assertion that Napoleon was bold and resourceful only when luck was
running his way, but when at a low ebb he was timid, circumspect and
uncertain. There was little encouraging news from Joseph: ju st that
Lucien, still destitute in St-Maximin, had been arrested as aJacobin a full
year after Thermidor but then released after two weeks.
To Desiree he wrote that he had a 'romantic soul', an imagination of
ice, a head of ice, a bizarre heart and melancholy inclinations. This was
hardly what she wanted to hear, for she was busy writing that she was
doing everything she could to make herself worthy of him, adding,
however, that she feared he would forget all about the pleasures of
Marseilles in the heady, hedonistic atmosphere of Paris. So uninterested
was Napoleon in Desiree that he let nine days go by bef ore going down to
the poste restante to retrieve her tear-stained letters. But it was typical of
him to blow hot and cold. On 24 June he decided to have his portrait
painted for Desiree. In July, when she was with her family in Genoa, he
complained to Joseph that he never heard from her, did not know
whether she was alive or dead, and chided Joseph with never mentioning
her.
Maybe Desiree, from the vantage point of the French capital, now
looked small beer or, more likely, she was a card he cynically kept in play
while he investigated his prospects of making a more financially lucrative
or politically advantageous match. Certainly he did the rounds of eligible
women, sounding out prospects. He probably did make overtures to
Laure Permon's forty-year-old widowed mother, and it may well be, as
1' Abrantes relates, that he was scornfully rejected. On the other hand,
the story that he proposed marriage to the sixty-year-old Mlle de
Montansier seems like obvious black propaganda spread by his enemies.
Other women whom he may have reconnoitred with a view to a marriage
of convenience include Mme de la Bouchardie and Mme de la Lespada.
Also in his sights for a while was thirty-year-old Grace Dalrymple,
later Lady Elliott, a Scotswoman who was an adventuress in a double
sense, having given birth to an illegitimate daughter by the Prince of
Wales and been imprisoned in France during the Terror. A walk in the
Tuileries convinced them there could never be a meeting of minds.
Napoleon, a one-time admirer of the English, now associated them with
Paoli's treachery and had all the fanatical Anglophobia of the newly
converted. He told Grace he wished the earth would open and swallow
up all Englishmen. She replied that the remark was scarcely tactful in her
presence. Napoleon protested that he believed all Scots loved France
more than they did England, but Grace hastened to assure him that her
heart was in England even more than Scotland.
marcin
(Marcin)
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