Napoleon - Vincent Cronin

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to have done with life. It is Eugénie who gave me it … Farewell, you whom I chose to be arbiter of my life, farewell, companion of my finest days! In your arms, with you, I have tasted supreme happiness. I have drained life and the good things of life. What remains but satiety and boredom? At twenty-six I have exhausted the passing pleasures that go with a reputation, but in your love I have known how sweet it is to be alive. That memory breaks my heart. May you live happily, forgetting unhappy Clisson! Kiss my sons; may they grow up without their father’s warm nature, for that would make them victims, like him, of other men, of glory and of love.

      This letter Clisson folded and entrusted to an aide, with orders to take it to Eugénie. Placing himself at the head of a squadron Clisson threw himself into the fray … and died ‘pierced by a thousand blows’.

      So ends Napoleon’s story of Clisson and Eugénie. It is curious that he should make his tragic ending turn on the woman betraying the man: on one occasion Eugénie did not write to him for a fortnight, but that was hardly sufficient justification. The sense that he had been, or would be, betrayed by a woman plainly arises from some unconscious hidden depths of Napoleon’s character: perhaps the powerful mother-image or earlier fear of castration. On the other hand, Clisson’s reaction is just what we would expect from Napoleon: he chooses a clean death rather than a shoddy life.

      Meanwhile, Napoleon was living in Paris on sick leave with more time on his hands than ever before. He wrote to Eugénie of ‘the luxury and pleasures of Paris’, adding that he would not taste them without her. But he did taste them. Though poor, he had well-to-do acquaintances and through them came to meet a number of amiable young women.

      One was a certain Mademoiselle de Chastenay, a bluestocking who lived with her mother in Châtillon, near Paris. Napoleon spent a day with her in May, and as he often did when he met a young lady, asked her to sing for him. Not only did she accede to his request, but she sang songs in Italian composed by herself. This was something far beyond Eugénie’s talent. She then let it be known that she had translated a poem about a fan. Napoleon was keenly interested, and he who at this period spoke chiefly in gloomy monosyllables, told her at length how fascinated he was by the Parisienne’s use of the fan. Extending Lavater’s principles, Napoleon had worked out in detail a theory according to which every movement of her fan reflected a lady’s feelings. He said he had recently proved this theory correct by watching the famous actress, Mademoiselle Constant, at the Comédie Française.

      Mademoiselle de Chastenay was never more than a friend for Napoleon, but she represented a more accomplished and highly educated world, beside which the Marseille of the Clarys would inevitably have appeared to disadvantage.

      A more remarkable woman whom Napoleon came to know was Thérésia Tallien. Under the Terror she had been in prison: twenty-one and awaiting the guillotine blade. She wrote a note to her lover, Jean Lambert Tallien – whom she later married – and concealed it in the heart of a cabbage, which she threw to him from her barred window: ‘If you love me as sincerely as you profess to do, use every effort to save France, and myself along with her.’ Thérésia was a beautiful woman with jet black hair, and her note in the cabbage produced the desired effect. Tallien rose to his feet in the Convention and dared to attack the dreaded Robespierre, thus precipitating Robespierre’s downfall, ending the Terror, and freeing his sweetheart.

      Thérésia Tallien lived in a ‘witty’ house: outside it looked like a thatched cottage, and inside was luxuriously furnished in the Pompeian style. She gave fashionable parties, at which she wore daring transparent dresses. Sometimes she wore a coiffure à la guillotine – hair cropped short or lifted up off the neck – and a narrow red satin ribbon encircling the throat. At other times she wore red or gold hair-pieces. And whatever she wore she was daring and witty.

      Napoleon went sometimes to her parties, in his threadbare uniform. Cloth was scarce but a recent decree had granted officers enough for a new uniform. Napoleon, however, not being on the active list, could not benefit from this. Doubtless he mentioned it to Thérésia Tallien as yet another ‘injustice’. She, instead of merely sympathizing, gave him a letter to a friend of hers, a certain Monsieur Lefèvre, commissary of the 17th division, and that was enough to get Napoleon a new uniform.

      Napoleon, then, during the summer of 1795 met a number of accomplished and beautiful women, older than Eugénie. In his story he had posed the dilemma: either his career or love in the wilds; and had chosen love in the wilds. But as he came to know Paris better, he evidently saw that the dilemma did not correspond with the facts. Here were influential women, married to generals or politicians, helping them in their careers. These women might have different values from his, but they lived in the same world, the world of the Revolution. Inevitably, as he interested himself in these women, Napoleon became less attached to Eugénie Clary of Marseille.

      In June Eugénie moved to Genoa, where her family had business interests. In writing to tell Napoleon of the move, she said that she would continue to love him always. Napoleon looked into his heart and found that he could no longer share that feeling. He tried to let her down as gently as possible: ‘Tender Eugénie, you are young Your feelings are going to weaken, then falter; later you will find yourself changed. Such is the dominion of time … I do not accept the promise of eternal love you give in your latest letter, but I substitute for it a promise of inviolable frankness. The day you love me no more, swear to tell me. I make the same promise.’ In his next letter but one he made the point again: ‘If you love someone else, you must yield to your feelings.’

      The fact is that Napoleon himself had met someone else who to an extreme degree excited his feelings: a close friend of Thérésia Tallien named Rose Beauharnais. Two letters later he was to break off altogether his love-affair with Eugénie. This episode had reached its most satisfying development only when they were apart, in Napoleon’s imagination. Indeed, from the beginning it had been something of a dream romance, for what after all did he and Eugénie have in common but a taste for music and an inability to spell the simplest words? Eugénie cried at first and said she would love Napoleon always, but she was soon to get over her tears and to make a happy marriage with Jean Bernadotte, another rising young army officer with southern blood in his veins.

       CHAPTER 7 Josephine

      THE Taschers de La Pagerie were a noble French family established since the seventeenth century in the island of Martinique, where they owned a large sugar plantation employing 150 Negroes, nominally slaves but in fact a well-treated community producing cane sugar, coffee and rum. The Taschers of Martinique had some things in common with the Buonapartes of Corsica. They were nobles residing overseas from their country of origin; they lived simply, close to nature, and in so doing, had retained the old virtues of the nobility. But the Taschers were richer and had an easier life.

      Rose was born on 23 June 1763, the eldest of three children, all girls. She spent a happy childhood in Martinique, which is as lush as Corsica is rugged. Around her house grew scarlet hibiscus and wild orchids, breadfruit and banana trees and coconut palms. The pace of life was relaxed. Rose gossiped with the Negro women, swung in a hammock, played the guitar, but read few books. At twelve she went to a convent boarding-school for four years. Meanwhile a suitable marriage was arranged for her with a man she had only occasionally met, Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, the son of a former Governor of the French West Indies. He was serving as an officer in France, and to France at sixteen Rose Tascher set sail.

      Alexandre de Beauharnais was nineteen, handsome and rich – he had an income of 40,000 francs. He had been educated at the University of Heidelberg. He was the best dancer in France and had the privilege of dancing in Marie Antoinette’s quadrilles. But the gifted Alexandre had lost his mother as a child and had grown up with three weaknesses: he was pretentious, he was self-centred, and where women were concerned he had no control.

      Alexandre was pleased with his bride, in particular with her ‘honesty and gentleness’, and Rose Tascher became the Vicomtesse de Beauharnais. The young couple had two children. Then Alexandre went off with another woman to live in Martinique. There he listened to totally unfounded gossip about Rose Tascher’s girlhood, and

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