 8o r , showed courage in
Haiti, and dabbled in voodoo. When Leclerc died of yellow fever she
returned to France (arriving New Year's Day, r 8o3). For 40o,ooo francs
she bought the Hotel de Charost in the Faubourg St-Honore and was
soon back to her promiscuous ways, embarrassing Napoleon at all points.

Her career came to a brief halt when she had to seek a cure (successful)
for gonorrhea. Then in r 8o3 Napoleon made one of those bizarre
decisions that so baffle historians. Despite the fact that Leclerc was a
nonentity, Napoleon ordered a ten-day period of mourning for his
brother-in-law; he later conceded that this had been a great public
relations error and blamed it on Josephine's poor advice. The period of
mourning was turned to farce by Pauline who, despite her brother's
urging that appearances should be kept up, remarried in August r 8o3,
with the papal legate Caprara officiating. This time her husband was
Prince Camillo Borghese, the richest man in Italy. Aged twenty-eight,
diminutive, dapper and elegant, Borghese had embraced Republican
principles to save the family fortune, but showed where his heart lay by
becoming the first man to appear in court dress at the Tuileries since the
days of Louis XVI.

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Pauline, who always hated Josephine, rubbed her nose in her new­
found wealth by visiting her at St-Cloud wearing the entire Borghese
collection of diamonds - the most beautiful in Europe - on a green velvet
dress. But her madcap career did not end there. Discovering that Camilo
Borghese was hopeless in bed - she told Cardinal Fesch she would rather
have stayed Leclerc's widow on 20,000 francs than marry Borghese - and
was in fact yet another repressed homosexual, Pauline again cut loose on a
life of sexual adventure. Her most notorious exploit was the visit to
Florence in r 8o4. Pleading ill-health, she commissioned the artist Canova
to paint her as a naked Venus. When someone later asked whether she
had posed nude in Canova's studio, she replied: 'Why not? There was a
perfectly good fire in the studio. ' Scandalized by her behaviour, Borghese
put her under house arrest in his palace, but Pauline responded by
smuggling in a further raft of lovers. The distraught Borghese was forced
to appeal to Napoleon, who warned Pauline that she could never be
received at the Tuileries without her husband.

Almost as though by a process of osmosis through contact with his
hedonistic family, Napoleon in the latter years of his consulate seemed to
take more interest in sex; indeed the evidence of the years r 802-4 points
to a morbid craving or satyriasis of the John F. Kennedy kind. Perhaps as
his appetite for Josephine waned, his attentions increasingly wandered; it
is certain that at this time the Consul and his wife ceased to sleep in the
same room and occupied separate apartments. In June r 8o2 he had an
affair with the young actress Louise Rolandeau. This was no more than a
'fling' but in November the same year he began a more sustained liaison
with another actress, the statuesque tragedienne Marguerite George,
whose previous lovers had included Lucien and the polish Prince
Sapiepha. With her the Consul was able to indulge his taste for
buffoonery, schoolboy japes, practical jokes and general horseplay.
Napoleon's affair with George soon became common knowledge. When
she was playing Cinna at the Theatre Franyais, she reached the line: 'If I
have seduced Cinna, I shall seduce many more.' The audience roared,
rose in a body, turned to the Consul's box and applauded. Josephine, who
was in the box with her husband, was distinctly unamused.

By this time she was used to his infidelities. She vacillated between
jealousy and indifference. One night she decided to catch the lovers red­
handed in Napoleon's apartment and began mounting the narrow
staircase that led there, before taking fright at the idea that the faithful
bodyguard Roustam might suddenly emerge from the shadows and
behead her, mistaking her for an assassin. Yet on another night she found
herself in the love nest willy-nilly. Piercing screams from Mile George

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