Napoleon - Adam Zamoyski

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arrogant than the others. Jean-Baptiste Le Lieur de Ville sur Arce, four years older than Napoleone, recalled being drawn to him by the ‘originality’ of his character, his ‘somewhat strange’ manner and his intelligence, and the two became close. Another friend was Pierre François Laugier de Bellecour, whom Napoleone liked in spite of his frivolity. There were others with whom he was on good terms, and he also had some friends among the friars and the teachers.7

      What did set Napoleone apart from his peers was his application and his intellectual curiosity. With a library at his disposal for the first time in his life, he read voraciously. The cadets were assigned small allotments of land to cultivate, and Napoleone fenced his off and planted it so as to provide himself with a place of solitude in which he could read. ‘Reserved in his temper, and wholly occupied by his own pursuits, Buonaparte courted that solitude which seemed to constitute his delight,’ recorded the librarian.8

      With Napoleone at Brienne and Joseph at Autun, Carlo with a seat in the Corsican Estates and the appointment in 1779 of his uncle Luciano as archdeacon of Ajaccio cathedral, the senior clerical post in the city, the standing of the family seemed assured. But Carlo’s social ambitions bred requirements which imposed new struggles on him, and anxieties on his family. By a complicated transaction in 1779 he managed to gain sole title to most of the lease granted to his ancestor Geronimo in 1584 on the Salines, twenty-three hectares of land outside Ajaccio. Originally a salt-marsh, it had been partly drained and turned into a cherry orchard, but had reverted to an unhealthy swamp. Carlo applied for a subsidy from the French government to drain the land on grounds of public health and turn it into a nursery for mulberry trees, which, it was hoped, would be planted all over the island and provide raw silk for the French textile industry. Thanks to Marbeuf’s support, the subsidy was granted in June 1782.9

      The next objective required more tortuous negotiations, in which his patron’s assistance would be even more necessary. Almost a century earlier, a great-aunt of Carlo had married an Odone, and in her dowry brought him a property which was to revert to the Buonaparte if the progeny of the union were to die out. But instead of returning the property, the last of the Odone bequeathed it to the Jesuits. When the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1764, the property devolved to the state. Carlo intended to prove that the Odone bequest was illegal, and laid claim to Les Milleli, another former Jesuit property, as compensation.10

      The matter required a trip to Paris and Versailles, and in September 1782 Carlo set off, taking Letizia with him for a cure at the spa of Bourbonne-les-Bains before going on to Paris. At some stage during this trip she visited Napoleone at Brienne, and recorded being struck by how wasted and sickly he looked.11

      Carlo marked his social ascent by restoring the Buonaparte home in Ajaccio, putting in marble fireplaces, mirrors, lining his bedroom with crimson silk, draping the windows with muslin curtains and installing a library. Behind the scenes, things looked different, according to inventories of the family possessions, which list every pot and pan in the kitchen, buckets, iron pokers, pewter plates (three large and twenty-nine small), knives, forks and spoons. The path to grandeur was not without its difficult moments. A row over possession of the part of the house occupied by Carlo’s cousin Maria Giustina and her Pozzo di Borgo husband, which Carlo escalated by trying to deny them the use of the only staircase, climaxed in Maria Giustina emptying her chamberpot over Carlo’s best silk suit, airing on the terrace below, which entailed yet another court case.12

