Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Buonaparte wrote saying that although he had met some ‘pretty and very charming women’ at Châtillon, none could compare with his ‘sweet and kind Eugénie’. He wrote two days later, sending her some songs, and again three days after that, with more sheet music, chiding her for not writing more often. On 14 June, on hearing that she had moved to Genoa with her brother and sisters, he wrote a long and barely coherent letter reproaching her for letting him down.31
He had made her promise that she would wait for him in Marseille, and her leaving made it impossible for them to see each other. A French citizen who went abroad was liable to be labelled an émigré and proscribed. For a serving officer to do so was tantamount to treason. Her going to Genoa suggested that her family were opposed to their marriage, and he saw it as a betrayal on her part. In an emotional letter of 14 June, Buonaparte assumes that their liaison is over while expressing the conviction that she will always love him. Feigning noble abnegation, he expresses the hope that she will find one worthier than himself. In a welter of self-deprecation he describes himself as a being cursed with ‘a fiery imagination, a cool head, a strange heart and an inclination to melancholy’, who is ‘surrounded by the savagery and immorality of men’, believes himself to be ‘the opposite of other men’ and despises life. Yet he insists that he can only find happiness in her love, and begs her to find a way for them to be reunited. ‘There is nothing I will not undertake for my adorable Eugénie,’ he affirms. ‘But if fate is against us think only of yourself and of your own Happiness: it is more precious than mine.’ Perhaps significantly, that was the day he resolved not to join the Army of the West and extended his sick leave.32
He wrote again ten days later, complaining of her silence and assuring her that although Paris was brimming with pleasures of every kind he could think only of his Eugénie and consoled himself with looking at her portrait, promising to send her his own. The same day in a letter to Joseph he wrote that ‘if the business with Eugénie is not concluded and if you do not send me any funds with which to operate, then I will accept the post of infantry general and go with the Army of the Rhine to seek my death’. He intimated that the engagement was broken off and suggested that as she would not want the portrait he had sent, Joseph should keep it for himself. She continued to cover notebooks with his name and initials, but there is little doubt her family wanted no more to do with him, and he too now had other things on his mind.33
‘So there we were the three of us in Paris,’ recalled Marmont. ‘Bonaparte without a job, me without any formal permission, and Junot attached as aide de camp to a general whom they did not want to employ […] passing our time at the Palais-Royal and at the theatres, having very little money and no future.’ Money does not in fact appear to have been a major problem; Buonaparte may have been on half-pay, but that did represent a regular income, and Junot, who came from a comfortably-off family, received subsidies from his father. Their future was indeed uncertain; Buonaparte’s military career had stalled and his political connections were not influential enough to restart it.34
Barras had opened a new world to Buonaparte by introducing him to those who set the tone in Paris. Chief among them was the great beauty, the daughter of a Spanish banker, Thérèse de Cabarrus, known as ‘Notre Dame de Thermidor’ because the revolutionary Jean-Lambert Tallien had fallen in love with her, freed her from prison and then helped bring down Robespierre and end the Terror in order to save his own as well as her neck. Other social lionesses included Juliette Récamier, Aimée de Coigny, Julie Talma and Rose de Beauharnais, as well as the more intellectually prized Germaine de Staël and older, more experienced ladies such as Mesdames de Montansier and Château-Renaud. They were seductive, sophisticated and assertive women who did as they pleased, and Buonaparte’s references in letters to Désirée and to Joseph leave no doubt that he was fascinated and excited by them.
He cut a poor figure with his small stature, lean and sallow features, hungry look and worn clothes, and he had no idea of how to present himself, how to enter a room, greet people or respond. His manner was farouche, a mixture of shyness and aggression that baffled people. While it could be appealing to the provincial girls he had encountered up till now, it grew disagreeable when he became defensive. He was particularly awkward with sophisticated women, and gave the impression of not caring what they thought of him. He was out of his depth, not so much socially as in terms of simple human communication: he showed a curious lack of empathy which meant that he did not know what to say to people, and therefore either said nothing or something inappropriate.
