The Empire and its consequences raised the old feud between the Bonapartes and the Beauharnais to a

new pitch. To get rid of the termagant Elisa, whose hostility to Josephine was overt, the Emperor made
her hereditary Princess of Piombino in March r 8os. This served only to work her sisters up into a fresh
lather of jealousy, complicated by the fact that Caroline Murat also loathed Pauline Borghese. At a loss
how to deal with the women in his entourage, Napoleon decided to win over Madame Mere by
bestowing fresh honours on her. He provided her with a lavish household of two hundred courtiers, with
the due de CosseBrissac as chamberlain, a bishop and two sub-chaplains as her confessors, a baron as
her secretary, nine ladies-in-waiting and one of Louis XVI's ex-pages as her equerry; the egregious Letizia
responded by complaining about the expense of her court. Aware that she was pathologically mean,
Napoleon gave her a sackful of money to purchase the Hotel de Brienne from Lucien as her Paris base.
As her country residence she had a wing of the Grand Trianon and, when she found fault with that, a
huge seventeenth-century chateau at Pont-sur-Seine near Troyes, with Napoleon footing the bill for all
furniture and redecoration. Madame Mere was also effectively Napoleon's viceroy in Corsica: 315
nothing happened on the island without her say-so. Legendarily stingy, Letizia was also, bizarrely, put in
charge of the imperial charities. She still tried to rule her family with a rod of iron but at last, overcome
by the Emperor's largesse, she joined his campaign to get Lucien to give up his wife. Napoleon always
hoped to repeat the success he had gained with Jerome and Betsy Patterson, but the defiant Lucien
refused to bend the knee; not even pressure from his mother could sway him. Meanwhile Letizia still
sniped away ineffectually at Josephine. The Empress, when she was not spying on her husband and
having rows about his amours, sought solace in grotesque clothes-buying sprees and in horticulture. She
turned the garden at Malmaison into a veritable botanical paradise and proved she was still a force to
be reckoned with by her presence at the baptism of Louis and Hortense's second son, in March r 8os .
Christened Napoleon in a ceremony conducted by Cardinal Fesch and using the ritual once employed to
christen a Dauphin, the child was the only ostensibly joyful sign in the disastrous loveless marriage
between Louis and Hortense. Of all the Bonaparte siblings, Pauline was the closest personally to
Napoleon. She was the sort of woman he approved of: a sensualist who lived purely for pleasure, be it in
the form of clothes, parties, balls or lovers. By common consent the Princess Borghese was a stunning
beauty, whose eccentricities provided endless tittle-tattle for the gossip sheets. Like Nero's wife
Messalina, she was said to bathe in milk and to be carried into the lactic bath by a giant black servant
named Paul - inevitably rumoured to have been a 'king' in Africa. When remonstrated with for her
familiarity with her male namesake, Pauline replied offhandedly: 'A negro is not a man.' Her fat husband
soon departed to be a colonel in the Horse Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, so there was no obstacle
to Pauline's life of hedonism and scandal. Lacking maternal feeling, she was absent from the bedside
when her only son by Leclerc, Dermide Louis, died aged eight, so Napoleon, fearing for the image of the
imperial family, had to repair the damage with lying propaganda about a tearstained matron keeping
vigil. During r 8o5-o7 Pauline was normally to be found at the Petit Trianon at Versailles, usually in the
arms of her principal (but not sole) lover Count Auguste de Forbin, a dispossessed aristocrat who
recommended himself, as Gibbon would say, enormitate membri. Such was Pauline's reputation for
sexual adventure that, Bonapartist propaganda notwithstanding, the inevitable happened and her name
was linked with her brother's. Beugnot, Louis XVIII's Minister of Police in r8r4-15, made widely known a
rumour that had been going the rounds 316 in imperial times, to the effect that Napoleon and Pauline
had been incestuous lovers. The 'source' was allegedly Josephine, said to have blurted out such an
accusation in r 8o6 to the French scholar Constantin Volney. We may confidently reject the assertion.
