Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (45 page)

As a young woman looking for protectors, Josephine once followed the hunt, but the Fontainebleau she returned to as an empress was very different. One thousand two hundred people descended on the estates in the autumn, including all the Bonapartes and the entire Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. Napoleon decreed that a hunt must take place three times a week, even in heavy rain. All the nobles and their households had their own hunting colors for riding coats—Josephine’s was purple, and Napoleon ordered that Hortense put aside her mourning dress and wear blue and silver. The men would go ahead to hunt, and then Josephine would lead the trail of ladies in open barouches before presiding over the hunt breakfast. While she once found hunting exhilarating, now she was cast down by the cruelty and hated the ritual her husband had imposed.

She was ill at ease, and the entire court was barely more cheerful. People found it hard to celebrate with the emperor after so many men had died in battle. Napoleon complained to Talleyrand in frustration that the court “refused to be amused and sat around looking tired and sad with long faces.” As he saw it, he had given them the marvelous treat of Fontainebleau, and they repaid him with melancholy. He set up lavish entertainments celebrating his victories and decreed that every night would see a splendid ball in one of the princely apartments, conducted just as it had been in the Bourbon days. Still, his courtiers sat unhappily in their heavy robes. In truth, it was his own behavior reflected back at him; paranoid about plots and whispers, he had become so remote that, according to Madame de Rémusat, “no one could reach the Emperor except Josephine.” In the evenings he would dine with her, then expect the entire court to assemble in the room designated for the ball. Josephine would enter and take her place, then a deathly silence would settle over them until Napoleon entered, seated himself next to the empress, and “with a forbidding expression,” watched his courtiers dance. Nothing, recalled Laure Junot, could describe “the magnificence, the magical luxury that now surrounded the imperial couple,” and the contrast between it and their downcast mood.

Once, Josephine was able to lull hundreds of people into feelings of cheerful ease. Now she was sad and nervous, constantly sending her ladies to monitor the rumors about divorce. She could see that some courtiers were distancing themselves from her in preparation for a new empress. Still, she tried to obey Napoleon in everything.

At the end of the year, Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme, was made the king of Westphalia, a country essentially created for him out
of parts of Prussia, Hesse, and Brunswick. Princess Catherine of Württemberg was hastily brought over to marry him in a grand ceremony at court. One of the guests, the handsome widower Crown Prince Frederick Louis of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was captivated by Josephine, but she was too afraid of offending Napoleon to respond to his blandishments. Still, while Napoleon was away, she went to the theater with the crown prince. Napoleon was infuriated, declaring his wife a second Marie Antoinette and demanding that his rival leave Paris within two days.

The Bonapartes were as intent as ever on pushing Napoleon toward a divorce. But this, as usual, only persuaded him to keep his wife; his family caused him endless distress, and Josephine’s presence soothed him. Napoleon’s beautiful younger sister Caroline Murat began an intense affair with the debonair General Junot. Only twenty-four, she was as hardened in her quest for power as her siblings. Annoyed that her husband had not been given a kingdom, she wanted Junot’s support in her mission to depose her brother and put her husband in his place. Eventually, the affair soured and Caroline turned to the wily Austrian diplomat Count Metternich. He seduced Junot’s wife, Laure, around the same time, and when Caroline told her former lover, he set upon Laure with a pair of scissors and nearly killed her. Jérôme turned out to be a hopeless king, imposing huge taxes, seducing every woman in sight, and plunging his treasury into debt. With him behaving like a lascivious satyr, Pauline taking a string of lovers, the Murats prompting crimes of passion, and Louis’s malicious treatment of Hortense, it was hardly surprising that Napoleon fled to the calm of Josephine’s room.

Although Hortense was pregnant with her third child, she was desperately unhappy again. The brief reconciliation after Napoleon Charles’s death had been forgotten. Louis was treating her as cruelly as ever, and she was losing her looks thanks to her suffering. Napoleon tried to intervene. “A King commands and seeks no one’s counsel,” he wrote to his brother. “In your domestic life you should display the paternal and effeminate character you show toward your government, and toward the government the severity you show your wife.”
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Louis did not listen. He knew that the wind was blowing toward a divorce, and he resented being stuck with the daughter of Josephine.

