Her husband remained ‘all day in admiration’ of her; he treated her as though she were ‘a divinity’; it would be ‘impossible to have a better husband’. There were, however, occasions when it was difficult for her to hide her irritation with his teasing of her, his habit of pinching her so hard it brought the tears to her eyes, his kissing her, fondling her breasts and hugging her so passionately and intimately, even when there were other people in the room, that Hamelin felt constrained to avert his eyes, to walk away and look out of the window as though ‘observing the weather’. Comte André Miot de Melito was equally embarrassed when he accompanied Bonaparte and Josephine on a journey by coach to Lake Maggiore during which, as he delicately put it, Bonaparte was ‘extremely attentive’ to his wife, frequently taking various ‘conjugal liberties’ with her.
The campaign against the Austrians was going badly, and there was even talk of a French withdrawal from Italy. But then came news of Napoleon’s victories, first on 15, 16 and 17 November 1796 at Arcola, then on 14 January 1797 at Rivoli Veronese, which ensured the fall of Mantua after a siege lasting well over six months.
Written in a state of euphoria in the aftermath of these decisive victories, Napoleon’s letters to Josephine became more passionate than ever. He wrote of his impatience to give her proofs of his ‘ardent love’, to be in bed with her, to see again her adorable face, her hair tied up in a scarf à la créole, her ‘little black forest’. ‘I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the time when I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian Fields.’
Soon, however, the letters changed their tone. On a visit to Milan, he found that Josephine was not in the Serbelloni Palace. For over a week he waited in vain for her return, writing her a succession of letters by turn angry, self-pitying, mortified and disillusioned. ‘I long to hold you in my arms,’ he wrote. ‘The pain I feel is unbelievable…When I ask you to love me as I love you, I am wrong to do so…I am not worth it…When I am sure that she no longer loves me I will keep silent, wishing only to be useful to her…I will submit to all sorrows, all grief, if only the fates will grant Josephine happiness…Oh, Josephine, Josephine.’
In his grief and discontent Napoleon pursued a policy in Italy quite at odds with the wishes of the Directory in Paris. Having advanced to within sixty miles of Vienna, he signed a preliminary treaty with the Austrians at Leoben, where onlookers were struck by the brusque demeanour of the little man who spoke in strongly accented French, giving orders, making demands and granting few concessions with supreme confidence. Again ignoring the wishes of the Directory and arousing further annoyance in Paris he deposed the Doge in Venice and destroyed that most ancient republic.
Whilst waiting for the details of his Italian diktat to be settled, in May 1797 Napoleon moved his headquarters from Milan to the huge Baroque palace at Mombello. Josephine, who had again been protesting that her poor health demanded her return to Paris, now announced that she would, after all, remain at Mombello, a decision widely assumed to have been taken because Captain Charles’s duties would require his presence there for the whole of that summer.
They were pleasant months for her. She was able to indulge her passion for flowers, which were planted under her direction all over the gardens, as well as her fondness for birds, which fluttered and glided over the waters of the lake and chirrupped in cages ordered for her by her husband. By day, Josephine could be seen strolling in her graceful way down the gravelled paths and across the well-mown grass; by night, she presided over the dining-room table in her white muslin dress, with an ivy wreath in her hair, captivating men by the glances of her eyes, ‘dark blue,’ as one of her admirers described them, ‘always half closed under long lids, fringed by the longest eyelashes in the world’, sipping coffee after dinner on the terrace, her dog by her side.
This was not Fortuné, who had been so impertinent as to bite Napoleon’s leg the first time he shared a bed with the animal’s mistress. For this tiresome animal, to whom Josephine had been so unaccountably attached, had been killed by a dog belonging to the Mombello chef, much to the pleasure of Napoleon who expressed the hope that Fortuné’s replacement – a puppy secretly given to her by Captain Charles – would meet the same fate.
Content as she was to be under the same roof as Charles, even though the opportunities to be alone with him were not frequent, Josephine did not take kindly to the thought of being thrown into the company of several members of her husband’s family whom he now decided to establish at Mombello.
Among the first to arrive on holiday from the Irish college at St Germain, the Dermott Academy, were Josephine’s son, Eugène de Beauharnais, now fifteen years old, and Napoleon’s brother, Jérôme, aged twelve. Also there was Jérôme’s and Napoleon’s mother, Letizia: Napoleon had thought it as well not to inform her of his marriage to the widow Beauharnais until after it had taken place, and Letizia did not approve of it or of her. Although Josephine behaved towards her mother-in-law with the utmost courtesy and that charm of manner that others found so beguiling, Letizia never could bring herself to respond to her wayward daughter-in-law’s natural warmth. Nor could Laure Junot, who wrote of her: ‘Mme Bonaparte was an astonishing woman and must formerly have been very pretty…though no longer in the first bloom of youth.’ Had she but possessed teeth, ‘I do not say pretty teeth but only teeth’, she would have been ‘more attractive than most of her contemporaries’.
Nor could Letizia’s three daughters outgrow their initial wary diffidence in the presence of what seemed to them the assured sophistication of their sister-in-law. Their ill-concealed jealousy soon turned to active dislike.
‘How could my brother be so cruel as to
send me into exile amongst savages and snakes?’
DISTRACTED AS HE WAS by his passion for Josephine, Napoleon was at the same time deeply concerned by the behaviour of his sister Pauline, who at sixteen, was a sensual, wayward, high-spirited girl, ‘the prettiest and worst-behaved person imaginable,’ in the opinion of the poet, Antoine-Vincent Arnault: ‘She had the deportment of a schoolgirl, chattering away without pause, laughing at nothing and everything, contradicting the most eminent personages, sticking out her tongue at her sister-in-law behind her back, nudging my knee when I wasn’t paying her sufficient attention, and drawing upon herself from time to time the most terrifying looks of reproof from her brother…But, even so, a naturally good-natured child, if without any principle. She was someone capable of doing good from pure caprice.’
Metternich, the Austrian diplomatist and statesman, provided a shorter and less indulgent character sketch. The girl was admittedly ‘as pretty as it is possible to be’, but she was ‘in love with herself and her only occupation was pleasure’.
Pauline had fallen in love with Stanislas Fréron, an unscrupulous, heartless dandy twenty-six years older than herself, a man reputed to be suffering from syphilis and undoubtedly keeping a mistress, an actress, at the Théâtre des Italiens, who had borne two of his children and was shortly to have a third. It had been bad enough, in her mother’s opinion, when Pauline’s brother Lucien – described by Laure Permon as the ‘tall, ill-shaped and very short-sighted Lucien’ – married Catherine, the illiterate and distressingly shy daughter of an innkeeper without informing his mother; but, at least, Catherine was gentle and affectionate. This business of Fréron was much worse.
He had been one of the most outspoken deputies in the National Convention and a leading advocate of the September Massacres. He had been sent with Barras to suppress the counter-revolutionary revolt in the south of France where he had ordered the mass