Bonaparte has been miserable since a conversation with Junot…I have heard that Captain Charles travelled in your carriage until you were within three posting stages of Paris, that you have seen him in Paris, and been to the theatre with him, that he gave you your little dog, and that he is with you now. I feel sure this is all gossip, invented by your enemies. Bonaparte loves you as much as ever and is as anxious as ever to embrace you. I hope that when you come here all this will be forgotten.
It was not to be forgotten, though; and while talking incessantly about Josephine’s betrayal, Bonaparte was ready to betray her, too.
Below deck in the French ships that had arrived in Aboukir Bay earlier that month were some three hundred women. Some – laundresses, cantinières and the like – were officially authorized to be there. But, although strict orders had been issued against the embarkation of other women, wives and mistresses, several had been smuggled aboard in the uniforms of their husbands’ and lovers’ regiments: General Verbier, for example, spirited aboard his attractive Italian wife; while Lieutenant Fourès of the 22nd Regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval also contrived to take with him his wife, Pauline, an exceptionally pretty, blue-eyed, twenty-year-old young woman who looked most attractive in the uniform of her husband’s regiment, blue jacket and tight, white breeches. Her fair hair, gathered tightly under one of her husband’s cocked hats, was said, when she was en déshabillé, to fall to her waist. She was the illegitimate daughter of a cook named Bellisle and was known to her friends as Bellilotte. Before her recent marriage to Lieutenant Fourès she had been employed as a vendeuse in a milliner’s shop in Paris.
Bonaparte caught his first glimpse of her on the first day of December 1798 when he and his staff gathered to watch the ascent of a balloon which, so the Egyptian spectators were assured, could fly through the air from one country to another. The display, however, was a disaster: the balloon caught fire and the basket crashed to the earth. ‘It was a mere kite,’ commented one of the Egyptian spectators whom it was intended to impress. ‘If the wind had driven it a little further, the trick would have worked and the French would have claimed that it had travelled to a faraway country.’
Amongst the witnesses to this fiasco was Pauline Fourès who soon caught the attention of one of Bonaparte’s aides-de-camp, his stepson, Eugeène de Beauharnais, who pointed her out to one of his companions. Overhearing their comments, Bonaparte looked at her, too. That evening he saw her again and spent minutes on end staring at her with that appraising, silent watchfulness which so often disturbed and embarrassed the objects of his attention.
Upon his arrival in Cairo, he had been presented with some becoming young women by the sheiks. There were rumours that he had also been offered young men and that he had accepted one of them and had indulged in a homosexual experience which he did not care to repeat. He fancied only one of the young women offered to him; the others were either too fat for his taste or their smell displeased him. Napoleon had a very keen sense of smell which, however, did not appear to disgust him on the battlefield. Later in Russia, when he entered Smolensk, the stench of corpses was so nauseating that even the most hardened and experienced soldiers were sick. But Napoleon appeared unmoved. ‘Isn’t that a fine sight?’ he said to Armand-Augustin-Louis, marquis de Caulaincourt, indicating the flickering glare of the burning buildings and the bodies of the Russian soldiers amidst the flames.
‘Horrible, sire,’ said Caulaincourt.
‘You must always remember,’ Napoleon told him, ‘the saying of one of the Roman emperors, that the corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.’
Yet, Baron Fain, Napoleon’s former secretary, said, ‘I have seen him move away from more than one servant who was far from suspecting the secret aversion his smell had inspired.’ And, in Madrid and on St Helena, he was to turn girls away because he could not stand their smell. In Spain, indeed, the smell of an actress to whom he was introduced so offended him that, so he said, ‘I very nearly fainted, I did indeed.’ Now in Egypt, however, the evidently odourless or fragrant Zenab, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the sheikh El-Bekri, did appeal to him; and, it being supposed that he took her to his bed, she became known as ‘the General’s Egyptian’.
Her father, it seems, raised no objection. A man who consumed stupendous quantities of brandy and burgundy every night, who was much occupied with a handsome slave boy, El-Bekri may well have believed that the liaison might be turned to his advantage. It was not, however, to benefit poor Zenab: when the French were about to leave Egypt, religious zealots set about punishing women who had consorted with the infidel foreigners.
Zenab had been debauched by the French [the chronicler, Abd el-Rahman El-Djabarti recorded]. The Pasha’s emissaries presented themselves after sundown. They brought her and her father to court. She was questioned about her conduct, and made reply that she repented of it. Her father’s opinion was solicited. He answered that he disavowed his daughter’s conduct. The unfortunate girl’s head was accordingly cut off.
‘Heavens! It isn’t my fault.’
IT APPEARS THAT Bonaparte’s brief supposed affair with the pitiable Zenab was petering out, or perhaps already over, when his attention was drawn to Pauline Fourès, whom he soon set about separating from her husband. He gave orders for the lieutenant to leave immediately by diligence for the coast at Rosetta. From there he was to take dispatches (all of no importance) to Paris by way of Malta. He was to remain in Paris for ten days and then – Bonaparte might well have tired of Bellilotte by then – Fourès was to return to Egypt ‘as quickly as possible’.
As soon as the unwilling Fourès had been dispatched on this assignment, Bonaparte sent General Andoche Junot to Mme Fourès to make his proposition. But Junot delivered his message in such a coarse and clumsy way that she indignantly declared that she would always remain faithful to her husband. Bonaparte thereupon sent a more reliable and tactful emissary in the person of General Geraud-Christophe-Michel Duroc to Mme Fourès with an apology for General Junot’s clumsy manner and the present of a valuable bracelet.
Soon afterwards, Bonaparte arranged for General Dupuy, the military commandant of Cairo, to give a dinner party to which Mme Fourès was to be invited with several other ladies. During the course of this party, Bonaparte subjected her to that intense observation with which he had examined her during the balloon fiasco.
Towards the end of the meal, when coffee was served, the officer sitting next to Mme Fourès upset his cup on her dress. Having apologized for the evident mishap, he offered to escort her to a bedroom where she might do her best to clean her skirt before rejoining the party. While she was endeavouring to remove the stain, General Bonaparte walked into the room. It was a long time before either of them reappeared.
The next day, Bellilotte was installed in a house next door to the Commander-in-Chief’s in Eskebiya square; and the young woman, by then known as ‘Cleopatra’, was often to be seen riding about the town in Bonaparte’s carriage attended by his aides-de-camp, a duty from which Eugène de Beauharnais was excused only after objecting that he could hardly be expected to perform it for his stepfather’s mistress.
No attempt was made to conceal the liaison which Bonaparte flaunted as a retaliation for Josephine’s affair with Hippolyte Charles. ‘Rumour has it that the young and pretty wife has caught the fancy of the Commander-in-Chief,’ wrote Major Detroye in his diary. ‘Details of his taking possession of her are openly talked about by everyone.’ ‘This liaison was soon the talk of headquarters and the subject of nearly every conversation,’ Bourrienne confirmed.
Lieutenant Fourès heard about it as soon as he returned to Cairo. This was sooner than anyone expected, since the courier ship, Le Chasseur, in which he was sailing was intercepted en route from Alexandria to Malta by H.M.S. Lion – whose captain behaved in a manner which seemed to suggest that he knew quite well why Lieutenant Fourès was aboard Le Chasseur. The French ship’s crew and her passengers were delivered up to the Turks, while Lieutenant Fourès,