Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (6 page)

Laure de Longpré heard the news and immediately began working her snakelike charms. She suggested that because the baby had arrived two weeks early, she was not Alexandre’s child. Alexandre drove himself into a frenzy of hatred. Cooling his heels on Martinique, dissatisfied and ill at ease, he decided his wife was as licentious as her father. It was suddenly clear to him: He was married to a whore.

Alexandre went on the hunt for evidence. He questioned Marie-Josèphe’s friends and family and tried to bribe and blackmail the slaves
on the plantation to tell stories against her. “Such totally base conduct and vile methods, how can this be the behavior of a man of culture and good birth?” Rose-Claire wrote in despair to the marquis. “I would never have thought that he would have let himself be led around so, by Mme. de Longpré. She has turned his head completely.”
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He even threatened to kill Brigitte, one of the family’s most trusted house slaves, if she did not give him the information he wanted. “M. le Vicomte used all his means to extract something unfavorable about the conduct of my mistress,” Brigitte recorded.
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In Alexandre’s mind, his wife was shockingly wicked. Scratching his wound over and over, he demanded corroboration of his wild fantasies.

Marie-Josèphe, far away in France, heard nothing of Alexandre’s activities. She continued unaware, wrapped up in her new baby, hoping that her husband would eventually grow tired of Laure. And that after a few months in the lush lands of her beloved Martinique, he might return contented.

CHAPTER 3

“Beneath All the Sluts in the World”

On a fine August day in 1783, twenty-year-old Marie-Josèphe was sitting with her son and daughter in the drawing room of the summerhouse at Noisy-le-Grand. She was told that a visitor had arrived to see her. Into the room swept Laure de Longpré, returned from Martinique; thirteen years Marie-Josèphe’s senior, she was sophisticated and glamorous—and sleek with pleasure over her triumph. She handed Marie-Josèphe a letter from Alexandre. Nothing could have prepared the young wife for its contents.

Marie-Josèphe read and learned that her husband had been gathering evidence against her, and he was quite sure of her depravity. “In spite of the despair in my soul and the fury which overwhelms me, I will contain myself,” Alexandre wrote. “I will tell you coldly, that you are in my eyes the vilest of creatures and my period in this country has revealed to me your abominable behavior.” The Creole heritage that had been such an attraction was now evidence of a propensity to vice that she had enthusiastically indulged. He told her he knew all about her affairs with other men. “As to repentance, I do not even ask it of you, you are incapable of it,” he wrote. “A woman, on the eve of her departure, who can take a lover into her arms when she knew that she is affianced to another, has no conscience; she is beneath all the sluts in the world.” And he believed that she had continued her dreadful licentiousness in France. What, he wondered, “shall I think of this last child, arriving eight months and a few days after my return from Italy?” He was, he puffed, “forced to accept her, but I swear to all the heavens that she
belongs to another; it is a stranger’s blood that courses through her veins!” Alexandre was merciless. “Never, never shall I put myself in danger of being so abused again. Remove yourself to a convent as soon as you receive this letter.” His letter left her no choice. “I will see you once and once only on my return to Paris, to discuss practicalities … but, I repeat, no scenes and no protestations.”
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Madame de Longpré glided away, smiling in victory. Marie-Josèphe was sick with shock. Her husband hated her. She was about to lose everything: her marriage, her home, and since men typically took the custody of children, Hortense and Eugène as well. Edmée and the marquis were horrified by the letter. Entirely dependent on Alexandre, since his inheritance paid for the house where they lived, they promised her they would try to intervene. But the letters from his father and stepmother only angered him. When he arrived in France in September, he was incensed to hear that Marie-Josèphe had not yet left their house. Writing from a property owned by Laure, he said that it would be quite impossible for them to live together because he would be forever “tortured by the perpetual images of the wrongs of which you know I am aware.” She had two alternatives: go to a convent or return to the Caribbean. And he was not going to listen to his family: “[T]ell my father and your aunt that their efforts will be useless.”
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He could not divorce her, but he would exile her and then proceed to live as he pleased. At twenty, Marie-Josèphe’s future looked bleak.

