Napoleon: His Wives and Women. Christopher Hibbert

did discover it and, when he did so, his behaviour was so violent that Bellilotte applied for a divorce which was granted her without delay; and so Mademoiselle Bellisle, as she now called herself, became the Commander-in-Chief’s maîtresse en titre. He intimated that he himself would obtain a divorce and marry her once she had given birth to his child. Yet, try as they would, pregnancy eluded her. The ‘stupid little slut’ wouldn’t make a child for him, Bonaparte complained to Bourrienne. When told of Bonaparte’s annoyance and pressed to consider how well her future would be assured if she did provide him with an heir, she responded, ‘Heavens! It isn’t my fault.’

      Within a few weeks, Bonaparte left Cairo to lead an invasion of Syria as a means of preventing a Turkish incursion into Egypt. Mlle Bellisle would have liked to go with him; but neither now nor later did he permit a woman to accompany him in the field.

      Bonaparte’s progress in the field was far from being as successful as it had been in Italy. The campaign had opened with a victory over the fierce and frantic Mamelukes in – as Bonaparte dramatically called it – the Battle of the Pyramids, and it ended with the defeat of a Turkish force – half the size claimed for it in Bonaparte’s report – in Aboukir Bay. Between the two engagements the French expeditionary force had not greatly distinguished itself.

      Following the destruction of almost the entire French fleet by the ships of Admiral Nelson in the Battle of the Nile, Bonaparte’s troops suffered a series of setbacks – which were nevertheless transformed into victories in his reports to the Directory – and were involved in a succession of disgraceful atrocities. When the fortress of Jaffa surrendered, the place was sacked and looted and the garrison, including women and children, were slaughtered. Promised that their lives would be spared, three thousand Turks capitulated and were then drowned or bayonetted to death on the orders of Bonaparte who made the excuse that he could not spare the ammunition to shoot them, nor the supplies to feed them.

      Bonaparte, still enraged no doubt by the knowledge that he had been so humiliatingly cuckolded by his wife, displayed similar ruthlessness at Acre where two thousand French soldiers lay wounded or suffering from plague outside its walls. The British naval commander offered to take the wounded on to his ships, but this offer was refused because Bona-parte declined to have any reason to be grateful to the enemy. ‘The heart of our army was pierced by our leaving our plague-stricken men behind,’ wrote an officer who was distressed to have to abandon them. ‘They pleaded with us not to forsake them…Their heads were cut off by the enemy as soon as we left.’

      Other wounded men and those suffering from plague, whom Napoleon wished to have poisoned, had to be left behind as the rest of the bedraggled troops marched along the rough and seemingly endless roads back to Cairo. ‘I saw officers with amputated limbs thrown from the stretchers by their bearers,’ Bourrienne wrote. ‘I saw wounded men and those suffering from plague left by the roadside…We were entirely surrounded by the dying, by pillagers and arsonists…Our march was illuminated by towns and villages set on fire by our angry men…The whole countryside was on fire…The sun was hidden by palls of smoke…We had the sea to our right and, to our left and behind us, the desert we ourselves were laying waste as we advanced.’

      The Directory was told none of this. ‘We want for nothing here,’ General Bonaparte reported in anticipation of his return. ‘We are bursting with strength, good health and high spirits.’ Any faults that might have been found in the conduct of the campaign were either glossed over or blamed on others. As Bourrienne said:

      The full truth was never to be found in Bonaparte’s dispatches when that truth was even slightly unfavourable and when he was in a position to dissimulate. He was adept at disguising, altering, or suppressing it whenever possible. Frequently he even changed the dispatches of others and then had them printed, whenever their view differed from his own or might cast some aspersion on his reputation and actions…He never hesitated to disguise the truth when he could make it embellish his own glory. He considered it sheer stupidity not to do so.

      Bonaparte’s intention to return to France was not divulged to Mme Fourès. Not long before he set sail, he had been in a light-hearted mood as he strolled in the garden of the palace of the Mameluke, Mohammed Bey el-Elfi, talking to his aides-de-camp and leaving them from time to time to give a playful but painful pinch to Mme Fourès who, dressed in the hussar’s tunic and tight trousers which so became her, was taking the air in a different part of the garden.

      He had still not told her of his intention to leave Egypt when he bade her a brief farewell, gave her a hurried kiss, a pat and another of his sharp pinches and was gone, assuring her he would return in a few days.

      General Kléber was left in command of the army. He much disliked Bonaparte and was only too ready to accede to Mme Fourès’s request and send her back to France where her presence would, no doubt, embarrass her former lover. She accordingly returned to France in 1800.

      Bonaparte declined to see her upon her return, but he did give her several sums of money and a large house just outside Paris. Still a most attractive and enterprising young woman in her early twenties, she soon married a former major serving with the Turkish army, Henri de Ranchoup, with whom, however, she seems never to have been on very close terms. While he served abroad in various consular posts in Spain and Sweden, she remained in France, living at first in the house given to her by Bonaparte, then at Craponne in Haute-Loire. She occupied her time in painting, playing the harp and in writing novels; the first, a romantic historical novel entitled Lord Wentworth and then a second, in the same vein – Une châtelaine du douzième síècle