Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (39 page)

After the shopkeepers had departed, Josephine gave audiences and applied herself to her correspondence. She also went through petitions and received charitable requests. She wrote incessant letters requesting help for all types of supplicants. “People get them from me by pestering me,” she explained to the minister of war when he protested at the sheer number of notes of recommendation. At a quarter to ten, she entered her Yellow Salon in order to take the morning meal with her ladies. Hers would be a more leisurely affair than her husband’s, with soup, entrées, and roasts arranged across the table, followed by sweets. There was no formal dining room in the palace (it was generally seen as a British custom), so a white cloth would be laid out on whatever table was indicated.

In the afternoon she received visitors, many of them émigrés demanding favors, and then perhaps would take a short walk. Later, as she
did not read and had little interest in needlework, she often strummed her harp, apparently always the same tune. The waiting to see whether Napoleon might appear was interminably dull, and Josephine sometimes found it difficult to bear. She once railed that she was little more than a “bejewelled slave.”

By the late afternoon, she was back in her apartments, dressing for the evening ahead, usually in one of her gold-embroidered gowns. Then she would wait to be called to dinner, which was supposed to be at six but might be delayed for hours while Napoleon worked. Most evenings they dined together for the quick twenty minutes it took him to wolf down his food. Official banquets and social celebrations were so replete with complicated dishes that they might take up most of the day. The custom of serving all the dishes together still prevailed, rather than the
à la russe
fashion of eating courses in sequence. The tables of the Tuileries groaned under silver candelabra, foot-high tureens of soup, and dishes of meat, fish, and fowl served on Sèvres porcelain decorated with pictures of Napoleon’s victories.

After dinner, the empress would retire to her salon and spend the evening with her courtiers, talking or playing cards or billiards. She was not particularly fond of chess, but she sportingly played whist and lotto with her visitors, ministers, ambassadors, and ladies. Napoleon forbade playing for stakes, but when he was away, she and her circle bet money, sometimes large amounts. Josephine also loved billiards, so much that it was the only game in which the emperor humored her and allowed her to beat him.

At ten, Napoleon might call her to read to him or join him in conversation; he was particularly partial to telling ghost stories. Her salon was connected to his room via a hidden staircase, and he would come to the door and tap on it as a signal that he needed her. Her ladies then had to wait for her in the salon until she returned. Invariably, by the time she arrived, they had fallen asleep, leaning against the tables for support since they were not supposed to sit down. If she was to be alone for the night, she went to bed at around midnight—allowed, for a few hours, to be free of rouge, with her hair undressed and her shoulders not weighed down by a heavy golden gown.

On days when Napoleon did not require her, Josephine saw her
merchants and talked to her ladies. As one of her friends remarked, she could “idle away her days doing nothing and yet never be bored with it.”
¹⁹
They didn’t guess how frustrated she grew.

Her “mania for having her portrait painted” meant that she was often sitting for artists or planning new compositions. She would give pictures of herself to anybody and everybody—friends, relations, courtiers, tradesmen. In her hundreds of commissioned portraits, she was ever young, beautiful, elegant, and graceful, her mouth closed to shield her bad teeth. Those who wished to please her adorned their houses with her delicate face. Such was the passion for her among the public that her portraits were transferred onto china, fans, and cards, so even the poorest laborer could display the empress over his fire.

Her apartments consisted of an antechamber, a first salon, a second salon, and her own salon. In her private rooms, she had a bedroom, a dressing room, a boudoir, and a bathroom. In every one of the emperor’s palaces, the layout was the same, and the rooms were decorated in a similarly imperial manner, with stolid Jacob furniture, tapestries, gilding, and drapes. As an empress, Josephine lived her whole day in public. Ladies and servants bustled around her rooms, and everyone stared when she ventured out.

Josephine was naturally informal and enjoyed conversation and befriending people when she traveled. This, Napoleon told her sharply, would have to stop. She should always be surrounded by “splendor,” escorted by infantry and cavalry, and met by the tolling of bells rung by the town mayor or prefect. When she returned to Paris, she would be greeted by cannons, and the courtiers would line up to pay homage. To him, it was time she started behaving like an empress. She missed Malmaison terribly, where the plants grew unseen by her and her orangutan wandered the grounds alone. Even when Napoleon was away, he wished her to keep up the imperial appearance, and that meant remaining in one of his grand palaces full of mahogany eagles and obeisant courtiers rather than walking the gardens of her beloved Malmaison.

