Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (37 page)

At three
P.M.
, the newly crowned emperor and empress departed Notre-Dame, taking a longer route back so that even more Parisians could witness their grandeur. Their carriage was surrounded by five hundred pages carrying torches to allow everybody a proper view of their rulers in the descending winter gloom. Every building was illuminated, and giant laurel-leaf “N”s hung from the balconies. At the Place de la Concorde, a huge star stood at the spot where Louis XVI had been executed. “Never have I seen on any face an expression of joy, of contentment, of good fortune, to compare with that which animated the figure of the Empress,” recalled Mademoiselle Avrillion. But the royalists scoffed at Napoleon’s sisters, “who had left their laundry behind and now appeared in all their finery and diamonds to carry the train of Barras’s former mistress.” Monarchists and revolutionaries alike were scandalized by the elevations of, as Madame de Staël said, “the bourgeois and bourgeoises of Ajaccio” (Napoleon’s hometown).
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Rather than hosting a ceremonial dinner, the emperor decreed that he would dine privately with his empress, much to the fury of his family. Napoleon whisked Josephine into the private salon, where he asked her to wear her crown for the meal, “because no one could wear a crown
with more grace.”
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It was a triumphant moment for her. Replete with success, she watched, with bitter irony, the courtiers who had so recently snubbed her all scrambling to please her. Confident in her position, she was inclined to be much more kindly disposed toward the Bonaparte sisters and to the other members of her husband’s entourage she distrusted—and this only added to Napoleon’s esteem for her.

Bonaparte’s improper act of crowning himself became gossip across Europe, discussed in horror by scandalized royalists and all those he had exiled. It appeared that the man’s ambition knew no bounds. It also proved a logistical headache for Jacques-Louis David, the former revolutionary who had been declared the court painter, as he had been commissioned to produce the official portrait of the coronation. For months, David struggled to find a way to show Napoleon crowning himself without making the picture appear ridiculous. After watching his master in torment, an apprentice suggested he paint Napoleon crowning Josephine. Napoleon approved the idea, and the problem was solved. Four years later, he and Josephine visited David’s studio, where the emperor spent over an hour scrutinizing every aspect of the picture. Much had been changed: Josephine and Napoleon were made to look younger and more statuesque; Madame Mère, who had left Paris in a temper, was painted into the congregation; and the Bonaparte sisters, perhaps as a sop from Napoleon, were shown standing to the side, rather than bearing the mantle. Through David’s alchemy, what had been a shocking insult to the pope and a complete usurpation of his role became refigured as an act of love and devotion from emperor to empress. Later, Napoleon railed that Josephine had indulged in “little intrigues” in order to put herself at the center of the painting. But at the time of viewing, he was most gratified. He told David that he was grateful to him “for recording for posterity the proof of the affection I wished to give to the woman who shared with me the burden of office.”
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Not even Napoleon was quite vain enough to wish the official portrait showed him crowning himself.

The emperor’s hunger for absolute power increased daily. He retained the tribunate, the senate, and the legislative body, but they were thin pretenses that existed mainly to persuade the French that they were
still living in a Republic. The emperor coined a catechism for schoolchildren. When they were asked, “What should one think of those who fail in their duties to our emperor?” they should reply, “According to the apostle St. Paul, they would be resisting the order established by God Himself and would deserve eternal damnation.” Napoleon liked religion when it suited him. In January, only a month after his coronation, he abolished one of the most celebrated innovations of the Republic: the revolutionary calendar.

