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

Opera-Comique. While Josephine was away at the
    spa town of Plombieres, where the waters were supposed to make a woman more fertile, Napoleon invited Louise to entertain the guests at Malmaison, their country home. Josephine wrote to Hortense, who was official hostess there, to put an end to the visits.
    "As if I could do anything about it," Hortense replied.
    Josephine returned to try to take control of the situation; but things went from bad to worse, when Josephine began to suspect her husband was having an affair with her young lady-in-waiting and confidante, Claire de Remusat. Josephine railed against her husband's sexual depravity. She warned Claire that he was the "most immoral" of men.
    "To hear her tell it, he had no moral principles whatsoever," wrote Madame de Remusat.
    "And he concealed his vicious inclinations only for fear they would damage his reputation. If he were allowed to follow his inclinations without restraint, he would sink into the most shameful excesses. Had he not seduced his own sisters one about another? Did he consider himself especially privileged to satisfy his sexual inclinations?"
    Napoleon responded innocently, asking Claire why Josephine should get upset over
    "these innocuous diversions of mine which in no way involve my affections".
    "I am not like other men," he would thunder when Josephine made accusations. "The laws of morality and society are not applicable to me. I have the right to answer all your objections with the eternal I"
    Nevertheless when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1803, Josephine was at his
    side.
    Josephine used the coronation skilfully to her own advantage. When Pope Pius VII
    travelled to France to anoint the new Emperor, she arranged to see him privately and told him that she was concerned about the legality of her marriage. Indeed, there had only been a civil service, not a religious one. The pope was shocked and refused to play his part in the coronation unless the situation was remedied immediately.
    On the evening of 1 December, 1804, in the greatest secrecy, an altar was set up in Napoleon's study. Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Fesch, performed the ceremony in front of two witnesses. Afterwards, Josephine asked the Cardinal for a certificate proving that this marriage was legal and binding.
    Napoleon's family hated Josephine and would do anything to get rid of her. They
    frequently put potential lovers his way. His sister Caroline introduced the ambitious and attractive Marie Antoinette Duchatel to court. Josephine soon suspected that Napoleon had taken her as his mistress. One day, she noticed that both her husband and Madame Duchatel were absent from the salon. She found them in a locked room and began frantically banging on the door. When Napoleon opened it, he and Madame Duchatel were naked. Madame
    Duchatel fled and Josephine burst into tears, while Napoleon stormed up and down, kicking the furniture and threatening to divorce her if she did not stop her spying.
    Josephine lived in constant fear that one of Napoleon's mistresses would conceive. She was certain that he would divorce her as barren and marry someone who could give him a son.
    Next Caroline provided the attractive eighteen-year-old Eleonore Denuelle, whose
    husband had just been arrested for forgery. Caroline kept Eleonore under constant
    surveillance and delivered her to the Tuileries for regular meetings with Napoleon. That way Napoleon could be sure that, if she conceived, the child would be his.
    In September 1806, she became pregnant. Josephine said nothing and simply resigned herself to her fate. When Eleonore Denuelle gave birth to a son, Napoleon proudly claimed to be the father. But still he did not drop Josephine. Later he learned that his sister's attempts to keep Eleonore Denuelle away from other men may not have been as successful as they had hoped. It seems that Caroline's own husband, Joachim Murat, may well have been the father of Eleonore's child.
    Many of Napoleon's affairs