Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (53 page)

Still, Hortense won in the end. Her third son, Charles Louis, became Napoleon III in April 1852. In 1853 he married Eugénie de Montijo, a pretty Spanish-born aristocrat, after seeing her at a ball. When he was overthrown after the failure of the Franco-Prussian War, they took refuge in Chislehurst in Kent. She died almost forty years after her husband, in 1920, after witnessing the world change in ways that Josephine never could have imagined.

E
UGÈNE CONTINUED AS
sensible and stoic as ever. After the fall of Napoleon, he retired to Munich and obeyed the strictures of his father-in-law, Maximilian of Bavaria, to keep out of French politics—although all his surviving children, except his second daughter, bore the middle name of Napoleon (with a second “E” for the females). Astonishingly, he succeeded in gaining seven hundred thousand francs from the Bourbons as compensation for his mother’s seized property. His six children (he lost one daughter, Caroline, in infancy) made auspicious marriages. His eldest daughter, Josephine, became queen consort to Oscar I of Sweden, the son of Désirée Clary and General Bernadotte. Josephine, like her grandmother, loved gardening, was a patroness of art, and always worked hard to promote her husband’s politics. Out of all the marriages, the most magnificent was that of his third daughter, Amelia, who became empress of Brazil. Her husband was so struck by her appearance that he apparently collapsed with emotion when he first saw her as her boat docked in Rio. Like her grandmother, she was renowned for her elegance, her gentle behavior at court, and her skill at hosting social events, a reputation that remained until her husband’s abdication in 1831. Eugène’s youngest son, Maximilian, married the eldest daughter of Tsar Nicholas I, Grand Duchess Maria (in the end, someone managed to seize a grand duchess). Eugène died in 1824 at the age of forty-two. Many royal households in Europe count themselves as his descendants.

Thérésa (Tallien) retired to Prince de Chimay’s estates in the Netherlands, where she lived until 1835, leaving behind ten children fathered by four men—her first husband, Tallien, the banker Ouvrard, and Chimay. Jean Lambert Tallien fell into poverty and finally had to accept a
pension of a hundred sous a month from Louis XVIII. He died of leprosy in 1820.

The free-spirited La Grassini became mistress to the Duke of Wellington in Paris, much to the shock of the newspapers. Pauline Fourès lived contentedly, surrounded by exotic birds in the home Napoleon bought for her in Paris. She wrote novels, of which the most successful was perhaps
Lord Wentworth,
and died in 1869. Marie Walewska remarried in 1816 but died the following year, shortly after the birth of a son. Alexandre, her son with Napoleon, became Napoleon III’s ambassador to Britain. At a London reception, a lady guest enthused about his striking resemblance to his “distinguished father.” “I had no idea, Madame,” he replied, “that you were acquainted with the late Count Walewski.”

Napoleon’s family took up occupation in Italy, welcomed by the Grand Duke of Florence and Pope Pius in Rome, still alive and willing to forgive the Bonapartes their slights. Italy had been thoroughly and cruelly conquered by the Bonapartes, its artworks and palaces looted, but their people provided refuge for the family. Letizia had returned with Napoleon to France from Elba, but he had forbidden her to accompany him to St. Helena. She died in Rome in 1836. Pauline died of consumption in Florence in 1825 at the age of forty-five. Elisa died in Trieste in 1820 at the age of forty-three. Her death particularly affected Napoleon on St. Helena; he cried that she had “shown me the way.”
⁷
Louis died alone in 1846 in Livorno. Caroline was arrested by the Austrians after a failed attempt to regain the Neapolitan throne. Freed, she lived with Elisa in Trieste, married a British general, and died in Italy of cancer in 1839. She was the only Bonaparte family member to attend the funeral of Hortense at Rueil, a token of respect to a school friend she had done so much to undermine and destroy.

Lucien and Joseph changed their loyalties and became preoccupied with installing Hortense’s second son on the throne as Napoleon II. His death in 1831 put an end to their hopes. Lucien turned to writing bad novels and died in Viterbo, Italy, in 1840, and Joseph died in 1844 at the grand age of seventy-six after a spell in New York and New Jersey, living off the proceeds of the stolen Spanish crown jewels. The luckiest of all was Jérôme, Napoleon’s least favorite sibling. He fought at Waterloo
and lived long enough to see the ascent of Napoleon III, and thus received the rank of a French prince. He died in 1860 in a château in Villegenis and was buried in Les Invalides—the only Bonaparte to die in France.

Cardinal Fesch, who had fallen out with Napoleon for taking the side of the pope, retired to Rome after Waterloo and remained there until he died in 1839. He kept intact his incredible collection of around sixteen thousand pictures, much of it looted from the Italian campaign.
⁸
He left more than a thousand pieces to the Bonaparte hometown of Ajaccio on Corsica, including works by Botticelli, Bellini, and Titian. Some he left in Lyon, and the rest were sold in Rome after his death. They now hang in museums and private homes all over the world. Five paintings are in the Wallace Collection in London, including two Greuzes; and several works, including Michelangelo’s
The Entombment
and Raphael’s
Mond Crucifixion,
are in London’s National Gallery.

