themselves. The scale of this madness became apparent during Napo
leon's triumphal procession through Italy in the fourteen weeks between
the beginning of April and mid-July r8os.
Departing fr om Fontainebleau, Napoleon made his way south through
Troyes, Macon and Bourg to Lyons, on the first stage of his project to
have himself crowned King-Emperor ofltaly. After pausing for a week in
Lyons, he proceeded via Chambery and Modane to Turin, where he
remained for two weeks before making a triumphal entry into Milan on 8
May. A second coronation ceremony followed, after which Napoleon
appointed his twenty-three-year-old stepson Eugene de Beauharnais as
his viceroy in Italy. This particularly infuriated the Murats, who had set
their sights on being overlords of Italy. The rapacity of this grasping
couple is hard to come to terms with. On New Year's Day r8os Napoleon
gave Caroline a present of 20o,ooo fr ancs, and when her second daughter
was born he gave her the Elysee palace, together with a further million
francs with which to buy out all existing tenants there. In addition
Caroline had an annual allowance of 240,000 fr ancs fr om the Civil List
and Murat himself had an official income of 70o,ooo francs. Together
with their estates and investments the Murats were able to command a
total income of one and a half million francs in the first year of Empire.
Yet they were still dissatisfied, so the dangerous and indefatigable
intriguer Caroline set her mind to increasing her influence over the
Emperor.
The Empire and its consequences raised the old feud between the
Bonapartes and the Beauharnais to a new pitch. To get rid of the
termagant Elisa, whose hostility to Josephine was overt, the Emperor
made her hereditary Princess of Piombino in March r8os. This served
only to work her sisters up into a fresh lather of jealousy, complicated by
the fact that Caroline Murat also loathed Pauline Borghese. At a loss how
to deal with the women in his entourage, Napoleon decided to win over
Madame Mere by bestowing fresh honours on her. He provided her with
a lavish household of two hundred courtiers, with the due de Cosse
Brissac as chamberlain, a bishop and two sub-chaplains as her confessors,
a baron as her secretary, nine ladies-in-waiting and one of Louis XVI's
ex-pages as her equerry; the egregious Letizia responded by complaining
about the expense of her court. Aware that she was pathologically mean,
Napoleon gave her a sackful of money to purchase the Hotel de Brienne
from Lucien as her Paris base. As her country residence she had a wing of
the Grand Trianon and, when she found fault with that, a huge
seventeenth-century chateau at Pont-sur-Seine near Troyes, with Napo
leon footing the bill for all furniture and redecoration.
Madame Mere was also effectively Napoleon's viceroy in Corsica:
marcin
(Marcin)
#1