‘I am highly regarded here.
I have friends, pleasures and parties.’
AS A PROTÉGÉ OF BARRAS, Buonaparte who, in his own words, ‘knew no one else there’ was introduced into the salons of Mme Tallien, Mme de Staël, Mme Récamier and of several other hostesses in Paris. Such women, he told his brother Joseph, appeared to ‘hold the reins of government’, while the men ‘made fools of themselves over them’ and lived ‘only for them’. They were, he told Désirée Clary thoughtlessly, beautiful as the female characters in old romances and ‘as learned as scholars’. They were all, indeed, remarkable women.
Thérésia Tallien, wife of Jean-Lambert Tallien, one of the leaders of the Thermidorian reaction after the fall and death of Robespierre, a woman of outstanding beauty and wit, still presided over her salon at the Chaumière from which she would emerge in wigs of astonishingly unnatural colours to act as referee in games of bowls, clothed, so one witness testified, ‘à la Diane, her bosom half naked, sandals on her feet and dressed, if one can use the word, in a tunic above her knees’. Indeed, so Talleyrand was to say of her, Thérésia was usually ‘as expensively undressed as it is possible to be’.
Germaine de Staël, the wife of Baron Eric de Staël-Holstein – the Swedish Ambassador in Paris – and mistress of Louis, comte de Narbonne, held Thursday soirées at the Swedish embassy. She greatly admired the young Napoleon, calling him ‘Scipio and Tancred, uniting the simple virtues of the one with the brilliant deeds of the other’. It was considered characteristic of her irritatingly fulsome admiration of the general that once, on approaching a drawing-room door, she drew aside to let Colonel Lavalette precede her with the words, ‘How could I venture to walk in front of one of Buonaparte’s adjutants?’ But Napoleon felt no admiration for the woman in return, finding her exasperatingly pretentious and impertinent. She once burst in upon him when he was in his bath with the announcement: ‘Genius has no sex.’
Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adelaide Récamier, the alluring eighteen-year-old, white-clothed, virginal wife of an extremely rich and elderly banker, an enticing, narcissistic girl who was to give her name to the day bed upon which she so elegantly reclined, held sway in a salon as vivacious as any of her rivals.
Among these rivals was Fortunée Hamelin, a sprightly, amusing young woman of about the same age who, despite an appearance rather too plain to be pronounced jolie laide, attracted a succession of lovers, including the high-spirited adventurer, Casimir de Montrond, whom, so she claimed outrageously, she had discovered in a lascivious embrace with Mme Récamier. Mme Hamelin herself was far from averse to such embraces and her appearance in a ballroom, heralded by the heaviest and most liberally applied of scents, was sure to be welcomed by numerous would-be partners eager to be clasped against her inviting breasts. Another of Mme Récamier’s rivals was Aimée de Coigny who had been married at fifteen to the duc de Fleury and then to Casimir de Montrond, who had hoped to get his hands on sufficient money to pay his ever-mounting debts and who, while imprisoned with Aimée at St Lazare, contrived to have their names removed every day from the lists of those submitted to the Revolutionary Tribunal by offering extravagant rewards, which he was in no position to pay, to the official whose duty it was to compile them.
In this Thermidorian Paris where women held such sway, Napoleon Bonaparte, as he soon chose to spell his name as appearing less Italian, cut a poor figure. As though in deliberate provocation of his fellow guests in their high fashions and fastidious toilets, he would appear with his hair dirty and uncombed, his face scarred with scabies contracted at Toulon, his body evidently unwashed, and his French as yet so imperfect that other guests sometimes could not, or affected not to, understand him.
At La Chaumière, he was, according to the banker, Gabriel Ouvrard, the least impressive of all the men there. He was at an exceptionally low ebb, once more contemplating suicide. There was only one thing to do in this world, he decided, and that was to acquire money as Paris’s nouveaux riches speculators were contriving to do; and, having acquired money, to get ‘more and more power’. Joseph had money now through his family connections, and Napoleon advised his brother how to invest it; though he himself had neither money nor power. Nor did he attract women. His friend, Andoche Junot, later recalled how, during their rambles around Paris, Napoleon would speak angrily of the jeunesse dorée, the Muscadins, who enjoyed ‘all the luck’ with women, and how, when he saw them promenading in front of him as he and Junot sat in an open-air café, he would petulantly kick the chair in front of him. He was unlucky in love, he declared mournfully, referring, so some thought, to Mme Tallien who rejected a proposal he made to her with what the young banker Gabriel Ouvrard described as ‘an incredulous laugh’.
But then his career took a more hopeful turn. Obtaining the requisite medical report, he applied for sick leave so that he would be free to accept a more promising appointment than that of the command of the Army of the West should an alternative be offered him. This caused temporary difficulties: the Committee of Public Safety ruled that the doctor who had supplied the certificate was not qualified to do so and that Bonaparte was to be relieved of his command for insubordination in disobeying orders.
Napoleon turned for help to Barras, who did not disappoint him: he was soon offered an important appointment in an influential department of the Committee of Public Safety in Paris, a useful stepping-stone to the power he craved. ‘If I could be happy far from you, I would be now,’ he wrote to Désirée in an affectionate letter reflecting his sudden change of mood. ‘I am highly regarded here. I have friends, pleasures and parties…I kiss you a million times and am your loving friend for life.’ A new-found friend he did not mention was Paul Barras’s maîtresse en titre, Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Beauharnais, vicomte de Beauharnais’s Creole widow, whom he was to call Josephine.
‘He absolutely worships me. I think he will go mad.’
NOT LONG AFTER that ‘whiff of grapeshot’ on 5 October 1795 had helped to defeat the supporters of a counter-revolution and had secured his future, Bonaparte received a letter from Josephine de Beauharnais who assured him of her fond attachment to him, gently reprimanding him for neglecting her, and inviting him to lunch on the following day. ‘Good night,’ she ended her letter, ‘mon ami, je vous embrasse.’
Napoleon answered the letter immediately, begging her to believe that it was only his pressing duties which kept him away from her, that no one desired her friendship as much as he did.
He had often seen this alluring widow at Mme Tallien’s house, La Chaumière, at Barras’s house and at her small neo-Greek pavillon at No 6 rue de Chantereine, the rent of which, so it was widely supposed, as well as the wages of her gatekeeper, her coachman, her groom, her gardener, her chef and her four domestic servants, was paid by her lover, Paul Barras.
She herself gave the impression of being rich, in possession of extensive estates in the West Indies; and this was at least one of her attractions in the eyes of Napoleon who, before becoming too deeply involved with her, went to see her notary to make enquiries about this rumoured wealth – an indiscretion which naturally much annoyed Josephine when she heard about it.
But there was far more to her than her supposed riches. Although six years older than Napoleon and described by the disaffected as ‘decaying’, as sunk in ‘early decrepitude’, by no means clever or witty like her young and intimate friend, Thérésia Tallien, she was still a most attractive woman: elegant, beautifully dressed, simpatica, voluptuous, languorous, speaking softly in her pleasing voice with its attractive Caribbean inflexion. She had bad teeth; but she had learned to smile without showing them. Napoleon, as he himself admitted, was gauche and shy with women, professing a defensive contempt for them as not to be regarded as men’s equals, as ‘mere machines for making children’. Yet with Josephine he felt at ease: she gave him