LETIZIA BONAPARTE
(MADAME MÈRE)
ELISE BACCIOCHI
(née BONAPARTE)
CHAPTER XIII
WOMEN
IT would be as easy to omit all mention of Napoleon’s mistresses in a serious history as it would be difficult to omit the king’s mistresses from a history of Louis le Grand or Louis le Bien-Aimé. Napoleon was not the man to allow his policy to be influenced by women. Not one of the many with whom he came into contact could boast that she had deflected him one hairbreadth from the path he had mapped for himself. Not all Josephine’s tears could save the life of the young d’Enghien; not all Walewska’s pleading could re-establish the kingdom of Poland.
“Adultery,” said Napoleon, “is a sofa affair,” and he was speaking for once in all honesty. He was a man blessed with a vast personality, a vast power and a vast income, and it is unusual for a man with these three to go long a-suing. Moreover, if the lady who attracted his attention proved recalcitrant, Napoleon rarely pleaded; he raised his offer, and in the event of a further refusal he turned away without a sigh and forgot all about her. That indicates Napoleon’s attitude towards women.
There were, as a matter of fact, one or two whom he honoured by more lover-like attentions. Josephine cost him many bitter hours of self-reproach; Walewska he sought long and earnestly; he displayed every sign of attachment towards Marie Louise. Yet not merely these three, but every woman who granted him favours received in return immense gifts, and, if she desired it, a husband whose path to promotion was made specially easy. The women who flit into and then out of Napoleon’s life seem to be without number, but the gossip of a thousand memoirs, and the hints of a thousand letters, combined with the painstaking care of a crowd of patient inquirers, have brought them all under notice at some time or other. And yet the most elaborate research can only prove that there was one woman who might perhaps have given much to Bonaparte before his meeting with Josephine, and that was a street-walker of the Palais Royal. This tiny incident is hinted at in a letter written by Bonaparte at the age of eighteen.
After this, we find nothing of the same nature for another nine years. Napoleon was too busy and too desperately poor to trouble about such things. He flirted with Laurette Permon, who later became Madame Junot, Duchess d’Abrantès; with his sister-in-law, Désirée Clary, afterwards Madame Bernadotte, Princess of Ponte Corvo and Queen of Sweden and Norway; and with a few young women of good social position whom he met while serving as a junior officer of artillery at Valence. That is all. He came to Josephine heartwhole and inexperienced, and he lavished upon her during the first feverish months of his married life all the stored-up passion of a man of twenty-six. Josephine baulked and thwarted this passion by her delay in joining him while he was conquering Italy, by her petty flirtations with Charles and others, and by the general light-mindedness of her behaviour; from that time forth Napoleon became passionless towards all women. Some he liked, and some he even admired, as far as it was in his nature to admire anyone, but for none did he ever exhibit the uncontrollable desire which for that brief space he had felt for Josephine. Unfaithfulness to her, which he would once have regarded as treason, he now thought of merely as necessary to a man of mature age.
However, throughout the years 1796 and 1797 one cannot find any proof of genuine inconstancy. It was only in 1798, when Napoleon found himself the unrestrained ruler of Egypt, with the whole East apparently at his feet, that he left the narrow path of strict physical virtue. The native ladies did not appeal to him, and he turned with disgust from their over opulent charms. The same cannot be said of some of his officers, a few of whom actually married Egyptian beauties and later brought them back to France. Menou, who succeeded to the chief command after Napoleon’s departure and Kléber’s assassination, was one of these. Others, again, married and settled down in Egypt after the evacuation. Their descendants were supporters of Mehemet Ali, and even nowadays many rich Egyptian proprietors can trace back their descent to a Frankish ancestor who became a Mohammedan a hundred and twenty years ago.
But although, as has been said, Napoleon found no charms behind the yashmaks, the possibilities were by no means exhausted, as his aides-de-camp hastened to point out to him. A few Frenchwomen, by donning male attire, had evaded the strict regulation that no women should accompany the Army of the Orient. The most attractive of these was Marguerite Pauline, wife of a lieutenant of Chasseurs, by name Fourès. To a Commander-in-Chief all things are possible, and young Fourès was packed off in one of the frigates which had escaped from the disaster of the Nile with orders to carry despatches to the Directory. The night of his departure Madame Fourès (la Bellîlote, as she was called, from her maiden name of Belleisle) was entertained by Napoleon at a gay little dinner party; the proceedings, however, were cut short by the General upsetting iced water over her dress and carrying her off under the pretext of having the damage attended to.