Just a week before the marriage of Napoleon with Josephine he had been appointed general-in-chief of the Army of Italy, and two days after the marriage he left for his command. Josephine remained in Paris, at her home in the Rue Chantereine, a little relieved, probably, at the departure of her tempestuous lover. Certainly she was not sufficiently in love to be able to keep pace with the ardent letters which he sent her from every post on his route. She read them, to be sure; even showed them to her friends, pronouncing them drôle; but her answers equalled them neither in number nor in warmth. Napoleon’s suffering and reproaches and prayers disturbed her peace. She could not love like this. Soon he began to beg her to come to Italy. The campaign was well started; he was winning victories. There was no reason why she should not join him; or come at least to Nice—to Milan. “You will come,” he begs, “and quick. If you hesitate, if you delay, you will find me ill. Fatigue and your absence are too much for me.... Take wings, come—come!”
But Josephine did not want to leave Paris. Particularly now when she was reaping the first fruits of her young husband’s glory in an homage such as she had never known, but of which there is no doubt she had dreamed from childhood. Napoleon’s victories had driven the Parisians wild with joy, and they asked nothing better than to adore the wife of the hero of the campaign. Scarcely two months, in fact, had passed, after leaving Paris before Napoleon sent back, by his brother Joseph and his aide Junot, twenty-one flags taken from the enemy. They were received at a public session of the Directory. Josephine was present with Mme. Tallien, and when the two beautiful women, accompanied by Junot, left the Luxembourg, where the presentation had taken place, there was such a demonstration as Paris had not seen over a woman in many a day. “Look,” they cried, “it is his wife! Isn’t she beautiful! Long live General Bonaparte! Long live the Citizeness Bonaparte! Long live Notre Dame des Victoires!”
New triumphs followed, and to celebrate them there was held a grand fête on May 29. There were balls at the Luxembourg, gala nights at the theaters. And everywhere Josephine, the wife of the conquering general, was queen. And yet almost every night, when she returned from opera or ball, she found awaiting her a passionate appeal from Bonaparte to come to Italy. Several weeks she put him off, she pleaded the hardship of the trip, the dangers and discomforts she might have to undergo there, a hundred excuses; and Bonaparte, in reply, only begged the more fiercely that she come.
At last she could resist no longer, but she took no pains to conceal her sorrow at going. “Her chagrin was extreme, when she saw there was no longer any way of escaping,” Arnault says, “she thought more of what she was going to leave than what she was going to find. She would have given the palace at Milan which had been prepared for her, she would have given all the palaces of the world, for her house in the Rue Chantereine.... She started for Italy from the Luxembourg, where she had supped with some friends. Poor woman, she burst into tears and sobbed as if she was going to punishment—she who was going to reign.”
It was the end of June before Josephine arrived in Milan. The palace which awaited her was the princely home of the Duke de Serbelloni;—the society the choicest of Italy. She at once found herself literally living like a princess. Unhappily for her, however, there was no opportunity to remain long quietly at Milan and enjoy the pleasures open to her. Bonaparte was in active campaign—unable to stay but a couple of days after her arrival, and he soon began to beg that she join him in the field. At the end of July, she did go to Brescia, where she experienced a series of exciting adventures. The Austrians were pressing close on the French—closer than Napoleon realized; twice he and she narrowly escaped capture together; once she was under fire. Finally Bonaparte was obliged to send her, by way of Bologna and Ferrara to Lucques, a journey that she made in safety, but in tears.
Henceforth Josephine had an excellent reason for not joining her husband in the field. And Napoleon did not ask her to do so. All he asked now was letters, letters, letters. “Your health and your face are never out of my mind. I cannot be at peace until your letters are received. I wait them impatiently. You cannot conceive my unrest.” And again, “I do not love you at all; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a wretched, awkward, stupid little thing. You do not write me any more at all; you do not love your husband. You know the pleasure that your letters give me, and yet write me not more than six lines and that by chance. What are you doing all day long, Madame? But seriously, I am very much disturbed, my dear, at not hearing from you. Write me four pages quickly of those kind of things which fill my heart with pleasure.” A few days later he writes, “No letters from you. Truly that disturbs me. I am told you are well and that you have even been to Lake Como. I look impatiently every day for the courier who will bring me news of you.” And again, “I write you very often, my dear, and you write me so rarely.” And so it went on through the entire summer and fall of 1796. While she received at Milan the honors due the wife of a conqueror who held the fate of states in his hands, he in the field exhausted himself in a frenzied struggle for victory—not victory for himself, so he told Josephine, and so for a time, perhaps, he persuaded himself; but victory because it pleased her that he win it; honor because she set store by it; otherwise, said he, “I should leave all to throw myself at your feet.”
All this impetuous passion wearied Josephine more and more. No response was awakened in her heart. That she was proud of his love, there is no doubt. She told everybody of his devotion, as well she might: it was her passport to power. But she could not answer it in kind, and she found excuses for her neglect in her health, which was not good at this time, and in the social requirements of her brilliant and conspicuous position, and frequently, too, in the fact that the life at Milan, gay as it was, did not please her. She was homesick for Paris. “Monsieur de Serbelloni will tell you, my dear aunt,” she wrote early in September, “how I have been received in Italy, fêted wherever I have gone, all the princes of Italy entertaining me, even the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Ah, well! I would rather be a simple private individual in France; I do not like the honors of this country, I am bored to death. It is true that my health does much to make me sad; I am not well at all. If happiness could bring health, I ought to be well. I have the kindest husband that one could possibly find; I have not time to want anything; my will is his; he is on his knees before me all day long, as if I were a divinity. One could not have a better husband. M. de Serbelloni will tell you how much I am loved; he writes often to my children and is very fond of them.”
JOSEPHINE.
By J. B. Isabey. (Collection of M. Edmond Taigny.) This portrait in crayon, lightly touched with color, was executed at Malmaison, probably in the course of the year 1798. It is very little known. Isabey, whose pencil was quick and sure, must have requested Josephine to pose for a few minutes after a walk in the park. This sketch was given to M. Taigny by Isabey himself.—A. D.