“But nobody would believe my chastity,” Pauline replied candidly, insisting that she be immortalized as Venus instead. There was an additional historical allusion to the composition; the Borgheses claimed descent from the mythological founder of Rome, Romulus, son of the war god Mars, who had an astral love-hate relationship with Venus.
Pauline and Camillo’s relationship was similarly fraught. Both were bons vivants, enjoying la dolce vita to the fullest; yet they would have separated had Napoleon not warned his sister that she would be unwelcome in France without her doltish husband, and if she didn’t behave with at least a modicum of decorum.
But Pauline defended her conduct, writing to Napoleon that she had twisted herself in knots to achieve a felicitous marriage, and was merely the victim of envious gossip: Despite the difficult and disputatious character of Prince Camillo, our household is the picture of happiness. For I have made sacrifices you would not have believed me capable of. . . . People jealous of advantages I have received by nature and fearing my return to Paris invent these black words to encourage you to abandon me. But write to Prince Camillo and his family, for their responses will convince you that my accusers play false.
In the summer of 1804, Pauline and Camillo went to Florence on holiday and from there traveled to the baths at Pisa. Pleading that the accommodations were too cramped, and that she had a large enough entourage already, the prince convinced Pauline to leave six-year-old Dermide, her son by Leclerc, in the care of Camillo’s brother Don Cecco.
During the third week in August, while the royal couple vacationed in Tuscany (and Pauline herself was ill), Camillo received a devastating letter from his brother: Little Dermide had died of a fever. Pauline’s lady-in-waiting Jenny Saint-Maur agreed to conceal the dreadful news from Pauline until her health improved, because the Borgheses believed the shock would be too great for her to bear. Ten tense days elapsed. Finally, Pauline divined the truth, after receiving a letter (also written postmortem) informing her of Dermide’s illness. Jenny’s gloominess and difficulty holding back tears in Pauline’s presence confirmed her suspicions that the worst had already transpired.
Pauline immediately blamed Camillo for her son’s death, exclaiming, “Without you I never would have been separated from him and he would still be alive. What will the Emperor have to say? And my family? Leave, monsieur, I cannot bear the sight of you. You, the butcher of my son!”
She now viewed Italy, and particularly Rome, as a cursed place and never wished to live there again. Dermide’s death had conjured up nostalgically romantic memories of his handsome blond father. And just as she had done right after Leclerc’s death, Pauline chopped off her hair, giving it to Jenny to place inside her son’s little coffin. Although Napoleon wanted her to remain in Italy, Pauline insisted that her grief was so heavy that there was nowhere else to go but Montgobert, in France, where Leclerc was buried and where Dermide would join him.
Her son’s death made Pauline even more self-centered. She initially refused to attend Napoleon’s coronation in December 1804, primarily because she and her sisters were expected to act as train bearers for their detested sister-in-law Josephine as she was crowned empress. It was only after Dermide was laid to rest and one of Pauline’s sisters sent her a sample of the latest fashion in court dresses (which was too delectably resplendent to resist for very long) that she decided to put in an appearance at the coronation after all. Pauline recast herself as Napoleon’s greatest supporter, averring, “He is my protector, he will defend me against the evil designs of my husband.”
Napoleon’s sisters were expected to take turns hostessing his soirees. But Pauline was clearly more interested in showing off. She paid meticulous attention to her coiffure, and to her lavish wardrobe and lengthy toilette, but neglected to prepare as assiduously to receive their guests, happiest when she was the center of attention. Bawdy as well as irreligious, Pauline broke the decorous mood with a spontaneous peal of laughter one evening while dining with the imperial family; their uncle, Cardinal Fesch; and His Holiness the pope. In response to their shocked looks and sideways glances, she exclaimed, “I was just thinking how it would edify our contemporaries, and astonish posterity, had the Holy Father, who sits there so grave, been so fortunate as to convert me to Christianity, or if I possessed the wiles to pervert him into infidelity!”
With impeccable sangfroid the pope told Pauline that he was sure that “you, before your death, will become one of my flock.”
“Then, Holy Father, you must live to a great age,” the irreverent princess replied.
