Napoleon

His Wives and Women

Christopher Hibbert

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780007389148
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A masterly biography of Napoleon, concentrating on his private life, by the historian described by Stella Tillyard as ‘a master portraitist of great men’s private lives’ and by Amanda Foreman as ‘one of England’s greatest living historical writers’.

1
THE CREOLE

‘She longs to see Paris and has
a very sweet disposition.’

‘CONTRARY TO OUR HOPES, it has pleased God to give us a daughter,’ Rose-Claire Tascher de La Pagerie wrote after the birth of her first child on 23 June 1763. The baby’s father, Joseph Tascher de La Pagerie, had wished for a son who might, as he himself had done, obtain a post as a page at court at Versailles – far away from the family’s sugar plantation on the West Indian island of Martinique. The mother had hoped that the birth of a boy might reconcile her husband to a marriage which was not a happy one, and which led him to seek such pleasures as could be found in Fort Royal, the capital of Martinique, where he was known to spend much of the day playing cards and was believed to spend the nights in bed with his black mistress.

In his plantation he took scant interest. His father had sailed out from France in 1726, having high hopes of making his fortune as so many Creoles – West Indians of European descent – contrived to do. But he was not a successful planter. Nor was his son and, by the time his grandchild was born, the plantation’s profits had fallen sharply, while the number of slaves, once as many as 150, summoned to work at half-past five every morning, had fallen to less than fifty.

These slaves, and the La Pagerie family, had all sought shelter in a stone-walled wind-house on the night of 13 August 1766 when devastating gales and a tidal wave tore across the island, killing over four hundred people, sweeping away the family’s mill and slave quarters and all the other wooden buildings of the plantation, and flattening the sugar canes, the mangoes, custard apples, tamarisks and bread-fruit trees.

The La Pageries’ large wooden house was not rebuilt and the upper floor of the refinery, above the clanking machinery crushing the sugar canes, became the three-year-old Rose’s home. Seven years later, after her mother had given birth to three more girls, Rose was sent to a convent school in Fort Royal where she was taught how to behave as a young lady would have been expected to behave in France, how to dance and sing and play the piano, how to use a fan and conduct a polite conversation; but to academic instruction not so much importance was attached.

When she was fourteen, Rose left the school at Fort Royal, and eagerly looked forward to leaving Martinique for a more exciting life in France. The opportunity to do so had been given to her by her aunt, Désirée, the mistress of a soi-disant marquis, François de Beauharnais, who had been appointed Governor of Martinique and of several nearby islands. Having, for propriety’s sake, married one of François de Beauharnais’s aides, Alexis Renaudin – who had thrashed her savagely when he discovered her ‘notorious conduct’ with the Governor and who had returned home to obtain a legal separation – Désirée followed him to France in order to enter a counter-plea and obtain a share of his money. Soon afterwards, François de Beauharnais and his wife also sailed for France, where Mme de Beauharnais went to live in the country on her family’s estate while her husband settled down in Paris with his mistress, Désirée Renaudin.

Désirée now set about arranging a marriage between one of her nieces in Martinique and her lover’s son. She accordingly asked her brother Joseph and his wife to send over from Martinique at least one of their daughters as a bride for Alexandre, then sixteen and a half years old. Alexandre thought that the second of the La Pagerie daughters, Catherine, aged twelve, would probably suit him best after a suitable Paris education; but Catherine died of tuberculosis before this could be arranged. Since her sister Rose was considered, at fourteen and a half, too near Alexandre’s own age, the youngest daughter, Manette, was then proposed. To be overlooked in this way was too much for Rose to bear. Usually so biddable and languorous, so lazily placid, she burst into frequent floods of tears until her father wrote to Alexandre’s family:

The oldest girl, who has often asked me to take her to France will, I fear, be somewhat upset by the preference given to her younger sister. She has a very fine skin, beautiful eyes, beautiful arms and an unusual gift for music. She longs to see Paris and has a very sweet disposition. If it were left to me I would bring the two daughters instead of one, but how can one part a mother from both her remaining daughters when death has just deprived her of a third?