Napoleon’s ministers were infuriated with his indecision over the
divorce. On the one hand was a son, a royal liaison, and a legacy. On the other was his Josephine, to whom he felt he owed loyalty for their long years of marriage and her support when everybody else had seen him as a Corsican upstart. The tsar hadn’t sent any firm commitment that he would hand over his sister Catherine; Napoleon read reports of various royal ladies and found none particularly engaging. At the end of the year, he traveled to Italy to celebrate his victories, without Josephine, carrying a list of twenty eligible princesses.

Josephine wrote to her son of her worries. “My own defense is to live a blameless life. I no longer go out, I have no pleasures.” She had come to resent the grandeur surrounding her. “How unhappy do thrones make people, my dear Eugène!” she wrote. “I would resign mine tomorrow, without any pain. For me the love of the Emperor is everything. If I should lose that, I would have little regret about anything else.”
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To her deep distress, she heard that Napoleon had brought Marie over from Warsaw and installed her in a house on the Quai Voltaire. There, he visited her secretly and loved to play a game in which they disguised themselves as a bourgeois couple and he engaged the local shopkeepers in chat about the devilish Bonaparte. Desperate, Josephine attempted to distract her husband by throwing one of her ladies-in-waiting in his way. He proved happy to dally with a new woman, but he still visited Marie. Late at night, his carriage left the palace for the townhouse of the beautiful Polish countess with golden hair.

One evening in March 1808, Josephine was about to enter the Yellow Salon when she received word that Napoleon was ill. She hurried to his apartments and found him in court dress, prostrate in bed, wracked by stomach pain, and weeping hysterically. She sat beside him and he pulled her into his arms. “My poor Josephine, I can’t possibly leave you,” he wailed. He demanded that she get into bed with him, and they made passionate love. She spent the night with him, although both were restless and slept poorly. That morning, she later found out, he had resolved on a divorce, but the thought of it was so painful that it had made him ill. “Why can’t the devil of a man make up his mind?” cried Talleyrand when he heard the news of the reconciliation.

In March 1808, King Charles IV of Spain abdicated after an uprising and allowed his son to take his place in an attempt to please the people.
He hated his son, who had tried to depose him the previous year. In April he appealed to Napoleon for help—an unwise move. Napoleon sent Marie Walewska home and commanded the entire Spanish royal family to meet him in Bayonne, on the French side of the Pyrenees. Once there, he sent for Josephine; he required her gentle diplomacy to charm the king, the queen, the power-hungry crown prince, and the prime minister, who was both the king’s favorite and the queen’s rumored lover. Napoleon had no desire to actually help them; he wished to persuade them into accepting his “protection.”

Josephine played the role of gracious hostess, befriending the queen and lending her clothes and jewels. A second rebellion broke out in Madrid, and Marshal Murat and his men suppressed it with savagery. Napoleon informed Charles IV that only he could save the king’s life, and the royal family agreed to give the throne to the emperor. Napoleon decreed that Joseph Bonaparte would be crowned, and he sent the Spanish royals to live under luxurious arrest. He then spent the last days in Bayonne relaxing with Josephine, pleased with a job well done. They ran hand in hand along the beach and swam in the sea. He played his usual tricks, throwing her shoes into the water and pushing her over in the sand. They were like young lovers on honeymoon.

On the way back to Saint-Cloud, Josephine continued performing as the empress, receiving gifts, sitting as guest of honor at banquets, and listening to speeches. But almost as soon as they reached the palace, Napoleon heard that there had been further uprisings in Spain, and Joseph had been so afraid of the mob that he’d fled to the frontier rather than be crowned. Worst of all, the French troops had been defeated at Bailén in Spain. The rout of the seemingly invincible French troops was shocking news for all Europe, and Napoleon knew it would prompt Austria to attack.

Josephine paid much more attention to the news that Hortense had given birth to a third son, Charles Louis Napoleon (later to be known as Louis Napoleon), on April 20. She hoped that this boy might have a hold on Napoleon’s heart.