His gracelessness, unkempt appearance and poor French, delivered in staccato phrases, did not help. Laure Permon, in whose parents’ house he and Junot found a second home, thought him ugly and dirty. Bourrienne’s wife found him cold and sombre, and little short of savage. He could sit through a comedy with them and remain impassive while the whole house laughed, and then laugh raucously at odd moments. She remembered him telling a tasteless joke about one of his men having his testicles shot off at Toulon, and laughing uproariously while all around sat horrified. Yet there was something about his manner that some found unaccountably attractive.35
The sophistication of the liberated ladies both attracted and repelled him. They made Désirée seem provincial and uninteresting on the one hand, yet pure and sublime on the other. But the ardent love of a virginal teenager would not stand up to the sensual draw of the more sophisticated older woman, particularly in a young man who was still a child craving a mother figure. It seems he made a pass at Thérèse Tallien, who rebuffed him but apparently retained a fondness for him, as he was welcome in her salon, and she even used her contacts to obtain some cloth for him to have a new uniform run up. He appears to have been more successful with other women, perhaps including Letizia’s childhood friend Panoria Permon.36
He was feeling sorry for himself. On 5 August he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety complaining that his merits and devotion to the Republic had not been recognised. A few days later he admitted to Joseph that he was ‘very little attached to life’, and suggested he might as well throw himself under a passing carriage. Those are not the only things he said and wrote which suggest that he did on occasion contemplate suicide.37
With little else to do, he spent whole days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, established in 1792 with the amalgamation of the old royal library and the noble and ecclesiastical libraries seized during the Revolution. He was not only reading, as he always did when he had time on his hands. He was also writing.
The fruit was a novella entitled Clisson et Eugénie, no doubt in homage to one of his favourite novels, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. Its hero, Clisson, feels the call to arms from earliest childhood, excited by the sight of a helmet, a sabre or a drum. At the age when others read fairy tales he studies the lives of great men; while others chase girls he applies himself to the art of war. He grows up to be an inspired young soldier who ‘marked every step with brilliant actions’, and quickly attains the highest rank. ‘His victories followed one after the other and his name was known to the nation as that of one of its dearest defenders.’ But he is the victim of ‘wickedness and envy’, having to endure the ‘calumnies’ of his peers. ‘They called his loftiness of spirit’ pride and reproached him for his ‘firmness’. Disenchanted, feeling out of place in social gatherings, he flees society, wandering remote forests and abandoning himself to ‘the desires and palpitations of his heart’ on moonlit nights, brimming with melancholy and self-pity. He meets Eugénie, who is ‘like the song of the nightingale or a passage of Paisiello [his favourite composer], which pleases merely sensitive souls, but whose melody transports and arouses passions only in those which can feel it keenly’. They fall in love, settle down and start a family, but after a few years he hears the call of duty from the endangered motherland and resolves to gird his loins once more. ‘His name was the signal for victory’, and his triumphs ‘surpas
sed the hopes of the nation and the army’. He sends one of his aides, his best friend, to console Eugénie in his absence, which he does only too well. When Clisson discovers that they have fallen in love he writes her a letter full of generosity and tenderness, and charges into battle and his death.38
The work requires little comment. It is a psychoanalyst’s feast with its display of emotional immaturity, dreams of glory, and sense of superiority combined with a desperate awareness of inferiority in some areas, with aggression coupled to a curiously mawkish sensibility, and total self-obsession.