The new emperor decreed everything from state policy to women’s fashion. He desired his new court at the Tuileries to outshine every other court across Europe for luxury and magnificence, outdoing even those of his Bourbon predecessors. For him, the court was a tool to demonstrate his belief that he was the most terrifying ruler in history. Essentially, his guiding aesthetic combined the style of ancient Rome with the brilliance and excess of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and Louis XVI. “What I want above all is grandeur,” he said, “what is grand above all is beautiful.” Napoleon’s favorite architectural team of Percier and Fontaine was entrusted with transforming the Tuileries. He found the palace too “bare and simple” (even though it had been redecorated since he arrived) and wished to erase all memories of the dull old Directory. Percier and Fontaine were instructed to make a new banquet room, a gallery, and a great central staircase; to hang the walls with thick silk brocades from Lyon; and to cover the place in decorated panels. Gold bees and the imperial eagle flew across curtains and adorned mahogany furniture—some much the worse for wear, thanks to Napoleon’s nervous habit of hacking into them with a penknife. He made plans for a theater and a chapel. Visitor’s eyes were dazzled by gilt, jewels, and silver everywhere they looked. The stables contained twelve hundred handsome horses, as well as dozens of carriages, all painted green. The annual budget for decorating and redecorating the imperial rooms and maintaining the palaces soared to six million francs. Napoleon had no time for suggestions that his court should reflect the aesthetic culture of Rome, which was perceived to be restrained. The days of the revolutionary symbols on the front of the Tuileries, the austere interiors, and the Committee of Public Safety were long gone. The glitter and the glamour worked to “throw dust in people’s eyes.”
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Napoleon was even more insistent that rules of etiquette and precedence be imposed on his courtiers, most of whom were in their twenties and thirties and too young to remember much of the ancien régime. The regulations of Louis XIV and his successors were pulled down from the library shelves. Madame Campan was questioned in minute detail, and anyone else who had been at Versailles was asked to provide information about life at the old court. A team headed by the Comte de Ségur produced the detailed volume
Etiquette du Palais Impérial,
which gave exact rules on everything from where people should stand at a court assembly to how they should seat themselves at dinner. Napoleon established a huge household for himself, bigger than that of Louis XVI, with a grand almoner, a grand marshal, a grand equerry, a grand huntsman, and a grand master of ceremonies. Josephine had an equally unwieldy staff of more than a hundred, including twenty ladies-in-waiting—four more than Marie Antoinette had. She also had seventeen ladies of the palace, including ladies of the wardrobe and ladies of the bedchamber. The competition to serve Josephine was intense, particularly as Napoleon often recruited his mistresses from her household. All were overseen by her
dame d’honneur,
Duchesse Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, a relative of Josephine’s first husband. A Saint-Domingue heiress and an avowed ancien régime royalist in her late thirties, she made it clear that she was merely deigning to be at the court; she even cowed the emperor into silence at times. Highly efficient, she kept Josephine’s household running perfectly, overseeing the day-to-day needs, the visits, the work of the servants, and deciding on presentations and invitations.

Josephine also had an almoner, chamberlain, two equerries (one to oversee the stables), lords-in-waiting, ushers, footmen, and pages. There was hardly any point to such a huge household; most of the ladies and gentlemen had very little to do but sit about, complain, and adjust their costume. It was one great self-serving machine: Josephine dressed three times a day to give them an occupation, and whole occasions were held to give them something to anticipate. The only true purpose was to create the aspect of majesty; the court functioned as a vast, pleasing looking glass for Napoleon.

The emperor was strict about formality. All the men of Josephine’s
household were to remain in her outer apartments, and if one needed to receive orders, he should scratch at the door of the bedroom, where one of her ladies “must always be in attendance, and seek permission to be introduced into her presence.” With the etiquette of “scratching,” the influence of Versailles was complete—courtiers there had been firmly instructed to scratch rather than knock at doors. There was no more republican equality; those at Napoleon’s court behaved with the subservience of a courtier to a king. “The Emperor is too grand for anybody to tell him the truth,” Josephine wrote to Eugène, “everybody who surrounds him flatters him all day long.”
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As Madame de Rémusat recalled, “The fever of vanity seemed every day to lay stronger claim on of us.”
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Napoleon’s obsessive interest in constructing a new world to surround him soon extended to female fashion. Despite his own passion for seeing Josephine in diaphanous dresses and gauzy wraps, he demanded that her ladies wear embossed gowns of lamé, brocade, and satin, with mandatory velvet trains, all heavily embroidered in gold. As the men gleamed with medals, so the women must sparkle with jewels, and never wear the same gown twice. Laure Junot was firmly reminded of her duty at one court event: “Madame, you have worn that dress several times. It is becoming, but we have seen it before.”
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Napoleon claimed he installed strictures on fashion to assist the French manufacturers. The result was very like the stiff grandeur of the court of Marie Antoinette, down to the restrictive and cumbersome nature of the apparel—exactly what women had been so eager to throw off after the Revolution. The empress sometimes rebelled against Napoleon by wearing trains of tulle or gauzy ensembles, but she was entirely obedient to his strictures about jewels and was always wearing new ensembles. She was clever at making a dress look different with shawls and accessories, but essentially, all her gowns were made to be worn once. An inventory in 1809 found 49 grand court dresses, 676 gowns, 60 cashmere shawls (and nearly 500 other shawls in other materials), 413 pairs of gloves, and more than 200 pairs of silk stockings.