Josephine was prone to hysterical exaggeration and may have mistaken a typically hyperbolic Corsican
gesture of sisterly affection on Pauline's part. Circumstantial evidence is entirely against the canard. It
was a peculiarity of Napoleon his admirers say because he was generous, his enemies because he
regarded all women as whores - to lavish money on any woman he had been to bed with. Yet in January
r8r5 he refused to pay a paltry bill of 62 francs for curtains which Pauline had incurred. Yet perhaps
there was a certain poetic justice in the slanderous rumour, for as Napoleon approached the mid-life he
began to exhibit clear signs of a satyriasis to rival Pauline's nymphomania. To an extent the Murats
made it easy for him by acting as procurers of beautiful and willing young women. By now Caroline had
concluded that her alliance with Joseph was not paying off in quite the way she had hoped. She
therefore persuaded an initially reluctant Murat to adopt a sycophantic line with the Emperor and to
outdo the resident yes-men. The Murats threw lavish parties for the Emperor and his entourage and
punctiliously observed his etiquette. Josephine, with her hypersen�itive antennae, vaguely intuited the
new influence of the Murats as being aimed at her, without as yet being able to put her finger on why.
As he approached his thirty-sixth birthday the Emperor was, sexually speaking, a ripe fruit to be plucked.
His infidelities were becoming more and more overt and the rows with Josephine as a consequence
more and more bitter. In April r 8o5, on his way to Milan for the second coronation, he had a brief fling
with an unknown woman at Castello di Stupigini, about six miles outside Turin. But the next liaison was
almost a calculated insult to the Empress, as the twenty-year-old blonde Anna Roche de La Coste was
one of the ladies-in-waiting whose job it was to read to Josephine. Yet Napoleon did not have things all
his own way during this tempestuous affair, since La Coste herself proved capable of running more than
one lover at once. Hearing rumours that La Coste had been the mistress of his chamberlain Theodore de
Thiard, Napoleon went to great lengths to ensure he and his new conquest would not be disturbed.
Having posted guards around her room, he was stupefied when he arrived to find her and Thiard in
flagrante. After a furious but ignominious altercation with Thiard, Napoleon sent him off on a mission to
the Vatican, then bought La Coste's loyalty by the gift of a priceless jewel. Still smarting from the 317
Thiard business, the Emperor seems to have displaced some of his hostility on to Josephine, for we hear
of a scene at court where he publicly humiliated his wife by offering La Coste a ring. When Josephine
threw another angry scene and demanded La Coste's banishment, Napoleon agreed - provided
Josephine received his mistress at a state reception - an unheard of privilege for a woman whose official
function was supposed to be limited by protocol to the Empress's bedroom. But in order to get rid of La
Coste Josephine swallowed the bitter pill. Napoleon still harboured feelings of resentment towards
Thiard and, in Italy shortly afterwards, he found a means to strike back at him. After a month in Milan,
Napoleon spent three weeks in Brescia, Verona, Mantua and Bologna before resting for the week of 30
June-6 July 1 805 in Genoa. One day Talleyrand was singing the praises of the daughter of a dancer,
called Carlotta Gazzani and mentioned that Thiard was her current lover. First Napoleon smashed a vase
in rage at the mention of the name, then he thought more coolly. After Genoa he intended to head back
to Fontainebleau by way of Turin, Lyons, Roanne, Moulins, Nevers and Montargis. It would be an
arduous journey, and what more ingenious way to kill two birds with one stone than to take Carlotta
Gazzani with him as his new mistress. At once he appointed Gazzani to fill La Coste's place as Josephine's
reader. Talleyrand pointed out this would scarcely do since Gazzani spoke no French, but a court wit
came to the Emperor's aid by remarking that since Italian was the language of love, Gazzani knew all she
needed to. A gleeful Napoloen summoned Thiard and sent him on another long mission, with orders to
leave at once. When Thiard looked dismayed, Napoleon taunted him: 'Anyone would think you are in
disgrace; perhaps there is some reason for it.' Thereafter he made sure Thiard never got near Gazzani
