CHAPTER FOURBy the time Archdeacon Lucien died, leaving the Bonaparte family
comfortably off, Napoleon's ambitions had moved on a notch. With
Joseph already president of the Ajaccio Directory, the Bonapartes were
making progress. Fortified by the gold of the late miser Lucien, Letizia,
still a striking woman habitually dressed in black, was able to abandon her
chores as housekeeper and start spending money on home and children.
The family dynamic was beginning to grow complicated. At sixteen
Lucien was a spoiled neurotic who resented the eminence of his two older
brothers. Thirteen-year-old Louis, whom Napoleon was glad to be able
to offload, was a good-looking mother's boy and favourite with women
but something of a 'hop out of kin'. Seven-year-old Jerome was
apparently as tiresome as a child as he was to be ineffective and useless as
an adult. With Elisa, aged fourteen, absent at St-Cyr and the pale
skinned nine-year-old Caroline a quiet child with some musical talent,
Pauline, aged eleven, was already usurping the role of most striking
female Bonaparte. Emotional, charming, humorous and showing signs of
her later stunning beauty, Pauline seemed to have inherited Letizia's
looks and Carlo's love of pleasure.
To advance in Corsican politics meant making a minute analysis of the
power structure on the island - something Napoleon, with his love of
detail, was good at. On the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789,
Corsica had at first been bedevilled by the extreme factionalism between
the royalists led by Buttafuoco and Peretti, who relied for support on the
Army, and the Paolists, whose power came from strong popular support.
Throughout 1790 and 1791 the Paolists had won victory after victory,
culminating in the royalist defeat when they tried to prevent the two
Paolist representatives, Gentile and Pozzo di Borgo (delegates from the
179 0 Orezza assembly) taking their seats at the National Assembly. But
almost immediately after this decisive rout of the royalists, the Paolistas
had themselves begun to splinter, basically between those loyal to France
and revolutionary principles and those who distrusted the Revolution's
anticlericalism and its attitude to property and hankered after an