Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (13 page)

At Brienne, the little king of the Bonaparte family was brought down to earth with a bump. Graceless, foreign, with a heavy Italian accent, small and ugly, an island boy on a scholarship, Napoleon was a prime target for the bullies. His fellow schoolboys shouted that the Corsicans were cowards, called him “
paille au nez
,” or straw nose, and laughed at his height and his waddling little body. “I’ll make you French
pay for this,” he cried. He became preoccupied with joining the army, so much so that when an inspector suggested he was not yet ready, he considered applying to the British navy.

Life at Brienne was harsh. There were no visits home unless a parent was gravely ill, and no holidays other than a fortnight’s break at the end of the summer, when the boys were taken on walks in the barren countryside around the school. Among the other boys was Bourrienne—who later would become his secretary—but Napoleon claimed that he had few friends while there, because friendship took up time. The teachers were poorly trained, and the inspection reports noted laziness in the 20 staff and 150 students, as well as widespread insubordination. The vice principal prided himself on dashing through Mass in nine minutes. Napoleon was bad at singing, deportment, and music and awful at dancing, but he tried hard in ancient history and geography and had a real aptitude for mathematics. “That child will never be good for anything but geometry,” he later recalled people saying.
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In 1782 he told an inspector that he wished to devote his life to science and produce a theory of electricity or a new model of the cosmos.

In 1784 he had his chance to escape. Just as he was due to graduate, the Ministry of War sent out a call for students with a talent for mathematics. Fourteen-year-old Napoleon was selected to attend the École Royale Militaire in Paris. Unlike ramshackle Brienne, the École Militaire was luxurious, with meals served by waiters and thirty professors and staff, from grooms to wig makers and shoemakers. Unfortunately for Napoleon, he still had to take the dreaded dancing lessons. He did, however, learn plenty of math and took useful classes in fortification. The boys at the École Militaire were the crème de la crème, too occupied with their studies to mock Napoleon for his accent, but they were not friendly to him, and he felt excluded and looked down on. He emerged with a lifelong chip on his shoulder regarding the aristocracy, to whom he felt everything came easily. His graduation report noted he was hardworking and “capricious, proud, and extremely egotistical.”
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In 1785 Charles died of stomach cancer. Napoleon barely mourned his father. He promptly informed his mother that he was now the head of the family, as his elder brother was wedded to the Church. Thirty-five-year-old Letizia and the four younger children—all born after his
departure—were now essentially dependent on his wages; fortunately, the middle two, Lucien and Maria Anna, known as Elisa, were on scholarships. Letizia was excused from attending church, as she had so much domestic work. As the breadwinner, Napoleon worked harder to qualify as an artillery officer, cramming into a few months’ preparation what would normally take two years. At sixteen, he graduated forty-second out of fifty-eight in his class. He was then sent as a second lieutenant to the La Frère Regiment in southern France. Already shy of women, he was the only new recruit who did not visit a brothel in Lyon on the way.

Life in the garrison town was undemanding. Napoleon spent his copious free time reading rapaciously. As he put it, “I conquered rather than studied history.”
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He ate one meal a day to save money and sent every spare penny to Letizia. In September 1786, he took an extended leave and finally returned home for the first time in eight years, meeting the four younger siblings he had been supporting: Louis, Pauline, Caroline, and Jérôme, still only a baby. He asked for further leave on the grounds of illness but returned in late 1787 to Paris.

There, he encountered a pretty girl working the red-light district of the Palais Royal. The expensive women took rooms overlooking the arcades, while the cheaper girls like her were forced out in all weather to find clients. Napoleon asked her how she had become a streetwalker and stood with her, feeling so vigorous, he declared, that he did not feel the cold. He took her to a nearby hotel and lost his virginity. After wasting a further six months on Corsica at the beginning of 1788, he returned to his regiment.

