Although she was not conventionally beautiful, a contemporary of Josephine’s once commented that “she offered her soul in her eyes.” And although Napoleon thought he might have captured her soul even as he took her body night after night, he had not won her heart. Josephine found him “passionate and lively,” but “awkward and altogether strange in all his person.” His letters were so full of ardor—and so illegible—that she showed them to her sophisticated girlfriends as an example of what a strange duck he was, mocking him behind his back.
Both parties were intensely focused on their own advancement, so in that respect they had something in common. But Josephine was not in love with Napoleon when she agreed to his proposal of marriage. However, she was a thirty-two-year-old mother of two in an age when girls were considered prime wedlock material at sixteen. And she was six years her ardent suitor’s senior.
Neither of their families considered the match ideal. Napoleon’s large family of parvenus was quick to deride Josephine, although she disliked them just as vehemently. One of his younger sisters, Pauline Bonaparte, referred to Josephine as “the old woman,” which was kinder, at least, than what his mother privately called her: la putana—the whore.
Nevertheless, on the evening of March 9, 1796, in the dingy mayor’s office of the second arrondissement, Napoleon and Josephine were wed in a very small civil ceremony. From the start, the marriage was somewhat inauspicious, if not in fact invalid. Claiming that he had been preoccupied with paperwork, the groom was nearly three hours late. The young officer who witnessed Napoleon’s signature was still a minor, and therefore ineligible to serve in that capacity. The official who conducted the marriage ceremony was also not legally qualified. And Josephine had failed to produce her birth certificate, claiming she lacked access to the document because the British now occupied the Windward Islands—so she conveniently shaved a few years off her age. Most biographers claim that she gave her age as twenty-nine. Napoleon, also lacking a legitimate birth certificate, opted to use the birth date of his elder brother Joseph—making him twenty-eight on his wedding day—and lied about his birthplace, claiming that it was Paris, rather than admitting to Ajaccio, Corsica.
But no doubt Josephine looked lovely in her white muslin dress and patriotic tricolor sash. About her neck she wore a medallion that was a gift from her new husband, inscribed with the phrase To Destiny.
The wedding night, too, was fraught with excitement of an unusual nature. The bridegroom was appalled that his wife intended to permit her pug, Fortuné, to join them in bed. But the pet was a permanent fixture, no matter the lover. Josephine advised Napoleon to take it or leave it.
“So I resigned myself,” Napoleon later wrote.
And as soon as the newlyweds commenced consummation, Fortuné bit his rival.
On March 5, Napoleon had been appointed commander of the republican army in Italy, and two days after the wedding, he departed for headquarters in Nice. He sent passionate letters to Josephine from the front, often writing to her twice a day. He longed to kiss her heart, then her lower anatomy, then much lower as he emphatically double underscored the word, referring to her as his “sweet love . . . the pleasure and torment” of his life. “Never had a woman been loved with more devotion, fire, and tenderness.” If she ever left him he’d have lost everything that made life worthwhile. He dreaded losing her and her “adorable person.”
On April 3, 1796, Napoleon wrote: You are the one thought of my life. When I am worried by the pressure of affairs, when I am anxious as to the outcome, when men disgust me, when I am ready to curse life, then I put my hand on my heart, for it beats against your portrait. . . . By what magic have you captivated all my faculties, concentrated in yourself all my conscious existence? It constitutes a kind of death, my sweet, since there is no survival for me except in you.
To live through Josephine—that is the story of my life.
But all the purple prose was still not enough to make her fall in love with him. Josephine tended to be an indifferent correspondent, but the strength of Napoleon’s passion may have been too overwhelming, even suffocating, despite their geographical distance. And perhaps, because her husband’s romantic ardor was one-sided, it was difficult for her to respond in kind, as she could not bring herself to fill a page with floridly embroidered lies.
Receiving no letters from his wife, Napoleon panicked. “No news from my friend . . . mi dolce amor. . . . Has she forgotten me already?” Then he entered another stage of paranoia; the desperate wooer who feared she’d returned to the arms of her former lover, Barras. Napoleon sent her “a thousand kisses on your eyes, your lips, your cunt” and told Josephine “the flame that comes from your lips consumes me.”