So, in September 1779, Britain having declared war on France the year before, Joseph Tascher de La Pagerie, his daughter Rose, and a freed slave named Euphémie, sailed for Europe in the Île de France. After a fearful, three-month-long crossing of the Atlantic in appalling weather, constantly threatened with interception by the English fleet and in danger of capture by pirates, M. de La Pagerie’s weary party landed at Brest, where he immediately went to bed to await the arrival of his sister, Désirée, who, accompanied by his future son-in-law, Alexandre de Beauharnais, set out from Paris as soon as she heard that the Île de France had docked.

Alexandre was not disappointed by the appearance of his intended bride, shaken though she was by the tossing of the Île de France in the Atlantic’s rough waters. ‘Mademoiselle de La Pagerie may perhaps appear to you less pretty than you had expected,’ Alexandre reported to his father, ‘but I think I may assure you that her amiability and the sweetness of her nature will surpass even what you have been told about her.’ He was not, however, so taken with the girl, now sixteen years old, as this description implied. She seemed good-natured, admittedly, but gauche and rather fat; and he might well have rejected her had it not been for the annoyance his rejection would cause his godmother, Désirée, who had been so kind to him since his mother’s death.

As for Alexandre himself, he was certainly a handsome young man, self-assured in his army uniform; proud of the title of viscount and of that of marquis which had by now been officially conferred upon his father; attractive to women, despite a pompous, sanctimonious manner; and already highly satisfied to have been the lover of several ladies of whose names and ranks he made lists to indulge his vanity – one of them, who bore him a son, being the satisfactorily aristocratic comtesse Laure de La Touche de Longpré.

As well as being socially pretentious Alexandre de Beauharnais was also an intellectual snob, inordinately proud of having shared a tutor with the nephews of the duc de La Rochefoucauld, the writer and social reformer, by some of whose views he had been influenced without sharing those which might have damaged his standing in society.

Not long after Rose’s arrival in France, on 13 December 1779, she and Alexandre were married. He than returned to his regiment in Brittany, came back to Paris for a few days and, later in the month, left Rose to go back to Brittany again.

2
THE DOOMED MARRIAGE

‘Kindly take yourself off to a convent.’

ROSE SEEMED QUITE CONTENT. She was as delighted as she had expected to be with Paris where she lived with her aunt Désirée and Désirée’s lover, the marquis, in the ancient part of the city in the rue Thévenot. Admittedly, it was a cold and draughty house, the rooms of which were cast into an unalleviated gloom by the tall houses on the other side of the narrow street, and often rendered noisomely offensive by the stench of the nearby tanneries and the effluent and pieces of skin and streams of blood from the butchers’ stalls pouring sluggishly down the kennel. But, in these early days of her marriage, Rose does not appear to have been distressed by the discomfort of the house in the rue Thévenot; and even when her ambition of going to court at Versailles was denied her because of the dubious nature of the title which her husband had assumed, it was he rather than herself who was the more indignant in their shared disappointment.

He was rarely at home; and, when he was, he could not disguise the irritation which his wife’s gaucherie and lack of education caused him. He suggested that she should learn the text of contemporary plays, even study Roman history so that she could converse with the kind of people to whom he was ashamed to introduce her. As it was, she was ‘an object’ who had nothing to say to him.

As time passed, however, and on those rare occasions when he returned from weeks spent away from the rue Thévenot on military duties or, more often, enjoying himself with other women, he did sometimes take his wife on excursions into Parisian society: to fashionable salons, to the receptions held by the duc d’Orléans’s attractive if rather precise mistress, Félicité de Genlis, at the Palais Royal, and to the salon at the Swedish Embassy, presided over by Germaine de Staël, daughter of Jacques Necker, the Swiss financier, wife of the Swedish Ambassador, and brilliant woman of letters and conversationalist before whom the Duke of Wellington, in an unaccustomed gesture of obeisance, was to stoop on bended knee, and of whom he was to say, ‘She was a most agreeable woman if only you kept her light and away from politics. But that was not easy. She was always trying to come to matters of state. I have said to her more than once, “Je dêteste parler politique”; and she answered, “Parler politique pour moi c’est vivre.”’