On 17 August, having received orders to take up his posting with the Army of the West, Buonaparte called on Aubry’s successor at the ministry of war, Doulcet de Pontécoulant. The new head of military affairs was struck by the way the frail, sickly-looking man came to life as he spoke, his eyes sparkling with fire as he uttered the words ‘army’, ‘battle’ and ‘victory’. He appointed him to the Cabinet Historique et Topographique, a general staff consisting of twenty officers. Buonaparte applied himself with his usual single-mindedness, producing plans and memoranda on every aspect of the military situation, often staying up until 3 a.m. ‘When I work on a plan of campaign, I cannot rest until I have finished, until I have worked through all my ideas,’ he later explained. ‘I am like a woman in labour.’ He presented Pontécoulant with a plan for the conquest of northern Italy which when it was sent to the commander of the Army of Italy was rejected as the figment of a madman who should be sent to an asylum.39
The work did not distract him from more prosaic matters; he was looking at properties within easy reach of Paris, and had located one with ‘a very fine house’ whose drawing rooms, dining room, kitchen, pantry, bedrooms, garden, orchard, kitchen garden, fields, pastures and woods he listed for his brother’s benefit. ‘In any case, I shall buy it, because it seems to me that it cannot fail to be a good deal,’ he concluded. His confidence in being able to find the necessary funds may have had something to do with a revival of his marriage plans.40
‘I have friends, much esteem, balls, parties, but far from my sweet Eugénie I can have only some pleasure, some enjoyment, but no happiness,’ he wrote to Désirée at the end of August, urging her to join him, adding, ‘time flies, the seasons follow each other and old age advances’. To Joseph he wrote that he wanted to ‘conclude the business of Eugénie’, as it was interfering with his plans; he felt it was time he married, and there was no lack of willing women in Paris. ‘It is for her to sort things out, since she spoiled everything by her journey [to Genoa]. If she really wants it, everything can be easily arranged.’41
‘You well know, my friend, that I live only for the pleasure I can give my own family, happy only in their Happiness,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘If my hopes are assisted by that success which never fails me in my enterprises, I will be able to be of use to all of you, make you happy and fulfil your desires …’ He was trying to obtain Joseph a consulate in Italy, and had managed to land Fesch a job provisioning the Army of the Rhine. He was sending Louis 300 francs a month: ‘He’s a good sort, and, also, just like me, he has warmth, wit, health, talent, attention to detail, all of it.’ He was pleased with the way the family was doing, and full of hope for the future. ‘I could not be better situated or have a more pleasant and satisfactory position here,’ he assured Joseph on 8 September. ‘The future should be held in contempt by a man who has courage.’ In between various proposals for speculating on property he returned to ‘the business of Eugénie’, which he insisted must be resolved. ‘If these people do not wish to conclude the matter of Eugénie, so much the worse for her, since she is stupid enough to listen to them,’ he wrote a couple of weeks later, making out that he would have done her family an honour by marrying her. He had better things to do than wait on them, and he crossed ‘Eugénie’ out of the title of his novella.42
He got wind of a project to send officers to Constantinople to modernise the Sultan’s artillery, and applied to lead it. As he explained to his brother, he would be in command of an important mission, he would probably be able to get him the post of consul, and they would make a deal of money. On 15 September 1795 he was confirmed in command of a military mission to the Porte. He selected Songis, Marmont, Junot and Muiron to accompany him on what promised to be the adventure of a lifetime. Yet a different adventure would change his plans.43
9
General Vendémiaire
What really happened on 5 October 1795 remains a mystery. The events of that day, 13 Vendémiaire in the revolutionary calendar, were rich in consequences, not so much for the continuing course of the Revolution as for the future of one man – General Buonaparte. Yet it is his role in the events that is the most elusive.
While he was absorbed by his contradictory feelings for Désirée, his financial speculations, his military career and his dreams of oriental riches, a new political crisis had been brewing. The men who had taken power after the fall of Robespierre had provided neither strong government and stability nor any principles which could unite the nation. They reflected all the vices and uncertainties of a society that had lost its way. Jacobins lurked in the wings, and the more extreme such as ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf were plotting the ultimate revolution. At the opposite end of the scale, royalists mustered for a restoration of the monarchy.
