nothing happened on the island without her say-so. Legendarily stingy,
Letizia was also, bizarrely, put in charge of the imperial charities. She still
tried to rule her family with a rod of iron but at last, overcome by the
Emperor's largesse, she joined his campaign to get Lucien to give up his
wife. Napoleon always hoped to repeat the success he had gained with
Jerome and Betsy Patterson, but the defiant Lucien refused to bend the
knee; not even pressure from his mother could sway him. Meanwhile
Letizia still sniped away ineffectually at Josephine. The Empress, when
she was not spying on her husband and having rows about his amours,
sought solace in grotesque clothes-buying sprees and in horticulture. She
turned the garden at Malmaison into a veritable botanical paradise and
proved she was still a fo rce to be reckoned with by her presence at the
baptism of Louis and Hortense's second son, in March r8os. Christened
Napoleon in a ceremony conducted by Cardinal Fesch and using the
ritual once employed to christen a Dauphin, the child was the only
ostensibly joyful sign in the disastrous loveless marriage between Louis
and Hortense.
Of all the Bonaparte siblings, Pauline was the closest personally to
Napoleon. She was the sort of woman he approved of: a sensualist who
lived purely for pleasure, be it in the form of clothes, parties, balls or
lovers. By common consent the Princess Borghese was a stunning beauty,
whose eccentricities provided endless tittle-tattle for the gossip sheets.
Like Nero's wife Messalina, she was said to bathe in milk and to be
carried into the lactic bath by a giant black servant named Paul -
inevitably rumoured to have been a 'king' in Africa. When remonstrated
with for her familiarity with her male namesake, Pauline replied
offhandedly: 'A negro is not a man.'
Her fat husband soon departed to be a colonel in the Horse Grenadiers
of the Imperial Guard, so there was no obstacle to Pauline's life of
hedonism and scandal. Lacking maternal feeling, she was absent fr om the
bedside when her only son by Leclerc, Dermide Louis, died aged eight,
so Napoleon, fearing for the image of the imperial family, had to repair
the damage with lying propaganda about a tearstained matron keeping
vigil. During r8o5-o7 Pauline was normally to be found at the Petit
Trianon at Versailles, usually in the arms of her principal (but not sole)
lover Count Auguste de Forbin, a dispossessed aristocrat who recommen
ded himself, as Gibbon would say, enormitate membri.
Such was Pauline's reputation for sexual adventure that, Bonapartist
propaganda notwithstanding, the inevitable happened and her name was
linked with her brother's. Beugnot, Louis XVIII's Minister of Police in
r8r4-15, made widely known a rumour that had been going the rounds
marcin
(Marcin)
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