Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (20 page)

While Napoleon pondered alien life-forms, Josephine followed his orders and waited at Toulon for two weeks for news that the fleet had passed Sicily safely. Once she had it, she set off for the spa town at Plombières to take the waters before traveling to Naples. On the way to Lyon, she wrote to tell Barras that General Brune—the French commander in Switzerland—was trying to break the government contracts
held by the Bodin Company. “Write on their behalf, I beg you, to General Brune,” she urged. “Both you and I owe everything to them.”
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Even though she knew how much Napoleon hated army profiteers, she was still trying to help Bodin’s company—and thus Hippolyte.

Plombières was a quiet town in the lush pine forests of the Vosges Mountains in Lorraine, made up of small houses with balconies. Dating back to Roman times, the original baths had been destroyed and then restored in the early seventeenth century. Since then, hundreds of well-heeled invalids had flocked to Plombières: rheumatic old women and gout-ridden men, along with dozens of frantic infertile women.
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The local doctor, Johannes Martinet, ran a roaring trade and in 1791 published a book promoting the waters and their wonderful effects—
Observations sur quelques maladies chroniques et sur les effets des eaux de Plombières dans ces maladies.
He was an advertising genius holding out the ever-inviting promise of eternal youth. Josephine lodged in the Pension Martinet with her maids and her huge wardrobe; she took the waters and promenaded in the town. Plombières was a good place to prove her virtue to her husband, for it was full of ladies trying to cure their health and become pregnant. One visitor who attended a ball reported that there were sixty women to twelve men, and only four of the men were fit to dance.

Having learned from her previous mistakes, Josephine wrote eagerly to Bonaparte, sending the letters by courier to Barras to forward. “I am so distressed at being separated from him that I cannot overcome my sadness,” she told Barras. “His brother, with whom he corresponds so closely, is so horrible about me that I am always worried when I am far from Bonaparte.”
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She dreaded Joseph. “He is a vile, abominable person,” she wrote heatedly, “some day you will know what he is like.”
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And yet she was still flirting with her former lover. “I wish that the waters of Plombières could be prescribed for you,” she told Barras coyly, “so that you could decide to come here and take them. It would be very kind of you to have an ailment in order to be able to cause me pleasure. I am very devoted to you.”
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The woman who once infuriated Bonaparte with her failure to write was now scribbling every day. “You know him and you understand how
he would hate not getting news from me regularly,” she wrote to Barras. “He says that I am to rejoin him as soon as possible and so I am hurrying to finish the cure.”
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The debacle with the Bodin Company had made Josephine feel nervous about her husband traveling without her, and she genuinely desired to go to Egypt, at least for a short time. And yet after her cure, she planned to return to Paris for a few days before setting out to Italy to meet the boat. While in the capital, she would have found it hard to resist seeing Hippolyte.

Either way, she did not have a chance to prove her newfound devotion. On June 20, two days after she wrote the letters to Barras, a maid called Josephine and her visitors to the balcony to see a little dog on the street. They all rushed outside and the terrace collapsed under their weight. The party fell twenty feet to the ground. One of her companions broke her leg, and Josephine herself was very badly hurt, for she was at the front and her visitors had landed on her. She had a suspected broken pelvis, and her spine was so bruised that she could not move.

The physician Martinet, a man more used to treating country burghers than the wife of the conqueror of Italy, promptly wrapped her in the bloody skin of a newly killed sheep, bled her, administered an enema, and plunged her into a hot bath. Martinet sent daily reports to Barras, intent on ensuring the health of such an estimable patient. Poor Josephine was tormented by douches, hot baths, more enemas, poultices, plasters, leeches, camphor, and compresses of brandy and boiled potatoes. Determined to make his fame out of the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, Martinet took notes of his treatments and would eventually publish everything in his
Journal physico-médical des eaux de Plombières.
He informed the horrified Josephine that she had to stay there for two months, imbibing the waters and submitting to his treatments.

