Napoleon: His Wives and Women. Christopher Hibbert

buttoned to his chin…His brusque and animated gestures revealed both passionate feeling and profound thought. His speech was curt, and in those days very incorrect.’

      Even so assertive a man as General Pierre Augereau, the son of a poor Parisian servant, whose rough manner was described as ‘loud and vulgar’, found him intimidating. ‘I don’t know why,’ he was once heard to murmur on emerging from the room which Napoleon used as a study at Mombello, ‘but the little bugger scares me.’ Napoleon also frightened General Vandamme who had shown remarkable bravery in the campaign of 1793. ‘I, who fear neither God nor the devil,’ Vandamme once declared, ‘am ready to tremble like a child when I approach him.’

      In Josephine’s presence he conveyed a far less intimidating impression. Indeed, in the company of his wife, so tactful, so polite, courteous, self-assured and charming, he was capable of exercising, when he chose, a far from spurious charm himself.

       13 ‘PEACE À LA BONAPARTE’

      ‘The Italians may squeal a bit,

      but that is of no consequence.’

      AS CANNON OPENED FIRE in Paris at three o’clock in the morning of 4 September 1797, General Augereau, who had been sent from the Army of Italy by Napoleon for the purpose, led a force of some two thousand men into the Tuileries and arrested all the deputies who had won seats in the recent elections and had been summoned to an emergency meeting. Augereau then marched off to the Luxembourg, the palace built for Marie de Medici, to take into custody two Directors who were at odds with their radical colleagues – Lazare Carnot, the military engineer and former driving spirit of the Committee of General Defence, and Francois, marquis de Barfhélemy, a former minister plenipotentiary in Switzerland, who had been elected a Director only three months before. Barthélemy was surprised in his bed; Carnot managed to escape in his nightshirt. No fewer than sixty-three citizens were also arrested and deported in iron cages to the penal colony of Guiana, where many died of fever. Several newspapers were closed; laws were passed prescribing the death penalty for royalist émigrés returning to France without permission and for anyone plotting to restore the monarchy; while the recent elections, the results of which had been decisively anti-Jacobin, were annulled.

      These results, reflecting the reactionary mood of the country, had persuaded the three radical Directors, Paul Barras, Jean-François Reubell and the lawyer, Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux, Reubell’s ally and colleague, the fiercely short-tempered anti-Christian proponent of deism, to organize the coup d’état which was so efficiently and ruthlessly carried out by General Augereau. Once Augereau had carried out his task, these three Directors, with the collaboration of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand and Talleyrand’s friend, Germaine de Staël, set about planning the next stage of their coup.

      The essential requirement for this was a general who commanded the respect of a large number of troops loyal to the republic and who was himself loyal to the Revolution. The most likely candidates were General Hoche and General Bonaparte.

      But, at the age of twenty-nine, General Hoche died of what seemed to be pneumonia; so General Bonaparte, who had already given the radical Directors his assurance that he was prepared to support them by sending General Augereau to Paris, remained the man most likely to give the radical Directors and their allies the backing they needed. The day after the coup, he received a letter from Talleyrand, the recently appointed Minister of External Relations: ‘Paris is calm, Augereau’s conduct was exemplary. It is clear that he has been taught in the right school.’

      For the moment, Napoleon was obliged to remain in Italy at Passeriano, the Doge’s summer residence outside Venice, impatiently endeavouring to conclude the peace treaty with Austria, biting his nails, uncharacteristically drinking too much, on occasions losing his temper or simulating ungovernable rage against the Austrian negotiator, Graf Ludwig von Cobenzl, threatening to deliver him up to French soldiers, smashing a valuable tea service on the floor, shouting that that was what was in store for the Austrian empire, declaring that it was just like ‘an old hag of a servant whom everyone in the house rapes’, storming out of the room and generally behaving, so Cobenzl reported, like a madman.

      On other occasions, he tried cajoling rather than threats, and for this approach he called upon the ingratiating talents of his wife who had arrived at Passeriano having spent, so it seems, some time alone with Captain Charles before his departure from Milan on leave. Mme Bonaparte was ‘amiability personified’. She invited the members of the Austrian delegation to dinner parties; she arranged déjeuners à l’herbe in the surrounding countryside; she paid particular attention to Cobenzl, who gained the impression that her husband – exaggerating both the dignity of his own birth as a Corsican nobleman and her own aristocratic connections – regarded her with a certain Ehrfurcht. As though he wished to demonstrate that this was not the case, one evening at dinner, in the presence of both French and Austrian delegates, Napoleon began bombarding her with pellets of bread. But her look of reproachful annoyance soon put a stop to the embarrassing cannonade; and Napoleon, so it was observed, ‘hung his head and stopped’.

      For all her gracious behaviour at the entertainments she provided for the delegates during the six weeks she spent at Passeriano that summer, Josephine was not happy there. She had heard a rumour that her lover, Captain Charles, was conducting an affair with an Italian lady. She had also been distressed to learn of Lazare Hoche’s death, and had been desparately worried that the letters which she had written to him might fall into the wrong hands.^* Also, she missed Paris and Paul Barras more than ever. ‘I can hardly wait to tell you of my affection for you,’ she wrote to him. ‘Write to Bonaparte to sign the treaty, and then I will soon be with my friends again…Goodbye…I love you with all my heart…Bonaparte sends you warmest greetings. He still adores me.’

      At last, in the middle of October 1797, the terms of the treaty with Austria were ratified and peace was signed at Campo Formio, a village near Udine. The treaty preserved most of the French conquests in Italy and confirmed France’s possession of Austria’s Belgian provinces. It was also agreed that France should annex the territories it occupied on the left bank of the Rhine from Basel to Andernach. Austria, however, was given the Venetian territory east of the Adige River, including Istria, Dalmatia and the city of Venice.

      This disposal of Venice, an independent state for over a thousand years, aroused widespread criticism, many believing that the so-called Peace of Campo Formio was a truce rather than an end to the war. It was, however, warmly welcomed in Paris where Napoleon’s prestige rose to new heights; and Talleyrand thought it as well to write the General a fulsome letter: ‘Now there is peace, peace à la Bonaparte. The Directory is pleased, the public overjoyed. The Italians may squeal a bit, but that is of no consequence. Farewell General and Peacemaker! My regards, admiration, respect, thanks – words fail me, the list could go on for ever.’

      Josephine, no longer required in Italy, was now free to go home to France, as Napoleon himself did on 16 November. But first she decided to visit Venice where the news of its fate had not yet become general knowledge.

      The Venetians, in the hope of appeasing her husband and in their eagerness to catch a glimpse of the famous General’s wife, crowded at the windows overlooking the Grand Canal and filled the swaying gondolas to watch her entry into their city, cheering her loudly as she floated by. For four days the city was en fête: a special performance was given for her at the opera; there was a ball at the Doge’s Palace; at night fireworks burst and flickered in the sky. Colonel Auguste Marmont, one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, was with her; so, it seems, was Captain Charles who soon had to leave immediately for Paris on Napoleon’s orders.

      Evidently Charles accompanied her at least part of the way when she herself returned to Paris. Being in no great hurry to reach the end of her journey, she passed through towns decorated and illuminated in her honour, beneath triumphal arches, and was welcomed by speeches and proclamations, the roar of cannon and the cheers of the National Guard ringing in her ears. ‘My husband,’ she replied to the congratulations offered