and insane rumour. In the countryside near Lyons he meets two sisters,
Amelie and Eugenie. After some inconsequential flirting with Amelie,
Clissold falls in love with Eugenie and she with him. Thereafter Clissold
renounces fame and lives only for the love of Eugenie. Years go by and
they have children. In what is surely a reference to his affair with Desiree,
Napoleon writes: 'Every night Eugenie slept with her head on her lover's
shoulder or in his arms... In his new life with Eugenie Clissold had
certainly avenged men's injustice, which had vanished from his mind like
a dream.'
The incomparable idyll comes to an end when Clissold is recalled to
the Army. He is away for years but every day gets a letter from Eugenie.
Wounded in battle, he sends his right-hand man, Berville, to comfort
Eugenie. Berville and Eugenie fall in love and, hearing of this, Clissold
decides to die in battle. At two in the morning, just before the battle, he
writes a letter of farewell to Eugenie:
How many unhappy men regret being alive yet long to continue living!
Only I wish to have done with life. It is Eugenie who gave me it ...
Farewell, my life's arbiter, farewell, companion of my happy days! In
your arms I have tasted supreme happiness. I have drained life dry and
all its good things. What remains now but satiety and boredom? At
twenty-six I have exhausted the ephemeral pleasures of fame but in
your love I have known how sweet it is to be alive. That memory
breaks my heart. May you live happily and think no more of the
unhappy Clissold! Kiss my sons. May they. grow up without their
father's ardour, for then they would be like him, victims of other men,
of glory and of love.The theme of betrayal by a woman hints at what was in the Napoleonic
unconscious. It squares with what we know of his deep ambivalence
towards Letizia, and the conviction that she had betrayed Carlo. The
seeds of disaster for the love affair with Desiree are already on show here.
To marry Desiree, Napoleon seems to hint, is to expose himself to the
full blast of romantic love with its almost inevitable heartache and, given
his opinion of women, virtually certain betrayal. Desiree's very status as a
virgin when Napoleon took her is, paradoxically, felt to be what is most
threatening about her.
Any chance of a spontaneous development of the romance was
destroyed when Napoleon suddenly received orders to join the Army of
the West, engaged in fighting the royalist counter-revolutionaries of the
Vendee. This posting to an infantry command was, in effect, a demotion
and Napoleon decided to go to Paris to protest it. Accompanied by