I have just received 400,000 francs for you. I have given it to Fesch
who will pay it into your account. I may instal the family here [Paris].
Let me have much more news of you and your wife and of Desiree.
Goodbye, my good friend, I am all yours. My only worry is the
knowledge that you are so far away and to be deprived of your
company. Were not your wife pregnant, I would try to persuade you to
come and spend some time in Paris.For the first time since Toulon Napoleon was unquestionably on the
winning side, and he revelled in his new status. His letters now bespeak a
confidence that he was born under a lucky star. He moved at once from
his dingy quarters in the Marais to a splendid new house. The man who
just a few days before was destitute now drove around Paris in a fine
carriage, invited guests to a private box at the Opera, and gave lush
parties at his headquarters in the Place Vendome. If Napoleon had been
unknown to the wider public before V endemiaire, now he was a
household name. Freron's extravagant praise, during a session of the
Convention on I I October, saw to that, even if the frightful Freron had
an ulterior motive, since he was slavering with lust at the thought of the
stunning fifteen-year-old Pauline Bonaparte, and had plans to marry her.
As Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Interior, Napoleon was
responsible for internal order and for tranquillity in Paris, that notorious
powder-keg. Since the economic crisis showed no signs of abating, he
began by striking at the most likely focus of discontent: he closed the
Pantheon Club, the nerve centre oftheJacobin party. With 4o,ooo men at
his disposal, he divided them into cohorts and heavily policed potential
trouble spots, with an ostentatious display of 'showing the flag'. The
pressing problem, as always, was the Parisian bread supply; throughout
these years the search for real bread, made from white flour, sold at
reasonable prices was the abiding concern of the proletariat. Napoleon
liked to tell a story, probably apocryphal, of a menacing situation that
developed when would-be bread rioters surrounded a platoon he was
commanding. A monstrously fat women jeered at the soldiers and tried to
work up the crowd by calling out that the military grew fat while the poor
starved. Napoleon was at this time extremely thin, and called out: 'My
good woman, look carefully at me. Which of us is the fatter?' The
contrast in profiles was too much. All tension dissolved in gales of
laughter.
October I795 was the great turning point in Napoleon's life for,
immediately after the Vendemiaire triumph, he became heavily involved
in an affair with Rose de Beauharnais which led to marriage. The two