Sex Lives of the Great Dictators Read Online Free PDF Page A

Milan. He ran up the staircase of the Serbelloni Palace to find her bedroom empty. She was in Genoa with Lieutenant Charles. For nine days he waited for her, writing her tortured, passionate, pitiful letters:
    I left everything to see you, to hold you in my arms. The pain I feel is
    incalculable. I don't want you to change any plans for parties, or to be
    interested in the happiness of a man who lives only for you. I am not
    worth it. When I beg you to equal a love like mine, I am wrong. Why
    should I expect lace to weigh as much as gold? May the fates
    concentrate in me all sorrows and all grief, but give Josephine only
    happy days. When I am sure that she can no longer love me, I will be
    silent and content only to be useful to her.
    After he sealed the envelope, he re-opened it and added desperately: "Oh Josephine, Josephine!"
    Napoleon still did not understand his wife's depth of feeling for Lieutenant Charles.
    Although he had heard that they spent a lot of time together, he considered Charles a fop -
    hardly a rival for a victorious general like himself. Back in Paris, his brother and sister told Napoleon that Josephine was using her influence to secure lucrative army contracts for her lover.
    When Napoleon confronted Josephine, she burst into tears and denied everything. If he wanted a divorce, he should just say so, she said. Napoleon was all too eager to believe his wife innocent. He even believed her when she said that she would break all communication with Charles. But directly after the confrontation, she wrote to Charles, saying: "No matter how they torment me, they will never separate me from my Hippolyte. My last sigh will be for him. Goodbye my Hippolyte, a thousand kisses as fiery as my heart, and as loving."
    A few days later they were back together again in a secret assignation because "only you can restore me to happiness. Tell me that you love me, that you love me alone. That will make me the happiest of women. I am yours, all yours."
    The two lovers were separated when Napoleon took Josephine to Toulon, where he was embarking his army for Egypt. Before leaving, Napoleon summoned General Dumas to his bedroom where Napoleon and Josephine were lying naked under a sheet. Once they had conquered Egypt, Napoleon said, they would send for their wives and do their utmost to impregnate them with sons. Dumas would stand godfather to the young Bonaparte.
    During his Egyptian campaign in 1798, Napoleon was again told of Josephine's
    unfaithfulness - and that he was the laughing-stock of Paris. To get his own back, he got his secretary to round up all the women he could find, but they were all too fat and ugly for his tastes.
    Then nineteen-year-old Pauline Foures came to his attention. She had dressed in a man's uniform to accompany her husband to Egypt. The skin-tight pantaloon that the French army wore at the time pandered to Napoleon's tastes. According to a contemporary, she had a
    "rose-petal complexion, beautiful teeth and a good geometrical figure".
    Napoleon sent her husband off up the Nile, while he staged a very public seduction. At a dinner party, he deliberately spilt some wine on her dress, then took her upstairs to sponge it off. When Lieutenant Foures returned to Cairo, Napoleon sent him back to Paris with despatches and installed Pauline in a house near his headquarters in Cairo.
    Like many soldiers, Napoleon had a thing about uniforms. Pauline would dress in a
    plumed hat and gold-braided coat to inflame his passion. She was soon nicknamed "Madame la Generale" or "Our Lady of the Orient".
    Poor Lieutenant Foures finally had to divorce his wife, while she publicly flaunted herself as Napoleon's mistress.
    It suited Napoleon for news of the affair to get back to Josephine. Napoleon ensured this by having Josephine's son, Eugene, riding escort when Madame Foures rode around Cairo in her carriage. Napoleon even promised to marry her, if she had a baby. When she did not become pregnant, she complained