When Napoleon did agree to her visiting Malmaison, he was envious of how much she loved it. Sometimes, seized by rage, he shot her swans, uprooted her plants, and killed her pets. When she begged him
not to shoot the animals during the breeding season, he was scathing. “It seems that everything is prolific at Malmaison, except Madame.”

Most of the time, Josephine could not go anywhere at all. Her life was minutely constrained, every detail reported back to Napoleon. She sat, ornate and alluring, until he had finished his work in the evening and might come to dally away ten minutes with her. Yet he relied on her emotionally and saw her as his essential helpmate. They divided the labor of imperial success. He stood for aggression, strategy, military triumph, and tyranny, while she assumed all the roles he reviled: patron of art and beauty, manners and sympathy. Her kind heart and gentle words smoothed over his anger and fooled people into thinking that Napoleon had a more humane side. “Nature,” he told his wife, “has given me a strong and resolute character; she has made you of lace and gauze.”
²⁰
Around Napoleon, the air fizzed and crackled; he was electric, intense, and terrifying. Josephine created a bewitching spell of ease and pleasure.

Josephine showed few signs of the independent will she once had. Her energy was invested in making herself Napoleon’s elegant, perfect wife, ideally submissive, ready to respond to his every need. “Josephine was invariably, unfailingly sweet with the Emperor,” recalled Mademoiselle Avrillion, “adapting herself to his every mood, every whim with a complaisance such as I have never seen in anyone else in the world. By studying the slightest change in his expression or tone she offered him the only things he now required of her.”
²¹
She might be the married and consecrated empress, but Napoleon, as she knew, did as he liked, and he would divorce her if he felt it necessary—especially for the chance of having a son. Few believed that she was still capable of having a child. She was forty-one and, as the doctors had told Napoleon, her menses had ceased.

And yet he was fonder of her than he had been since Egypt. She was still the only person allowed to address him as
tu.
He was eminently satisfied with his act of crowning her, thus stealing authority from both the Republic and the pope, and she was his evidence that he had practically usurped the role of God in anointing a sovereign consort. Laure Junot recalled how she saw the empress enter a room at Saint-Cloud, wearing clinging white muslin secured by medallions at the shoulder.
Even though Napoleon professed to detest muslin, he went to her, kissed her on the shoulder and the forehead, and took her to a mirror so he could inspect her from all sides. “Now, Josephine, I think I must be jealous, you must have some conquest in mind. Why are you so beautiful today?” She replied, “I know that you love to see me in white and so I put on a white gown, that’s all.” “Very well, then, if it was to please me, then you have indeed succeeded.”
²²
He promptly kissed her again.

Napoleon remained obsessed by her jewels and dress. He regularly interfered in what she wore, pulling her low-cut gowns from her wardrobe and tearing her shawl, even throwing clothing into the fire if he thought it ugly. He would erupt into her room and demand that she change her gown or jewelry for no particular reason, forcing her to try on outfit after outfit until he was content. “I care only for the people who are useful to me—and only so long as they are useful,” he said on St. Helena.
²³
He loved Josephine—but she was also beneficial to him.

T
HE GREAT EMPEROR
was still jealous of Hippolyte Charles and would never hear his name mentioned. On one occasion, he was walking with General Duroc, and his face paled as he gripped the general’s arm. Duroc thought he was about to faint and was going to hurry for help, but the emperor silenced him furiously. Napoleon had seen Hippolyte Charles in a passing carriage—the first time he had laid eyes on the dandy since Italy.

