* Now the Palace of the Legion of Honour.
* “The Friends of the Constitution”—formerly the Breton Club, and soon to become known as the radical and powerful Jacobin Club. In the interests of clarity, all references have been changed to the “Jacobin Club.”
*After the nobility lost their feudal rights (a decree Alexandre supported), it was no longer appropriate to indicate heritage in a name: hence Alexandre de (of) Beauharnais became, simply, Alexandre Beauharnais, a man without lineage. Some individuals got around this by incorporating the “de” into their last name—“de Moulins” becoming “Demoulins,” for example.
*Although Alexandre’s term of office would be for only two weeks—the position of president rotated—this was a prestigious honour.
*Before the Revolution, all of the officers had been aristocrats. When the Revolution came, most fled. There were few men left in France who had been trained to lead an army, fewer still with any experience.
* The Commune was the municipal government of the city of Paris. Conflicts arose because the city government, which tended to be radical (urban-based), felt that the conservative (rural-based) national government was not doing enough to protect Paris. The Commune, therefore, felt justified in taking control.
*Decapitation, formerly the privilege of the aristocratic class, was made available to all social classes by means of the guillotine. It was created by Dr. Guillotin, who died of grief over the abuse to which his humanitarian invention had been put.
*Two weeks earlier (August 18, 1792), all religious institutions had been closed by the state. This included most of the schools, which had been run by the Church.
*Anne-Julie de Béthisy was the cousin of the Abbesse de Penthémont. Rose had been introduced to the girl’s aunt, Marquise de Moulins (or Demoulins), in Fontainebleau.
*On November 2, secret correspondence between the King and the Austrians was discovered in a locked iron chest hidden behind a wooden wall panel in the Tuileries Palace.
*In fact, Tallien uses the term “Convention.” During the Revolution, the name of the elected body was changed several times: on June 17, 1789, the Estates General became the National Assembly, which in turn became the Constituent Assembly in the fall of that same year. With the adoption of the new constitution, on October 1, 1791, the elected body became the National Legislative Assembly, which on September 22, 1792, became the National Convention. In the interests of making the text less confusing for the reader, the word “Assembly” has been used throughout.
*The revolutionary government frowned on prostitution as a remnant of the corrupt Ancien Régime.
*The Queen was publicly accused, among other things, of taking her eight-year-old son into bed with her and teaching him how to masturbate, to which she responded, with tearful dignity, “I appeal to all mothers here—is such a crime possible?” She was convicted of aiding and abetting foreign powers and conspiring to provoke civil war within France.
**To further separate France from the Church, the Gregorian calendar was replaced by a “Republican” calendar, dating from September 22 of the previous year (1792), the date upon which the Republic had been proclaimed.
*Previous to the Revolution the French had over thirty feast-days a year in addition to Sundays and Mondays. Under the new revolutionary calendar, there was one day off every ten days plus five or six “jours complémentaires” tacked on at the end of the year—a considerably heavier workload.
* The young woman who murdered Deputy Marat.
* Some prisoners believed they were fed human flesh.
* Pickled herrings were given to the prisoners in great quantities, provided to the French government by the Dutch in lieu of payment on a debt.
*It was common for the women in the prisons to put aside their most elegant ensemble to wear on the day of their execution.
*This is Guéry, the fourteen-year-old son of one of Thérèse’s business acquaintances, released the day before from the Luxembourg prison.
*France wants her King.
*Syphillis or gonorrhea (thought at the time to be the same disease).
*Louis-Marie-Stanislas Fréron had met Buonaparte’s thirteen-year-old sister Maria-Paola in Marseille two years before. They wanted to marry, but met resistance from Madame Buonaparte. Although an educated aristocrat, turned violent revolutionary, Fréron was over thirty, inclined to drink and had had three children by an actress.
*A reference to the Republican calendar.
*Venereal disease was treated with mercury.
*Lazare Hoche would die in his bed on September 17, 1797, at the age of twenty-nine.
*Bernadine Eugénie Désirée Clary would later marry Bernadotte, who became crown prince of Sweden—making Désirée Crown Princess. Ironically, their son, Oscar I of Sweden, would marry one of Rose’s granddaughters.
*Joephine’s first husband, Alexandre Beauharnais, the father of her two children—Hortense (twelve) and Eugène (fourteen)—was beheaded on July 23, 1794, at the height of the Terror, the violent phase of the French Revolution in which thousands of aristocrats were guillotined.
*Madame Campan had been lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Antoinette, who had been beheaded two-and-a-half years earlier during the Terror, when the monarchy had been abolished and a democratic Republic installed in its place.
