by the beginning of June he could tell himself that he controlled the
entire Lombardy plain except the fortress of Mantua.
Returning to Milan on 7 June, he was bitterly disappointed not to find
Josephine waiting for him. Instead, there was a 'scrap of a letter' in which
she claimed she was ill, with three doctors in attendance. In despair he
wrote to her that a thousand daggers were tearing at his heart. ' My
emotions are never moderate and since the moment I read that letter I
have been in an indescribable state ... the ardent love which fills me has
perhaps unbalanced my mi nd.' To Joseph he wrote: 'You know that
Josephine is the first woman I have ever adored ... I love her to
distraction and I cannot remain any longer without her.' By now he had
heard from Murat and did not like what he heard. Always a superstitious
man, Napoleon was deeply troubled by the apparent coincidence that on
the very day Murat arrived in Paris, the glass broke on the miniature of
Josephine he carried on his person. According to Marmont, he went pale
when the glass broke and said: 'Marmont, either my wife is very ill or she
is unfaithful.'
Receiving no further word from Josephine and unable to work out
what was detaining her in Paris, Napoleon decided to put his private
woes before the Directory. On I I June he wrote to Barras: 'I hate all
women. I am in despair. My wife has not arrived, she must be detained
by some lover in Paris.' Four days later he wrote to Josephine: 'Without
appetite or sleep, without interest or friendship, no thought for glory or
Fatherland, just you. The rest of the world has no more meaning for me
than if it had been annihilated.' The hatred for women he acknowledged
to Barras found expression in one of his few peevish letters to Josephine,
in which he accused her of loving everyone more than her husband,
including the dog Fortune; in the latter assessment of the featherheaded
Josephine's cynophilia he was certainly correct.
Napoleon followed his broadside to Barras by an explicit statement to
Josephine that, since she was ill, he would return to Paris within five
days. Becoming more and more fearful that the distraught Napoleon
might really return to Paris to fetch his wife himself, bringing the ever
victorious army with him, possibly for a final settling of political
accounts, the five men of the Directory exerted maximum pressure on
Josephine to join her husband. Carnot concocted a ludicrous letter,
claiming that the Directory had kept Josephine in Paris, lest her presence
distract Bonaparte from his victories but that, now he held Milan, there
could be no further objection. There is an element of farce in the way the
Directory colluded with Josephine to conceal her infidelity. The
dalliances of women have often threatened to shake regimes and dynasties
marcin
(Marcin)
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