In September, Napoleon departed to meet the tsar in Germany. Before he left, he and Josephine played “prisoner’s base” in the dark with a few courtiers, a game in which players had to run to base before another
player spotted them. Footmen with torches illuminated the emperor and empress running around in their finery, until Napoleon swept Josephine away, despite the protests of the others. His lightheartedness made her feel more secure. “For the last six months he has been simply perfect to me,” she wrote to Eugène. “So when I saw him leave this morning, it was with sadness at the parting but not concern about the future.”
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But as soon as she was out of earshot, courtiers again began gossiping. As everybody but Josephine knew, before he departed, the emperor had ordered a diadem in Paris for a new empress.

“I wish the Emperor Alexander to be dazzled by the spectacle of my power,” Napoleon decreed. He ordered all his German vassal kings and princes to attend his meeting with the tsar at Erfurt, and adorned the palace in incredible style with paintings and ornaments sent from Paris. He brought French chefs to tend to the palates of the Russians, and the company of the Comédie-Française, including Talma, its star, came to entertain them. Josephine, hitherto the greatest display of Napoleon’s power, was absent. There was good reason; he had decided he wished to awe the tsar into allowing him his sister’s hand in marriage. He saw himself as doing a great act for his country. “It would be a real sacrifice for me. I love Josephine; I will never be happier with anyone else, but my family and Talleyrand and Fouché and all the politicians insist upon it in the name of France.”
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After his first meeting with Napoleon in Tilsit the previous year, the tsar had arrived back in St. Petersburg to find his family and ministers furious at his gesture of peace toward the emperor. They were outraged by the harsh strictures imposed on Prussia and resented Napoleon’s demand that any French citizen who had taken exile in Russia should be expelled. When the tsar saw his darling sister again, he was even more dubious about the marriage. As he well knew, his mother, the dowager empress, would revile the idea of her beloved Catherine becoming the wife of the emperor of France. Marriage to a divorcé was scandalous, and furthermore, Napoleon was a commoner and the merciless killer of so many Russian men, as well as the cruel aggressor of Prussia.

When the tsar arrived in Erfurt, he was determined not to be beguiled by Napoleon. He enjoyed the daily hunting parties, receptions, and balls but offered no concessions. Napoleon made every effort to
please, even letting his rival shine on the dance floor. “The Emperor Alexander dances, but not I. Forty years are after all, forty years,” he wrote to Josephine.
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The emperor begged, promised, and bowed low in the hope of winning the grand duchess’s hand. “I am very busy,” Napoleon told his wife. “Conversations which last whole days and which do not improve my cold. Still all goes well. I am pleased with Alexander, he ought to be with me. If he were a woman, I think I would make him my mistress.”
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The emperor’s cause was actively undermined by Talleyrand, who was taking money from Austria to push its interests. On a personal level, he still resented the forced marriage to his mistress Catherine Grand, whom he did not love. Politically, he had come to fear Napoleon’s wild military ambition and believed that Europe could not be at peace if he were allowed to continue unchecked. Behind Napoleon’s back, Talleyrand suggested to the tsar that an alliance with Austria would give him more power and independence and stonewall Napoleon’s rampant desire for territory.

Napoleon decided to put his cards on the table. “Use any argument you like,” he told Talleyrand, begging his minister to persuade Alexander to hand over his sister. “Tell him I will agree with him on any of his plans for the partition of Turkey.” The tsar’s spies were aware that no movements had been made toward a divorce, and Alexander used the knowledge to play for time. He told Napoleon he would happily give his consent, but that of another was needed: Josephine. By remaining uncommitted, he got everything he wanted. In return for a promise of assistance if Austria declared war on France, Napoleon said that he would not intervene if Russia invaded Finland or Turkey, and the tsar could do as he wished with Poland. Marie Walewska’s sacrifice had been worthless.

When he returned home to his wife, Napoleon was shifty with her, failing to meet her eye. She was suspicious but too afraid to ask questions. After only ten days, he departed for Spain, asking for a good-luck kiss. She pleaded with him, “Will you never stop making war?” He replied evasively and refused to allow her to accompany him. “It is not I who direct the course of events, I only obey them.” When she wrote to him of her concerns that Austria was growing more powerful, he was
dismissive. “You are in a black mood of depression,” he said. “Austria will not make war on me … nor will Russia desert us. People in Paris are mad! Things are going splendidly here.”
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