too long and whose face was too austere for a claim to real beauty to be
advanced. It was true that she was petite (s'r"), with rich dark-brown hair
and slender white hands; and what she had, incontestably and by
common consent, were large, lustrous, deep-set eyes. As was normal at
the time, Letizia was wholly uneducated and trained in nothing but
domestic skills.
Letizia fulfilled the essential requirement of women of the time, which
was to be an efficient childbearer. She gave birth to thirteen children in
all, of whom eight survived. A son, named Napoleon, was born and died
in 1765. Pregnant again almost immediately, Letizia next brought forth a
girl who also died. Then came a mysterious interlude of about two years.
Allegedly Paoli sent the twenty-year-old Carlo as his envoy to Rome, to
appease the Pope when he launched his planned attack on the Genoese
island of Capraia (Capraia and Genoa had originally been deeded to
Genoa by papal gift), but the best evidence shows Carlo becoming a
Paolista while he was in Italy. Carlo's time in Rome seems to have been
spent in cohabitation with a married woman. His own story was that he
returned from Rome after running out of funds, but a stronger tradition
has it that he seduced a virgin and was run out of town. On his return to
Corsica he again impregnated Letizia, who this time bore him a lusty son
in the shape of Joseph (originally named Giuseppe), who was born on 7
July 1768.
Another prevalent myth about Napoleon's background was that he was
born into indigence. The property brought into the marriage by Carlo
and Letizia seems to have been nicely calculated, since Letizia's dowry
was valued at 6,750 livres and Carlo's assets at about 7,000 livres. The
joint capital generated an annual income of about 670 livres or about
£9,000 a year in today's money. In addition, there was the money earned
by Carlo. Pasquale Paoli employed the young man as his secretary on
account of his unusually neat and clear handwriting. Carlo also worked as
a procureur - approximately equivalent to a British solicitor. Letizia
employed two servants and a wet-nurse - hardly badges of poverty.
What Carlo and Letizia suffered from was not poverty but relative
deprivation. The Buonapartes and their great rivals, the Pozzo di Borgos,
were among the richest families in Ajaccio, but they were aware that they
were big fish in a very small pond. Across the water, in mainland France,
their wealth would have counted for nothing and their pretensions to
nobility would have been laughed at. The Buonapartes wanted to be as
rich as the richest nobles in France and, since they could not be, they
created a compensatory myth of dire poverty. Economic conditions in
Corsica and their own pretensions worked against them. A sharecropping
marcin
(Marcin)
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