Napoleon’s much desired son, the “king of Rome,” lived a miserable existence as the captive of his grandfather in Vienna. On April 21, just before he died on St. Helena, Napoleon wrote him a lengthy letter. “My son should not think of avenging my death. He should profit from it,” he announced. “Let my son bring into blossom all I have sown.” He was quite sure that the Bourbons would fall after his death, and he saw the little king building an empire. “He ought to establish institutions which shall efface all traces of the feudal law, secure the dignity of men,” he wrote. “He should propagate, in all those countries now uncivilised and barbarous, the benefits of Christianity and civilisation.”
⁹
It was not to be. The king of Rome died of tuberculosis in Vienna at the age of twenty-one.

W
HEN
J
OSEPHINE DIED
, Eugène inherited Malmaison and sold the Hesse-Kassel paintings to the tsar in 1815. In 1819 he ordered a huge house sale. Interested parties could buy antique busts and statues, Etruscan vases, granite columns, boxes, dresses, shawls, lace, collars and feathers, objets d’art, tables, and even two mummies, one male and one female. The buyers spilled in to purchase a little of the empress’s greatness. Josephine’s treasures were dispersed across the world, her flower paintings lost, her fine furnishings broken and burned. Occasionally,
her belongings come up at auction and sell for huge sums. The tsar snapped up many of her paintings and sculptures, with most now in the Hermitage, although some of the paintings have disappeared.
¹⁰

Josephine died before she could see the sculpture of the Three Graces she had commissioned from Canova. The Duke of Bedford, who had desired it on display in the studio, immediately demanded it. The tsar also wished to own it. Luckily, Eugène claimed it for France.
The Three Graces
remained in Eugène’s possession until his son Maximilian, by then married to the grand duchess Maria, took it to the Hermitage. The Duke of Bedford had Canova make a copy—something that Josephine never would have allowed—and it was installed at Woburn Abbey in 1819. It is this version that is alternately displayed in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland.

O
VER THE YEARS
, Malmaison and its fine gardens fell into decline. All the furniture was stripped from the house and sold at auction. The roses were trampled, the remaining animals killed or sold off to homes that did not love them so well. In 1828, after Eugène’s death, his widow sold Malmaison to a Swedish banker, Jonas Hagerman. In 1842 Queen Christina of Sweden took over the house and used it as a country residence. In 1861 Napoleon III, who had such fond memories of nibbling sugarcane in the gardens, demanded that she sell the house to him. He opened it as a museum to coincide with the 1867 World’s Fair. The house and gardens were damaged in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the state sold it in 1877 to an estate agent who parceled off the land.

In 1896 a philanthropist, Daniel Iffla, bought the château and some of the land and donated it to France in 1904. A new museum was opened there in 1906.

Malmaison is a story of grandeur and neglect in one, a reminder of power and how quickly it fades. The rolling estates have been eaten into by the expansion of Paris. For long years Josephine’s picture gallery echoed emptily; once more, it is visited and enjoyed. If you walk into the gallery and look out onto the rose gardens, you might imagine yourself a guest at one of Josephine’s parties, watching as she walks toward you over the grass in her long white gown.

J
OSEPHINE LIVED AN
incredible life, rising from a humble childhood in Martinique to great power and glory. She experienced the highs and lows of rule and the pains of exile. Her tastes set the trends for art, fashion, gardening, and decoration, and her manner as a consort became seen as the ideal, with Empress Eugénie imitating her, much to the delight of the people.

Most of all, Napoleon and Josephine’s romance is celebratated as one for the ages, a
coup de foudre
both mysterious and passionate. Although they were married only fourteen years, they shaped each other’s legacies, and theirs is one of the great love stories of history. Napoleon needed Josephine to spin him from general to politician, to smooth his way, to charm his opposition. She threw in her lot with him, gambling that he would lift himself beyond mere military glory. She won her bet, and yet it came at a price. Marriage to him was exhausting, and she had to pretend she was someone she was not for much of her life.

This year, 2014, marks the two hundredth anniversary of Josephine’s death. Her life in many ways reveals the miseries that come with having power; yet we are still entranced by the story of the woman who captured the emperor’s heart. Napoleon never stopped thinking of her, surrounding himself with pictures of her at St. Helena (and eating off plates bearing her face). She has exercised a similar power over future generations, the empress whom France never forgot.

In 1811 Josephine wrote to Hortense saying that she had been entertaining her grandsons and had asked Louis Napoleon, the future Napoleon III, “who I resembled.” He replied that she “looked like the loveliest woman in Paris.” As she told Hortense, it was an “answer that shows he sees me more with his heart than with his eyes.”
¹¹
This, to me, is the key to her appeal: flawed, vulnerable, engaging, powerful—a woman to be seen with the heart rather than the eyes.

Empress Josephine in Her Coronation Robes,
by François Pascal Simon, Baron Gérard, 1807–08 (
illustration credit i1.1
)