Prussia west of the Elbe. The scandal of his first marriage and the fiasco
of his naval career proved no barrier to an illustrious marriage with
Princess Catherine of Wi.irttemberg, but when this compulsive woman
izer began neglecting Catherine just months after the wedding in order to
flirt with Stephanie Beauharnais, Napoleon dispatched him in disgrace to
Boulogne. When he left Paris at the end of 1807 to assume direction of
his kingdom, he left behind a mountain of debt (two million francs in
Paris alone), which the Emperor had to pay for reasons of credibility and
'family honour'.
In Westphalia his rule was the predictable disaster. He bled the
country dry with exorbitant taxes and the costs of French troops billeted
there; his treasury was chronically in debt and his defence budget
inflated. King Jerome's grotesque extravagance and lavish consumption
were compounded by a Nero-like penchant for acting on the stage.
Habitually unfaithful to the luckless Catherine, he exhibited all the
symptoms of satyriasis: it was said that he would sleep with anything in a
dress, and simply bought off the outraged husbands and boyfriends with
sackfuls of sovereigns. He even tried to trick his first wife Betsy into
crossing from England to Germany so that he could seize his three-year
old son, but she outfoxed him and instead wrung compensation money
from the publicity-conscious Emperor. For all Jerome's incompetence
and absurdity, Napoleon always forgave him, partly because he was the
beloved Benjamin and partly because, unlike Louis, Jerome was a genuine
puppet ruler and allowed French recruiting sergeants and press gangs
free rein in his domains.
Yet in many ways the most hyperbolic of all the Bona partes was always
the nymphomaniacal Pauline. Promiscuous, impulsive, capricious and
arrogant, she showed her contempt for the fraternal gift of the tiny duchy
of Guantalla near Parma by selling it on to the kingdom of Italy fo r six
million francs. Yet Napoleon was always fond ofher and was pleased with
her husband Camillo Borghese's behaviour at Friedland. He even gave
him the honour of taking the news back to Paris, but here Camillo was
upstaged by the official imperial messenger who beat him to the capital
with a duplicate set of dispatches. Camillo was then posted to Turin as
governor-general, where Napoleon ordered Pauline to join him; she,
however, claimed to be very ill so as not to have to return to Italy.
Yet Pauline's alleged malady may have had an organic basis, for around
this time appeared the first signs of a breakdown in her constitution that
would eventually consign her to an early death at forty-five. At the age of
just twenty-eight she slipped into a cycle of illness and debilitation.
Medical opinion is divided on the cause. Some say she suffered from
marcin
(Marcin)
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