She herself regarded a possible marriage to this young and rather uncouth general with misgiving. He was undeniably ‘passionate and lively’ yet still ‘awkward and altogether strange in all his person’, though admittedly not so unprepossessing as he had been in the recent past: he now brushed his hair properly and splashed himself liberally with eau de Cologne, and his features were occasionally transformed by a remarkably attractive smile. But, despite his undoubted promise, his future was far from secure, as hers might well be also if she married him. She was evidently concerned that, if she became Bonaparte’s wife, she might lose the protection of Barras who had already taken Thérésia Tallien as a supplementary mistress. Moreover, neither his family nor hers was in favour of such a match; nor was her notary, Raguideau, who told her she would do much better marrying an army contractor who would have the means to make her rich. Others proposed Gabriel Ouvrard.
Once he had decided that marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais might well promote his career, Bonaparte for his part had no doubt that he should make her his wife. Having come to that decision, he fell in love with her. After what was evidently their first night together, he wrote to tell his ‘sweet and incomparable Josephine’ that he drew from her lips and heart a flame that consumed him. He sent her ‘a thousand kisses’; and asked her not to send him any in return for they burned his blood. Less romantically, and much later, he told comte Bertrand, ‘I really loved Josephine, but I had no respect for her. She had the prettiest little cunt in the world…Actually I married her only because I believed her to be rich. She said she was, but it wasn’t true.’
It was not until the end of February 1796 that Josephine’s reluctance was at length overcome and she agreed to marry Napoleon, telling Grace Dalrymple Elliott that she did not really love him but that she thought he could be of service to her children. He had already written to Désirée, telling her that unless she could obtain her parents’ consent to an immediate marriage – consent which, as a minor, it was essential for her to obtain and which he presumed she would not get – he would be compelled to end their relationship. Her answer was contained in a sad little letter, wishing him well and assuring him that she could never love anyone else. He had destroyed her life, she told him, but she was ‘weak enough’ to forgive him. ‘May the woman you have chosen make you as happy as you deserve to be. In the midst of your present happiness do not forget poor Eugénie, and be sorry for her fate.’
Marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais, a civil ceremony, took place on 9 March. For a variety of reasons it was, in fact, invalid: the official who conducted the service was not legally qualified to do so; the young officer who witnessed Napoleon’s signature was a minor and, therefore, equally unqualified for this duty; Josephine, claiming that she could not do so because of the British occupation of the Windward Islands, failed to produce her birth certificate and took the opportunity of reducing her age by four years; while Napoleon, also claiming to be unable to produce his own birth certificate, gave his date of birth as Joseph’s and place of birth as Paris rather than Ajaccio.
The bride, wearing a white muslin gown with a tricolour sash and an enamelled medallion engraved with the words ‘To Destiny’ – a present from the bridegroom – waited for the appearance of Napoleon, with the Talliens, Paul Barras and her notary sitting by her side. They waited in the cold room by the light of a tin lantern for an hour, then two hours, then three before Napoleon burst into the room, shook the sleepy official by the shoulder, told him to get on with it, and, within a few minutes, was driving back with his wife to her house.
Four days before, to the annoyance of more senior officers and particularly of Lazare Hoche, under whom he had declined to serve in Vendée, Napoleon had been appointed commander of the Army of Italy, an appointment described maliciously as ‘Barras’s dowry’; and, two days after the wedding, he left Paris for the Army’s headquarters in Nice. Here he encountered the major-generals who were, with varying degrees of reluctance, to serve under him: Louis Desaix, Pierre Augereau and André Masséna. They were all tall men, powerfully built, towering over Napoleon whom Masséna later described as ‘puny and sickly looking’, a man who had got his command through the influence of Barras and Barras’s women.
Within weeks, their opinion of the pale little Corsican had been transformed. Napoleon found the army under strength, badly equipped and poorly paid. In one of those inspirational addresses which were to exhilarate his soldiers in campaign after campaign, he is said to have promised to lead them into the ‘most fertile plains in the world’, through rich provinces and great cities where they would find ‘honour, glory and riches’. True to his word, he succeeded in splitting the forces of the Austrian Emperor and of the King of Sardinia which outnumbered him. He won a succession of astonishing victories, news of which were sent to the government in Paris, the Directory, by relays of couriers galloping across the plains of Lombardy.
These couriers also took with them not only trophies of victory–flags and standards – but a series of scribbled letters addressed to 6 rue Chantereine for Mme de Beauharnais who had not, as yet, adopted her husband’s name. He wrote every day, sometimes twice a day, his pockets stuffed with unfinished, scarcely coherent letters never sent to his ‘adorable Josephine’, his ‘sweet love’, the ‘pleasure and torment of his life’. Not a day went by, he told her, without his loving her, not a night without his longing to hold her in his arms. He loved her more each day; he longed to kiss her heart and then lower on her body, much, much lower, underlining the words with such force that the point of his pen struck through the paper. ‘Never has a woman been loved with more devotion, fire and tenderness,’ he told her. If she were to leave him he would feel that, in losing her and her ‘adorable person’, he would have lost everything that made life worthwhile.
Preoccupied with parties, subscription balls, receptions, shopping, fittings at her dressmaker’s, visitors who crowded into her boudoir, and relishing the credit she enjoyed at the most expensive shops as the wife of the brilliant young general, the reception accorded to her at the theatre where audiences stood up to applaud her as she entered her box, the shouts of welcome in the streets, and the cheers of fishwives in Les Halles, Josephine did not find time to read all these letters on the days of their arrival. Occasionally, she would pick one up to read an extract or two to a visitor. Once, she read one to the poet and playwright, Antoine Arnault. In this Napoleon had written of his jealousy of other men who could be with her as he could not, and had added, ‘Beware of Othello’s dagger.’ She laughed and commented, ‘Qu’il est drôle, Bonaparte.’
‘Josephine, no letter from you,’ he complained on 24 May. ‘No news from my good friend…mi dolce amore…Has she forgotten me already?’ Couriers arrived from Paris, but brought no letter from her. He was consumed with anxiety and jealousy. He began to think she must have resumed her liaison with Barras, or perhaps found another lover. He could never bear that, he said, sending ‘a thousand kisses on your eyes, your lips, your tongue, your cunt’. ‘Obviously your pretended love for me was but a caprice.’ Then he relented. ‘Drowning in my sorrow, I may have written too harshly.’
‘I had not believed it was possible to suffer so deeply, so much pain, such awful torment,’ he told her in another letter. ‘I send you a million kisses. Remember there is nothing so strong as my love for you…It will last for ever…The flame that comes from your lips consumes me…My emotions are never moderate…I am in an indescribable state…The ardent love which fills me has, perhaps, unbalanced my mind.’
Frustrated by the few, short letters she sent in reply to his frantic effusions, he sent Andoche Junot to Paris with enemy flags for the Directory and a peremptory order not to return to Italy without his wife. ‘You will come, won’t you?’ he begged her. ‘You must return with Junot, do you hear, my adorable one?’
He sent Colonel Joachim Murat with, similar orders and a fateful question: ‘There’s no one else, is there?’ He later heard with great distress that the big, handsome, buccaneering Murat had boasted of a gross intimacy with Mme Bonaparte, giving ‘barely decent details, fit only for a hussar officers’ mess’. On the day that Murat had arrived in Paris, wearing out numerous post-horses on