the background of the women in his informal harem and was happy to
add Rose to his collection.
The friendship between Rose and Theresia Tallien, ten years her
junior, was celebrated; they often wore identical clothes to establish the
rapport. Both were generous and compassionate women, both had been
married young to unsuitable men and both had been imprisoned during
the Terror and come close to the guillotine. From the sexual point of
view, the most intriguing similarity was that they were both mistresses of
Barras, who in his memoirs left a devastating comparison of the
lubricious charms of each. Barras claimed that Theresia was a genuinely
passionate woman, but that behind Rose's pretended ecstasies in the
bedchamber was a calculating machine, mentally clocking up francs and
livres. But other memoirs contradict this: the consensus is that Rose/
Josephine was a woman of genuinely high sex drive, only this side of
nymphomania, and that Barras's testimony is unreliable for obvious
reasons (it has even been suggested that his executor wrote the passage in
question).
Such was the thirty-two-year-old woman with whom Napoleon
became involved in October I795· Not really pretty, past the bloom of
youth, with no outstandingly good features and with teeth so bad and
blackened (they were described as being 'like cloves') that she had trained
herself to smile without showing them, Rose de Beauharnais was at best a
jolie /aide. Some descriptions make her sound like a southern belle of the
pre-American Civil War type: she had fine, silky, chestnut hair, magnetic
dark-blue eyes and long lashes. She had trained herself to be sexy: hence
the sweet smile, the graceful walk and the husky, drawling voice which
she tried to render mellifluous. She made the best of a good skin tone by
dressing elegantly, surrounding herself with jewels and flowers.
At first the affair with Napoleon was little more than flirtation. On 28
October she wrote to him: 'you no longer come to see a girlfriend who
loves you. You are wrong, for she is tenderly attached to you. Come
tomorrow to dine with me. I need to see you and talk about your
interests.' Napoleon replied at once: 'I cannot imagine the reason for the
tone of your letter. I beg you to believe that no one desires your
friendship as much as I do, no one could be more eager to prove it. Had
my duties permitted, I would have come in person to deliver this
message.'
From 29 October Napoleon spent every night for five months with
Josephine. For the first few days contact was restricted to dining but early
in November the affair was consummated. The morning after they first
made love, Napoleon wrote to her, fixing her for all time as 'Josephine':
marcin
(Marcin)
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