When Monsieur Permon died, Napoleon visited the house regularly to comfort the widow. On one occasion, finding himself alone with her, he suggested that they united their two families. Her son Albert, Napoleon suggested, should marry his pretty young sister Pauline. But Albert might have plans of his own, Madame Permon said.
Then her daughter Laure should marry his brother Jerome, Napoleon suggested. They were too young, said Madame Permon. In that case, the two of them should marry, Napoleon proposed. They would, of course, have to wait until a decent period of mourning had been observed.
Madame Permon took this proposal as a joke. She was forty and much too old for him. But it was no joke and after he was refused, Napoleon never visited the house again.
Soon after that he met Josephine Tascher Beauharnais. A thirty-two-year-old former vicomtesse from Martinique, she had been imprisoned and her husband guillotined during the Terror. When she was released, like the rest of Paris, she was determined to have some fun.
The city was in the grip of a dance craze. Over six hundred dance halls opened. Determined to put the excesses of the Revolution behind them, women wore their hair a la guillotine, cropped or pinned up, leaving the neck exposed. To enhance the macabre effect, the fashion was to wear a thin, blood-red ribbon around their necks. There was even a Bal a la Victime, a dance to which only the relatives of those who had been guillotined were invited.
Josephine fostered out her thirteen-year-old son, Eugene, to General Hoche, a fellow prisoner and former lover. Then she began borrowing money to fund an extravagant lifestyle, squandering it on carriages, furniture, exotic food, flowers and fashionable clothes.
With her slender build, topped by a riot of chestnut curls, Josephine had the perfect seductive figure for the new Directoire style. Although she did not go quite as far as her friend Madame Hamelin who walked down the Champs-Elysees naked to the waist, she could be seen bare-armed and practically bare-breasted in flimsy gowns over flesh-coloured body stockings.
She used her well-displayed charms to persuade those in authority to give back the property that had been confiscated from her during the Terror. Her Paris apartment was unsealed and her clothes, jewels and furnishings returned. She was granted access to her late husband’s chateau and was richly compensated for the furniture, silver-ware and books that had already been sold. She was also reimbursed for the horses and equipment her husband had lost when he was stripped of his command of the Army of the Rhine. This exercise gave her all sorts of important contacts. Josephine made such a habit of sleeping with the important men in postrevolutionary France that the security services paid her for the pillow talk she garnered. It was truly amazing, a contemporary wit remarked of Josephine, that bountiful nature had the foresight to put “the wherewithal to pay her bills beneath her navel”.
One of Josephine’s closest friends was another fellow prisoner, Therese de Fontenay. She was the daughter of a Spanish banker who distributed her favours so liberally around high government circles that she was said to have been stamped “government property”. She was the mistress of financier Gabriel Ouvard, government minister Jean Tallien, to whom she was later briefly married, and the Director himself, Paul Barras.
Barras was a former nobleman who had joined the Revolution when he saw which way the wind was blowing. He supported the Terror; then, when the time was right, engineered Robespierre’s downfall. He became the most important man in post-revolutionary Paris and he lived in the Luxembourg Palace in a style as lavish as any pre-revolutionary salon. His taste for pleasure, a contemporary remarked, was like that of “an opulent, extravagant, magnificent and dissipated prince”.
Therese introduced Josephine to Barras — indeed, the two of them had danced naked before him. When Barras grew tired of Therese, Josephine took her place in his bed. Some of her acquaintances were shocked, but to Josephine this was perfectly natural. Both her husband and father had been tireless adulterers and she had an aunt who slept with her father-in-law. Besides, Barras was a very handsome man.
Josephine was definitely not the type of woman Napoleon was looking for. He was quite dismayed by the way powerful men seemed to be controlled by feckless and immoral women.
“Women are everywhere,” he wrote to his brother, disapprovingly, “applauding in the theatre, strolling in the parks, reading in the bookshops. You will find these lovely creatures even in the wise man’s study. This is the only place in the world where they deserve to steer the ship of state. The men are mad about them, think of nothing else, and live only for them.”
As commander of the Army of the Interior, Napoleon was now invited to all the important salons. Although there was still some debate about his charms, some young women were impressed by his classical “Grecian” features and his large eyes that seemed to light up when he spoke.
“You would never have guessed that he was a military man,” wrote one. “There was nothing dashing about him, no swagger, no bluster, nothing rough.” Most agreed that he looked painfully thin.
He met Josephine after an order had been issued that all weapons in private hands were to be handed in to the authorities. Josephine’s son, Eugene, had a sword that had belonged to his father. Eugene did not want to hand this memento in, so he approached the General commanding the Army of the Interior to ask if he could keep it. Impressed by the child’s filial devotion, Napoleon gave his consent.
The next day, Josephine came to thank General Bonaparte in person. Napoleon admitted later that he was bowled over by her “extraordinary grace and her irresistibly sweet manner”. He asked if he could call on her.
Josephine can hardly have been impressed with what she saw. This short, skinny man, with gaunt, angular features and lank hair, was hardly the sort to turn a girl’s head. But she spotted that Bonaparte was the coming man and invited him to one of her regular Thursday receptions.
Napoleon was not comfortable in such surroundings. He was appalled that the money she spent on flowers and food for one of these soirees would have been enough to keep his family for a week. Josephine’s house, a neighbour noted, was stacked with luxuries — “only the essentials are missing”.
Josephine’s salon was full of actors and playwrights, leaving Napoleon tongue-tied; and the beautiful women intimidated him.
“I was not indifferent to the charms of women, but up to this time they had not spoiled me,” he said, “and my disposition made me shy in their company.”
But with Josephine, it was different. Her attentiveness reassured him. A friend noted later that there was “a certain intriguing air of languorousness about her — a Creole characteristic apparent in her attitudes of repose as well as in her movements; all these qualities lent her a charm which more than offset the dazzling beauty of her rivals”. Before long, Napoleon was hopelessly in love.
He must have known about her relationship with Barras — all of Paris did. They were hardly discreet. When she entertained him at her house in Croissy which he paid for- the neighbours would see baskets of luxuries turning up from early in the morning. Then a detachment of mounted police would arrive, followed by Barras and a huge party of friends.
Barras himself said: “Bonaparte was as well acquainted with all of the lady’s adventures as we were; I knew he knew, because he heard the stories in my presence. And Madame de Beauharnais was generally recognized as one of my early liaisons. With Bonaparte a frequent visitor to my apartment, he could not have remained ignorant of such a state of affairs, nor could he have believed that everything was over between her and me.”