*Josephine’s mother, a widow, lived on the family sugar plantation in the Caribbean island of Martinique (“Martinico”), where Josephine had been born and raised. A small percentage of the plantation’s earnings constituted Josephine’s main source of income—when she received it, that is, which was rarely. Formerly under French rule, the island was now controlled by England.
*The executive authority of the Republic was vested in a council of five directors—“five Majesties.” Director Paul Barras was considered the most powerful of the five, and hence the most politically powerful man in the French Republic.
*A new calendar had been established during the Revolution. The ten-day week ended in Décadi, the official day of rest. The names of the months were changed as well: Vendémiaire (the month of vintage), Brumaire (the month of fog), Frimaire (the month of frost) and so forth. Nevertheless, many continued to observe the old calendar, causing considerable confusion.
*Hysteric water: a mixture that was said to cure uterine disorders—“an excellent water to prevent fits, or to be taken in faintings.” It was made of a mixture of roots of zedoary (similar to ginger), lovage and peony, parsnip seeds, mistletoe, myrrh, castor oil and dried millipedes steeped in mugwort tea and brandy.
*Fanny Beauharnais, a bohemian poet, is related to Josephine through her first husband. She is Émilie’s grandmother and Hortense’s godmother. She is being sued at this time by a young woman claiming to be her illegitmate daughter.
*The List was a listing of émigrés and relations of émigrés forbidden from entering France. Having left the country because of the Revolution, émigrés and even their families were considered enemies of the Republic. Those listed lost all civil rights, had their property confiscated and risked execution if discovered on French soil. The names numbered over a hundred thousand. To be “erased” meant to have your name taken off the List.
**In addition to Josephine and Thérèse, the group included Fortunée Hamelin, Madame de Châteaurenaud (called Minerva), and Madame de Crény. Fortunée Hamelin (nineteen) is a créole like Josephine. She is famous for her wit, her daring (un)dress and her dancing. Minerva (thirty-six) is a voluptuous woman known for a mild, sweet manner and an interest in the occult. Madame de Crény (thirty-five), met Josephine when Josephine’s first husband, Alexandre, forced her to live in a convent. Thérèse Tallien (twenty-three) is one of the famous beauties of the day. A wonderful teller of stories, she describes herself as a comedian.
*Drawers—or pantaloons—were considered men’s wear, worn only by women of ill-repute.
*Josephine’s first husband had been convicted (falsely) of conspiring to get out of prison. He was exec
uted, and his property confiscated.
*Laudanum: a solution containing opium, used widely in the eighteenth century for pain, particularly for “women’s complaints.”
*Josephine had bad teeth and was in the habit of smiling with her lips closed or behind a fan.
*Julie Careau and the great actor François Talma had lived in Josephine’s house when previously married.
**Under the purple: royal life.
*With the Revolution, the government had seized Church property, as well as the estates of émigrés and arrested aristocrats. From time to time, in order to raise money, the Republic put these properties up for sale—usually at a very good price.
*Merveilleuse: an extravagantly (and wildly) dressed woman of the period, typically of the newly rich class of profiteers, bankers and financiers.
*General Lazare Hoche had taken on the difficult task of quelling the uprisings (fuelled by émigrés and England) against the Revolution in the south of France.
*Chauffe-pieds: literally “hot feet,” the term given to the criminals who would extort what they wished by burning the feet of their victims.
*The Marquis’s son Alexandre, Josephine’s first husband, had been arrested for “allowing” the Austrians to invade Mayence (Mainz, in German), on the west bank of the Rhine River. The French traditionally believed that the Rhine River was their natural boundary.
*Churches were official sanctuaries. Any criminal who took refuge in a church could not be arrested.
*Bellissima regina: Italian for “beautiful queen.”
*Mal-aria: malaria, translated in Italian as “bad air,” which people believed to be the cause of the disease.
*La beauté du diable: beauty of the devil, or bloom of youth, the sexual appeal of a girl.
*Before the Revolution, aristocrats wore boots with high red heels.
*Aimée Hosten, a créole friend of Josephine’s with whom she was imprisoned.
**A country villa north of Milan that Josephine and Bonaparte leased for the hot summer months.
*Oh spring, youth of the year! Oh youth, springtime of life!
* Veni, vidi, fugi—Latin for “I came, I saw, I fled”—was attributed to Napoleon in a Royalist journal in Paris. It plays on the famous line by Caesar, Veni, vidi, vici, meaning, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
* Josephine’s husband Alexandre had at least three known illegitimate children, one of whom was Marie-Adélaïde d’Antigny. Josephine and Désirée jointly contributed to her support.