Josephine’s coronation dress was the pattern for all her court gowns. She wore empire-line waists with high embroidered collars and trains attached to the back. Her dressmaker, Leroy, was the mastermind behind
her “look,” and he quickly became the most in-demand designer in Paris.
Le Journal des Dames et des Modes,
the fashion bible of the day, was filled with pictures of Josephine, the most stylish woman in the country. Even passionately patriotic British women nursed secret desires for a French gown
à la
empress.

Back in Britain, Lord Nelson and his mistress, Emma Hamilton, had set up home in Merton Place, near Wimbledon. They turned a rather ramshackle house into a tribute to his victories, with large “N”s on the walls, pieces of his ships over the staircase, and fittings from crockery to crocus planters decorated with his name and image. What Nelson was doing on the domestic level, Napoleon wished to write large over his nation. There were “N”s and “J”s, eagles and swans, everywhere. He placed the lion stolen from the column in the Piazza San Marco, Venice, in the middle of Paris and arranged the bronze horses from San Marco in the Tuileries Gardens.

Napoleon set Percier and Fontaine about feverishly making monuments to his great successes in order to remind everyone of his brilliance. He demanded that a sixty-foot-high elephant inscribed with his victories be placed over the Champs-Élysées, facing toward the Tuileries (the plans for the elephant would be replaced eventually with those for the Arc de Triomphe). He was equally delighted with the idea of a column made from melted-down Austrian cannon in the Place Vendôme to commemorate the Grand Army. Percier and Fontaine scribbled out plans for towers, giant statues, and more columns, each one unashamedly masculine in style, all situated to prove that the emperor could never be dislodged.

Now that Napoleon was emperor, he was ever more determined to have a son. He asked Josephine to feign a pregnancy and then pretend she had given birth, while he offered to find a child, probably from a mistress who was pregnant at the time. She agreed, but the chief physician refused to be party to such a deception. Certainly, it would have been nigh impossible, considering the close quarters at which everybody observed Josephine and the number of spies on her staff. When this plan failed, her position was weakened. Whenever Napoleon and Josephine argued, usually after she had asked him questions he didn’t
like, he would counter by claiming he was not truly married to her. She would cry that she had the certificate of marriage to prove it; when Fesch was consulted, he agreed with her and said that the marriage was legal and validly solemnized. He advised Josephine to keep the certificate close.

A
S EMPEROR
, N
APOLEON
had become more brutal and aggressive than ever. He was curt with his generals and courtiers and often attacked his servants. He once seized Berthier and banged his head against a stone wall; he kicked a minister in the genitals for presenting unappealing statistics. In the morning, during the ritual of dressing, he would sometimes throw nail scissors, brushes, or boxes at the servants if he felt they prodded him too hard or dressed him in something he did not like. He slapped staff, pinched court ladies and pulled their hair while he insulted them, and loved to offend anyone he could in public. Despite his incredible power, he derived a thrill from making his inferiors tremble with fear. As tyrannical as a medieval king, he screamed and shouted, complained and demanded, and everyone had to obey. Only Josephine had the ability to calm him with her soft hands and gentle words.