And still no letters from her. Napoleon’s next reaction was rage: “Obviously your pretended love for me was but a caprice.”
Finally, full of repentance for being such a boor, he wrote, “Drowning in my sorrow I may have written too harshly.”
“My emotions are never moderate,” he told his wife. Missing Josephine dreadfully, in June he dispatched a handsome cavalry officer, Joachim Murat, to escort her to Italy.
Napoleon always wore the miniature of Josephine about his neck. The day Murat arrived in Paris, the glass that protected the tiny portrait shattered. Napoleon blanched, announcing that the omen was an indication that Josephine was either dead or was being unfaithful. He was, in fact, frighteningly prescient.
Josephine told Murat she was pregnant and therefore unable to travel. But that excuse merely delighted her husband, who longed to see her “little tummy,” which he was certain lent her “a wonderfully majestic appearance.”
However, there was no pregnancy. Or, if there was, Josephine lost the baby before she might have begun to “show.” In any event, she and Napoleon had only spent two nights together before he’d left for Italy; conception was possible, but not likely. She could have become pregnant as a result of their premarital sex, but if that were the case, her condition would certainly have been obvious by this time. Josephine’s subsequent claim that she was too ill to leave Paris wasn’t considered satisfactory, either. When Napoleon threatened to desert his post and return to her arms, France’s Directory government insisted that Josephine pack her bags for Milan forthwith. Accompanying her was a blue-eyed, black-curled, diminutive and vivacious army captain nine years her junior named Hippolyte Charles. They had been lovers for months.
Josephine was madly in love with Hippolyte and their correspondence reflects their mutual ecstasy. Yet they managed to be extremely discreet during the journey from Paris to Milan, and upon their arrival, Napoleon was deliriously happy to see his wife, gushing, “What nights! My happiness is being near you, ma bonne amie. . . . Surely, you must have some faults in your character. Tell me.”
If he only knew.
Napoleon’s effusive passion for his wife embarrassed her. Alternately cruel and crude, he would pinch her so hard she would cry, or fondle her breasts in public. Josephine remained in Italy for eighteen months while Napoleon conducted his military campaigns. In the wake of his decisive victories against the Austrians that winter, his correspondence expressed his eagerness to show her the proof of his “ardent love”; to be in bed with her and once again see her face, her hair bound into a headscarf à la Creole, and her “little black forest.”
“I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the time when I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian Fields.”
But Josephine remained overwhelmed by her husband’s peculiar brand of ardor. “My husband does not merely love me. He absolutely worships me. I think he will go mad,” she told her friend and society hostess Thérèse Tallien in 1796.
Not only was Josephine still romantically involved with Hippolyte Charles when Napoleon returned to Paris (and her ostensibly waiting arms) on December 5, 1797, but she was actively engaged in business dealings with her lover through the Bodin company, using her influence to obtain contracts for Bodin
to supply the army of Italy—her husband’s troops. Both Josephine and Hippolyte may have profited from this Directoire-era Halliburton by skimming commissions off the top.
Hippolyte Charles was the one bright spot in Josephine’s life. In 1798 she wrote to him that “if [Napoleon] wanted a divorce, he only had to ask me . . . I hate all of them [the Bonaparte brood]. You alone have my loving tenderness. . . .” Her husband’s quixotic moods, his focus on military affairs, the pressures of public life now that Napoleon was a war hero, and continual derision from her in-laws conspired to make her life hell.
Meanwhile, Napoleon had his eye on the ultimate prize—the government of France—but his old friend Barras was none too keen on helping him take center stage. So Napoleon focused his sights on conquering Egypt. As a military man, his star was still on the rise, and it was a badge of honor that he continued to have the English running scared. Josephine, beginning to realize what a great man she had wed, asked to accompany her husband, but Napoleon thought it best that she remain in France. Even so, on the voyage to Egypt, he spoke of her incessantly. According to his secretary, Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne, “his fondness for her was close to idolatry.”
But the idol was about to be shattered.