* Headquarters had been moved to Passariano north-east of Venice in order to facilitate the peace talks.
* Director Barras is reported to have thrown a writing desk into a mirror in his rage at discovering that Director Carnot had managed to escape so narrowly that his bed was still warm.
**General Pichegru was a Royalist agent.
* Historically, the Treaty of Campo-Formio is regarded as both spectacular and shameful. Spectacular because, among other things, the French Republic gained Belgium and the Rhineland (including Mayence), getting back its “natural frontier,” and shameful because of the sacrifice of the fledgling Republic of Venice to the Austrians.
*Napoleon had returned to Paris by way of Rastatt, Germany, where meetings continued regarding the peace accord. Josephine had left Milan at a later date, returning to Paris on her own.
*It was customary to fire servants who married or got pregnant.
*Rue de la Chantereine had been changed to Rue de la Victoire in honour of Napoleon’s victories.
*Tea made of rue, an evergreen shrub, was commonly used by women wishing to abort.
*Joseph Fouché was a radical Revolutionary with a reputation for violence (even atrocities) and a penchant for conspiracy.
*Ultimately 167 scholars were persuaded to go, forming a Commission of Arts and Science that would, in turn, be called the Institute of Egypt. Out of this campaign, a twenty-four volume Déscription de l’Égypte was published, upon which the science of Egyptology is founded.
* All of these were popular abortive measures. Uterus powder is likely ergot, a black, hard fungus that grows on stalks of rye, an abortive widely used for “bringing on the flowers.” Powder made from the leaves of a savin bush, which was often to be seen in the garden of a village midwife, was commonly used. Tea made from rue was considered just as powerful and more reliable than savin, however.
* The Trust would be made up almost in its entirety of the estimated eight million francs Bonaparte is thought to have brought back from Italy.
* It wasn’t unusual for a young married woman to go to a boarding school when her husband was away.
* On June 20, Josephine and three acquaintances were on her balcony when it collapsed. Josephine’s injuries were critical. She was immediately wrapped in the skin of a newly slaughtered lamb. For a time it was not known whether she would live, and Hortense was sent for. Josephine’s treatment, which was published in a medical journal, consisted of a punishing regime of enemas and douches.
Dr. Martinet’s initial report stated: “Citoyenne Bonaparte was the most seriously injured of the group. She was given a drink of infusion of arnica to stop the bleeding and an enema, which she evacuated, urinating as well. She was immediately put in a warm bath, after which leeches were applied to the most severely bruised parts of her body, as well as to her haemorrhoids, which were swollen. Warm topical remedies and emollients were put on her bruises (apples cooked in water had a good effect). This was followed by compresses soaked in camphor.”
* The command of the Army of Italy passed from Napoleon to General Berthier, Napoleon’s former chief of staff, and then to General Brune. Berthier had favoured the Bodin Company (it is possible he was in on the financial rewards), but General Brune did not and was threatening to cancel the contract.
* Lahorie blamed Josephine for Barras’s rejection. Consequently, in 1812, he joined a conspiracy to overthrow Napoleon and was shot for treason.
*Lancette (lance), laitue (lettuce), rat: a play on the words l’an sept les tuera.
*The article in the London Morning Chronicle read: “It is not very creditable…that the private letters…which were intercepted, should be published. It derogates from the character of a nation to descend to such gossiping. One of these letters is from Bonaparte to his brother, complaining of the profligacy of his wife; another from young Beauharnais, expressing his hopes that his dear Mama is not so wicked as she is represented! Such are the precious secrets which, to breed mischief in private families, is to be published in French and English.”
*Backgammon dice were initially tumbled in a noisy iron container and for that reason (some claim) the game was considered ideal by men wishing an opportunity to converse privately with a married woman without arousing suspicion. During the noisy game for two, they would not be overheard.
*A message relayed from one vantage point to another by means of flags.
*Sauveur means saviour; sauvage means savage.
*On August 22, four ships slipped out of Alexandria harbour. By staying close to the coast, they luckily managed to evade the British for six weeks.
*The young considered it fashionable to look old as well as rumpled: shirts were slept in to give the right effect, servants given new clothes to “break in.”
*Bernadotte had married Eugenie-Désirée Clary, Joseph’s wife’s sister (and Napoleon’s former fiancée). Bernadotte will be crowned King of Sweden, and their son will marry one of Eugène’s daughters.
*In Egypt Tallien became blinded in one eye, possibly due to untreated syphilis. On his return he is captured by the English. He does not arrive back in France until 1801, only to discover that his wife Thérèse is living openly with Ouvrard. They divorce and he ends his days in poverty.
The Josephine B. Trilogy Page 112