Hortense was rushed to Plombières from school in Paris, arriving to find her mother an invalid, unable even to feed herself. The whole plight was made worse by Napoleon’s missives; unaware of her accident, he assured her that he could not live without his Josephine and reiterated the instructions to embark at Naples. She told everyone who would listen that she was too ill to move. “I wish my health would permit me
to depart now; but I don’t see the end of my cure,” she wrote to Barras in July. “I cannot stand upright for more than ten minutes without terrible pains in the lower back. I do nothing but cry. The doctors say that in a month I shall be cured.” She told Barras, however, that his letter had “put balm on my bruises.”
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Whether it was Barras’s letters or Martinet’s enthusiastic baths and potions, something did the trick, or at least did not hinder a natural improvement. By August, Josephine had recovered and agreed to act as godparent to Martinet’s newborn daughter—and she asked Barras to be a godparent, too. On August 15, she and Hortense arrived back in Paris to find pictures of Napoleon suspended around the city. She was still hopeful of joining him in Egypt, if a ship could be found. But then a shocking piece of news came through. Upon hearing it, Josephine wrote immediately to Barras. “I am so worried about the news that has just come in via Malta that I must ask to see you alone tonight at nine. Give orders for no one else to enter.”
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On August 1, at Aboukir, off the coast of Alexandria, Nelson had attacked the French fleet. All but four of Napoleon’s ships had been sunk.

When British spies had seen the ships assembling at the French ports, they began to debate Napoleon’s destination. The minister for war and the British consul in Livorno suggested he might be heading to Egypt. Earl Spencer, first lord of the Admiralty, ordered the dispatch of Horatio Nelson, then rear admiral of the Blue, to the Mediterranean to ascertain Napoleon’s destination. Though he was missing an arm and was wounded in one eye, thirty-nine-year-old Nelson was a genius for strategy and propaganda, and he was equipped with a pathological hatred of the French. Nelson had much in common with Napoleon: He was also a social outsider and impatient with etiquette. He had been living in miserable retirement with his wife, making model ships and reading
The Times,
and he was hungry to be back at sea chasing his prey.

Napoleon was aware the British had been dispatched, but he was too convinced of his own brilliance to worry. He avoided Nelson with ease and, on June 11, took Malta and raided the island’s coffers. The Knights of Malta, the possessors of the island, were aging, and the ten thousand men who made up the garrison were not loyal and were unlikely to risk
their lives to defend their masters. Napoleon banished the Knights and set about making the island into a modern state. He issued dispatches, abolished feudal privileges, and freed two thousand slaves. Meanwhile, his men scoured the monasteries, churches, and knightly properties for treasure. On June 19, they set off once more, their trunks filled with gold.

On board, Napoleon pondered Islamic history and chattered about his wife. “Josephine almost always formed the subject of our intimate chats,” Bourrienne noted. “His love for her verged on idolatory.”
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The thought of Josephine was a distraction from the awful conditions on board, for the meticulously planned food stores had spoiled and the men were living on dry, wormy biscuits. When the fleet landed at Aboukir, Napoleon was concerned that Nelson might catch them—they were very vulnerable to attack just in port. He demanded his men disembark immediately, but the sea was rough and many boats capsized. Already exhausted, the soldiers began marching to Alexandria, spurred on by the thought of finding drinking water. Alexandria surrendered quickly, and Napoleon’s men won a victory over Mameluke troops at Shubra Khit, a village on the Nile. Buoyed by these triumphs, he commanded his battle-scarred men to continue on to Cairo.

If he had been missing Josephine on the boat, he was craving her in Egypt. In the calm after the victory over the Mamelukes, he had been boasting of his wife’s excellence. Junot, seeing the men laughing behind their hands as their leader extolled Josephine’s virtue, decided Napoleon must be told the truth. A cynical philanderer, Junot had little belief in love. Most of all, he hated Josephine for dismissing Louise because of their affair, and he wanted revenge.

As Junot accompanied Napoleon past an oasis, he seized his moment. He told him that Josephine had continued her affair with Hippolyte and that all Paris knew it. He reiterated that Louise had traveled with Josephine en route to Italy and she had seen everything. Napoleon fell into a state of shock: His face paled and his limbs began jerking. He beat his head with his fists. “I have no wish to be the laughingstock … I will divorce her.” He cried out, “Divorce—I want a public and sensational divorce.”

He dashed to Bourrienne and asked him the truth.

