Josephine relished the imperial style, but at first the Milanese burghers
found her hard to take and the manners of her entourage outrageous;
particular offence was given by the marchesa Visconti, who doubled as
Josephine's lady-in-waiting and Berthier's mistress. But soon it became
chic to ape the easy-going hedonism of the Josephine circle. Even as the
new Milanese elite followed her into sensualism, they deluged her with
presents on the understanding that she would get her husband to stop the
looting.
When he was away from Milan, Napoleon chafed at the separations.
The love letters recommenced and were just as impassioned as before.
From Lake Garda, where he was conferring with Serurier, he wrote on
18 July: 'I have been in Virgil's village, by the lake side, in the silver light
of the moon and not a single second without thinking of Josephine.' That
he was suspicious of her is clear from the many exhortations to marital
fidelity and his (p robably deliberately exaggerated) disgust for the illicit
pleasures of the flesh. When his officers consorted with prostitutes and
caught venereal disease, he wrote: 'Good God, what women! What
morals. Tell my brother Joseph to be faithful to his Julie.'
At the end of July there was a reunion in Brescia. Napoleon wrote that
'the tenderest of lovers awaits you.' Since this was where Hippolyte
Charles was based, the presumption must be that Josephine agreed to
meet Napoleon there rather than elsewhere because of the presence of the
rake-Hussar. But Napoleon's planned idyll was cut short by the sudden
advance of a new Austrian army down the Brenner pass. He sent
Josephine back to Milan with Junot and the dragoons by a circuitous
route. When Josephine heard of Napoleon's success against this new
army, which made it safe to return to Brescia, she sped back to the city.
Napoleon's headquarters was just twenty-five miles away and she found
an urgent appeal from him to join him there. Pleading exhaustion, she
spent the night with Hippolyte Charles instead. Her biographers have
predictably had fun with the dramatic irony about the 'tenderest of
lovers' who awaited Josephine in Brescia.
It was 29 July when Napoleon got definite news that an Austrian
counter-offensive was under way. From then until February 1797 a
titanic struggle took place for the besieged Mantua and the other three
fortresses - Peschiera, Verona and Legnago - which formed the famous
quadrilateral on the southern tip of Lake Garda, guarding the entrances
to the Lombardy plain from the Brenner pass and the Alps. Since
Mantua was so bitterly fought over, it has acquired a symbolic
importance in the Napoleonic story, but it was not Mantua itself
marcin
(Marcin)
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