Pauline, who always hated Josephine, rubbed her nose in her new
found wealth by visiting her at St-Cloud wearing the entire Borghese
collection of diamonds - the most beautiful in Europe - on a green velvet
dress. But her madcap career did not end there. Discovering that Camilo
Borghese was hopeless in bed - she told Cardinal Fesch she would rather
have stayed Leclerc's widow on 20,000 francs than marry Borghese - and
was in fact yet another repressed homosexual, Pauline again cut loose on a
life of sexual adventure. Her most notorious exploit was the visit to
Florence in r8o4. Pleading ill-health, she commissioned the artist Canova
to paint her as a naked Venus. When someone later asked whether she
had posed nude in Canova's studio, she replied: 'Why not? There was a
perfectly good fire in the studio.' Scandalized by her behaviour, Borghese
put her under house arrest in his palace, but Pauline responded by
smuggling in a fu rther raft of lovers. The distraught Borghese was forced
to appeal to Napoleon, who warned Pauline that she could never be
received at the Tuileries without her husband.
Almost as though by a process of osmosis through contact with his
hedonistic family, Napoleon in the latter years of his consulate seemed to
take more interest in sex; indeed the evidence of the years r 802-4 points
to a morbid craving or satyriasis of the John F. Kennedy kind. Perhaps as
his appetite for Josephine waned, his attentions increasingly wandered; it
is certain that at this time the Consul and his wife ceased to sleep in the
same room and occupied separate apartments. In June r8o2 he had an
affair with the young actress Louise Rolandeau. This was no more than a
'fling' but in November the same year he began a more sustained liaison
with another actress, the statuesque tragedienne Marguerite George,
whose previous lovers had included Lucien and the polish Prince
Sapiepha. With her the Consul was able to indulge his taste for
buffoonery, schoolboy japes, practical jokes and general horseplay.
Napoleon's affair with George soon became common knowledge. When
she was playing Cinna at the Theatre Franyais, she reached the line: 'If I
have seduced Cinna, I shall seduce many more.' The audience roared,
rose in a body, turned to the Consul's box and applauded. Josephine, who
was in the box with her husband, was distinctly unamused.
By this time she was used to his infidelities. She vacillated between
jealousy and indifference. One night she decided to catch the lovers red
handed in Napoleon's apartment and began mounting the narrow
staircase that led there, before taking fright at the idea that the fa ithful
bodyguard Roustam might suddenly emerge from the shadows and
behead her, mistaking her for an assassin. Yet on another night she found
herself in the love nest willy-nilly. Piercing screams from Mile George
marcin
(Marcin)
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