The year was 1795. The goddess of fortune who had smiled on Napoleon at the Siege of Toulon was about to smile on him in Paris too. The Directory, the body that ruled France in those days, needed a soldier to protect it from the mob that was about to storm its seat in the Tuileries Palace. Napoleon took on the challenge. He surrounded the palace with cannons, killed dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the crowd, saved the Directory and was promoted to général de division. And he met a woman named Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, whom he would call, for short, Joséphine. Joséphine de Beauharnais (1763-1814) was to become the lucky charm of his life.
This meeting fulfilled part of a prophecy given twenty years earlier to little Rose by a Black woman named Euphémie, at a voodoo ceremony on the island of Martinique:
Two marriages far from the colony, two children from the first husband.
The second part of the prophecy was:
The second husband will raise you so high that you will be more than a queen….
Now pay attention to how the prophecy ended, with a “but”:
But he will have to beware of the priest who will ruin him.
And the priest, for those who don’t know, was Monsieur de Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838), who started his career in the ranks of the Church…
From Martinique to Paris
Rose, or Joséphine, was born in 1763, six years before Napoleon, on the island of Martinique in the West Indies. She was called a Creole, the name given at the time to French people born in the colonies. She was born in a small place called Les Trois-Îlets (the Three Islets), a name that can sound chilling if you think of three islands: Corsica, Elba and Saint Helena. Her family owned sugarcane plantations, and little Rose used to chew a lot of the cane, which ruined her teeth.
Later in life she smiled often, but always with her mouth closed. In her many portraits you’ll never, ever find her with her mouth open. Natural disasters and her father’s poor management left the family impoverished. At sixteen, Rose was sent to France to marry a nineteen-year-old from a wealthy noble family, Alexandre de Beauharnais, a pretentious, self-centered man with no self-control when it came to women. The marriage produced two children, a son named Eugène and a daughter named Hortense. But the marriage didn’t go well, and the two lived apart.
And then the Revolution broke out. Alexandre, who sympathized with its goals, was made a general, but after a military failure caused by his own negligence he was thrown into prison, and his name went on the list of those condemned to death. Rose proved to be brave, and she pleaded with the leaders of the Terror on behalf of her children’s father. As a result she, too, was thrown into prison, in the Carmes convent, and her name also went on the list of the condemned. Alexandre was executed by guillotine, but the power of the prophecy was stronger than anything: a day before Rose was due to be taken to the guillotine, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) lost his head. Rose walked free.
Joséphine de Beauharnais was a small, pretty woman, about 150 centimeters tall, slender, with small hands and feet. She had dark brown eyes with long lashes, light chestnut hair, usually curled and combed forward, magnificent skin, a slight Creole accent and a charming, infectious laugh.
She was close to the society women who ruled the salons, led by the beauties of Paris, Madame Tallien and Madame Récamier. But she was penniless, and as a single mother she needed someone to support her. True, she was one of the many mistresses of the Directory’s strongman, Paul Barras (1755-1829), but she was looking for steady support, and she found it in General Bonaparte, whose star was rising.
A stormy love, full of crises
His gaze made her shudder, she wrote to a friend, but the life expectancy of generals in those days was short, and she toyed with the idea that she might soon live comfortably on the generous pension of a general’s widow. And Napoleon? Napoleon had been led to believe that a large fortune was waiting for her in Martinique, which at the time was ruled by Britain. But the truth was that he had fallen head over heels for her.
Then, on the night of December 30, 1795, in this house, number 6 Rue Chantereine, which would soon be renamed Rue de la Victoire in honor of its famous tenant, Napoleon left a note by the bed of the still sleeping Joséphine:
I awake full of you. Your image and the intoxicating pleasures of last night give my senses no rest. Oh sweet Joséphine! There is no one like you. How strange is your effect on my heart. Are you angry with me? Are you unhappy? Are you moved? My soul is broken with sorrow, and my love for you gives me no peace. But how can I rest when I draw from your lips and from your heart a scorching flame?
Yes, one night has taught me how far you surpass your portrait. You are leaving at noon. In three hours I will see you again, and until then a thousand kisses, mio dolce amor, but do not give me any back, for they set my blood on fire.
Two months later, on March 9, 1796, the two were married.
Raguideau, Joséphine’s notary, tried to talk her out of this crazy idea of marrying a man whose only property was his sword and his military cloak. He said it to Joséphine in private, but the door of the room was open and Napoleon heard every word. He wouldn’t forget it.
The wedding took place in a room of a building on Rue d’Antin that still stands today and belongs to the bank Paribas (the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas). On the marriage certificate Napoleon added a year and a half to his age and Joséphine took four years off hers, so that they would look the same age. Napoleon, who in the meantime had been appointed commander of the army on the Italian border, arrived very late. He had been bent over his maps planning the invasion of Italy and lost track of time. After two nights of love that didn’t leave much of an impression on Joséphine, Napoleon left Paris and headed south to army headquarters in Nice. And Joséphine? Joséphine breathed a sigh of relief. Now she could go back to having fun.