Napoleon was fully aware that his sister had no intentions of accompanying Camillo back to Rome. He was also cognizant of her numerous love affairs and didn’t wish to leave her to her own devices in Paris. In order to satisfy this conundrum the emperor conferred upon Camillo an order he had established in 1802—the grand cordon of the Légion d’Honneur—which entitled Prince Borghese to immediate French citizenship.
But little could be done to ameliorate a bad marriage. The prince and princess were constantly at each other’s throats. Pauline had begun referring to her husband as “His Serene Idiot.” And even after Napoleon gave him a commission in his army, posting him to various distant fronts, things didn’t get better; as far as Pauline was concerned, Camillo couldn’t be sent far enough from her sight.
In order to maintain as much control as possible over his increasingly expanding empire, Napoleon appointed his relatives to rule as satraps—proxies or viceroys who would govern according to his wishes. Because he thought Camillo was a moron and knew how much Pauline disdained and derided court etiquette, the couple received no satrapy. Jealous of her siblings and brothers-in-law, Pauline balked. So Napoleon gave the Borgheses Guastalla. Pauline was delighted at becoming Duchess of Guastalla, fantasizing about presiding over a glittering court in her own little empire, until she thought to ask her brother where Guastalla was.
“A village, a borough—in the states of Parma and Piacenza,” Napoleon informed her, admitting that the little duchy covered barely four square miles.
Pauline was incensed. “A village, a borough! What do you expect me to do with that?” she fumed.
“Whatever you like,” the emperor coolly replied.
“What I like!” Pauline’s vitriol increased; she referred to Guastalla as “a miserable village with a few beastly pigs,” insisting that Napoleon treated their youngest sister, Caroline, better than he treated her. She tartly informed Napoleon that if he didn’t give her “a proper state, a bit bigger than a pocket handkerchief, and with subjects who don’t have four feet and wiggly tails,” she’d scratch his eyes out. She then added, “And my poor Camillo, how can you do nothing for him?”
“He is an imbecile,” Napoleon responded bluntly.
“True, but so what?”
Pauline ultimately sold the duchy of Guastalla to the kingdom of Italy (then a conglomerate of the northern city-states) for six million francs, pocketed the sum, as well as the revenue from Guastalla’s feudal lands, and retained the title of duchess. She then invested the income in French government bonds that yielded an annual sum of four hundred thousand francs.
Pauline wanted everything both ways: She wished to take full advantage of her stature as the emperor’s favorite sister, yet had little desire to assume most of the responsibilities commensurate with that status, expecting instead the deference owed to her as Principessa Borghese. A contemporaneous (and anonymously written) account of Napoleon’s court published in England and titled The Secret History of the Cabinet of Bonaparte described Pauline as “. . . very witty; and very frequently in her sallies, tells her imperial family some bold truths, and very often mocks them. She thinks, I suppose, that, as she is married to a genuine prince, such liberties are permitted.”
The princess had no kind words at all for her husband, going so far as to remark very publicly to Napoleon just as Camillo was about to depart for the German front, “After a useless life, a glorious death.” Des
pite his personal opinion of the prince, the emperor bristled. “You always go too far,” he admonished Pauline.
Yes, she always did. According to a female court insider, “She gave herself carte blanche with her favorites and took a kind of pride in making her preferences public property,” a statement corroborated by a Polish countess, Anna Potocka. “People talked of nothing but Pauline’s intrigues, and they certainly did provide material for lengthy discussion.”
Sometime during the summer of 1806, Pauline told Laure Junot, duchesse d’Abrantes, “To give oneself to Camillo was to give oneself to no one.” He was reputed to be impotent, but when Pauline took a French count as her lover, her husband tried to seduce one of her ladies-in-waiting.
That summer, plagued with gynecological concerns, lower abdominal pain, and periodic pain in her lumbar spine (her physician, Dr. Peyre, believed her ailments sprang from an infection in her fallopian tubes), Pauline visited the spa town of Plombières to take advantage of the hot springs. There, she insisted on being carried everywhere (though her pain, rather than divadom, may have been the real reason for it), as well as bathing—and showering—in milk. Aware that the dynamic between mistress and servant and the contrast of light and dark created additional drama and scandal, Pauline would have her strapping black servant Paul rinse the liquid from her body through a hole in the ceiling. And when people were scandalized that she permitted an African such intimacies, the princess blithely replied that a Negro was not a man.