On 8 June the ten-year-old son of Louis XVI died in the Temple prison in Paris. His uncle, the late king’s younger brother, issued a proclamation from Verona, where he had taken refuge, assuming the succession as Louis XVIII. Less than three weeks later the Royal Navy landed 4,000 émigrés in Brittany to support royalist insurgents. General Hoche, commanding the army in which Buonaparte should have been serving, forced them back to the Quiberon peninsula, where they and another 2,000 men landed by the British were defeated on 21 July. The following day peace was signed between France and Spain, whose invasion force had been driven back as far as Bilbao. The Republic appeared to be secure. But royalist feeling remained strong, and discontent with the existing government simmered on.
There was a degree of consensus that the country needed a new constitution. The first, passed in September 1791, had turned France into a constitutional monarchy. It had been superseded, along with the monarchy, by a republican one in June 1793, Year I in the revolutionary calendar. But this had been quickly suspended in the state of national emergency provoked by the threat of invasion. A new one, the Constitution of Year III, was adopted on 22 August 1795. It replaced the Convention with a Council of the Five Hundred and a Council of Elders of half that number, both elected by suffrage based on property ownership. The governing Committee of Public Safety was to be superseded by an Executive Directory of five elected by the chambers through a complex procedure. ‘The government will soon be formed,’ Buonaparte wrote to Joseph on 12 September. ‘A serene future is dawning for France.’ He could not have been more wrong.1
Those who sat in the Convention had no intention of relinquishing power. Realising that in free elections royalists would capture a majority in both new chambers, they passed a law stipulating that two-thirds of the seats, 500 out of 750, would go to members of the existing Convention. This provoked an insurrection in Normandy and agitation in Paris. Royalists were dominant in several of the sections, the neighbourhood assemblies of the capital, and by the first days of October the city was in a state of ferment.
On the evening of 3 October Buonaparte received a note from Barras, still a member of the Committee of Public Safety, asking him to call at his house in Chaillot at ten the following morning. Barras needed ‘men of execution’ to deal with what he called ‘the royalist terrorists’ mustering their forces. It is not known what was agreed at their meeting, but Buonaparte seems to have remained non-committal, and Barras also contacted two former Jacobin generals who had been set aside after the fall of Robespierre: Carteaux and Guillaume Brune.2
Insurrection was in the air, and by the time Buonaparte returned from Chaillot one of the sections, Le Pelletier, was mobilising
its National Guard. He nevertheless went to the theatre. By the time he came out, at about seven or eight in the evening, the situation had grown critical. The Le Pelletier section was in open revolt, turning its narrow streets into an impregnable fortress. General Jacques Menou and representatives of the Convention had set out with troops to confront the rebels, but seeing the impossibility of dislodging them without heavy casualties and realising that they would soon be trapped, they negotiated a truce and retreated. The Le Pelletier section declared itself to be the rightful authority, and called on other sections to join it.
Menou, a former officer of the royal army, was accused of treason and placed under arrest, and the search was on for someone to replace him. Writing more than twenty years later, Buonaparte asserts that he went to the Convention and found the deputies in a state of panic. The names of various generals were put forward, including his. Hidden among the spectators, he was able to slip out to consider his position. He relates that it took him half an hour to decide whether to take up the challenge: he did not like the existing authorities, but if the royalists were to get the upper hand and bring back the Bourbons, everything that had been achieved since 1789 (and his own future) would be in jeopardy. He maintains that he then offered his services to the Committee of Public Safety, on condition he was given absolute authority, without having to take instructions from its representatives as was usual.3
Barras tells a different story. ‘There is nothing simpler than replacing Menou,’ he claims to have told the Committee. ‘I have the man you need; a little Corsican officer who will not be so squeamish.’ In Buonaparte’s version, Barras assumed nominal command of the Convention’s forces, which dispensed with the requirement of government representatives, and he, as second in command, took effective control of operations.4
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