would be the end of his friendship. Laugier either did resist, or was
able to persuade Napoleon that he had. But once in Paris the temptation
was simply too great. Laugier 'came out', to Napoleon's disgust, and
when the Corsican coldly told him their friendship was over, Laugier,
angry and distraught, assaulted him. Laugier came off the worse from
the encounter, and a contemplated charge of assault against Napoleon
was dropped, since the school authorities knew all about Laugier's
proclivities.
At the military school in Paris Napoleon had the first of the 'hate at
first sight' experiences that were to dog him through life. His enemy was
Le Picard de Phelipeaux, who just pipped him into forty-first place in
the artillery examination, became an emigre after the Revolution, and
fought with the British against Napoleon at Acre in 1798. But Napoleon
had the gift for rubbing up the wrong way against young females as well
as male rivals. In 1785 he sometimes visited Madame Permon, a Corsican
and an old friend of Carlo; she had married a rich French commissary
officer and had two daughters, Cecile and Laure. There seems to have
been an instant antagonism between Napoleon and Laure who, seeing his
long legs in officers' boots, laughed at him and called him 'Puss in Boots'.
Although Napoleon tried to turn the whole thing into a joke, it was clear
he was deeply affronted. He would not have liked Laure anyway: she had
been dressed as a boy until the age of eight and was as assertive as only
men were supposed to be in that era. Later she married Napoleon's friend
Junot and was a persistent thorn in the Bonaparte side. A kind of female
Bourrienne, like him she would do anything for money and in that
capacity later brought out eighteen volumes of memoirs which rival
Bourrienne's for their unreliability.
Napoleon could never abide any gender uncertainty or 'unnatural'
behaviour by assertive or strident women. His ambivalent feelings about
his mother are at the root of this, but if tradition is any guide, as a cadet
he had further experiences that made him wary of women. He was said to
have met up with two young women, then been shocked and incredulous
to find they were lesbians. The other story from his cadet years concerns
the attempt to seduce him by a much older woman. But the sixteen-year
old Second Lieutenant Bonaparte was still sexually timid and repressed.
He was allegedly the only successful artilleryman in Paris posted to the
La Fere regiment who did not visit a brothel in Lyons on the way south.
With a chip on his shoulder about his social origins and his nationality,
an uncertain touch with his male peers and a fear and suspicion of
women, Napoleon needed little else to make him feel as though he were
one of nature's loners. But, to cap all, he was short of stature, only 5'6"
marcin
(Marcin)
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