In such company, Rose, vicomtesse de Beauharnais, was, at first, a fascinated observer rather than an example of the influence of women over men, irritating her husband by expecting his attention. ‘She has become jealous,’ he complained, ‘and wants to know what I am doing.’ Exasperated by what he described as her possessiveness and pettish outbursts, he accepted his godmother’s suggestion that he should make a tour by himself of Italy whence he wrote letters home expressing less enjoyment of his travels than envy of those who had been fortunate enough to have been left behind.

When he returned to Paris to a new house near the faubourg St Honoré, he decided he must soon go abroad again – this time to the West Indies, to serve with his regiment in order to gain some experience of active service against the British as a preliminary to a higher command.

Rose – who had borne him a son, Eugène, on 3 September 1781 and was now pregnant with their second child, Hortense – pleaded with him not to leave France again so soon; but he replied in peevish letters complaining of his lot and of a wife who did not, unlike the wives of other officers, write regularly to her husband. To Désirée he wrote to say that the comtesse Laure de La Touche de Longpré, the mother of his illegitimate child, would be sailing in the same ship as himself; so would she keep an eye on their son and the comtesse’s other child while they were away and would she also, as the comtesse suggested, send a set of the game of lotto to occupy the idle hours of the long voyage. To his wife he wrote: ‘I begin to fear that our marriage is turning out undeniably badly. You have only yourself to blame.’

The letters that subsequently arrived in Paris from the West Indies were almost hysterical in their fury. Her husband told Rose, ‘the vilest of creatures’, that he had learned that her behaviour at Martinique had been outrageous, and that, on the very eve of her departure for France, she had been discovered in the arms of a lover. ‘What am I to think of this second child of yours,’ he asked, ‘born eight months and a few days after my return from Italy? I swear by heaven that it belongs to someone else. Kindly take yourself off to a convent as soon as you receive this letter. This is my last word on the subject and nothing in the world can move me to change it.’

Other letters from him followed in the same vein, upbraiding his wife and pitying himself, protesting his ‘virtuous conduct’, even though a man in whose house he had stayed at Fort Royal had locked his own wife up in her room, convinced that the vicomte had seduced her.

Self-righteous and indignant as ever, he returned to Paris, professing fury that Rose had not yet entered a convent as he had required.

His own conduct, he declared, was in striking contrast to his wife’s unfaithfulness. His health was badly affected; his legs had become ‘extremely weak’; this was due to his fearful state of mind; he was ‘greatly to be pitied’. He was not, however, too ill to drive off with his son, Eugène, whom he was obliged to send back to the boy’s mother by order of the Provost of Paris. He then demanded the return of both the jewellery which he had given his wife and the furniture in their house.

Since he could produce no proof of the wild accusations he made about his wife’s behaviour, he was eventually compelled to retract them, to accept paternity of their daughter, Hortense, and to pay Rose an allowance of five thousand livres a year. With all this settled to her satisfaction, Rose moved into the convent of Penthémont in a fashionable part of Paris, a comfortable establishment which provided rooms for upper-class ladies in need, for one reason or another, of a temporary retreat from the outside world. Here; at the age of twenty-one, she embarked upon her delayed education, watching and listening to the sophisticated young aristocrats in whose company she now found herself, taking note of the subjects and manner of their conversation, assuming their graceful movements and seductive gestures, cultivating a delightful and rather husky tone of voice made all the more alluring by its melodious Caribbean inflexion in which her Rs all but disappeared, contriving even to lose weight and the plumpness in her cheeks, and walking with that slightly swaying gait characteristic of the slaves of Martinique.

After living at Penthémont for just over a year, Rose joined her son Eugène, her daughter Hortense, her aunt Désirée Renaudin, and her aunt’s lover, the marquis de Beauharnais, at Fontainebleau, where they were then living in rather straitened circumstances. Rose, extravagant and improvident, was also short of money, although those who met her at this time, and were struck by the elegance of her fashionable dresses, could not suppose that this was the case.