At each of the eleven stops on his way to Nice, Napoleon wrote Joséphine a passionate love letter, and a courier rushed off with it to Paris. Napoleon arrived in Nice, where three older, experienced, battle-hardened generals were waiting for him: Pierre Augereau (1757-1816), Jean Sérurier (1742-1819) and André Masséna (1758-1817). They looked down on the young, skinny, short officer who had been sent to command them, but within minutes Augereau felt something strange, as he later confessed to General Masséna: “I cannot understand it. That little runt frightens me.”
On the eve of the first battle, at Montenotte, Napoleon wrote to Joséphine:
It is one o’clock in the morning and I have received a letter. It is a sad letter, and my soul is grieved, for Chauvet is dead. He was our chief commissary. You met him once or twice at Barras’s house. I feel the need for someone to comfort me, my dearest. My only comfort is writing to you; the thought of you is the star that lights my moral ideas, you are the confidante of all my troubles. What is the past? What is the future? What is that magic medium that surrounds us and hides from us the very things that interest us most? We live and die surrounded by miracles. Is it any wonder that priests, astrologers and charlatans have traded on this trait, on this strange weakness of ours, to march our ideas in procession and bend them to their own ambitions?
Joséphine de Beauharnais cheats on Napoleon, and he pays her back in kind
Napoleon shared his philosophical musings with Joséphine. And she? She shared her bed with a new lover, a hussar lieutenant several years younger than Napoleon and one centimeter shorter, named Hippolyte Charles (1773-1837): dark skin, blue eyes, black hair. His ability to make Joséphine laugh, together with the perfect knot of his cravat, won her heart. Another advantage he had over Napoleon was his free time and his availability.
Napoleon won one brilliant victory after another, but he was tired, exhausted and a little sick. His soul longed for Joséphine, and he wrote to her:
When I am tempted to curse my bitter fate, I put my hand on my heart and touch your portrait. Love floods me with happiness and fills my life with light.
He missed Joséphine and begged her to come to Italy, writing:
Where are you, Joséphine? What is the point of glory, of victories, of flags waving, without you? You must be with me, with my heart in my arms.
And the next day he wrote:
I want you to come, to be with me, in my arms, on my lips. Come to me on wings. A kiss on your heart, and another one lower, much lower
How much lower? We know that from another letter, in which he described Joséphine up close:
A little white shoulder, a sweet mouth. Firm white breasts, a small face like a painting. With the Creole scarf on her head, and with that little black forest.
And Joséphine? Joséphine wouldn’t dream of leaving the delights of Paris, where she was the star of every evening as the wife of the victorious general in Italy. But when her cool letters started arriving less and less often, Napoleon grew suspicious and wrote:
Hurry, and I warn you that if you delay you will find me ill. Fatigue together with your absence is more than I can bear. What are you doing? Why do you not come? If it is a lover who is holding you back, beware of Othello’s dagger!
Joséphine understood that she couldn’t stay in Paris without a good reason. So she invented one: a pregnancy, a false pregnancy of course. Napoleon was beside himself with joy and wrote:
I have wronged you, and I do not know how to atone for my sin. I scolded you for staying in Paris while you were suffering. Forgive me, my darling. My love for you has robbed me of my common sense. I will never be cured of it. I am hopeless. I am worried about your health. If I could hold you in my arms I would be happy. But the distance between us fills me with grief. A child as adorable as you will soon be carried in your womb. If I could hold you in my arms I would be happy, but unfortunately a man like me cannot be away, not even for a moment.
At the same time he wrote to his brother Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844):
My friend, I am in despair, because my wife, the sweetest creature on earth, is ill, and I am crushed by dark thoughts about her condition. I beg you to tell me the truth about her condition, and in the name of our blood ties and the noble brotherhood that unites us, I beg you to watch over her as I would. You cannot love her as I do, but you are the only man in the world who can take my place. You are the only man on earth for whom I have always felt affection. You and Joséphine are the only two people I care about. Tell me the truth; you know my fiery character….
But a false pregnancy can’t last long, and Joséphine had to announce, with regret, that the pregnancy had failed. With a heavy heart she climbed into a carriage that took her south to Italy. At her side, who else? Hippolyte Charles, and on her other side her lapdog Fortuné, whom Napoleon had hated ever since it scratched his leg when he had to share Joséphine’s bed with it.
Napoleon, despite the enormous pressure he was under, showered her with love and honors, but she was bored, as she wrote to a friend, and soon went back to Paris.
Napoleon completed the conquest of all of northern Italy, signed a peace treaty with Austria at Campo Formio and returned to Paris as the victor and the great peacemaker. But his rising political power threatened the Directory, which wanted him as far away from Paris as possible. On the advice of Monsieur de Talleyrand he was sent at the head of an army of more than 30,000 soldiers to conquer Egypt. On the eve of his departure he told Joséphine that he would arrange for her to come to Egypt once things there had settled down. He boarded the ship. And Joséphine? Joséphine went off to the sulfur baths of Plombières, known as a fertility cure (for a real pregnancy, of course).
When Napoleon reached Egypt, he discovered that Joséphine was cheating on him, and he was boiling with rage. He took a mistress of his own, whom you can read about in the article Marguerite Pauline Bellisle, the woman who almost took Napoleon away from Joséphine. He decided to leave Egypt and divorce Joséphine.
