After they had been nearly eating one another with voracious kisses he told Pauline about his interview with her terrible brother. At first she was horrified that he should have been told that she had committed bigamy. But Roger pointed out that she could be certain that he would never mention it to anyone; so the lie would go no further. She then held him away from her at arm’s length, smiled at him, gave a sigh and said:
‘Rojé, what a man you are! What other would have dared first to defy him, then have so skilfully brought him to heel? And he’ll not now seek to interfere between us. What a triumph. Oh, I am so proud of you.’
Next day, once more wearing his Colonel’s uniform, Roger reported at the Tuileries. Napoleon showed no signs at all of the epileptic fit that had struck him down the day before, and was as usual displaying his dynamic energy in dealing with innumerable problems.
The following week Roger accompanied him on a tour of inspection of several of the seven Army Corps that had been assembled for the invasion of England. They did not go as far north as Hanover, where Bernadotte commanded the First Corps, or Utrecht, where Marmont had the Second, or as far south as Brest, where Augereau was stationed with the Seventh. But at the Headquarters of the Third at Bruges, Roger had the satisfaction of enquiring politely of the sour Davoust whether he had had any deserters shot lately. At Boulogne, Soult had the Fourth Corps and, being a great devotee of music, entertained them to a fine concert. The many times wounded but apparently unkillable Lannes had, the previous year, been packed off as Ambassador to Lisbon, because of the intense irritation he had caused Napoleon by continuing to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ him familiarly—a habit now forbidden to even the oldest friends of the First Consul. But he was too fine a soldier to be left out of the invasion plans, so had been recalled to take command of the Fifth Corps at Calais, where they found him as bluff and foul-mouthed as ever. Red-headed Ney had the Sixth at Montreuil, Murat the Cavalry Corps and Bessiéres the Consular Guard.
They also toured long stretches of the Scheldt, Somme and Seine, for in every town and village along their banks—and those of the rivers Elbe and Weser as well—shipwrights brought from all parts of France were labouring night and day building the vast fleet of invasion barges that was to carry the ‘Army of the Coast of the Ocean’ across the Channel.
On their return to Paris there were other matters to be gone into that had already been put in train earlier that autumn. An American inventor named Fulton, a man of undoubted genius but uncertain sympathies—at one time he claimed that he would ‘Deliver France and the world from British oppression’ and a little later that Napoleon was ‘A wild beast who ought to be hunted down’—had been busying himself on two projects. One was an adaptation of the steam vessel with which Henry Bell had filled all beholders with wonder and terror on the Clyde in 1800. The other was a forerunner of the modern submarine.
Fulton’s first paddle steamer had been so ill constructed that during a gale it rid itself of the weight of its engine by breaking in half, but he had since made another that astonished the scientists of the Institute by chugging very slowly down the Seine. The submarine, or ‘plunging boat’ as it was termed, suffered the disability that, being a sailing vessel, as soon as it disappeared under water it lost all power to move forward. Admittedly it succeeded in discharging a form of torpedo into another small vessel and sinking it, but it certainly would have been blown to pieces before it could have done so had its victim been armed with a cannon.
Napoleon, like most wise military commanders, was extremely chary of changing any main type of armament while his country was at war because, although the new type might be an improvement on the old, the change-over involved great organisational difficulties and the troops had to be trained in handling it before it could be used effectively. So he could not be brought even to consider building a fleet of Fulton’s steamboats for the invasion.
By that time his building programme of flat-bottomed barges was well advanced, and during the autumn Roger saw a letter of his to Admiral Gantheaume in which he said that he would soon have one thousand three hundred barges on the northern coast capable of carrying over one hundred thousand men, and another flotilla based on the Dutch ports that would transport a follow-up of a further sixty thousand.
