At military school in Brienne, the fourteen-year-old Napoleon was well known for his inability to make friends. He did, however, become very close to one boy named Pierre Francois Laugier de Bellecour, a pretty aristocrat from Nancy. It was rumoured that Pierre Francois was, in Brienne slang, a “nymph” and Napoleon got rather jealous when Pierre Francois widened his circle. He demanded that Pierre Francois assure him that he was still his best friend.
The two of them went together to the Ecole Militaire in Paris. As Pierre Francois was quickly sucked into overtly homosexual circles, Napoleon renounced his friendship and told Pierre Francois never to speak to him again. Napoleon wrote to the Minister of War suggesting that the “rigours of Spartan youth” be introduced into military academies, but he was advised to drop the matter.
During his first posting, to Valence in 1785, the sixteen-year-old Second Lieutenant Bonaparte grew close to a Madame du Colombier. A long way from home, the middle-aged Madame du Colombier provided a comforting mother-figure for him. She also had a pretty daughter named Caroline and, during the summer of 1786, romance blossomed.
Napoleon recalled the affair from exile in St Helena thirty years later: “no one could have been more innocent than we were. We often used to arrange little assignations and I recollect one in particular, which took place at daybreak one morning in the middle of summer. You may not believe it, but our sole delight on that occasion consisted of eating cherries together.”
Twenty years after that summer of young love, he wrote to Caroline and they met in Lyons. She could scarcely believe that her lanky boy soldier was now Emperor.
“She watched his every movement with an attention that seemed to emanate from her very soul,” a courtier recorded.
But in his eyes, his pretty young love had turned into a fat and boring housewife. He regretted arranging the meeting. Nevertheless, he gave her husband a government post, made her brother a lieutenant and appointed her lady-in-waiting to his mother, or Madame Mere, as she was officially known.
Napoleon did not lose his virginity until he was eighteen, with a prostitute he picked up in the Palais Royal in Paris. It was a deliberate act — “une experience philosophique” as he wrote in his notebook. The Palais Royal was a well-known centre for prostitution throughout the Revolution. The more expensive prostitutes took rooms on the mezzanine. From the half-moon windows, they would lean out and shout to passersby, or strike suggestive poses. Better-known harlots sent out runners who would hand out leaflets describing their specialities and their prices to the crowd below, while the cheap whores would work the garden outside.
The young Napoleon had just collected his back pay. As he walked in the Palais Royal gardens he noted that he was “agitated by the vigorous sentiments which characterize it, and it made me forget the cold”. He recorded that he was stopped by a frail young girl to whom he explained the nature of his philosophical quest. Apparently she was used to earnest young men undertaking such arduous research assignments. He asked her how she lost her virginity and why she had turned to prostitution. She told him the usual story — she had been seduced by an officer, kicked out of the house by an angry mother, taken to Paris by a second officer and abandoned there to fend for herself. She then suggested that they go back to his hotel.
“What shall we do there?” he asked naively.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ll get warm and you’ll have your fill of pleasure.”
Napoleon found the experience disappointing and he remained shy around women.
It is widely rumoured that Napoleon had a tiny penis. The evidence comes from the autopsy report performed by the British and was probably largely propaganda. His pubis was described as feminine in appearance, resembling “the Mons Veneris in women”; his body completely hairless; his skin soft and white; and his breasts plump and round such that “many amongst the fair sex would be proud of it.” The penis was removed and preserved at the time and came to auction at Christie’s in 1969. His member, referred to genteelly by the auctioneers at Christie’s as “Napoleon’s tendon”, was small and unsightly. But who would be at their best after 150 years in brine?
At twenty-five, he fell in love for the first time. The object of his affections was Desiree Clary, a renowned beauty. He called her Eugenie, finding Desiree too vulgar. She was dark-haired and slender, and had the characteristics that Napoleon most craved in a woman small hands and feet, and a large dowry. His brother had married Eugenie’s older sister and Napoleon hoped this would smooth the way. But when the question of marriage was broached, Eugenie’s wealthy parents said that one penniless Bonaparte in the family was quite enough.
Napoleon did not give up. He continued the affair, largely through correspondence. She was in Marseilles with her parents, while he was making his way in Paris. His letters were passionate. He even wrote her a flowery love story called Clisson et Eugenie to indicate the depth of his feelings for her. It is the tale of a brilliant young warrior, Clisson, who dies gloriously in battle after learning that his wife, the gentle Eugenie, has fallen in love with his best friend.
“Sometimes on the banks silvered by the star of love, Clisson would give himself up to the desires and throbbings of his heart,” Napoleon wrote. “He could not tear himself away from the sweet and melancholy spectacle of the night, lit by moonlight. He would remain there until she disappeared, till darkness effaced his reverie. He would spend entire hours meditating in the depths of a wood, and in the evening he would remain until midnight, lost in reveries by the light of the silver star of love.”
Who says tyrants have no heart. Even from the distance of his exile in St Helena, he recalled Eugenie as his “first love”. However, he suddenly withdrew his offer of marriage. The brush-off was delicately delivered. Napoleon wrote that one day, he knew, her feelings towards him would change. That being the case, he could not hold her to her vow of eternal love. The very day she no longer loved him, she must tell him. And if she fell in love with someone else, she must give way to her emotions. He would understand.
Eugenie was heartbroken.
“All that is left to me now is to wish for death,” she wrote.
But after a while her heart mended and she married another up-and-coming soldier, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte. He went on to become a Marshal of France and, in 1810, ascended to the Swedish throne. Eugenie became the Queen of Sweden and her descendants sit on the Swedish throne to this day.
Eager to marry, Napoleon shifted his attention to more mature women. He proposed at least five times one of the women, Mademoiselle de Montansier, was sixty — but, shabby and badly dressed, the young Napoleon was not a very savoury prospect. He wore his battered round hat crammed down over his ears while his lank, ill-powdered hair hung down over the collar of his greatcoat. His boots were cheap, shoddy and unpolished, and he never wore gloves, condemning them as a “useless luxury”. In truth, he could not afford any. What’s worse, he was a bore, making frequent outbursts against the iniquities of the rich.
Madame Permon was one of the few women who allowed Napoleon to attend her salon, and this was largely because she was a fellow Corsican. There he would dance with Madame Permon’s daughter, Laure.
“At that time,” Laure wrote, “Bonaparte had a heart capable of devotion.”
Napoleon’s fortunes improved out of all recognition when he led a detachment that shot down a column of royalists who were marching on the National Assembly. Overnight, Napoleon became the “saviour of the Republic”. He was made a full general with command of the Army of the Interior. He had a brand new uniform and moved out of his shabby hotel and into a house on the Rue des Capucines. He even had his own carriage.