Napoleon

Shortly after his release from arrest he had gone to Marseille to see Joseph, who was enjoying his new-found wealth and having himself addressed by the title of count by his in-laws. On meeting the family, Buonaparte had been struck by Marie-Julie’s much prettier younger sister, Bernardine Eugénie Désirée, and declared himself to be in love. Désirée, or Eugénie as he would call her, was sixteen or seventeen, modest and innocent, with just enough education for a deferential companion and obedient wife. ‘A stranger to tender passions’, Buonaparte wrote to her on 10 September, he had succumbed to ‘the pleasure’ of her company. ‘The charms of your person, of your character, imperceptibly conquered the heart of your love.’ His letters to her are stilted, rushes of passionate prose alternating with suggestions that she buy a piano and take a good teacher, as ‘music is the soul of love, the sweetness of life, the consolation of sorrows and the companion of innocence’. They lack conviction, which is not surprising.11

A new envoy from the Convention, Louis Turreau, had arrived at headquarters in Loano. As he had only just married, he brought his twenty-three-year-old wife with him, but it turned out to be not much of a honeymoon, as she took a fancy to Buonaparte and wasted no time in having an affair with him. ‘I was very young then, happy and proud of my success,’ he later recalled, and admitted that his exhilaration had led him to act irresponsibly: he had taken her on an excursion to see the front line, and to impress her he ordered a battery to open fire on an enemy position. The ensuing cannonade had cost the lives of several men. He later reproached himself bitterly for his childish action.12

Operations on the Italian front had come to a standstill, and at the beginning of November the Committee of Public Safety switched its priority to Corsica. The British had responded to Paoli’s appeal by occupying the island as a colony, with George III as monarch, Sir Gilbert Elliot as viceroy and Pozzo di Borgo as chief administrator. Paoli was bundled off to a second exile in London. As General Dumerbion had paid generous tribute to Buonaparte’s talents, he was given the task of preparing the artillery of the expeditionary force intended to recapture the island.13

He spent most of the last month of 1794 and the first two of 1795 in Toulon where it was assembling. The city was scarred by the siege and subject to riots by mobs seeking ‘aristos’ to lynch. One day a captured Spanish ship with some émigré French noble families aboard was brought into harbour, and a mob gathered in expectation. The city authorities tried to protect the émigrés, only to be accused of being royalist stooges and threatened with lynching. Buonaparte managed to calm the crowd, which contained some gunners who had served under him at the siege, and then smuggle the émigrés out of town in his artillery caissons.14

The Corsican expedition sailed from Toulon on 11 March, but soon ran into an Anglo-Neapolitan fleet, and after a brief encounter in which it lost two ships, sailed back into port. Disheartened by the prospect of inaction, Buonaparte asked to be transferred to the Army of the Rhine. His request remained without response, and he spent the next weeks mainly in Marseille, where on 21 April he became engaged to Désirée.15

He had been seeing her intermittently over the past months and corresponding with her regularly. Most of his letters are couched in the tone of a schoolmaster, as he tells her which books to read and which not, frets about whether her music teacher is good enough, arranges for a publisher in Paris to send her the latest tunes, reminds her to sing her scales regularly, going into tedious detail about the effects of striking a wrong note. He was a great music-lover, with a passion for the Italian composers of the day, and enjoyed lecturing those French ones he found wanting, sometimes entering into arguments of a technical nature with them.16

The engagement had probably been precipitated by the fact that at the end of March he had received a transfer to the Army of the West, operating against insurgents in the Vendée region of western France. The order to take up this posting reached him on 7 May, and to his chagrin he learned that he had been struck off the list of artillery generals, as their quota had been exceeded and he was the youngest, so he was relegated to what he regarded as the inferior status of infantry general.

