You have made me so unhappy, and I am weak enough to forgive you!
You married! Poor Desiree must no longer love you or think of you?
... My one consolation is that you will know how steadfast I am ... I
have nothing more to hope for but death. Life is a torment to me, since
I may no longer dedicate it to you ... You married! I cannot grasp the
thought - it kills me. Never shall I belong to another ... And I had so
hoped soon to be the happiest of women, your wife! Your marriage has
shattered my happiness ... All the same I wish you the greatest joy and
blessing in your marriage. May the woman you have chosen make you
as happy as I had intended to make you and as happy as you deserve to
be. In the midst of your present happiness do not quite forget poor
Eugenie, and be sorry for her fate.What possessed Napoleon to marry a penniless Creole, six years his
elder and with fading looks? There can be many answers, ranging from
the banal to the pathological. At the simplest level, it can be argued that
Napoleon anchored himself to the ruling elite by this marriage to one of
its leading female icons. Some have gone so far as to say that Barras forced
him to marry Josephine as a quid pro quo for the supreme command in
Italy. But this view hinges on the mistaken idea that Napoleon had no
relationship with Barras before Josephine; in fact he was a firm favourite
long before Rose de Beauharnais ever featured in his life.
An alternative view is that Napoleon was naive, thought Josephine was
of higher rank than she was, and imagined that he had married into the
aristocracy. It is true that in a letter to Joseph he described the
Chaumiere circle as 'the most distinguished society in Paris', and if we
incline to this view Napoleon would emerge as a victim of snobbery,
imagining that he now had entree into royalist and aristocratic circles.
Marmont thought this was the explanation and wrote in his memoirs:
'Napoleon almost certainly believed at the time that he had taken a
greater step upwards than ever he felt when he married the daughter of
the Caesars.'
But all this makes the match a marriage of convenience and it was
never that. Napoleon himself, aware that he had lost his head over
Josephine, tried to rewrite this episode on St Helena, as he rewrote all the
others in his life, and insinuated that reason of state was involved.
Perhaps he hated himself for the one spontaneous, unmeditated action of
his life. What decisively refutes the idea of marriage of convenience is
Napoleon's sexual besottedness with Josephine, for which the evidence is
overwhelming. 'She had the prettiest little cunt in the world, the Trois
Islets of Martinique were there,' is one of many expressions of his
appreciation of her physical charms. Besides, Josephine was exactly the