again: the luckless chamberlain served first in Austria, then in Dalmatia and was finally required to
accompany the Emperor on the protracted military campaign of 1 80�7. Back at St-Cloud Josephine
tried to catch her husband in the act with Gazzani in his famous alcove room, but this time the imperial
valet Constant firmly barred the way. It was on Napoleon's return from Italy, and even as he trysted with
Gazzani, that the Murats played their master card. They introduced to the Emperor a tall, willowy black-
eyed brunette called Eleonore Denuelle de la Plagne, an eighteen-year-old beauty with the status of
'grass widow' since her husband was in jail. A beautiful though not very bright woman, Denuelle was to
be one of the most important of all Napoleon's mistresses. She was the daughter of shady adventurer
parents and found a niche as personal secretary to the Murats. Later an absurd story was 318 concocted
that Murat had raped her, but the truth was that she became his lover willingly enough. The cynical
Caroline was unmoved by this but saw potential in Eleonore as a real threat to Josephine. The Murats
set about their stratagem with great ruthlessness. First the husband, Jean-Fran�ois Honore Revel,
serving a prison sentence for forgery, had to be squared. The Murats told Revel he would be freed at
once if he agreed to divorce his wife, but the obstinate Revel dug in his heels. He was then hauled
before a tame judge, a creature of the Murats, who told him he would be deported to Guyana if he did
not agree. Something about the demeanour of the Murats convinced Revel that they were in earnest
and would stop at nothing. He agreed to the divorce (granted in April 1 8o6) but later got a kind of
revenge by publishing the story of the affair in a pamphlet. Napoleon threw himself into the affair with
Denuelle with avidity; she used to visit the alcove every day. After each session she would return to
Murat for a bout of lovemaking and would pour out her alleged distaste for the Emperor. Finding that
Napoleon liked to spend exactly two hours with her every day, she once moved the big hand of the clock
in her room on thirty minutes with her foot as the Emperor caressed her; a little later Napoleon noticed
the time, cut short his caresses, jumped up, dressed hurriedly and departed. He never suspected her
dupl.icity and was so pleased with her that he took a house for her in the rue de la Victoire. In December
18o6 she bore a son, whose paternity the Emperor at first accepted, until wagging tongues and Fouche's
spies put him in the picture. While still accepting the theoretical possibility that he could have been the
father, he suspected that the true impregnator was Murat. Caroline had been just a bit too clever. By
this time not only did Hortense and Josephine know of Denuelle's duplicity with Murat, but the rest of
the Bonaparte family did as well. Angry with Caroline's barefaced scheming they combined to have
Denuelle edged out of favour; but for that, it is possible Josephine might have been replaced as consort.
Napoleon finally managed to dovetail his amorous pursuits and his ambition for dynastic marriages
when he was forced to sublimate his passion for Josephine's niece, Stephanie de Beauharnais. The
Emperor's open lusting after her caused great embarrassment at court and infuriated Caroline Murat;
even Josephine began to grow alarmed when she found her husband capering outside her niece's room
and realized he had allowed Stephanie the run of the palace. The Empress put it to Napoleon that as he
had formally adopted Stephanie as his daughter, to have intercourse with her was a kind of incest and
would certainly be construed as such by his enemies. After a severe talking to from 319 Josephine about
her behaviour, Stephanie reluctantly accepted the dynastic marriage Napoleon had arranged for her
with Charles Louis, Prince of Baden, but at first refused to consummate the union, vainly hoping that
Napoleon would come to her. Fighting his own libidinous instincts, Napoleon reluctantly confided to
Stephanie that she could hope for nothing from him and should therefore be a proper wife to the Prince
of Baden. To sweeten the pill he gave her the territory of Breisgau as a benefice, provided a necklace
costing one and a half million francs for her dowry and paid an exorbitant price for her trousseau. There
is some evidence that for Napoleon Eleanore Denuelle was simply a fantasy surrogate for the
unattainable Stephanie.