The following day he set off for Paris, accompanied by his brother Louis, to whose education he was continuing to attend, drilling him mercilessly with mathematical tests even as they travelled up the valley of the Rhône and through Burgundy. He also took with him his devoted Junot and Marmont, who had come to hero-worship him. ‘I found him so superior to everything I had encountered in my life, his intimate conversation was so deep and so captivating, his mind was so full of future promise,’ wrote Marmont, ‘that I could not bear the idea of his impending departure.’ When Buonaparte suggested he accompany him he did not hesitate, even though he had no authorisation to do so.17

Marmont insisted they break their journey at Châtillon-sur-Seine, where his parents lived. His mother found Buonaparte taciturn to the point of being impossible to communicate with, and took the ‘little general’ off to visit her friends the Chastenay family who lived nearby. ‘On this first visit, in order to pass the time I was asked to play the piano,’ recalled the daughter of the house, Victorine. ‘The general seemed to appreciate it but his compliments were curt. I was then asked to sing, so I sang one in Italian which I had just learnt the music for. I asked him if I was pronouncing right, to which he just said no.’18

The following day the Chastenays dined at the Marmonts’, and afterwards Victorine asked Buonaparte about Corsica. He unwound, and in the course of the conversation, which lasted a full four hours, he spoke of his love for the epic poems supposedly written by the thirteenth-century Gaelic poet Ossian and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie. He spoke earnestly about politics, about happiness and self-fulfilment. On the third day he helped her make a posy of cornflowers and they played games, flirting and dancing. She was dismayed when, the day after that, he continued his journey.19

On reaching Paris in the last days of May, Buonaparte called on François Aubry, Carnot’s successor at the war ministry, but any hopes of reversing the decision striking him off the list of artillery generals were quickly dispelled. Aubry, a former artillery officer embittered by career disappointments, was not to be swayed. Buonaparte began to look around for someone who might help him.

One of the most prominent among those known as the ‘jeunesse dorée’, a faction persecuting the fallen Jacobins, was Stanislas Fréron, who was in love with Buonaparte’s fifteen-year-old sister Paulette, whom he had met in Marseille and whom he wished to marry. Buonaparte was not averse to the match if it could help his own cause.20

A potentially more useful acquaintance was Paul Barras, who had also been at Toulon. His chequered past included fighting the British in India, voting for the death of Louis XVI in the Convention, a minor role in the downfall of Robespierre, and the defeat of a royalist attempt to overthrow the Republic. A spell as commissary to the army had provided the opportunities for graft which enabled him to acquire considerable wealth, with which he indulged his love of luxury and women. He had turned his Jacobin coat inside out, surrounding himself with a court of roués and courtesans, and would have welcomed another ex-Jacobin with a realist’s ability to change his tune, but Barras trusted nobody. There had been Jacobin riots a few days before Buonaparte’s arrival, and the political situation remained unstable, with people representing every shade of revolution and counter-revolution manoeuvring in a kaleidoscopic succession of alliances and realignments. Barras would see no point in helping Buonaparte until he needed him. But he did take him under his wing to keep in reserve.

On 13 June Buonaparte received his posting to the Army of the West under General Lazare Hoche, operating against royalist rebels in the Vendée. He had no intention of going and obtained sick leave until 31 August, which gave him time to consider his options.

The fall of Robespierre had put an end to the Terror, and the resulting release from fear produced an eruption of hedonism. Buonaparte was astonished at the extent to which the people of Paris threw themselves into a life of pleasure. ‘To dance, to go to the theatre, to parties out in the country and to pay court to women, who are here the most beautiful in the world, is the main occupation and the most important thing,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘People look back on the Terror as on a bad dream.’21

Antoine Lavalette, a contemporary of Buonaparte, was horrified at what had happened to his native city, where ‘the dissolution of society had plumbed new depths’. He noted disapprovingly that ‘it was the newly rich who sought to set the tone, combining all the errors of a bad upbringing with all the ridicule of an inborn absence of dignity’. He was shocked at the ‘barely believable level of licentiousness’ on display, at the ‘lovely, well-bred women of high birth’ who ‘wore flesh-coloured pantaloons and buskins on their feet, barely covered by dresses of transparent gauze, with their breasts uncovered and their arms naked to the shoulder’. As another explained, ‘The aim of these ladies and the ne plus ultra of their art was to show as much nudity as possible without being naked’. Some moistened their dresses with oil to make them cling to the body.22

