LITMIR.BIZ

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November the Committee of Public Safety switched its priority to Corsica. The British had responded to Paoli’s appeal by occupying the island as a colony, with George III as monarch, Sir Gilbert Elliot as viceroy and Pozzo di Borgo as chief administrator. Paoli was bundled off to a second exile in London. As General Dumerbion had paid generous tribute to Buonaparte’s talents, he was given the task of preparing the artillery of the expeditionary force intended to recapture the island.13

      He spent most of the last month of 1794 and the first two of 1795 in Toulon where it was assembling. The city was scarred by the siege and subject to riots by mobs seeking ‘aristos’ to lynch. One day a captured Spanish ship with some émigré French noble families aboard was brought into harbour, and a mob gathered in expectation. The city authorities tried to protect the émigrés, only to be accused of being royalist stooges and threatened with lynching. Buonaparte managed to calm the crowd, which contained some gunners who had served under him at the siege, and then smuggle the émigrés out of town in his artillery caissons.14

      The Corsican expedition sailed from Toulon on 11 March, but soon ran into an Anglo-Neapolitan fleet, and after a brief encounter in which it lost two ships, sailed back into port. Disheartened by the prospect of inaction, Buonaparte asked to be transferred to the Army of the Rhine. His request remained without response, and he spent the next weeks mainly in Marseille, where on 21 April he became engaged to Désirée.15

      He had been seeing her intermittently over the past months and corresponding with her regularly. Most of his letters are couched in the tone of a schoolmaster, as he tells her which books to read and which not, frets about whether her music teacher is good enough, arranges for a publisher in Paris to send her the latest tunes, reminds her to sing her scales regularly, going into tedious detail about the effects of striking a wrong note. He was a great music-lover, with a passion for the Italian composers of the day, and enjoyed lecturing those French ones he found wanting, sometimes entering into arguments of a technical nature with them.16

      The engagement had probably been precipitated by the fact that at the end of March he had received a transfer to the Army of the West, operating against insurgents in the Vendée region of western France. The order to take up this posting reached him on 7 May, and to his chagrin he learned that he had been struck off the list of artillery generals, as their quota had been exceeded and he was the youngest, so he was relegated to what he regarded as the inferior status of infantry general.

      The following day he set off for Paris, accompanied by his brother Louis, to whose education he was continuing to attend, drilling him mercilessly with mathematical tests even as they travelled up the valley of the Rhône and through Burgundy. He also took with him his devoted Junot and Marmont, who had come to hero-worship him. ‘I found him so superior to everything I had encountered in my life, his intimate conversation was so deep and so captivating, his mind was so full of future promise,’ wrote Marmont, ‘that I could not bear the idea of his impending departure.’ When Buonaparte suggested he accompany him he did not hesitate, even though he had no authorisation to do so.17

      Marmont insisted they break their journey at Châtillon-sur-Seine, where his parents lived. His mother found Buonaparte taciturn to the point of being impossible to communicate with, and took the ‘little general’ off to visit her friends the Chastenay family who lived nearby. ‘On this first visit, in order to pass the time I was asked to play the piano,’ recalled the daughter of the house, Victorine. ‘The general seemed to appreciate it but his compliments were curt. I was then asked to sing, so I sang one in Italian which I had just learnt the music for. I asked him if I was pronouncing right, to which he just said no.’18

      The following day the Chastenays dined at the Marmonts’, and afterwards Victorine asked Buonaparte about Corsica. He unwound, and in the course of the conversation, which lasted a full four hours, he spoke of his love for the epic poems supposedly written by the thirteenth-century Gaelic poet Ossian and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie. He spoke earnestly about politics, about happiness and self-fulfilment. On the third day he helped her make a posy of cornflowers and they played games, flirting and dancing. She was dismayed when, the day after that, he continued his journey.19

      On reaching Paris in the last days of May, Buonaparte called on François Aubry, Carnot’s successor at the war ministry, but any hopes of reversing the decision striking him off the list of artillery generals were quickly dispelled. Aubry, a former artillery officer embittered by career disappointments, was not to be swayed. Buonaparte began to look around for someone who might help him.

      One of the most prominent among those known as the ‘jeunesse dorée’, a faction persecuting the fallen Jacobins, was Stanislas Fréron, who was in love with Buonaparte’s fifteen-year-old sister Paulette, whom he had met in Marseille and whom he wished to marry. Buonaparte was not averse to the match if it could help his own cause.20

      A potentially more useful acquaintance was Paul Barras, who had also been at Toulon. His chequered past included fighting the British in India, voting for the death of Louis XVI in the Convention, a minor role in the downfall of Robespierre, and the defeat of a royalist attempt to overthrow the Republic. A spell as commissary to the army had provided the opportunities for graft which enabled him to acquire considerable wealth, with which he indulged his love of luxury and women. He had turned his Jacobin coat inside out, surrounding himself with a court of roués and courtesans, and would have welcomed another ex-Jacobin with a realist’s ability to change his tune, but Barras trusted nobody. There had been Jacobin riots a few days before Buonaparte’s arrival, and the political situation remained unstable, with people representing every shade of revolution and counter-revolution manoeuvring in a kaleidoscopic succession of alliances and realignments. Barras would see no point in helping Buonaparte until he needed him. But he did take him under his wing to keep in reserve.

      On 13 June Buonaparte received his posting to the Army of the West under General Lazare Hoche, operating against royalist rebels in the Vendée. He had no intention of going and obtained sick leave until 31 August, which gave him time to consider his options.

      The fall of Robespierre had put an end to the Terror, and the resulting release from fear produced an eruption of hedonism. Buonaparte was astonished at the extent to which the people of Paris threw themselves into a life of pleasure. ‘To dance, to go to the theatre, to parties out in the country and to pay court to women, who are here the most beautiful in the world, is the main occupation and the most important thing,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘People look back on the Terror as on a bad dream.’21

      Antoine Lavalette, a contemporary of Buonaparte, was horrified at what had happened to his native city, where ‘the dissolution of society had plumbed new depths’. He noted disapprovingly that ‘it was the newly rich who sought to set the tone, combining all the errors of a bad upbringing with all the ridicule of an inborn absence of dignity’. He was shocked at the ‘barely believable level of licentiousness’ on display, at the ‘lovely, well-bred women of high birth’ who ‘wore flesh-coloured pantaloons and buskins on their feet, barely covered by dresses of transparent gauze, with their breasts uncovered and their arms naked to the shoulder’. As another explained, ‘The aim of these ladies and the ne plus ultra of their art was to show as much nudity as possible without being naked’. Some moistened their dresses with oil to make them cling to the body.22

      There were balls to which only relatives of those who had been guillotined were invited, in some cases held in prisons where the September massacres had taken place, at which the guests wore a red ribbon round their necks in a gesture somewhere between gallows humour and exorcism. Buonaparte may have been shocked, but he showed understanding of people’s need to compensate for the sufferings and the anxieties of the past – and he was a good deal less censorious than Lavalette when it came to the nouveaux riches.23

      A disastrous economic situation and a financial crisis provoked by the vertiginous fall in value of the paper currency, the assignats, coupled with the emigration or execution of nobles, entailing the confiscation of their property, meant that there were a large number of properties on the market. People who had grown rich during the Revolution were desperate to park their depreciating cash in solid assets, creating a febrile market in which there was money to be made. On leaving Châtillon for Paris,

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