in imperial times, to the effect that Napoleon and Pauline had been
incestuous lovers. The 'source' was allegedly Josephine, said to have
blurted out such an accusation in r 8o6 to the French scholar Constantin
Volney. We may confidently reject the assertion. Josephine was prone to
hysterical exaggeration and may have mistaken a typically hyperbolic
Corsican gesture of sisterly affection on Pauline's part. Circumstantial
evidence is entirely against the canard. It was a peculiarity of Napoleon
his admirers say because he was generous, his enemies because he
regarded all women as whores - to lavish money on any woman he had
been to bed with. Yet in January r8r5 he refused to pay a paltry bill of 62
francs for curtains which Pauline had incurred.
Yet perhaps there was a certain poetic justice in the slanderous
rumour, for as Napoleon approached the mid-life he began to exhibit
clear signs of a satyriasis to rival Pauline's nymphomania. To an extent
the Murats made it easy for him by acting as procurers of beautiful and
willing young women. By now Caroline had concluded that her alliance
with Joseph was not paying off in quite the way she had hoped. She
therefore persuaded an initially reluctant Murat to adopt a sycophantic
line with the Emperor and to outdo the resident yes-men. The Murats
threw lavish parties for the Emperor and his entourage and punctiliously
observed his etiquette. Josephine, with her hypersen�itive antennae,
vaguely intuited the new influence of the Murats as being aimed at her,
without as yet being able to put her finger on why.
As he approached his thirty-sixth birthday the Emperor was, sexually
speaking, a ripe fruit to be plucked. His infidelities were becoming more
and more overt and the rows with Josephine as a consequence more and
more bitter. In April r8o5, on his way to Milan for the second coronation,
he had a brief fling with an unknown woman at Castello di Stupigini,
about six miles outside Turin. But the next liaison was almost a
calculated insult to the Empress, as the twenty-year-old blonde Anna
Roche de La Coste was one of the ladies-in-waiting whose job it was to
read to Josephine. Yet Napoleon did not have things all his own way
during this tempestuous affair, since La Coste herself proved capable of
running more than one lover at once.
Hearing rumours that La Coste had been the mistress of his
chamberlain Theodore de Thiard, Napoleon went to great lengths to
ensure he and his new conquest would not be disturbed. Having posted
guards around her room, he was stupefied when he arrived to find her
and Thiard in flagrante. After a furious but ignominious altercation with
Thiard, Napoleon sent him off on a mission to the Vatican, then bought
La Coste's loyalty by the gift of a priceless jewel. Still smarting from the
marcin
(Marcin)
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