There were balls to which only relatives of those who had been guillotined were invited, in some cases held in prisons where the September massacres had taken place, at which the guests wore a red ribbon round their necks in a gesture somewhere between gallows humour and exorcism. Buonaparte may have been shocked, but he showed understanding of people’s need to compensate for the sufferings and the anxieties of the past – and he was a good deal less censorious than Lavalette when it came to the nouveaux riches.23

A disastrous economic situation and a financial crisis provoked by the vertiginous fall in value of the paper currency, the assignats, coupled with the emigration or execution of nobles, entailing the confiscation of their property, meant that there were a large number of properties on the market. People who had grown rich during the Revolution were desperate to park their depreciating cash in solid assets, creating a febrile market in which there was money to be made. On leaving Châtillon for Paris, Buonaparte had made a detour to view a country house at Ragny in Burgundy. ‘The château itself consists of a new residence or pavilion in the modern style,’ he wrote to Joseph on 22 May, going on to list its merits and pointing out that if the turrets which gave it ‘an aristocratic look’ were demolished it could be marketed as a splendid residence, with its ‘superb’ dining room four times the size of their old one in Ajaccio.24

The pursuit of pleasure had spawned a taste for luxuries of every kind, and some were scarce in Paris. Three days after reaching the capital Buonaparte took time off from promoting his career to research the price of sugar, soap and coffee. As it was far higher than in Marseille, he instructed Joseph to buy up a stock there and ship it to Paris. Ragny had been sold, he informed his brother a few weeks later, but there were plenty of other investment opportunities.25

At the beginning of July he reported that he had put in hand the sale of the coffee Joseph had sent, and urged him to buy up in Genoa, where the Clary family had moved, silk stockings, shawls, and Florentine and English taffeta (which would have to be imported into France through Leipzig, since Britain and France were at war), all of which were at a premium in Paris. He had succeeded in finding a sales outlet in Paris for Joseph Fesch, who had set himself up in the porcelain trade in Basel in Switzerland. He even urged Joseph to investigate the price of pasta in Italy, as the food shortages in Paris might make it worthwhile to import that. He had located a promising property in the valley of Montmorency, and was looking for others. He wanted Joseph to finance these speculations, but he also identified ways of buying on credit and selling on at a profit before having to realise the purchase. If only Joseph had followed his first suggestion, he complained, they would have made a million. Buonaparte could see people making fortunes all around him, and was exasperated by Joseph’s lack of interest.26

Naturally lazy, Joseph had no wish to hazard his easily acquired fortune in property speculation. He had followed the Clary family to neutral Genoa, where they had managed to take most of their money with them and from where they carried on their Levantine trade. Joseph was living well, and supporting his mother and sisters at Château-Sallé. Yet he badgered Buonaparte to use his influence to obtain for him a post as French consul in some trading city in Italy or the Levant, where he would be able to benefit from the salary and use his position to further his commercial activities. ‘We have lived so many years so closely bound together that our hearts have become entwined,’ Buonaparte wrote back, promising to try. ‘You know better than anyone how profoundly mine is entirely devoted to you.’27

He had managed to place Louis in the officers’ school at Châlons, which was costing him a considerable share of his half-pay, and was exploring the possibilities of getting the youngest, Geronimo, into school in Paris. He had used his connections to free Lucien – ‘Brutus’ had got himself arrested for his Jacobin connections. He found Lucien tiresome, impudent and irresponsible, ‘a born intriguer’, but he was family.28

In the culture to which Buonaparte had been brought up, the family operated as a clan, providing a security which he was missing in Paris. Although he was now twenty-five years old, and had been through a great deal over the past few years, he was still in many ways a child, with his displays of aggressive defensiveness and of emotion clothed in cynicism. Yet he was now having to deal with a complex set of challenges and sensations, and was emotionally torn between two different worlds. The one associated with Désirée held strong appeal.