Though Napoleon guarded and worshipped his wife, he demanded that a steady stream of beautiful young women be available in the chamber next to his. He refused to allow his wife or her spies inside. Constant would answer the door, saying firmly, “I have orders to let no one in, not even Her Majesty the Empress.” Actresses, courtiers, ladies-in-waiting, dancers, and ladies of fashion: Few refused Napoleon’s call, even though his lovemaking was brusque and he lost interest almost as soon as he had conquered a woman. The women were instructed not to wear perfume and often had to wait for him having already undressed, so that matters could be speedily conducted. They hoped for jewels, influence, and money; they were curious about the great man himself; and of course they wished to prove themselves more beautiful than Josephine.

Though Josephine resolved not to be jealous, she struggled, for not only did Napoleon conduct his affairs with flamboyant indiscretion, he also liked to acquaint her with every detail. As he fiddled with her makeup pots or vandalized her shawls, he would talk about his latest infatuation, praising the other woman’s beauty and asking Josephine what she knew about her. Within a few days of sleeping with a new mistress, he would be telling his wife of the conquest with, as Madame de Rémusat said, “the most indecent openness.” Then he would describe “the physical imperfections and anatomical peculiarities,” as well as his thoughts on the “performance” of the ladies—information he shared with his male courtiers as well. Most of the women were half Josephine’s age, and nothing was more painful to her than hearing of lissome bodies that had not yet aged, luxuriant hair when hers was thinning and growing gray, and faces that were always bright, even in the morning. He seemed to have no particular preference for brunettes or blondes. Any pretty girl would do.

Josephine also had to watch the progress of her husband’s love affairs, as he would often attend her salon in the evening and play cards or talk with his latest lady while his wife tried not to stare from the other side of the room. She pretended calm, but she could hardly bear his behavior and spent thousands on hiring others to watch and inform on his activities, much to the anger of her husband, who railed at how “she humiliates both herself and me by surrounding me with spies.”
²⁴
The empress demanded that her ladies-in-waiting write anonymous letters to Napoleon, reproaching him for his behavior (wisely, the ladies secretly burned the letters after they had written them), and when she knew he was with one of his mistresses, she would torment herself, weeping that she would be cast into oblivion and disgrace, forced out, and divorced.

As he began to tire of his conquest and turn his eye to another willing actress or lady-in-waiting, he would ask Josephine to help him let the woman down gently and tell her she was no longer needed: the coward’s way out. The price of Josephine’s continued presence as empress and consort was her willingness to forgive, even enable, Napoleon’s affairs. His desire for women had become so well known that people would thrust pretty girls in his way to gain influence, just as they
had done with the old despotic kings. Courtiers sent their wives to flirt with him in the hope of finding out his plans. Napoleon had started offering thousands of francs as little presents to those he took for the night; men were throwing their wives, lovers, and even daughters at him for money and favors. Some women even tried to seduce members of his entourage as a way of getting to him. But what he really wanted were the women who did not wish for him, those whom he could slap, compel, or browbeat into being his mistresses.

Napoleon claimed that his affairs meant nothing, though some women did gain power from their new status. When a woman received particular favor, she naturally became a focus for courtiers and ministers who needed assistance. One Madame de X was a royalist spy, eager to undermine the Jacobins, and ready to “abuse the indulgence” of the emperor by taking action to further the exiled king’s cause. As she knew, the way to please the ever suspicious Napoleon was to share gossip about plots against him, so she invented tales about certain courtiers and “many persons were ruined during her spell of favor.”
²⁵
Josephine was fearful of Madame de X and thought she had used her influence to try and send Eugène on an impossible mission. Luckily for her, Napoleon grew weary of Madame’s telltale tongue before she could do any lasting damage, and he asked Josephine to put an end to the affair. The empress did so, generously informing Madame de X that she wouldn’t hold any grudges.

Napoleon was too hardened to offer love to a susceptible woman and too ambitious and sexist to give a determined one a chance at power. The actresses who could use the liaison to win publicity came off the best of all. For, as Napoleon said, “Women shall have no influence at my Court; they may dislike me but I shall have peace and quietness.”
²⁶
He thought ladies “ornamental at fetes and that was about all.”
²⁷
He never forgot his position as an excluded young man in the post-revolutionary years, and he was not about to let any woman gain power over him now. “Women belong to the highest bidder,” he said contemptuously. “Power is what they desire … I take them and then forget them.”
²⁸
He often sounded more like an ancien régime roué than a great emperor.