They were not to remain so for long. Within a week or two, Hoche was marched out of Les Carmes to face the Revolutionary Tribunal and by the end of November, released on its orders, was in command of the army of Brest.
Rose was left alone with her fear. For much of the time, unlike the other more stoical women in the prison, she was in tears or anxiously setting out her tarot cards in vain attempts to discover her fate.
Beyond the walls of Les Carmes the Revolution was reaching a climax. In the heat of the month known in the new revolutionary calendar as Thermidor, power was slipping from the hands of Maximilien Robespierre who had been elected President by the National Convention in June; and on 28 July 1794, his jaw shattered by a self-inflicted pistol shot, he and twenty-one of his supporters were guillotined before a cheering crowd in the Place de la Révolution. The Revolution was now about to take a sudden lurch to the right.
Rose emerged into startling sunlight, one of the first of the three thousand prisoners to be released by the end of August. Désirée Hosten being still in prison, Rose agreed with another Creole friend, Mme de Krény, to take an apartment in the rue de lUniversité. Here she was soon once more deep in debt and borrowing money from anyone who would lend it to her, even from Hortenses governess, who lent her a lifetimes savings, and from General Hoche, who also sent her passionate love letters to which she replied in terms no less ardent, though she was not so exclusively devoted to him that she declined to submit, so it was said, to the rough overtures of one of his grooms.
It was not a time to be short of money in Paris. With the ending of the Terror the city had emerged suddenly from gloomy foreboding into bright and exciting life. Theatres reopened; cafés were thronged; dance halls and brothels sprang up everywhere. Profiteers and speculators, spending money as rapidly as they made it, sped through the streets with their women in ornately painted carriages to expensive restaurants, to gambling dens and to places of entertainment whose private rooms, in the words of a police report, were absolute sewers of debauchery and vice. The jeunesse dorée, young men of mostly middle-class and artisan background, marched about the streets carrying short sticks weighted with lead with which to intimidate sansculottes, wearing a kind of uniform of square-skirted coats, tight trousers and extremely high cravats, their hair in long locks over their ears and plaited at the back of their heads. Also dandies known as incroyables, affecting lisps and dressed in the most outlandish fashions, appeared in the Tuileries gardens and were seen enjoying boating parties on the Seine accompanied by merveilleuses whose scanty, revealing clothes were equally exotic and whose wigs were triumphs of the perruquiers art. At bals des victimes, entertainments at once riotous and ghoulish, guests whose near relations had perished in the Terror wore hair as though prepared for the blade of the guillotine and thin bands of red silk round their necks. They greeted each other by nodding sharply as though their severed heads were falling into the executioners basket.
In this society Rose de Beauharnais contrived to survive, even to flourish, borrowing money whenever she could, cultivating new and influential friends and taking care to keep old friendships in good repair. While many Parisians came close to starvation in the fearful winter of 1794 when the Seine froze over from bank to bank, people could be seen in the streets chopping up beds for firewood to cook what little food they could procure, and long queues formed outside the bakers shops to buy the rationed loaves of so-called bread, a soggy concoction made of bran and beans, which, spurned by Baron de Frénillys dog, stuck to the wall when his master threw a handful at it.
Rose de Beauharnais did not go hungry. It became customary for guests to bring their own bread and wine and candles when they dined in other peoples houses; but it was accepted that Rose was not in a position to do so. Nor was she expected to keep a carriage to carry her about the town, so Jean-Lambert Tallien, who had played a prominent part in Robespierres overthrow, and Paul Barras, a charming, clever, unscrupulous former army officer of noble birth who had fought bravely before being cashiered, a cousin of the marquis de Sade and Talliens successor as President of the National Assembly, arranged for her to be provided with both a coach and a pair of horses.
Rose was on the best of terms with Talliens beautiful young wife, Thérésia, formerly Barrass mistress, and she was often to be seen at the Talliens house, La Chaumière, where the women guests, adopting the neo-classical fashion of their hostess, appeared in Grecian tunics, scanty and almost as revealing as the dress in which the sensual and heavily scented Fortunée Hamelin paraded lasciviously bare-breasted down the Champs-Élysées.
At La Chaumière, Rose found just the kind of society which she relished, and in which she shone. It was here that she met a man described as Barrass little Italian protégé, a twenty-six-year-old brigadier on half-pay, Napoleon Buonaparte.
4 THE CORSICAN BOY
He is most proud and ambitious.