Josephine!—and I six hundred leagues from her—you ought to have told me. That she should have deceived me like this!—Woe to them!—I will exterminate the whole race of fops and puppies! As to her—divorce! Yes, divorce! A public and open divorce!
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Napoleon said he would write to his brother Joseph to pursue the divorce, but Bourrienne attempted to quiet him, urging that it would be unreasonable to rely on hearsay evidence while so far away. He told him that it was unfair to accuse a woman of such infidelity when she was not present to defend herself. As for divorce, “it would be time to think of that hereafter.”
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Napoleon eventually agreed to restrain himself from immediate action. His anger was subsiding. “I would give anything if what Junot had told me was untrue, I love her so much.”
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But the seeds had been sown, and it was clearly only a matter of time before he abandoned his wife. Night after night, Napoleon called his stepson to his tent to bemoan Josephine’s behavior. Eugène was powerless to defend her in the face of his emotion. Josephine was effectively ruined.

Napoleon was distraught, but he was able to put his feelings aside to focus on the campaign. At Embabeh, they took on the Mamelukes again, and he sent home news of his great victory at “The Battle of the Pyramids.” On July 24, he entered Cairo. Instead of the opulence they expected, his men found “shadowy houses often in ruins, even the public buildings seem like dungeons, shops are nothing better than stables.” Mercilessly, they complained that all the children were too skinny and covered in flies.
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Napoleon requisitioned the palace of Alfi Elfi Bey on the edge of the city. Only recently renovated, the residence was a riot of marble, mirrors, damask curtains, and silk-woven Persian carpets, with sunken baths on both floors. He settled in and sent the Directory his requirements for creating a properly French community in Cairo.

1st, a company of actors; 2d, a company of dancers; 3d, some dealers in marionettes, at least three or four; 4th, a hundred French women; 5th, the wives of all the men employed in the
corps; 6th, twenty surgeons, thirty apothecaries, and ten Physicians; 7th, some founders; 8th, some distillers and dealers in liquor; 9th, fifty gardeners with their families, and the seeds of every kind of vegetable; 10th, each party to bring with them: 200,000 pints of brandy; 11th, 30,000 ells of blue and scarlet cloth; 12th, a supply of soap and oil.
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The conqueror also ordered the building of hospitals and bakeries, made mandatory the use of lit torches outside houses, and forbade the burial of bodies inside the city walls. Declaring himself the liberator of the Egyptian people, he set up newspapers, threw balls and receptions, and founded the Egyptian Institute for the scholars he had brought with him. The wives who had hidden themselves in uniforms now appeared openly, while the soldiers and scholars began to befriend the Egyptian women, though they were rather shocked at their size (to compliment an Egyptian lady, they learned, one should say “she was so beautiful, she could not get through the door”). The Egyptians complained that the Frenchmen were giving the women ideas about dominance, since they gave gifts and presents and “pride themselves on their submission to women.”

With Cairo secure, Napoleon went back to contemplating Junot’s revelations. On July 25, he sent Joseph an anguished letter. “I have a lot of domestic problems for the veil is completely torn away. You are the only person left to me in this world,” he mourned. “It is a sad state of affairs when all one’s affection is concentrated in a single person. You know what I mean.” In words not dissimilar to those in his novel
Clisson et Eugénie,
he said he wished never to see Josephine again. “I have had enough of people. I need solitude and isolation. Greatness no longer interests me. All feeling in me is dried up. At twenty-nine, everything is over.”
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Eugène wrote quickly to his mother.

My dear mama, I have so much to say to you that I don’t know how to start. Bonaparte has been miserable for five days, as a result of a conversation with Julien, Junot, and Berthier. Their
words have affected him more than I would have believed. All I have heard amounts to this: that Charles traveled in your carriage until you were within three posting stations of Paris; that you met him in Paris; that you were with him at the Theatre of the Italians in the private boxes; that he gave you your little dog; that even now you are with him. Such, in scattered phrases, is everything that I have heard. You know, mama, that I don’t believe a word; but what is certain is that the general is very upset. However, he redoubles his kindnesses to me. He seems to say, by his actions, that children are not responsible for the faults of their mother. Your son, however, chooses to believe that all this gossip has been manufactured by your enemies. Your son loves you as much as ever and is as eager as ever to greet you. I hope that when you do come all will be forgotten.
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