addition, deflowering a virgin would have brought him uncomfortable
reminders of Desiree at a time when he had already admitted, in his letter
to Joseph, that he might have made a mistake in his treatment of her.
There has always been a persistent rumour that in Egypt Napoleon
allowed himself his one and only homosexual encounter, on the
Voltairean prescription of 'once a philosopher, twice a pervert'. Allegedly
he agreed to experiment because it was put to him that all great
conquerors, such as Caesar and Alexander, made a point of tasting
'forbidden fruit'. But it is interesting that this tradition also holds that the
encounter was unsuccessful. This surely indicates that the idea of
Napoleon's bisexuality, much trumpeted since Sir Richard Burton
popularized it in his notes to his translation of the Arabian Nights, is not
really convincing. It is true that Napoleon had distinct traces of
bisexuality in his psychic makeup, but this is very different from saying
that he was bisexual in an active sense. Whatever the unconscious
impulses, the conscious Napoleon disliked any suggestion of sexual
deviancy and punished the Marquis de Sade accordingly. On the other
hand he cannot have been unaware that homosexual practices were
rampant in any army deprived of women.
This was a germane consideration on the Egyptian expedition, for
officers and men had been expressly forbidden to take wives, mistresses
or girlfriends with them. Many blatantly defied the proscription and
dressed their women as men to embark at Toulon; once safely at sea an
epicene army appeared, with large numbers of the soldiers proving to be
females in disguise. Among those who came to Egypt in this way was the
twenty-year-old blue-eyed blonde Pauline Foures from Carcassone. She
and her husband were considered by undiscriminating judges to be an
ideal couple, but when Napoleon met her on 30 November, she soon
made it clear she had no objections to becoming his mistress.
Yet first there was a serious contretemps which once again showed
Junot to be a master of the gaffe. After the initial meeting in a public
garden in Cairo, when smouldering eyes and other obvious body language
made it clear to Pauline that the generalissimo wanted her, Napoleon
dispatched Lieutenant Foures away on a trumped-up errand and then
sent Junot to Pauline as his ambassador of love. Junot, an earthy
sensualist, botched the mission by making the proposition in terms of
extreme crudity; Pauline replied with affronted dignity that she would
always remain faithful to her husband.
Napoleon's anger with Junot when he heard the outcome was
overdetermined. By an obvious association of ideas he linked Junot's lack
of discretion over Josephine and Hippolyte Charles with this further
marcin
(Marcin)
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