The night that saved the marriage of Napoleon and Joséphine
Napoleon left, or rather abandoned, the army in Egypt, under circumstances that today would lead to an official inquiry. When the news of his landing in the south of France, on the coast of Provence, reached Joséphine, she rushed out of Paris in a panic to meet him and to get to him before his family, who loathed her. But she took one road and Napoleon reached Paris by another. He arrived at their house on Rue de la Victoire, ordered all her belongings removed from the house, went into the bedroom and locked the door.
Joséphine arrived later. She stood in front of the locked door, knocked on it, wept bitterly and begged him to let her in, but the door stayed locked. Toward dawn, when Joséphine had almost given up, her clever maid suggested bringing in her two children. So the three of them stood in front of the locked door, crying. Then the door opened and Joséphine went in. In the morning, when Joseph arrived with the papers needed to arrange the divorce, he was disappointed to find the couple together in bed.
Napoleon later wrote in his memoirs:
When I arrived in Paris, at the house on Rue de la Victoire, I said to myself: nothing connects me to Joséphine anymore. She will never set foot in my house again. I do not care what people say. They will chatter for a day or two, and on the third day they will stop. Forgive her? Never!!! The next day I said: well, well, she is here! Do not think that I forgave her. Never!! But how much I would have given to be free of the doubts in my heart about her betrayal. When I saw her coming down the stairs in tears, my eyes fell on Eugène and Hortense, and there they were, following her, crying.
I did not inherit from my mother a heart immune to tears. Eugène had been with me on all my travels in Egypt, and I saw him as my adopted son. How honest he is, what a good young man. Hortense: society will open its arms to her. Everyone who knows her praises her. I admit I was shaken to the core. I did not have the strength to be cruel to these poor, weeping children. I said to myself: must they suffer for their mother’s sins? What could I do? A man whose heart does not soften is not a man.
So, as you can see, Napoleon was sensitive and emotional. This also fits what he told his treasury minister, Nicolas François Mollien (1758-1850), in 1806:
Do not think that I do not have a heart as sensitive as other men. I have had to develop the habit of self-control. Since my earliest childhood I have worked to silence that string, which now gives me no sound at all.
From love to friendship
But the relationship between Napoleon and Joséphine never went back to what it had been. The roles were reversed. Joséphine became a faithful, devoted, attentive and caring wife, and she traded her taste for wild living for an appetite for spending money that knew no limits. The burning flame of love in Napoleon’s heart turned into a wonderful friendship, with great respect for Joséphine’s social talents, which charmed the people of Paris and did a lot for Napoleon’s public image. But Napoleon made sure their bedrooms were in separate wings of the palace, far from each other, and that a secret corridor led to his own bedroom, through which a long parade of women passed.
When Joséphine found out about the parade, she threw hysterical fits of jealousy. Napoleon responded to them by saying:
She always thinks I will fall seriously in love. Can she not understand that love is not for me? Love is a passion that makes a man abandon everything for it. I am certainly not the kind of man who gives himself entirely to love. So why should she, Joséphine, care that I amuse myself with women for whom I feel nothing?
And in one of his letters to her he wrote:
I do not understand your complaints about the women I correspond with (“correspond”, that is what he called it). I love only one, and that is my little Joséphine. She is sweet, she is capricious, and she takes offense easily. Her quarrels are as charming as everything else she does. And she, she is always adorable, except when she is jealous, and then she turns into a little devil…
The divorce from Joséphine
In 1809 Napoleon was at the height of his political power. The seeds of disaster had already been sown in Spain, but they had yet to sprout. Now he decided to divorce Joséphine in order to marry Marie Louise of Austria (1791-1847), who could give him an heir. Napoleon was a brave man, on the battlefield and in politics, but facing Joséphine he lost his nerve. After failing to persuade others to deliver the message for him, he had to face her himself.
She fainted. He shed a tear, but once she came to, she understood that the decision couldn’t be undone. He gave her everything she asked for: the Château de Malmaison, the hunting château of Navarre, an allowance of three million francs a year, and he let her keep the title of empress. He also continued to take an interest in her and look after her after the divorce.
Despite the divorce, Napoleon and Joséphine stayed on good terms, and she even got to see her former husband’s son, who was born about a year after the divorce. In 1814, shortly after Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba, Joséphine caught a cold while walking in the gardens of Malmaison with Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-1825). The cold turned into pneumonia, and Joséphine died on May 29, 1814. When Napoleon heard of her death, he shut himself in his room for two days and refused to be comforted.
Napoleon went on loving Joséphine until the end of his life, even though, by his own account, he didn’t hold her in high esteem. So it’s no surprise that his last words were “France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine” (“France, l’armée, tête d’armée, Joséphine”).
More than twenty-five years after Napoleon left a note by Joséphine’s bed, “I awake full of you”, he closed his eyes full of her.
Some say that the biggest mistake Napoleon ever made was invading Russia, but if you ask me, his biggest mistake was divorcing Joséphine, because she was the lucky charm of his life.
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