The menace of an invading army of such a size would have made Roger tremble for the safety of his country had he believed that any great part of it would succeed in getting ashore. But Napoleon and his generals knew nothing of the tides, cross-currents and uncertainties of the English Channel, whereas Roger had spent countless days of his boyhood sailing from Lymington on yachts large and small up and down the coast; so he knew a great deal. It was, therefore, his firm opinion that even a moderate choppiness of the sea would make most of the troops in the cumbersome barges terribly seasick, that many of the barges would sink and all be extremely vulnerable to both the guns of the Royal Navy and those of the shore batteries.
During the autumn, whenever Roger was not on duty with his master, or being despatched on brief missions by him, he continued his delightful liaison with the unfailingly amorous Pauline, to the great pleasure and satisfaction of them both.
On several occasions he encountered her husband, Camillo Borghese, when attending receptions at the Tuileries, the Hotel de Charost and other private mansions, and soon knew all about the Prince. He was twenty-eight and an attractive man with large dark eyes. His estates in Italy were vast, but his education left much to be desired. He spoke French with a heavy accent and was incapable of writing even his own language correctly. Five years earlier, with the enthusiasm of youth for new ideas, he had espoused the Republican cause in Rome. Accepting the doctrine of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ without reserve he had, with other like-minded young nobles, thrown his coat of arms into a public bonfire, wherein Cardinals’ hats were already blazing, and danced round it.
These antics had since been discreetly overlooked, and older members of his family had seen to it that he retained his vast possessions. His courtship of Pauline had been warmly approved by her mother, whose natural language and sympathies were Italian; and it was Madame Letizia who had pushed Napoleon into agreeing that Pauline should be allowed to marry Borghese before her twelve months of mourning had expired.
When in society Roger tactfully refrained from paying more attention to Pauline than to the other Bonaparte ladies and, secure in her passionate attachment to him, he could afford to make himself pleasant to the Prince. Meanwhile a furious strife was raging among the members of the Bonaparte family.
The idea had long been canvassed that to protect himself from assassination Napoleon should become an hereditary monarch and thus, having appointed a successor, ensure that his death would not lead to rival factions plunging France into civil war. As Napoleon had no son, all the Bonapartes were already at loggerheads over their claims to become his heir. Joseph, as the eldest, naturally asserted it to be his right. Lucien, the ex-Robespierreist, was now more eager to become an heir apparent than any of them and argued that, had it not been for the part he had played during the coup-d’état of Brumaire, Napoleon would never have become consul at all. The two younger brothers, Louis and Jerome, both put in bids. Then there were the children. Eliza had only a daughter, but both the ambitious Caroline and Pauline had sons. Louis, too, had a boy and Josephine did her utmost to persuade Napoleon to adopt him, because he was her grandson by Hortense. Last but not least there was her own son, Eugène de Beauharnais, who could not altogether be ignored owing to his having become a good soldier and because Napoleon was fonder of him than he was of any of his own brothers.
During the autumn, however, two of the claimants ruled themselves out. Jerome, now aged nineteen, had been put into the Navy and sailed to the West Indies. France, since the Louisiana settlement, having most friendly relations with the United States, young Jerome had had himself landed there and, as the First Consul’s brother, been most handsomely received. In Baltimore he had met and married a M
iss Elizabeth Patterson.
When Napoleon had learned of this he had become berserk with rage. Pauline having married a Prince had impressed upon him the heights to which he could raise his family now that, in all but title, he was a monarch; so he had intended that Jerome’s wife should be nothing less than a Princess, and the wretched boy had spoilt this gratifying prospect by getting himself tied up to the daughter of an American merchant.
The case of Lucien, by far the cleverest but also the most pig-headed and troublesome of Napoleon’s brothers, was even more deplorable. An habitual lecher, while Ambassador in Madrid, he had tried but failed to seduce a Spanish Infanta, and had then acquired the beautiful Marquesa de Santa Cruz as his mistress. On his return from Spain, to the fury of his sister Eliza who, after the death of his first wife, had enormously enjoyed acting as hostess for him, he had brought the Marquesa back with him and installed her as châtelaine in a château that he had taken just outside Paris.