On July 19, 1798, as Napoleon and General Junot strolled beside an Egyptian oasis, the general told his commanding officer about Josephine’s affair with Hippolyte Charles. Napoleon turned deathly pale and immediately exclaimed that he would demand a very public divorce. “I can’t bear to be the laughing stock of Paris . . . I love that woman so much I would give anything to have what Junot has told me pronounced untrue.”
“I have nothing to live for. At twenty-nine I have exhausted everything,” he wrote when his older brother Joseph confirmed the worst. “My emotions are spent, withered, nothing remains but for me to become a complete egoist,” he added.
So he exacted his revenge by taking lovers. Zenab, the sixteen-year-old daughter of an Egyptian sheikh, paid a high price for Napoleon’s lust. Following her stint as his unwilling bedfellow, as the French army was departing she was beheaded by religious zealots—the punishment for all native girls who had consorted with foreigners.
Napoleon flaunted his next mistress, Pauline Fouères, the twenty-year-old blond wife of one of his cavalry lieutenants, dispatching the cuckolded husband on a fool’s errand in order to maximize his time with Pauline. Napoleon intimated that he would marry her after he divorced Josephine for her infidelity, but the “stupid little slut” wasn’t conceiving. “Heavens! It isn’t my fault!” Pauline defensively exclaimed—one of many intimations made over the years about Napoleon’s lack of virility.
By the time he returned to France from the Mediterranean, Josephine’s affair with Hippolyte Charles was common knowledge. Nonetheless, she was depressed and missed her husband. She had taken Napoleon’s suggestion to find them a quiet country estate, purchasing the Château de Malmaison some ten miles from Paris, lavishly furnishing and redecorating it, although she was already up to her eyebrows in debt.
Counterrevolution was in the air and Napoleon was the man of the moment. He was still in Egypt when prominent government officials began courting Josephine, hoping she would urge her husband to step into the breach. But the first fire to be put out was the marital conflagration.
Upon returning to their Parisian residence in the rue de la Victoire only to discover that his wife was not at home, Napoleon threw her garments and possessions out of the armoires and cupboards and ordered a servant to dispose of them, shouting, “I will never forgive her!”
Josephine was absent because she had wanted to speak with her husband about Hippolyte Charles before anyone else further poisoned the waters. She had tried to intercept his entourage in Lyons but arrived too late. But once she was back in Paris, Napoleon refused to see her. Josephine bombarded his locked door with tearful entreaties, assuring him that she would explain everything. After what his secretary Bourrienne characterized as “three days of marital pouting,” Napoleon unbarred the door. The spat continued in his dressing room and Napoleon swore he would never live with his wife again.
But the following morning, when Napoleon’s brother Lucien showed up to provide further dirt on Josephine’s infidelity, he found the couple cozily in bed.
Napoleon had always been the ardent pursuer and Josephine the indifferent prey. But this quarrel marked a turning point in the relationship. Now it was Josephine’s turn to play the wooer. This ugly patch made her realize how much she relied upon—and loved—her husband. Hippolyte Charles was given his congé; but their affair had cost Josephine Napoleon’s trust. And Napoleon would make her pay dearly for it throughout the rest of their marriage, flaunting his own infidelities while she remained totally faithful, endeavoring to be the perfect wife in every way.
Josephine’s skills as a society hostess were indispensable to the rising politician. They were learning how to be partners as she ultimately accepted the hand he’d dealt her. “Bonaparte makes your daughter very happy,” Josephine wrote to her mother in Martinique. Now, their only quarrels were about her debts.
On November 10, 1779, Napoleon marched into the Council of Five Hundred, republican France’s legislative body, and declared that it was time for change. Although he was shouted down as a military dictator, that week the government reconstituted itself as a tri-person Consulate with Napoleon as one of the three Consuls. Before long he was First Consul and the most powerful government official in France.
As the First Consul’s wife Josephine was expected to set the tone for all Frenchwomen, presenting an elegant, refined demeanor. Gone were her flesh-baring diaphanous neoclassic gowns and body stockings, replaced with the high-waisted puff-sleeved frocks that became the fashionable silhouette.