EVERY YEAR, on the Feast of the Assumption, High Mass is celebrated in the sixteenth-century cathedral in Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica. On the stiflingly hot day of 15 August 1769, there was an additional cause for celebration: it was the first anniversary of the islands reunion with France after having been a possession of the republic of Genoa for two centuries. In the cathedrals congregation that sultry August day, as, indeed, for at least a short time on every day of the year, was Letizia Buonaparte, the small, nineteen-year-old wife of a lawyer, Carlo Maria di Buonaparte. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she felt the first, urgent pains of labour. She hurried from the cathedral and reached her large stone house in the nearby strada Malerba just in time for the baby, her second son, to be born on a sofa in a downstairs room. Later that day a priest called at her house and it was decided the delicate-looking child should be christened without delay. He was given the name of an uncle who had died recently, Napoleone, the name also of an obscure Egyptian martyr, Neapolus. In the family the boy was called Nabulio.
The mother was a frail-looking young woman, a wife since the age of fourteen, with a pale, eager countenance, dark hair, large dark eyes and a patrician nose, shy but determined and capable and extremely thrifty. One French observer described her as being by far the most striking-looking woman in Ajaccio. She did not often smile, and she spoke Italian in a Corsican dialect.
Her family, the Ramolini, originally came from Lombardy and were proud to number among their ancestors the counts of Coll Alto; but her more recent forebears had been settled in Corsica for some 250 years. Her father was a civil engineer who had died when she was a child. Soon afterwards, her mother had been remarried to a Swiss officer serving in the Genoese marines, Captain Franz Fesch, whose son, Joseph Fesch, was to become a cardinal and French ambassador in Rome.
The Buonapartes were also of old Italian stock, an ancestor, Guglielmo di Buonaparte, having been a distinguished councillor in Florence in the thirteenth century. We thought ourselves as good as the Bourbons, Napoleon was to say, and on the island we really were. There are genealogists who date my family from the Flood, and there are people who pretend that I am of plebeian birth. The truth lies between the two. The Buonapartes are a good Corsican family, little known since we have hardly ever left our island, but much better than the coxcombs who take it upon themselves to denigrate us. His enemy, the diplomatist and Romantic writer, François-René de Chateaubriand, was to comment sardonically that Napoleon was so lavish with French blood because he did not have a drop of it in his own veins.
The Buonapartes were also of old Italian stock, an ancestor, Guglielmo di Buonaparte, having been a distinguished councillor in Florence in the thirteenth century. We thought ourselves as good as the Bourbons, Napoleon was to say, and on the island we really were. There are genealogists who date my family from the Flood, and there are people who pretend that I am of plebeian birth. The truth lies between the two. The Buonapartes are a good Corsican family, little known since we have hardly ever left our island, but much better than the coxcombs who take it upon themselves to denigrate us. His enemy, the diplomatist and Romantic writer, François-René de Chateaubriand, was to comment sardonically that Napoleon was so lavish with French blood because he did not have a drop of it in his own veins.
A sixteenth-century member of their family had sailed for Corsica, when the island was being colonized by the Genoese, in the hope of fortune if not fame. His descendant, Letizias husband Carlo, was a tall young man, who had studied law at Pisa; charming in manner though vain and frivolous by nature, socially ambitious and compulsively intrigant. He was to become well-known for the elegance of his clothes and for the sword he wore as evidence of his noble rank: he was known on the island as Buonaparte il magnifico; he himself added to his name the aristocratic di. He took to wearing cerise jackets, buckled shoes, embroidered stockings, puce knee breeches and a powdered wig with a black ribbon. It meant much to him fare bella figura.
Two years after his marriage, he had taken his wife to meet Pasquale Paoli, the guerrilla leader whose lifes work it was to drive the Genoese from Corsica. It had been a long and hard journey on horseback to Paolis headquarters at Corte, a small town on high ground in the middle of the island. Letizia had clearly been intrigued and impressed by the great patriot who, in turn, had obviously been attracted by the sixteen-year-old girl whom he had asked to sit down to play cards with him and by whom he had been soundly beaten.
Carlo had also created a favourable impression upon Paoli, who had asked him to go to Rome on his behalf to do his best to ensure that, when an attack was made on the Genoese island of Capraia, in order to draw Genoese troops away from the Corsican ports still in their hands, there were no reprisals by the papacy which had given Corsica as well as Capraia to Genoa. The Vatican was disposed to listen sympathetically to Carlos submissions; but Genoa now offered to sell Corsica to the King of France, ten thousand of whose troops landed to take possession of the island.