In 1789 the Revolution broke out and Napoleon, bored of quelling bread riots, went back to Corsica hoping to win political influence on the island. He had little success and returned to France in 1791. He hedged his bets: He joined the Jacobin Society on July 3 and publicly celebrated Louis XVI’s birthday in August. As the Terror spread, Napoleon left Paris and took his sister, Elisa, out of her school at Versailles. On the journey south to Corsica, their coach was frequently halted by revolutionaries demanding their passports and instructing them to shout “Vive la Nation!” The people clapped Napoleon on the back, shabby in his army uniform. In Marseille, Napoleon felt safe: He and his sister spent a month there and then traveled in leisurely fashion to
Corsica. For Napoleon, his early twenties were a time of dodging responsibility. He had little interest in romance, as he wrote in his
Dialogue on Love:
“I do more than dispute the existence of Love. I consider it to be actually as injurious to society as to the personal happiness of mankind.”
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In 1793 the political situation on Corsica exploded. The Corsican Assembly deemed the Bonapartes traitors and exiled them for good. Napoleon and his banished family fled to Toulon, where he wrote a republican pamphlet and found his spirit at last. Toulon had been attacked by the British, and Napoleon, the budding politician, used his contacts with the president of the revolutionary committee and was given the post of commander of artillery, after the previous holder had been wounded. It was the first of his impressive promotions. He took a key role in the rescue of Toulon, impressing Paul de Barras, who at the time was in Nice with the army. Barras spotted Napoleon’s talent and, after the French won Toulon, encouraged his promotion to brigadier general.

By 1794 Napoleon’s brother Joseph had long since given up the priesthood and was on the verge of marriage to a Marseilles girl, Julie Clary. He introduced Napoleon to her plump, cheerful sixteen-year-old sister, Désirée. Napoleon called Désirée by her middle name, “Eugénie,” and was more practical than romantic with her, telling her what books she should read and how she could improve her manners. He considered marrying her, since she brought a large dowry, but was not affected by particular feelings for her. He held fast to his belief that love weakened man.

He received orders to join the Army of the West, suppressing the protests of royalists in the Vendée. He would have been under the command of Marie-Josèphe’s lover, Lazare Hoche, a man strict with those who took unpaid leave. There was no glory in the Vendée, and Napoleon traveled to Paris to argue his position. Following a furious unresolved argument, after his leave period expired, he was living in a cheap hotel, existing on a tiny allowance sent by Joseph. He tried to meet anyone of influence, knocking on doors and demanding introductions, but was often turned away.

Depressed and miserable, Napoleon looked sickly. He rarely bothered to comb his hair and his uniform was shabby. At the age of twenty-six, his career seemed over. He wrote despondent letters to Joseph and Désirée and seriously contemplated suicide. “I will end up not stepping aside when a carriage passes,” he wrote dolefully to Joseph.
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“Life is a mere dream that fades.”
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Paris in the summer of 1795 was food for cynicism. The only winners after the Terror were the get-rich-quick speculators and black marketers, profiteers, military contractors, and bankers. Thermidor was a regime that protected property, enshrined the supremacy of those with money, and allowed them to get richer by buying public monopolies for a song, snapping up handsome estates previously owned by aristocrats and the extensive lands once owned by the Church. “There is one thing alone to do in this world and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power,” Napoleon said.
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He wandered the streets and started work on a romantic novel,
Clisson et Eugénie
—a doomed love story that reflected a young man’s eager desire to experience passion—having repeatedly read Goethe’s
Sorrows of Young Werther.
Clisson, “born for war,” meets two sisters and falls in love with the younger, Eugénie. He gives up the army for her but is then called back. When wounded, he sends his aide to tell Eugénie, but she falls in love with the aide. Clisson decides to die in battle, writing to her, “At twenty-six I have exhausted the fleeting pleasures of fame.”
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Napoleon had taken up his pen as a romantic novelist, but the fates were aligned differently. Paul de Barras saw in him a man who would do anything to be on the winning side. Barras’s friends were baffled by the great man’s fascination with the swarthy Corsican: “Who is this Bonaparte? Where has he served? Nobody has ever heard of him.” The vitiated society men laughed at “Barras’s little protégé.” “At that stage in his life,” wrote Laure Permond, “Bonaparte was ugly.”
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At just over five feet three, he was not excessively small (the average Frenchman was about five feet six), but he gave the impression of short stature because of his slumped posture and skinny chest.
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Underfed, with a yellowing complexion, gray eyes, and a protruding nose and chin, he was almost unpleasant to look at. In an age when the ideal of
male beauty was dark curls and lustrous eyes, Napoleon’s lank, greasy hair and small eyes made him a joke and revealed him—to snobbish Parisians—as lowly stock. He refused to waste money on gloves, so his fingernails were as dirty as his boots. Even worse, his French was heavily accented and hesitant. Dress and behavior meant everything, even after the Revolution, and Napoleon was scruffy, sloppy, and rude. He had little idea of social niceties and tended to smile at the wrong moment or burst into laughter for no reason. Most of the time he was too awkward to say anything, but when he did speak, it was usually to offer a crude joke. Profoundly frustrated that he could not impress people as he wished, he retreated into bouts of temper and sulking. And yet under all the grime and poor manners, he was profoundly intelligent—and had a force of will that was irresistible, if one made the effort to speak to him.