It was generally believed that these dresses were not all bought with her own money. At Fontainebleau, it was rumoured that the alluring, provocative young woman, separated from her husband, was conducting an affair not only with the duc de Lorge, a well-known figure at court in the nearby royal château, but also with the chevalier de Coigny; and it was further supposed that her liaison with one or other, if not both of these men, was the reason why, taking her daughter with her, and leaving Eugène in the care of Mme Renaudin at Fontainebleau, she suddenly left one day in the greatest hurry for Le Havre, where she clambered aboard a merchant ship for the Atlantic crossing to Martinique.

Here she seems to have found other lovers among the officers at the naval base in Fort Royal, among them comte Scipion du Roure. ‘Without being exactly pretty,’ another naval officer wrote of her, ‘she was attractive because of her wit, gaiety and good manners…She cared nothing for public opinion…And, as her funds were extremely limited, and she was most extravagant, she was often obliged to draw upon her admirers’ pockets.’

She remained on the island for two years until, warned that rioting slaves as well as French soldiers, who had mutinied and joined forces with them, were threatening to attack Fort Royal, she and Hortense sought safety aboard comte Scipion du Roure’s ship, La Sensible, in which, in October 1790, after a voyage of almost two months, they managed to reach Toulon.

3
THE CITOYENNE
BEAUHARNAIS

She confessed she was
‘too indolent to take sides’.

ROSE AND HER DAUGHTER found France in a mood of expectancy. The year before, a large crowd of assailants had attacked the Parisian prison, that symbol of repression known as the Bastille, and had released its four remaining inmates. Since then the attention of the country had been directed towards the National Assembly as the people waited for the next act in the drama to begin.

The President of the Assembly in October 1790, the month of Rose’s return from Martinique, was her former husband, relishing the opportunity now afforded him of making a series of sententious speeches.

Often to be seen listening to the deliberations of the Assembly in the gallery of the Tuileries Palace riding school, where their meetings were held, was Rose de Beauharnais, no longer vicomtesse, now citoyenne, in accordance with a decision taken by liberal French nobles to disclaim their titles. She also attended the salons of both Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis as well as the drawing rooms held in their houses by the radical German Prince Frederick of Salm-Kyrbourg and his sister, Princess Amalia.

Forceful as were the opinions expressed in these salons, Rose de Beauharnais gave no indication that she either approved or disapproved of them. As she herself confessed, she was ‘too indolent to take sides’; and, indeed, as a woman who knew her well was later to observe, her attention soon ‘wandered from any discussion of abstract ideas’. When it suited her to do so, however, she could readily feign an intelligent interest in what was said and knew well enough, as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the statesman and diplomatist, was to testify, when to keep silent rather than expose her ignorance or ingénuité.

As well as in the gallery of the National Assembly, Rose de Beauharnais was also to be seen at the exhibitions of the Academy where, among the portraits on display, was that of her husband, peering proudly from the canvas, his long Roman nose above an undershot chin.

From time to time, Rose came across him during her excursions about the town; and, in a quite friendly way, they discussed their children of whom he was certainly fond. But she could not persuade him to allow her an increased income of which she now stood sorely in need. Even so, she contrived to live well enough in her house in the rue St Dominique which she shared with a friend, Désirée Hosten, maintaining a household which included a valet, a governess for Hortense, and the freed slave, Euphémie, brought over from Martinique.

Adopting the ‘language and behaviour of the common people’, as one of her contemporaries put it, she cultivated sympathetic friends among the radicals, making use of the name of her former husband, who was twice elected President of the Jacobin Club, and, after his appointment to a military command on France’s endangered frontier, ending her letters ‘Lapagerie Beauharnais, wife of the Maréchal de Camp’.

Like the Abbé Sieyès, a leading member of the States General, who, when asked what he had done in the ensuing months of bloody revolution, replied, ‘I remained alive’, Rose de Beauharnais also survived. She lived through the attack on the Tuileries in the summer of 1792 and the subsequent September Massacres; she saw the erection of the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution which ended the life of the King on 21 January 1793; and she endured the days of the Terror during which the father of her children was also guillotined in 1794 after failing to prevent the fall of Mainz to the allied army which the excesses of the Revolution had provoked into existence.

When the Law of Suspects imposed the death penalty upon former nobles and their fami...