As the houseguest of her former brother-in-law John Louis Leclerc, she requested one such milk shower. Her host apologized, saying he lacked the appropriate plumbing. No problem, Pauline replied dismissively. Jean Louis could just make a hole in the ceiling from which his servants might “pour the milk through when I am ready. It’s a slight inconvenience to you, I know, but think of the consequences to my health.”
Paul Barras, a former lover of the empress Josephine when she was between husbands, was certain he understood the genesis of Pauline’s malady, after meeting her at another healing spa, Gréoux: “Excessive sexual activity, in consequence of furor uterinus [nymphomania] had given her an incurable ill. Too weak to walk, she was in such a state she had to be carried everywhere.”
Josephine, too, considered her sister-in-law a nymphomaniac—among other things. She’d harbored her suspicions about the nature of Pauline’s relationship with her husband for some time, but one evening at Malmaison during the winter of 1805-1806, after a dinner among family members and friends, the empress approached one of her usual confidants, the philosopher Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, in tears, exclaiming that she was “wretched indeed. You don’t know what I have just seen,” Josephine told the count, who was accustomed to offering her a shoulder to cry on whenever she discovered Napoleon’s latest marital infidelity. “The Emperor is a scoundrel,” she continued. “I have just caught him in Pauline’s arms. Do you hear! In his sister Pauline’s arms!”
Josephine’s outburst to the comte de Volney was not the first time she had expressed the view that her husband and his sister enjoyed an inappropriately intimate relationship. The American diplomat Gouverneur Morris had also heard the rumors, and characterized “the present Princess Borghese” as “a Messalina.” Messalina, the wife of the emperor Claudius, reputedly competed with a renowned prostitute to see who could bed more lovers in a single night. When confronted with Josephine’s suspicion via a third party, Pauline at first denied any such impropriety, insisting that “. . . the Empress was no better than she should be herself. At length she acknowledged it.”
By that time many rumors had surfaced regarding the possibility of an illicit relationship between Pauline and Napoleon. The buzz had begun almost as soon as Napoleon had himself crowned emperor at the end of 1804. His opponents found in Pauline a perfect target for their character assassinations of both of them. Napoleon and his beautiful, promiscuous sister were accused of incest; and other tales circulated that at the age of fourteen Pauline had been a prostitute in a Corsican brothel run by their own mother, giving new meaning to the imperial title of “Madame Mère” that the emperor had bestowed on Letizia.
Further fueling the fires of speculation was the siblings’ shared reputation for libidinousness and Napoleon’s opinion that his exalted status afforded him license to satisfy “every fantasy.” Pauline loved the limelight, and negative attention was still attention. Consequently, even in the absence of firm proof, it is certainly plausible that the siblings enjoyed an incestuous affair.
Pauline’s recent biographer, historian Flora Fraser, has arrived at the same conclusion, stating that “The truth is, it seems, almost inevitable, given the strong sex drive for which Pauline and Napoleon were both renowned,” and for “their mutual affection” and “clannish affinity,” as well as their blasé attitude toward their sexual conquests. Not only that, but coming from Corsica, where intermarriage among relatives was a fairly common practice, the Bonapartes may have had a different cultural outlook on incest.
Whether or not it was true that they were lovers, Pauline flaunted her intimacy with the emperor and the odd sort of power that she alone of all her siblings wielded over the most powerful man on earth. She also loved to shock and titillate people.
And regardless of her special relationship with Napoleon, at Plombières in 1806 Pauline finally had a love affair that touched her heart. She began a torrid liaison with another spa visitor, the thirty-year-old Comte Auguste de Forbin, a mediocre painter who had studied in the atelier of the great revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David. The comte, whose father had been guillotined, was an impoverished aristocrat who also fancied himself a poet. Keeping her affair a secret, Pauline begged Napoleon to employ Forbin as her chamberlain. That done, she paid Forbin’s debts; and while Camillo was off fighting in central Europe with the imperial army, Pauline’s emotional attachment to her new man did not go unremarked. She lavished him with perquisites, including an expensive carriage pulled by matching milk-white horses.
