‘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
The work requires little comment. It is a psychoanalyst’s feast with its display of emotional immaturity, dreams of glory, and sense of superiority combined with a desperate awareness of inferiority in some areas, with aggression coupled to a curiously mawkish sensibility, and total self-obsession.
On 17 August, having received orders to take up his posting with the Army of the West, Buonaparte called on Aubry’s successor at the ministry of war, Doulcet de Pontécoulant. The new head of military affairs was struck by the way the frail, sickly-looking man came to life as he spoke, his eyes sparkling with fire as he uttered the words ‘army’, ‘battle’ and ‘victory’. He appointed him to the Cabinet Historique et Topographique, a general staff consisting of twenty officers. Buonaparte applied himself with his usual single-mindedness, producing plans and memoranda on every aspect of the military situation, often staying up until 3 a.m. ‘When I work on a plan of campaign, I cannot rest until I have finished, until I have worked through all my ideas,’ he later explained. ‘I am like a woman in labour.’ He presented Pontécoulant with a plan for the conquest of northern Italy which when it was sent to the commander of the Army of Italy was rejected as the figment of a madman who should be sent to an asylum.39
The work did not distract him from more prosaic matters; he was looking at properties within easy reach of Paris, and had located one with ‘a very fine house’ whose drawing rooms, dining room, kitchen, pantry, bedrooms, garden, orchard, kitchen garden, fields, pastures and woods he listed for his brother’s benefit. ‘In any case, I shall buy it, because it seems to me that it cannot fail to be a good deal,’ he concluded. His confidence in being able to find the necessary funds may have