Joseph’s was a perfect match. The Buonaparte and the Clary were grounded in the culture of the Mediterranean with its mainstay of the family. Both families were bent on financial and social advancement, but were essentially middle-class in outlook. Their aspirations to noble status were driven by material rather than ideological motives, and had nothing in common with the supposedly chivalric impulses of the noblesse. Nor were they bound by its prejudices.29

It is unlikely that Buonaparte’s feelings for Désirée were profound. Yet he did kindle strong feelings in her. Her surviving letters and drafts exude all the passion and sentimentality one would expect of a lovelorn teenager. When he left for Paris in May she spelled out her desolation, assuring him that every instant they were apart pierced her soul. ‘The thought of you is with me always, and will follow me to my grave,’ she wrote shortly after his departure, her only consolation the knowledge that he would always be faithful. She hoped he would not find the Parisian beauties too alluring, and reassured herself that ‘our hearts are much too closely united for it ever to be possible for them to separate’.30

Shortly after his arrival in Paris, Buonaparte wrote saying that although he had met some ‘pretty and very charming women’ at Châtillon, none could compare with his ‘sweet and kind Eugénie’. He wrote two days later, sending her some songs, and again three days after that, with more sheet music, chiding her for not writing more often. On 14 June, on hearing that she had moved to Genoa with her brother and sisters, he wrote a long and barely coherent letter reproaching her for letting him down.31

He had made her promise that she would wait for him in Marseille, and her leaving made it impossible for them to see each other. A French citizen who went abroad was liable to be labelled an émigré and proscribed. For a serving officer to do so was tantamount to treason. Her going to Genoa suggested that her family were opposed to their marriage, and he saw it as a betrayal on her part. In an emotional letter of 14 June, Buonaparte assumes that their liaison is over while expressing the conviction that she will always love him. Feigning noble abnegation, he expresses the hope that she will find one worthier than himself. In a welter of self-deprecation he describes himself as a being cursed with ‘a fiery imagination, a cool head, a strange heart and an inclination to melancholy’, who is ‘surrounded by the savagery and immorality of men’, believes himself to be ‘the opposite of other men’ and despises life. Yet he insists that he can only find happiness in her love, and begs her to find a way for them to be reunited. ‘There is nothing I will not undertake for my adorable Eugénie,’ he affirms. ‘But if fate is against us think only of yourself and of your own Happiness: it is more precious than mine.’ Perhaps significantly, that was the day he resolved not to join the Army of the West and extended his sick leave.32

He wrote again ten days later, complaining of her silence and assuring her that although Paris was brimming with pleasures of every kind he could think only of his Eugénie and consoled himself with looking at her portrait, promising to send her his own. The same day in a letter to Joseph he wrote that ‘if the business with Eugénie is not concluded and if you do not send me any funds with which to operate, then I will accept the post of infantry general and go with the Army of the Rhine to seek my death’. He intimated that the engagement was broken off and suggested that as she would not want the portrait he had sent, Joseph should keep it for himself. She continued to cover notebooks with his name and initials, but there is little doubt her family wanted no more to do with him, and he too now had other things on his mind.33

‘So there we were the three of us in Paris,’ recalled Marmont. ‘Bonaparte without a job, me without any formal permission, and Junot attached as aide de camp to a general whom they did not want to employ […] passing our time at the Palais-Royal and at the theatres, having very little money and no future.’ Money does not in fact appear to have been a major problem; Buonaparte may have been on half-pay, but that did represent a regular income, and Junot, who came from a comfortably-off family, received subsidies from his father. Their future was indeed uncertain; Buonaparte’s military career had stalled and his political connections were not influential enough to restart it.34

Barras had opened a new world to Buonaparte by introducing him to those who set the tone in Paris. Chief among them was the great beauty, the daughter of a Spanish banker, Thérèse de Cabarrus, known as ‘Notre Dame de Thermidor’ because the revolutionary Jean-Lambert Tallien had fallen in love with her, freed her from prison and then helped bring down Robespierre and end the Terror in order to save his own as well as her neck. Other social lionesses included Juliette Récamier, Aimée de Coigny, Julie Talma and Rose de Beauharnais, as well as the more intellectually prized Germaine de Staël and older, more experienced ladies such as Mesdames de Montansier and Château-Renaud. They were seductive, sophisticated and assertive women who did as they pleased, and Buonaparte’s references in letters to Désirée and to Joseph leave no doubt that he was fascinated and excited by them.