Carlo, who had by now returned to Corsica, once more left Ajaccio to join Paoli, taking Letizia with him. In the tangled evergreen shrubs of the maquis, the Corsican guerrillas had defeated the French who retreated from the island with the loss of five hundred prisoners and their commander in disgrace. They came again next year, however, more than twice as many of them, under a more gifted and resolute commander.
Once again, Carlo accompanied once more by Letizia, pregnant with Napoleone and carrying her first baby, Giuseppe, in her armshad left Ajaccio for the maquis and had established his family in a cave on Monte Rotondo, the highest ground on the island. Whenever she had emerged from the cave, bullets whistled past [her] ears, she wrote later. But I trusted in the protection of the Virgin Mary, to whom I had consecrated my unborn child. In the middle of May, a French officer had clambered up Monte Rotondo under the protection of a white flag. He had brought a message from his general: following Paolis defeat at Ponte Nuovo, Corte had fallen to the French; the guns were silent; Paoli himself was sailing into exile in England; all Corsicans under arms were free to return to their homes.
Carlo had accepted the offer and had taken Letizia and Giuseppe back to Ajaccio where, by the time Napoleone was born, the Corsican flag had been replaced by Frances fleurs de lys on a blue ground.
Puny as Napoleone had seemed at first born so suddenly before his time and worried as his mother had been that he might die, as two of her babies had already done, he soon grew stronger, being fed at his mothers breast as well as by a wet-nurse, a sailors wife named Camilla Ilari.
In contrast with his quiet, retiring elder brother, Giuseppe, Napoleone grew into a rather rumbustious boy, often provoking Giuseppe into rowdy wrestling matches on the floor until their mother took all the furniture out of one of the rooms and left the children there to be as noisy and rough as Napoleone liked. She was not, however, an over-indulgent mother, insisting on daily baths, regular attendance at Mass, and often giving them a sharp buffet when they were tiresome or naughty. Napoleon himself, so he later confessed, was particularly unruly and stubborn as a child. I would hit Giuseppe, he said, and then force him to do my homework. If I was punished and given only plain bread to eat I would swap it for the shepherds chestnut bread, or I would go to find my nurse who would give me some little squids I quite liked.
He recalled one particularly severe beating:
My grandmother was quite old and stooped [he was to tell his natural son, Alexandre Walewski], and she seemed to me and my sister, Pauline [born in 1780], like an old fairy godmother. She walked with a cane; and, although she was fond of us and gave us sweets, that did not stop us walking behind her and imitating her. Unfortunately she caught us doing this and told our mother who, while loving us, would stand no nonsense. Pauline was punished first because skirts are easier to pull up and down than trousers are to unbutton. That evening she tried to catch me also but I escaped. The next morning she pushed me away when I tried to kiss her. Later that day she said, Napoleone, you are invited to lunch at the Governors house. Go and get changed. I went upstairs and began to get undressed. But my mother was like a cat waiting for a mouse. She suddenly entered the room. I realized, too late, that I had fallen into her trap and I had to submit to her beating.
His mother was, Napoleon said of her, both strict and tender; and he readily acknowledged the influence she had over the development of his character. I was very well brought up by my mother, he was to say. I owe her a great deal. She instilled pride. The childrens father sometimes worried that his wife was too strict with them; but she insisted that bringing up the children was her business, not his. She was masterful in her way.
All in all, Napoleones was a happy childhood, and a very familial one. The big, dark house was large but fully occupied behind its shuttered windows. Napoleone, his parents and siblings lived on the first floor. The ground floor was occupied by Letizias mother-in-law and an uncle, Luciano, Archdeacon of Ajaccio, who was often incapacitated by gout; while, on the second floor, lived various cousins who were, on occasions, a quarrelsome lot of whom Carlo would have been pleased to be rid had he felt able to turn them out. Relations between the two families went from bad to worse after a tub of slops was thrown out of a second-floor window on to one of Letizias dresses hanging out to dry below. Although Letizia saw to it that they did not live extravagantly, the Buonapartes did live quite well. Carlo had inherited two good vineyards and both pasture and arable land from his father, while Letizia had brought to the marriage over thirty acres, a mill and a large oven in which bread was baked from corn ground in the family mill. Milk and cheese came from the familys goats, oil from their olives, tunny from the fishermen trawling the Golfe dAjaccio. Uncle Luciano was proud to say that the Buonapartes had never paid for bread, wine or oil. Napoleone, however, was not much interested in food except for cherries, which he consumed with relish. Otherwise, he ate what was put before him without enthusiasm or comment.