Napoleon, regarding this as a temporary affaire, made no objection to it and, ever forgiving of the ungrateful way in which his family abused his generosity, endeavoured to make friends again with Lucien, then evolved a fine plan to further his fortunes. The young and incredibly stupid King of the newly created Kingdom of Etruria had died the previous May; why should not Lucien marry the widowed Queen and so become the son-in-law of the King of Spain, which would bind Spain still more firmly to the interests of France?
Meanwhile Lucien had got rid of the Marquesa and acquired a mistress with a most dubious reputation, named Alexandrine Jouberton, the wife of a defaulting stock-jobber, and had installed her in a house in the Rue du Palais Bourbon. Then, at the end of October, when Napoleon approached him about marrying the Queen of Etruria he had calmly revealed that he had already been married for six months to Alexandrine; giving, of all things for such a man, as his reason that he had felt in honour bound to marry her because he had put her in the family way.
Napoleon’s anger knew no bounds and he declared that as Jouberton was still alive the marriage could not be legal; but fate was against him because the defaulting broker had fled to San Domingo and, soon afterwards, it was learned that he had died there of yellow fever. Pleas and threats alike failed to induce Lucien to divorce the undesirable wife he had acquired and, supported by his mother, who always took his side, he declared that he would have no more to do with his autocratic brother and departed with his wife to live in Italy.
Napoleon, meanwhile, was taking, with the ladies of the theatre, such relaxation as he could snatch from his endless commitments. Little Mademoiselle George, honest, sweet-natured, unambitious, devoted, the perfect companion for a tired man, remained his favourite. But from time to time others were summoned, among them the superb actress Mademoiselle Mars and the pert, mentally agile Thérèse Bourgoin. The latter he took from his Minister of Finance, Chaptal, who had long kept her, to that elderly gentleman’s fury and, not long afterwards, Thérèse’s disgust; because she had given up a rich permanent lover for the mercurial Napoleon who, tiring of her rapacity, soon threw her aside.
The usual procedure was for Constant, Napoleon’s valet, to collect these ladies from the theatre at which they were playing and conduct them in a coach, driven by the First Consul’s faithful but notoriously drunken coachman, to St. Cloud. There Rustem, Napoleon’s Mameluke bodyguard, took over, escorted them to a vast room with a bed in one corner and reported their arrival to his master; after which these delectable young ladies might wait for anything from ten minutes to four hours before being received by their host, according to what other matters might be occupying his immediate attention.
Josephine, of course, knew all about these goings-on and, occasionally, threw jealous scenes during which she wept copiously; but in the main she accepted them with resignation, on other nights reading Napoleon to sleep and consoling herself with his abiding affection for her.
Early in November Roger suffered a severe blow to his self-esteem. On the nights when he was able to visit Pauline in secret, which averaged about twice a week, it had become customary for him to undress in a small closet on the far side of Pauline’s boudoir from her bedroom. On this occasion he had spent some two hours with her and returned to the closet to dress. The little room held only a marble basin, in which Aimée always left a covered jug of hot water for him, hooks on which to hang clothes and a shelf holding a few toilet things.
He was just about to blow out the candle and leave the room when he noticed among the scent bottles and powder jars a round pocket mirror. His attention was caught by the elaborate gold cipher on the leather back, and he recognised it at once as that which the flamboyant Murat had emblazoned a foot high on the doors of his coaches and carriages.
To come upon the little mirror in that particular place gave Roger furiously to think. But it was possible that on some occasion Pauline, finding that she had neglected to put her mirror in her reticule, had borrowed it from her vain brother-in-law and had forgotten to return it. Picking it up he walked across the boudoir into Pauline’s bedroom and, as she sat up in bed for him to kiss her goodnight, he held it out to her and asked:
‘How did you come by this pretty thing?’
Smothering a yawn, she replied sleepily, ‘Oh, that is Joachim Murat’s. He is always looking at himself in it and must have left it on the table in the boudoir when he was taking coffee with me this afternoon.’