“Come back to your little country,” begged her mother, “our arms are always open to welcome you … and console you for the injustice you have suffered.”
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But Marie-Josèphe knew that if she left for La Pagerie, she would have to leave her children with Edmée. And she would be nothing on Martinique but a burdensome daughter on a struggling plantation, unable to marry again even if any man were to take an interest in her. At the end of November 1783, she took up residence in the Panthémont Convent in the rue de Grenelle in Saint-Germain. Eugène and Euphémie went with her. Hortense was left behind, as she was too young to be separated from her wet nurse. In nearly four years of marriage, Alexandre had spent a mere ten months with his wife.

Marie-Josèphe, with the assistance of her aunt Edmée, chose a particularly fashionable convent, dedicated to housing women of aristocratic
background. Thomas Jefferson sent his two daughters to attend the attached convent school, after assurances that the girls would be exempt from religious instruction. Ladies of great hauteur lived side by side with the nuns, some staying temporarily within the walls because their fathers or husbands were away; others, like Marie-Josèphe, had been abandoned. These lady boarders paid to rent anything from a small chamber to a grand six-room apartment with its own kitchen. And they were able to leave the convent, receive visitors, and generally behave as they pleased.

In December, Marie-Josèphe met the court adjudicator to discuss her marriage. She showed him Alexandre’s enraged letters from Martinique and talked of his unfaithfulness. As she explained, even her father-in-law believed her the wronged party. “It is not possible for the complainant to submit to such indignities,” the adjudicator ruled.
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The provost of Paris ordered that she remain in the convent while the legal process of separation began and that Alexandre should pay maintenance for his children and various costs. Alexandre did not. Instead, he demanded that the lease on the house in Neuve Saint-Charles be sold, refused to pay her bills, and asked for money from her—including the sum she’d received after selling her jewelry to pay for Hortense’s baptism.

The Panthémont ladies were fashionable aristocrats, more used to the dressmaker and the salon than Bible reading. They amused themselves as they had done in the outside world, with dancing, couture, and debate. Marie-Josèphe, hitherto such a poor student, was finally willing to learn. Understanding that she had nothing but her charms to rely on, she watched the women around her and soon grasped the art of graceful movement and conversational allure. She lost her accent, practiced the art of whispered suggestion, and softened her voice to a husky, slow tone that would become one of her chief attractions. She learned to cover her mouth with her handkerchief when she laughed, to hide teeth ruined by too much sugar as a child. She lost weight and discovered how to enhance her rather clumsy figure with clinging dresses, shawls, and perfect carriage.

Changes in fashion helped. Bored with stiff, heavily embroidered gowns that stuck out so widely from the hips that the wearer had to turn
sideways to pass through the door, Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker, Madame Bertin, had encouraged her royal mistress to eschew the hoops and brocade on more formal occasions and assume a simpler look. And as the queen had begun losing her hair after the birth of her eldest son in 1781, a plainer coiffure—popularized by the painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun—also became à la mode. The new draped gowns and softly curling natural hairstyles perfectly suited Marie-Josèphe’s face and figure.

The Panthémont women were eager to pass on their secrets. Marie-Josèphe learned to make the best of herself with creams, lotions, whitening potions for the face and hands, and oils for the hair. She probably added dye to brighten the color of her hair and smoothed the fashionable lead-based white paint on her cheeks—which had the lucky effect of disguising how the sun had darkened her skin. Other women traced their veins with blue pencil to suggest the opacity of the skin, but Marie-Josèphe’s skin was a little too dusky for such pretenses. She added shading to her eyes with kohl and elderberries and even applied soot to her eyebrows and long lashes. And she learned the art of rouge.