      The intimacy with Marbeuf would soon be at an end. He had married a young lady of his own class, and lost interest in his Corsican protégés. This came at a bad moment. The mulberry nursery was not going well, and the costs soon outstripped the amount of the subsidy. Another trip to Paris would be required, for family reasons too. Carlo had succeeded in getting his third son, now referred to as Lucien, admitted to Autun, where he joined Joseph. And he had achieved a social triumph in having his eldest daughter Maria-Anna accepted into the Maison Royale de Saint-Cyr, founded a hundred years before by Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Maintenon for the daughters of indigent nobility, which not only provided a free education, but also a dowry when they left. In June 1784 he set off for Paris with her. He needed to get more money out of the government for the Salines project, to press his suit over the Odone inheritance and the Milleli compensation, and to lobby for the nine-year-old Lucien to be granted a bursary at Brienne, where he was now due to join Napoleone. After stopping off at Autun to pick up Lucien, Carlo’s appearance at Brienne, dressed in a cerise coat with puce breeches and silk stockings, with silver buckles on his shoes and his hair curled, caused Napoleone embarrassment. ‘My father was a good man,’ he later reminisced, but added that he was ‘a little too fond of the ridiculous gentility of the times’.13

      Carlo’s plans were beginning to come unstuck. Joseph had come to the conclusion that he was not made for the priesthood, and announced that he too would like to pursue a military career, as an artillery officer. Carlo was dismayed, and pointed out that Joseph was neither hardy in health nor courageous. With Marbeuf’s backing he would easily obtain a good position and end up a bishop, which would be of advantage to the whole family, while, as Napoleone explained, he could at best make a passable garrison officer, being entirely unsuited for the artillery on account of his lack of application and his ‘weakness of character’.14

      These comments were made in the first extant letter written by Napoleone, to his half-uncle Joseph Fesch in June 1784. He was still only fourteen, but while his spelling and grammar are atrocious, he adopts an authoritative tone, particularly with relation to his elder brother, whom he discusses as a parent might a wayward teenager. Of his younger sibling Lucien he remarks that ‘he shows a good disposition and good will’ and ‘should make a good fellow’. Lucien claimed that on his arrival at Brienne Napoleone received him ‘without the slightest show of tenderness’ and that ‘there was nothing amiable in his manner, either towards me or towards the other comrades of his age who did not like him’, but these reminiscences, written down much later by an embittered Lucien, are unreliable.15

      Napoleone had originally intended to go into the navy. The voyages of exploration of Admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and the creditable part played by the French navy against the British during the War of American Independence had raised its profile and made it fashionable. The navy offered a better chance of action in peacetime, and with it better prospects for promotion. It held greater appeal than garrison service in some gloomy northern town. In the navy consideration rested on talent, and social origins counted for little. Napoleone was good at mathematics and geography, and he was small and agile, all vital assets. But in 1783 higher powers decided that he should go into the army. Carlo’s interventions in Paris proved fruitless and he was destined for the artillery – which came as a relief to Letizia, as the navy involved the danger of death by drowning as well as by enemy action. The artillery had also gained in prestige due to recent technical advances, and as it was an arm in which favour could not trump ability and mathematics was a prerequisite, Napoleone would also have an advantage. On 22 September 1784 he was interviewed by the inspector Raymond de Monts and selected for the École Militaire in Paris.16

      The fifteen-year-old Napoleone and four other cadets set off, under the care of one of the friars, on 17 October, travelling by heavy mail coach to Nogent-sur-Seine, where they changed to a coche d’eau, a barge with a superstructure for passengers and goods, drawn by four Percheron horses along a tow-path. Two days later they disembarked on the left bank of the Seine opposite the Ile de la Cité and walked through what was then known as the ‘pays latin’ to their new school. On the way they stopped at a bookshop to buy books, and at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to say a prayer.17

      The École Militaire, founded in 1751, had been reformed in the 1770s by the war minister Claude Louis de Saint-Germain. The 200 cadets wore military uniform of blue coat with yellow collar and red facings, red waistcoat and breeches. They were housed in a grand stone building which still stands at the end of the Champ de Mars, with a spacious courtyard in which they performed drills and played ball games. They slept in a dormitory with wooden partitions, each compartment containing an iron bedstead with curtains and minimal built-in furniture for their clothes, ewer and basin, and a chamberpot.18

      The day began with mass at six o’clock, followed by eight hours of instruction, except on Thursdays, Sundays and feast days, when the only obligations

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