‘I must tell you that she knows absolutely nothing,’ Napoleon had told Mme Campan when making arrangements for Caroline to be taken at the school. ‘Try to make her as clever as our dear Hortense.’ It was an exhortation, if repeated to the girls, not likely to ease the relationship between them. Nor was Mme Campan herself at all pleased when four grenadiers came clattering up to the school door late one evening with a message for Mlle Bonaparte from one of her brother’s generals. This general was Joachim Murat, the handsome, swaggering cavalry officer, thirty-two years old, the man who had seized the cannon at Sablons and brought them to the Tuileries gardens, thus enabling Napoleon to save the Convention.
He had been born on 25 March 1767 in a small village in the province of Guyenne, the youngest of the eleven children of a smallholder who also kept the village inn and posting station. He had been intended for the Church and had been granted a bursary to attend the Collège Saint-Michel. From there he had gone on to a Lazarist seminary at Toulouse, thus being given a far better education than had been available to his brothers. It was not long, however, before he decided that he had no vocation for the priesthood and, resolving to be a soldier, he had enlisted in a cavalry regiment in 1787.
His rise in the army had since been rapid. By May 1793, he was a major in the 16th Chasseurs, and by 1796, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in the Army of Italy with which he served with notable dash and bravery. Wounded by a sabre cut on his arm at Mantua, he was later shot through the mouth, the bullet, as he told his father, going in through one cheek and out of the other without injuring his tongue or breaking a tooth.
Although Napoleon respected Murat as a dashing cavalry leader with an enviable capacity to judge the strength of enemy formations with remarkable accuracy, he was annoyed when he heard that the man, a mere innkeeper’s son with a strong provincial accent, wanted to marry his sister Caroline, a girl fifteen years younger than himself. She had been rather plain as a child, thin and pale; but she was now growing into an attractive young woman: there would come a time, he said, when sovereigns ‘might vie for her hand’.
‘She is a knowing little scatterbrain, with no thought for my position,’ her brother complained to Mme Campan. Murat was admittedly a brave man, but that was not enough. Napoleon said as much to Caroline herself. The man had a little learning, he conceded: he had, after all, ‘been raised as a priest’. But he had no real intelligence, just as he had no politesse. ‘One day,’ Napoleon told his sister angrily, ‘you’ll learn what it is to go to bed with a man who can’t control himself and find yourself alone with him, without your chemise and the man naked.’ He then added, ‘In the high position to which fortune has raised me, I simply cannot allow a member of my family to marry into one like that.’
But her eldest brother, Joseph, as head of the family, approved of the marriage. A marriage contract was consequently drawn up and Napoleon was prevailed upon to sign it; but he declined to go to the wedding which took place on 20 January 1800 at Joseph’s estate at Mortefontaine.
Once the matter had been settled, however, Napoleon decided to be accommodating; taking with him his two fellow consuls, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, the churchman who drafted the new constitution, and Pierre-Roger Ducos, a compliant protéegée of Barras, he attended a ball given at the Ministry of the Interior by Lucien Bonaparte, the Minister, in honour of Caroline and Joachim Murat. Napoleon also provided the bride and bridegroom with a pleasant apartment in the cour des Tuileries at the Hôtel Brionne, while they also acquired an estate in the country at Villiers, overlooking the Seine opposite the Îie de la Grand Jatte, and another in the Deux-Sèvres for which they paid almost half a million francs (a sum they could well afford, Caroline having been given a handsome dowry and Murat having acquired a fortune from various dubious activities while serving in Italy).
They were clearly very happy. The comtesse de Chastenay wrote of the pleasant sight of Murat with his ‘sunburned face and black hair…holding the gloves and fan of the slim, white little creature’, his wife. Murat himself described Caroline as ‘the most adorable little woman’; yet, although so young, she had a determined will: another observer, Mme Lenormand, wrote of the ‘contrast of the rather childish grace of her face with the decisiveness of her character’.
Fond as they were of each other in the early years of their marriage, Murat was not faithful to Caroline, nor she to him. She dutifully bore his children; but it was not long before she embarked upon a series of affairs including, so Hortense de Beauharnais said, one with her husband’s aide-de-camp, the comte de Flahaut and, more passionately, with Metternich and also with Laure Permon’s husband, Andoche Junot, who came close to murdering his wife when he discovered that she, too, was conducting an affair with Metternich.
Hortense was ambivalent in her feelings for Caroline. She was a mistress, Hortense said, of the ‘art of attracting and charming…Admittedly a small claw sometimes showed itself…She was brave, determined and emotional, the charm which made one long to serve her could not conceal a lust for total domination…Nor could she hide her envy of anyone else’s success.’
According to Talleyrand, she had the ‘mind of Cromwell in the body of a pretty woman. Born with a most forceful character, she was as graceful as she was charming and attractive. But she could not conceal her passion for power.’
Her brother Napoleon recognized this passion as well as her commanding personality; and when, at the age of thirty-nine, Murat was created King of Naples, Napoleon told him, ‘With a wife like yours, you can always leave should a war induce me to summon you back to my side. Caroline is perfectly capable of acting as regent.’
The marriage of Caroline’s sister Pauline to General Leclerc had taken place in the Mombello oratory on the same day as that of her eldest sister, Elisa, to a thirty-five-year-old Corsican officer, Captain Felice Bacciochi. A man of no discernible personality or talent, he was considered to be the best match that the plain and rather bossy Elisa could hope to make and he was soon shipped off to no very demanding employment on the island of his birth.
While granting Elisa, as he granted Pauline, a generous dowry of forty thousand francs, Napoleon was thankful to be able to dispose of so dull and insignificant a brother-in-law, for his household at Mombello was already assuming the formality and dignity of a royal court.
Officers on Napoleon’s staff were now required to make courteous genuflections on encountering his mother or his wife or any of his sisters. Nor did these officers dine at the table of the General who had his meals served separately under the respectful gaze of visitors permitted to watch the meal in progress in the manner of those who had been permitted to watch King Louis XVI at table at Versailles.
On a visit to Mombello in June 1797 the diplomatist, comte André-Francois Miot de Melito, had expected to find an army headquarters but found instead ‘a brilliant court’:
Strict etiquette reigned round him [Miot de Melito said]…An invitation was an honour eagerly sought, and obtained only with great difficulty. Bonaparte was not in the least embarrassed by the excessive honours paid to him, but received them as though he had been accustomed to them all his life. His reception rooms and an immense marquee pitched before the palace were constantly filled with a crowd of guards, administrators, and the most distinguished noblemen of Italy who came to solicit the favour of a momentary glance or the briefest interview. In short, everyone bowed before the glory of his victories and the haughtiness of his demeanour. He was no longer the general of a victorious republic, but a conqueror on his own account, imposing his own laws on the vanquished.
Napoleon’s whole manner, indeed, had for some time now been far removed from that of the untidy, gauche young man whom Barras had introduced to Parisian society. His self-confidence, his conviction of a future guided by his ‘star’, were now complete. Miot de Melito described an encounter with him at Mombello during which Napoleon spoke uninterruptedly for two hours during a walk in the park. The comte described