met Marguerite George he tore off her veil and trampled it on the floor.
He seldom said anything agreeable to women but was habitually rude,
indiscreet, malicious or unflattering. Among his quoted slights are: 'What
an ugly hat!' 'Your dress is none of the cleanest.' 'Do you never change
your gown? I have seen you wearing that at least twenty times!' He
specialized in asking young women impertinent questions about their
private lives. He once ordered that camp followers who did not leave the
Army when ordered to should be smeared with soot and exposed for two
hours in the marketplace. Bourrienne reported that he had a particular
aversion to fa t women or to bluestockings like Germaine de Stael. Other
oft-quoted remarks are in the same vein: 'Madame, they told me you
were ugly; they certainly did not exaggerate.' 'If you appear again in that
despicable dress, you will be refused entry.'
It was often remarked that Napoleon praised the backside as the most
beautiful part of a woman, which has led some commentators to speculate
that he was a repressed homosexual. There is no good evidence to
support this though, in an age when we are less inclined to make hard and
fast distinctions about sexuality, we may perhaps allow that there were
some bisexual undercurrents in Napoleon. He was a man's man who
preferred the company of men - a not unnatural trait in a soldier - and
was impatient with any form of deviance. He ordered th.e commencement
of formal dances as though he were on the parade ground and was
puritanical in his public persona, maintaining a straitlaced court, though
reserving fo r himself the right of sexual licence. When he heard that
orgies were going on in a noted trysting place in the park of
Fontainebleau - the mare aux loups - he was incandescent with rage. If
he discovered through his spy network that the wife of an important
soldier or courtier was unfaithful, he always informed the husband and
threatened to exile the couple unless the husband took his wife in check.
Many farfetched theories have been advanced fo r Napoleon's
misogyny. It is suggested that he suffered from a 'castration complex' or
that his 'organ inferiority' (in his case phallic) led to military overcom
pensation. It is asserted, on no grounds whatever, that he had abnormally
small genitals, and that this explained both his resentment of women and
his lofty ambition ('masculine protest'). It is significant that Josephine
never made such an accusation. Her complaint was that her husband
made love too fast and suffered from ejaculatio praecox. Nor are there
grounds for saying that Napoleon was anything other than heterosexual.
Rather than bisexuality in the full sense, what we can detect in
Napoleon's psyche is some form of sadism or sexuality transmogrified as
aggresston.
marcin
(Marcin)
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