He cut a poor figure with his small stature, lean and sallow features, hungry look and worn clothes, and he had no idea of how to present himself, how to enter a room, greet people or respond. His manner was farouche, a mixture of shyness and aggression that baffled people. While it could be appealing to the provincial girls he had encountered up till now, it grew disagreeable when he became defensive. He was particularly awkward with sophisticated women, and gave the impression of not caring what they thought of him. He was out of his depth, not so much socially as in terms of simple human communication: he showed a curious lack of empathy which meant that he did not know what to say to people, and therefore either said nothing or something inappropriate.

His gracelessness, unkempt appearance and poor French, delivered in staccato phrases, did not help. Laure Permon, in whose parents’ house he and Junot found a second home, thought him ugly and dirty. Bourrienne’s wife found him cold and sombre, and little short of savage. He could sit through a comedy with them and remain impassive while the whole house laughed, and then laugh raucously at odd moments. She remembered him telling a tasteless joke about one of his men having his testicles shot off at Toulon, and laughing uproariously while all around sat horrified. Yet there was something about his manner that some found unaccountably attractive.35

The sophistication of the liberated ladies both attracted and repelled him. They made Désirée seem provincial and uninteresting on the one hand, yet pure and sublime on the other. But the ardent love of a virginal teenager would not stand up to the sensual draw of the more sophisticated older woman, particularly in a young man who was still a child craving a mother figure. It seems he made a pass at Thérèse Tallien, who rebuffed him but apparently retained a fondness for him, as he was welcome in her salon, and she even used her contacts to obtain some cloth for him to have a new uniform run up. He appears to have been more successful with other women, perhaps including Letizia’s childhood friend Panoria Permon.36

He was feeling sorry for himself. On 5 August he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety complaining that his merits and devotion to the Republic had not been recognised. A few days later he admitted to Joseph that he was ‘very little attached to life’, and suggested he might as well throw himself under a passing carriage. Those are not the only things he said and wrote which suggest that he did on occasion contemplate suicide.37

With little else to do, he spent whole days at the Bibliothèque Nationale, established in 1792 with the amalgamation of the old royal library and the noble and ecclesiastical libraries seized during the Revolution. He was not only reading, as he always did when he had time on his hands. He was also writing.

The fruit was a novella entitled Clisson et Eugénie, no doubt in homage to one of his favourite novels, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. Its hero, Clisson, feels the call to arms from earliest childhood, excited by the sight of a helmet, a sabre or a drum. At the age when others read fairy tales he studies the lives of great men; while others chase girls he applies himself to the art of war. He grows up to be an inspired young soldier who ‘marked every step with brilliant actions’, and quickly attains the highest rank. ‘His victories followed one after the other and his name was known to the nation as that of one of its dearest defenders.’ But he is the victim of ‘wickedness and envy’, having to endure the ‘calumnies’ of his peers. ‘They called his loftiness of spirit’ pride and reproached him for his ‘firmness’. Disenchanted, feeling out of place in social gatherings, he flees society, wandering remote forests and abandoning himself to ‘the desires and palpitations of his heart’ on moonlit nights, brimming with melancholy and self-pity. He meets Eugénie, who is ‘like the song of the nightingale or a passage of Paisiello [his favourite composer], which pleases merely sensitive souls, but whose melody transports and arouses passions only in those which can feel it keenly’. They fall in love, settle down and start a family, but after a few years he hears the call of duty from the endangered motherland and resolves to gird his loins once more. ‘His name was the signal for victory’, and his triumphs ‘surpassed the hopes of the nation and the army’. He sends one of his aides, his best friend, to console Eugénie in his absence, which he does only too well. When Clisson discovers that they have fallen in love he writes her a letter full of generosity and tenderness, and charges into battle and his death.38