Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Beauharnais was born into the parvenu and scandal-ridden family of Tascher, who owned La Pagerie, a plantation in the French island colony of Martinique. She was brought to France and married off at an early age to an undistinguished nobleman, Alexandre de Beauharnais, who paraded under the assumed title of vicomte. He was jealous and abusive as well as unfaithful, and repudiated her after having sired two children. During the Revolution he had briefly presided over the National Assembly and then been put in command of the Army of the Rhine. An inept soldier, he had allowed the fortress of Mainz to fall to the enemy in 1793 out of fecklessness, but was accused of treason and executed the following year. His wife, known in childhood as Yéyette and later as Josephine, was incarcerated in the same prison, Les Carmes, where, while he was conducting an affair with the widow of an executed general, she was doing the same with General Lazare Hoche, also a prisoner.
Prisons were hotbeds of sexual activity during the Terror, and Les Carmes, whose walls were still smeared with the blood of the 115 priests massacred there in September 1792, was no exception. The usual instinct in the presence of impending death was in this case reinforced by the hope of getting pregnant, which would spare a woman the guillotine. As a result, the multiple-occupancy chambers throbbed to the sound of couplings, often with the warders themselves, in scenes of fear and degradation which left their mark on those like Josephine who were fortunate enough to survive.
On her release from prison following the fall of Robespierre, Josephine made the most of the friendships forged there with, amongst others, Thérèse Tallien. She resumed her affair with General Hoche and was prominent in the exuberant new society, the salons and the extravagant macabre entertainments of the capital. Sometime in the early summer of 1795 she became the mistress of Barras, but by the beginning of the autumn he was ready to move on and began looking around for a husband who might provide for her. She had no money and was living from day to day on the generosity of lovers, currently that of Barras, who had rented a small house for her off the rue Chantereine.
Josephine was thirty-two and, as Barras put it, ‘growing precociously decrepit’. She had never been a beauty, and with her freshness wilting she had to resort to what he called ‘the most refined, the most perfected artistry ever practised by the courtesans of ancient Greece or Paris in the exercise of their profession’. She knew how to overcome every disadvantage, concealing her rotten teeth by keeping her mouth shut when she smiled, which many found irresistible. She possessed an almost legendary charm, grace, and a languor of movement which people associated with her creole origins, lending her a certain spice in their imagination. She was both dignified, with elegant manners and bearing, and girlishly light-hearted, displaying a devil-may-care attitude to practicalities. And there is little doubt that she was an accomplished lover. But she had no position to fall back on when these assets failed, and marriage was the only practical way of securing her future.14
According to Barras she had set her cap at Hoche, but he was married, and had allegedly commented that ‘one could take a whore as a mistress for a time, but not as a legitimate wife’. It seems that Barras then suggested she marry Buonaparte. She was not taken with the idea, allegedly saying that of all the men she might bring herself to love, this ‘puss in boots’ was the last, and objecting that he came from ‘a family of beggars’, even though he was by then showering her with presents. Barras encouraged the match, partly in order to establish her on a respectable footing, perhaps also to tighten his grip on the useful young general, who was growing alarmingly independent.15
Buonaparte had begun to do as he pleased, appointing and cashiering officers, reorganising units, and extending his brief beyond military matters. He called on the Directors almost daily, not so much advising them as telling them what to do, and castigating them for their incompetence. When they reproved him for acting in an arbitrary manner, he reputedly countered by saying it was impossible to get anything done if one were to stick to the law, and he usually managed to get them to see things his way. Getting Buonaparte settled might make life easier for the Directors. Barras advised him that ‘a married man finds his place in society’, and that marriage gave a man ‘more substance and greater resilience against his enemies’. Most people thought he was merely trying to park an unwanted mistress, and the Marquis de Sade would publish that version, thinly veiled, in his Zoloé et ses deux acolytes.16
Buonaparte was not as fussy as Hoche. He allegedly told Barras that he did not like the idea of seducing a virgin, and preferred to find ‘l’amour tout fait que l’amour a faire’, in other words the ground well prepared. Whether those really were his words or not, there is a ring of truth about what they expressed; such cynical bluster is characteristic of the sexually insecure.17
The first extant letter from Buonaparte to Josephine is undated, but it was written at seven in the morning, probably in the second half of December 1795, and almost certainly after their first night of love. ‘I have woken full of you,’ he wrote. ‘The picture of you and the memory of yesterday’s intoxicating evening have left no rest to my senses. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have had on my heart!’ He goes on to say that he cannot stop thinking about her and what she is doing, and cannot wait to see her again, in three hours’ time. ‘Meanwhile, mio dolce amor, a million kisses from me; but do not give me any, as your kisses set my blood on fire.’18
The incomparable courtesan had clearly given him his first pleasurable amorous experience. ‘It was, it seems, his first love, and he experienced it with all the intensity of his nature,’ noted Marmont. He also noted something else. ‘What is incredible, and yet absolutely true, is that Bonaparte’s vanity was flattered,’ he wrote, explaining that for all his republican talk, the young general was beguiled by the social grace of the old nobility, and that in the company of the former pseudo-vicomtesse de Beauharnais he felt as though he had been accepted into its charmed circle; he was not Carlo Buonaparte’s son for nothing. Josephine fed Buonaparte’s social aspirations with talk of her estates in Martinique, cleverly disguising her penury and hinting at great wealth. She had taste and flair, and had managed to create a sense of elegance in the little house on the rue Chantereine with the few sticks of furniture and meagre ornaments she possessed, and despite the chipped assorted china and unmatched flatware her dinners exuded refined aristocratic ease. The house itself, designed for the philosopher Condorcet by Claude Nicolas Ledoux, was an intimate retreat, reached by a narrow walled lane, a refuge from the political turmoil of the capital. Buonaparte felt well there not just on account of his love for Josephine. He quickly captivated her two children, the fourteen-year-old Eugène and the twelve-year-old Hortense. They had begun by resenting his intrusion, but gave in when he started telling them ghost stories and playing with them. Still something of a child himself, he had found a home in Paris.19
Josephine was unsure about this third child. ‘They want me to marry, my dear friend!’ she wrote to a confidante. ‘All my friends urge me to, my aunt almost orders it and my children beg me to! “Do you love him?” you will ask. – Well … no. “So you find him unappealing?” – No, but I find myself in a state of tepidity which I find unpleasant …’ She goes on to say that she feels she should feel greater ardour: ‘I admire the general’s courage, the extent of his knowledge in all things, of which he speaks equally well, the agility of his mind, which allows him to seize the thoughts of others almost before they have expressed them; but I am fearful, I confess, of the control he seems to wish to exert over everything around him. His piercing look has something about it quite mysterious which impresses even the directors: you can judge for yourself how it intimidates a woman!’
What seems to have bothered her most was his ardour. His various sexual encounters to date had evidently left him cold, and what he experienced with Josephine had opened up a gamut of new sensations and unlocked feelings he had either never known, or had repressed with all the vehemence with which he had lambasted