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.
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."