In Britain and other parts of Europe, red face paint was frowned upon as the tool of courtesans, but no French lady of style saw herself as dressed without her rouge. By 1781, French women were using two million pots of rouge a year. Court ladies wore heavy swathes of it, leading down from the sides of their eyes to their lips, while gentry wives placed small spots of rouge in the middle of the cheek. Unknowingly, Marie-Josèphe was covering herself with toxins, for the best rouge was made from vermilion, ground from cinnabar (mercury sulfide) or from ceruse, which was produced by dousing lead plates in vinegar. Some women actually died from smearing their faces with lead-based potions—the famous London beauty and socialite Maria Gunning passed away at the age of twenty-seven from excessive use of such makeup.

To a twenty-first-century observer, French eighteenth-century women would look strange, for there was comparatively little color on the eyes (apart from maybe a spot of rouge, which cannot have been flattering), while the cheeks flamed with false-looking red. But at the time, rouge was battle paint—it recalled sexual flush and made women
look more doll-like. Marie-Josèphe’s annual expenditure on rouge alone would soon amount to well over three thousand francs.
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At twenty-one, she was not a great beauty or even “precisely pretty.”
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She was about five feet—a respectable height for a woman—and slender, with slim hips but a slightly broad back. She had small, attractive feet, thanks to a childhood without shoes (eighteenth-century shoes were stiff and pointed and bad for little feet). The foot was an intensely erotic part of a woman’s body, since it was so infrequently seen after a girl turned fifteen or so and her skirt lengths dropped, thus indicating she was a woman. A dainty ankle was often more likely to drive men wild than a generous bosom. The new style of flowing gown more easily revealed the feet, and Marie-Josèphe made sure to expose hers at every opportunity.

The vicomtesse had become a charming woman, with her beautiful, low voice and the easy, sensual grace she had learned so carefully at the convent. Her chestnut hair fell in beautiful curls, while white paste concealed her tanned complexion and highlighted her delicate features. But her most appealing attributes were her luminous eyes, surrounded by luxuriant lashes. They glowed green or amber in different lights and stopped men in their tracks. Women pondered the nature of Marie-Josèphe’s attraction, but men saw it immediately. She made them think of the boudoir.

I
N EARLY
1785, Alexandre seized Eugène from the convent. Marie-Josèphe wrote to the provost of Paris to complain, and the vicomte and vicomtesse were called to appear at the Châtelet. In March, the affair was settled. Marie-Josèphe won. Under the terms of the separation, she would be allowed to live anywhere she chose and use any monies of her dowry. Alexandre was to give her 5,000 livres a year and 1,000 a year for Hortense until the age of seven and 1,500 thereafter. Hortense was to live with her mother until marriage. Eugène would be taken by his father after the age of five, but he would spend summers with Marie-Josèphe. Hotheaded Alexandre also had to eat humble pie. The authorities found no evidence for his accusations of immorality and forced him to sign a document withdrawing his accusations, and to admit that “he was wrong to write the said lady the letters of 12 July and
20 October of which she complains and which he admits were inspired by the passions and anger of youth.”
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Marie-Josèphe had been declared innocent. Yet it was a straw victory. She was in an impossible position, a woman without real male support, unable to marry again.

She soon joined the marquis and Aunt Edmée at their new home in Fontainebleau. At the time, Fontainebleau was a rather countrified village, around thirty-five miles southeast of Paris. Surrounded by lush forest, it was entirely dominated by the king’s hunting seat of the same name, a huge and ornate palace built by Francis I in the sixteenth century on a site that had hosted the royal hunt since before the twelfth century. The village was transformed during the hunting season as the court arrived and the aristocracy took houses. Marie-Josèphe, her face whitened, her cheeks rouged, resplendent in a flowing gown and soft coiffure, could finally play the part of the Creole who was as sensual as Martinique itself. In just over a year, she had metamorphosed from a gauche schoolgirl into a sophisticated seductress—all she needed now was a man to seduce.