Barras took Napoleon to the salons of Madame Tallien and Madame de Staël and to various parties. “He was just a little general who was unhesitatingly dubbed a fool by all those who knew him,” said Madame de Chastenay. Bonaparte mused to his brother that “a mad desire to get married will take possession of me.”
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He was so frantic to be accepted that he proposed marriage to Laure Permond’s mother, fourteen years his senior. He even considered the gold-digging courtesan Grace Elliott, whom Marie-Josèphe had met in prison.
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Napoleon was young, lustful for power, and fascinated by the women who spurned him. Parisian ladies, he wrote to Désirée Clary, were as “beautiful as old romances and as learned as scholars … all these frivolous women have one thing in common, an astonishing love of bravery and glory.” He observed them like a scientist, evaluating their characteristics. “Their toilette, the fine arts and their pleasures take up all their time. They are philosophers, lovers, courtesans, and artists.”
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Admiring but excluded, he was more than ready to fall in love with the first of these fabulous creatures who deigned to show him any attention. At the fateful dinner in 1795, he was captured wholesale by Madame de Beauharnais.

At first it seemed impossible that he could act on his passion for his patron’s mistress, but Barras quickly allowed him leave to court her. Barras had been growing disillusioned with Marie-Josephe, for she was both expensive and increasingly dependent on him. He also reasoned
that if Napoleon “took” his lover, the young general would feel even more loyalty to Barras.

Marie-Josèphe’s interest in Napoleon, on the other hand, was utterly baffling to her friends. The ladies in the salons, the
Merveilleuses,
and the women who wished to be like Marie-Josèphe could not comprehend her willingness to humor the skinny little Corsican. But while she was drawn to his ambition and intelligence, she refused to be his lover. As she told Barras, “she believed she could do better than him.”
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In October 1795, pro-royalist sentiment flared in the streets of Paris. In what became known as the 13 Vendémiaire, royalist supporters rose up and declared allegiance to the émigré army of the Comte d’Artois, then marching toward the capital. Barras put Napoleon in charge, and he suppressed the riots with swift brutality. Hundreds of royalists were killed.

Barras and his allies used the violence to declare the need for a new political system, the Directory: five men in overall charge, presiding over the Council of Elders and the Council of Five Hundred. Barras quickly emerged as the leader. “The memory of the terror today serves the friends of despotism,” said Madame de Staël.
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Barras resigned as commander in chief of the Army of the Interior and put Bonaparte, the inexperienced soldier who had been practically expelled from the army, in his place. At only twenty-six, Napoleon, dubbed General Vendémiaire, was wealthy and celebrated. He moved to an expensive new house, took headquarters at the Place Vendôme, and used a private box at the Opéra. He immediately started enriching his family—and redoubling his appeals to Marie-Josèphe.