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be the Army of the Alps.

      Napoleon would have proposed marriage to Josephine anyway, once he had assured himself that he could afford it and that it would not harm his career. Barras’s offer was merely an added incentive. But Josephine at first did not see it like that. She was upset by this mingling of love and politics. One evening in February she made a scene. She accused Napoleon of wanting to marry her only in order to get the command in Italy. Napoleon denied the charge; how, he asked, could Josephine have entertained ‘so base a feeling’? Later, when he returned home, he wrote Josephine a letter saying how pained he was by her charge. But instead of retaliating at this imputation on his sincerity, he finds – to his own surprise – that he returns to lay his heart at her feet. ‘It is impossible to be weaker or to be brought lower. What is your strange power, incomparable Josephine? … I give you three kisses, one on your heart, one on your mouth, one on your eyes.’

      Reassured as to Napoleon’s sincerity, reassured also that Barras would continue to protect her and pass business contracts her way, Josephine looked into her heart and asked herself what her feelings were for Napoleon. She liked his courage, the range of his knowledge and the liveliness of his mind. What she liked less was, paradoxically, his passionateness, the fact that he was demanding, and that he would expect her to belong to him alone. Josephine summed up her feelings to a friend: ‘You are going to ask, “Do I love him?” Well … no. “Do you feel aversion to him ?” No. What I feel is tepidness: it annoys me, in fact religious people find it the most tiresome state of all.’

      Tiresome also was the fact that Josephine was thirty-two years old. Still very pretty, but thirty-two, with no sure income. As for marriage, had not Chaumette declared it to be ‘no longer a yoke, a heavy chain; it is no more than … the fulfilling of Nature’s grand designs, the payment of a pleasant debt which every citizen owes to the patrie’? Being now only a civil union, it could be ended easily by divorce. Napoleon wanted the marriage ardently, Barras wanted it. At last Josephine said yes.

      Josephine took Napoleon to see her notary, Raguideau, in the Rue Saint-Honoré. Raguideau was a tiny man, almost a dwarf. He closeted himself with Josephine, but inadvertently failed to shut the door tight. After Josephine had explained her intentions, through the partly open door Napoleon heard Raguideau say, ‘This is a very great mistake, and you’re going to be sorry for it. You’re doing something quite mad – marrying a man who has only his army cloak and sword.’ Napoleon was deeply hurt and never forgot the incident.

      Raguideau drew up a marriage contract extremely unfavourable to Napoleon. There was to be no community of goods, and it was stipulated that he should pay his wife 1,500 livres a year for life. Meanwhile, Barras was seeing about his side of the bargain. It had been a boast to say that he would give Napoleon the Italian command as a wedding present, for he first had to get the consent of his fellow Director, Lazare Carnot, whose special responsibility was the French army. Carnot, a chilly Burgundian mathematician who had been responsible for France’s brilliant victories in 1794, examined Napoleon’s plan, drafted for Pontécoulant, in which he proposed to strike through north Italy and ‘sign peace under the walls of Vienna’. This plan had been criticized by General Berthier, who said it would demand 50,000 extra troops, and by General Scherer, a former commander in the Alps, as ‘the work of a madman such as could be executed only by a madman’. Carnot, however, thought well of the plan; so he and Barras drafted the order transferring Napoleon to command the Army of the Alps. This was signed on 2 March; the marriage was to take place on the 9th.

      Napoleon did not have a birth certificate and Corsica was occupied by the English. So he did what Lucien had done two years earlier: borrowed Joseph’s. Josephine did not have a birth certificate either and Martinique also was occupied by the English, so she used the birth certificate of her sister Catherine. This was primarily a practical arrangement, but it had the advantage of making her seem younger than she was. On paper Josephine became twenty-eight instead of thirty-two, and Napoleon twenty-seven instead of twenty-six.

