set much later. Two pieces of circumstantial evidence seem to support
this idea. One was Louis's honeymoon tirade, when he threatened to
divorce Hortense if she gave birth to a child even one day before the
prescribed term; was he simply afraid that Hortense had already emulated
her mother, or was there a darker suspicion? The other was that when the
five-year old child died in r8o7, Napoleon seemed for a time inconsolable
and told his confidantes there was no longer any impediment to his
divorcing Josephine. Working against the theory, on the other hand, is
the known fact that it was Josephine's cousin, Stephanie, whom Napoleon
lusted after, though of course the one liaison by no means precludes the
other.
The fourth of Napoleon's brothers, his 'Benjamin', was the supremely
useless Jerome. Seventeen in r8o2, the fresh-faced Jerome was a classic
spoiled brat, an unprepossessing character with curly-black hair, a bull
neck and a cruel little mouth; also a spendthrift, whose lavish bills were
picked up by the First Consul. Napoleon sent him to sea with Admiral
Ganteaume, hoping to make a sailor out of him, but in the Caribbean the
swaggering Jerome merely antagonized his brother officers by the gap
between his high position and his non-existent abilities. Like Lucien,
Jerome ignored all the orders from Napoleon he found inconvenient.
Despite repeated advice that he was being reserved for a dynastic
marriage and should seek permission from his brother for any permanent
liaison, Jerome took up with the daughter of a wealthy shipowner in the
U.S.A. and on Christmas Eve r8o3 was married to Betsy Patterson. An
enraged Napoleon gave orders that if 'Mrs Jerome Bonaparte' tried to set
foot on French soil, she should be put back on a ship for the United
States.
It was with reason that Napoleon used to remark bitterly that his
brothers were all useless and to lament that, unlike Genghiz Khan, he did
not have four able sons whose only object was to serve him. But
Napoleon in his attitude to his family was a true product of Corsica. Even
if he was disinclined to advance his siblings, the gadfly Letizia was always
on his back, protesting that every advancement made on pure merit had
to be balanced, for the sake of family 'honour', with an equal promotion
for one of her brood. Now in her fifties, Letizia still retained her good
looks, though she had lost her teeth. She refused to adapt, spoke Italian
and could manage French only with the thickest of brogues. Her sole
interest in life was her family and investing money. If Letizia's meddling
had ended there, Napoleon could doubtless have borne it, but she kept up
an incessant vendetta against Josephine and proved herself just as
grasping as the children she had brought into the world. Napoleon
marcin
(Marcin)
#1