In 1807, Pauline became a fastidious hostess at her little satellite of the imperial court, her table as important as her toilette; and people clamored for an invitation to the Monday-evening soirees at her grand Parisian home, the Hôtel Charost.
But her physical condition had deteriorated. Pauline’s doctors reported that her limbs were spasmodic. The imperial physician, Dr. Halle, confiding in the princess’s personal medic, Dr. Peyres, was certain that her “overstimulated uterus” was the origin of all her ailments. “The douche and the hose,” he asserted, “cannot be held responsible for everything. One must suppose that there is a more substantial cause for the exhaustion this young and pretty woman [she was twenty-six years old] who is susceptible, so alone, displays.”
Halle insisted that it was an immediate imperative to “save this woman from destruction. And if there is someone who has preyed on her weakness and is complicit, this person, whoever he may be, could accuse not himself . . . but us—of having seen nothing, or having permitted everything.” Who else but Napoleon would care enough about Pauline’s health, or would be in the position, to accuse the doctors of malpractice? Camillo wasn’t even in the country; he was fighting on the fields of Poland at the time. And it isn’t likely that Forbin, her erstwhile chamberlain, would have asserted himself so boldly in such an intimate discussion.
The doctors prescribed abstinence, coupled with medicinal baths. Pauline wrote to Forbin to lament that they were being deliberately kept apart. Still, she managed to outwit her family and her physicians, sending for Forbin to meet up with her while she took her cure; she was even bold enough to visit Forbin’s family’s mansion in Aix-en-Provence without him. Pauline held out hope of enjoying their Provençal love nest indefinitely, assuring Forbin, “You are my real husband. Mine doesn’t merit so sweet, so sacred a title.” Referring to Forbin as her “dear idol,” she wrote to say, “I send you flowers that have been at my breast, I have covered them with kisses. I love you, you al
one.”
Napoleon was displeased to hear from his spies that Pauline’s erstwhile chamberlain was on his way to Aix-en-Provence to meet her. Camillo, now a general in the imperial army, was no less upset. He let it be known that if Pauline were not the emperor’s sister, his revenge upon her would have been dire. Genuine royalty, Prince Borghese also resented playing second fiddle to his parvenue wife, who too often made him feel like he was her consort.
In 1807 on one lucky day for both prince and emperor, the lovers quarreled. Pauline hurled a book at Forbin’s head and the love affair was over. Napoleon gave Forbin a commission in the Grande Armée and dispatched him to Portugal.
Without an illicit liaison for people to gossip about, they discussed Pauline’s outré eccentricities, including her manner of using whoever was handy (servants, government officials, ladies-in-waiting) as human footstools, backrests, shelves, sedan chairs, and even as an arch support and massage roller—when she placed her feet on the throat of her supine waiting woman, Madame de Chambaudoin.
But Pauline soon had a new man in her life, an Italian musician named Felice Blangini, who was understandably terrified that their affair would become public knowledge, dreading most the inevitable wrath of the emperor. Blangini maintained that he “had no wish to go and sing my nocturnes in Spain to a chorus of cannonballs and gunfire.”
Around the new year Napoleon named Camillo governor-general of the Transalpine Department of the French Empire, essentially the emperor’s viceroy in the northern Italian states that had once comprised the kingdom of Savoy. Pauline was ordered to travel to Turin, the seat of government, and settle in as first lady of the realm. Although she resented being dispatched to a provincial backwater, she dropped Blangini like soiled linen and focused her energy on the new wardrobe that her status would require. She insisted that because she was French-born (which wasn’t quite true, as Corsica was still endeavoring to assert its independence when she was a child), she took precedence over her Italian husband. Never mind that Camillo was the governor-general; Pauline wanted to be the one to meet with the dignitaries and to hear the common pleas of their new subjects. The couple quarreled vociferously over the issue and only the invocation of Napoleon’s name and temper could muzzle Pauline. Once again, the emperor was compelled to advise her to “make yourself beloved, be affable to the world” and to treat her husband well.
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