By admitting that Murat had been there that day she had given herself away; as there was no lavatory in the closet nor water except that brought up by Aimée at night in a can. If he had wanted to wash he would have done so downstairs; so he could have used the closet only to undress in.
After a moment, Roger said, ‘Drinking coffee was not the only thing you did together, was it? You see, I found this in the closet.’
‘Oh dear!’ Pauline sighed. ‘How very careless of him to leave it there. He … he went in to … to, yes, fetch me some scent.’
‘Stop lying!’ he told her sharply. ‘You keep all the scents you use yourself in your own bathroom. You went to bed with him, didn’t you?’
Now wide awake and very flushed, she stammered, ‘I … Well … if you must know the truth, yes.’
‘And he your sister’s husband!’
‘What has that to do with it?’ she asked peevishly.’ ‘Caroline goes to bed with lots of men, and would have with Leclerc if she had had half a chance. Camillo had ridden out to Chantilly to see a race horse he wants to buy; so was out of the way and … well, Joachim and I just felt like it.’
‘I don’t doubt he did. I remember hearing Napoleon once say of him, “Apparently Murat has to sleep with a woman every night but any woman does for him”. But you! Damn it! And knowing that I was coming to you tonight!’
‘Oh, Rojé, please don’t be unreasonable. How could I refuse an old friend?’
‘So this wasn’t the first time?’
‘No, oh no. The first time was years ago, when I was a girl at Montebello.’
‘And how many other old friends have you?’ Roger demanded angrily.
Becoming angry too, she snapped at him, ‘Since you insist on prying into my affairs, quite a number. And I don’t see what you have to complain about.’
‘Don’t you, indeed! I thought you loved me.’
‘But I do. I put you before all others. I let you come to me any night you choose.’
‘D’you mean that on the nights I don’t, you have other men here?’
‘Well, now and then. After all, when you have to go to the coast you are sometimes away for a week or more. You can’t expect me not to have a little fun with someone else occasionally.’ Suddenly she flung her arms round his neck and burst into tears.
Angry as he was, he could not bring himself to upbraid her further, and she clung to him until he said he would forgive her.
While walking back down the Champs Elysées across the Place de la Concorde, then through the dark, older streets of Paris to La Belle Etoile, he sadly
took stock of this new situation. Scandalous stories had come back from San Domingo about Pauline’s immoralities while she was there—even that she had participated in orgies and had had a giant negro as a lover. Those he still did not believe, but it was now beyond doubt that she was a nymphomaniac and so unable to control her sexual urges. He then admitted to himself that her attraction for him was solely a physical one, and that his distress was not really because he had a deep love for her but because his pride was hurt. There remained the question of whether he should break off the affaire or continue it knowing that she had other lovers.
Having slept upon it, he decided that since going to bed with her gave him so much pleasure, and he apparently held first place in her affections, to break with her would only be to cut off his nose to spite his face; so during the next week he went to her again on two occasions, both of them tacitly ignoring the scene they had had after her revelation that he was not her only lover.
Yet fate decreed that their liaison should shortly be brought to an abrupt termination. One night near the middle of November, when Aimée took him up to Pauline’s room he found her in the depths of depression. Borghese had for some time tired of Paris and wanted to return to his own palace in Rome. Pauline had told him to go if he wished but that she had no intention of accompanying him. Loath to leave her behind, Borghese had spoken to Napoleon and he had written to her from Boulogne. In his letter he said that she must go with her husband and at once, as otherwise snow would make the Alps impassable. There had followed injunctions to ‘love her husband, be respectful to his relatives, conform to the customs of the country, admire everything, never say “in Paris we have better than that”, show attachment to the Holy Father, receive only people of unblemished reputation and never the English, etc., etc., and above all not to be wanton or capricious.’ The lecture ended by pointing out that she was twenty-four so ought now to be mature and sensible. In fact she was barely twenty-three, but that did not make the letter less an order that must be obeyed.
The Wanton Princess Page 31