She became invaluable to her husband’s “fusion” policy of integrating “a large and important segment of society” (the surviving nobility of the ancien régime, with whom she had hobnobbed in her early days in Paris) into the new postrevolutionary culture. Compared to the upstart Bonaparte family, the former vicomtesse de Beauharnais, with her elegant bearing and charming behavior that always put everyone at ease, was a genuine aristocrat.
Napoleon and Josephine moved into the Luxembourg Palace, where he spent long hours drawing up a new constitution. Although they spent just ten days there before moving into the Tuileries, Josephine was never comfortable residing in the same apartments that had housed Marie Antoinette less than a decade earlier. “I was not made for such grandeur . . . I can feel the Queen’s ghost asking what I am doing in her bed,” Josephine remarked to her daughter, Hortense.
Napoleon, who had no problem adjusting from ratty revolutionary to aspiring emperor, endeavored to cheer his overwhelmed wife. “Come, little Creole, get into the bed of your masters,” he coaxed as he romantically carried her over the threshold on their first night at the Luxembourg.
Napoleon considered Josephine his good-luck charm and believed that a sort of “magnetic fluid” flowed between them. And he complained of missing his “sweet little one” while he was defeating the Austrians at Marengo; yet when he triumphantly returned to Paris he took up with a series of mistresses. Josephine was forced to swallow her pride. Her husband adored her, but he wanted an heir. She had thus far failed to conceive with him and her visits to the healing spa waters at Plombières in the hopes of becoming fertile were proving fruitless.
Napoleon’s numerous sexual conquests humiliated her. The room adjacent to his office was set aside for trysts, during which he would divest himself of little more than his sword, insisting that “the matter was all dealt with in three minutes.”
“Love is not for me,” he dismissively claimed. “I am not as other men.”
Yet all over France it was whispered that Napoleon was occasionally impotent. At some dinner tables an acceptable topic of discussion was the exceptionally modest amount of the First Consul’s ejaculated semen and the size of his penis, disproportionate even to his diminutive stature.
Even Josephine was known to jest “Bon-a-parte, c’est bon à rien”—Bonaparte is good for nothing.
However, her biggest fear was that her husband would eventually fall in love with one of his paramours, or impregnate the woman (or both) and then demand a divorce. In 1803 Josephine turned forty and was desperate to turn back the clock, dyeing her hair and beautifying her skin with white lead makeup, rouge, and facial masques of raw meat. Josephine was expected to (and did) put up with his “rutting season,” as her husband called it, and was anxious to remain his number one in every way. In reply to an affectionate letter Napoleon penned from the Channel coast, Josephine wrote, “. . . I want to be always in your eyes as you would want me to be. . . . All I want is to be your sweet and tender Josephine devoted only to your happiness . . . that is my wish, to please you and to love you—no, to adore you.”
But being adoring—and acquiescent—didn’t mean Josephine wasn’t jealous of her rivals. And Napoleon expected her to understand and accept his infidelity. “It is your place to submit to all my fancies. You ought to think it perfectly natural that I should allow myself amusements of this kind . . . I am a person apart. I will not be dictated to by anyone.”
“With every new mistress he would become hard and pitiless toward his wife,” wrote Claire de Remusat, one of Josephine’s ladies. “He did not hesitate to tell her about the affair, nor to go into details about the perfections and imperfections of her body . . . nor to show an almost ferocious astonishment that she should disapprove of it.”
Napoleon made it quite clear to Josephine what her role as his wife required: “I want you to resign yourself to serving my political advantage.”
On August 15, 1802, Napoleon was made Consul for Life. He and Josephine moved from Malmaison to the much more formal palace at Saint-Cloud, where Napoleon took to dressing in a red velvet coat embroidered in gold and spent lavishly on home furnishings and décor. Self-conscious about his stature, he walked about on tiptoe, consciously mimicking the swaying gait of Louis XVI and referring to the executed king as his uncle. Gone were the days of the smelly, unkempt revolutionary. Napoleon had become exceptionally fastidious about his personal hygiene, spending hours at a time in terribly hot baths. He’d go through sixty bottles of cologne in a month, and would brush his teeth twice in a row with two different products, followed by the use of a tongue scraper. His scraggly locks were a thing of the past as well. Now, once a week he’d have Josephine’s coiffeur cut his hair very short.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 36