      On the evening of 9 March a group of important people gathered in what had once been the gilded drawing-room of a nobleman’s house at 3 Rue d’Antin, and now served as a room for marriages in the town hall of the second arrondissement. Barras the Director was there in his ostentatious triple-plumed velvet hat, and Tallien, to whose courage Josephine owed her life. The third witness was Jérôme Calmelet, Josephine’s lawyer, who approved of her marriage as much as Raguideau disapproved. Josephine herself wore a high-waisted muslin dress decorated with red, white and blue flowers. The last to arrive was Napoleon, in his gold-embroidered blue uniform, accompanied by an aide-de-camp, Lemarois, the fourth witness. The acting registrar, an ex-soldier with a wooden leg, had dozed off beside the fire. Napoleon shook him awake. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘marry us quickly.’

      The acting registrar got up from his chair, faced the couple, and addressed Napoleon. ‘General Buonaparte, citizen, do you consent to take as your lawful wife Madame Beauharnais, here present, to keep faith with her, and to observe conjugal fidelity?’

      ‘Citizen, I do.’

      The registrar addressed Josephine. ‘Madame Beauharnais, citizen, do you consent to take as your lawful husband General Buonaparte, here present, to keep faith with him and to observe conjugal fidelity?’

      ‘Citizen, I do.’

      ‘General Buonaparte and Madame Beauharnais, the law unites you.’

      After signing the register, Napoleon and Josephine drove through the cold March night to the pretty, unpaid-for house in Rue Chantereine. As a wedding present, Napoleon gave Josephine a simple necklace of hair-fine gold from which hung a plaque of gold and enamel. On the plaque were inscribed two words: ‘Au destin’. In an age without religion it was Napoleon’s way of saying, in the language Josephine favoured, that Providence had brought them together and would look after their marriage.

      In the ground-floor bedroom upholstered in blue and hung with lots of looking-glasses Napoleon found that he was not to be alone with his bride. Josephine had a pug called Fortuné who was devoted to her. The pug had been with her in prison and carried messages to her friends hidden in his collar. Since then he had had the privilege of sleeping on Josephine’s bed. When Napoleon sought to avail himself of the same privilege, Fortuné resented it. He barked, snapped and finally bit his rival in the calf.

      Napoleon’s feelings towards his new wife are described in the letters he wrote to her as soon as they were apart. His heart, he said, had never felt anything by halves, and it had shielded itself against love. Then he had found Josephine. Her whim was a sacred law. To be able to see her was his supreme happiness. She was beautiful and gracious. He adored everything about her. Had she been less experienced or younger, he would have loved her less. Glory attracted him only in so far as it was pleasing to Josephine and flattered her self-esteem.

      Only one thing troubled Napoleon – Josephine’s feelings for him. While he was never away from Josephine for an hour without taking out her portrait from his pocket and covering it with kisses, he learned with dismay that she had never once taken out of her drawer the portrait of himself which he had given her in October. He sensed that she cared for him less deeply than he cared for her, and that one day even that affection would diminish. It was the ending of ‘Clisson et Eugénie’ come true. The thought ‘terrified’ Napoleon, and he sought to dispel it by bringing it into the open. ‘I ask neither eternal love nor fidelity,’ he told Josephine, ‘but only … truth, unlimited frankness. The day when you will say to me “I love you less” will be the last day of my love or the last of my life.’

      On the day after their wedding Napoleon and Josephine went to see Hortense at Madame Campan’s fashionable school in Saint-Germain. Hortense had opposed her mother remarrying because, as she told Eugène, ‘she’ll be bound to love us less’ – a prediction which was to be proved untrue. Napoleon, who was fond of children in general, and of Josephine’s children in particular, put himself out to please the blue-eyed Hortense. On returning to Rue Chantereine, he immersed himself in books which he had taken out of the National Library three days previously. They were the Memoirs of Marshal de Catinat, a Life of Prince Eugène, three folio volumes of Prince Eugène’s battles, a book on the topography of Piedmont

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