A thousand and one stories circulate about the sexual life of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is said that, when he came to the warmth of his tent after a hard fight, he wrote to Josefina de Beauharnais with a request that calmed his baser instincts: I’ll be back in three days. Don’t wash yourself! And like this, many others. It has been written of the Sire that he was addicted to oral sex, that he was inept in the bedroom, or that he lacked the manliness to satisfy his wives. Although, to his credit, it would have to be said that his relationship with his first love ended abruptly, to put it mildly.
Today it is difficult to know how far the tentacles of fallacies reach. However, as far as the Sire’s love affair is concerned, there is a question that stands out above the rest and that brings the experts upside down: Did Napoleon Bonaparte lose his virginity to a prostitute? The issue navigates in uncertainty due to a letter dated November 1787. A very brief letter in which the ‘Little Corsican’ narrates the meeting he had with a prostitute in Paris. “This text is taken by most historians at face value, but it is possible that the story is fictitious, just an exercise in the imagination of the pen,” explains Professor of Modern History Philip Dwyer in his work ‘Napoleon: The Path to Power 1769-1799’.
No one doubts that theLittle Corsican‘ was a military genius. However, the same did not happen to him on a personal level. Experts agree that he devoted his childhood to study and put aside social relationships with men and women. Everything indicates that it was in November 1787 when he lost his virginity. And it is that, on the 22nd, Napoleon Bonaparte himself wrote in his own handwriting a letter to himself (his goal was not to publish it) in which he made it clear that he had lain with a prostitute. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, an expert on the history of the Sire, the letter was written at the hotel in Cherbourg (in present-day Rue Vauvilliers) under the title ‘Meeting at the Palais Royal’.
New experiences
It all happened, it seems, while the ‘Little Corsican’ was trying to solve a series of legal problems related to a greenhouse owned by his family. “This note, written for himself, recounts his encounter with a prostitute whom he picked up in an area of bad reputation in the center of the capital, populated by gambling houses, restaurants and jewelry stores,” adds the expert in ‘Napoleon: a life ‘. Meeting with a prostitute was not well seen at the time. In fact, this is how Ramón de la Sagra defined prostitution at the beginning of the 19th century in his work ‘Notes of travel, written during a short excursion to France, Belgium and Germany in the fall of 1843’:
«And what shall we say of prostitution? For a short time now, its condition, its causes, and its progress have been studied, and each year that has elapsed, a new sore is discovered in this gangrenous body, which is already infecting the rich classes who mocked it with infamous disdain. Before, prostitution was the immediate daughter of the corruption of these that caused it and of the miseries of the proletarian classes, which succumbed: but at least dishonor prevented hunger. Now, in the manufacturing districts of France, the young woman prostitutes herself to get work, and after she gets it, her misery does not respect her either ».
Portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte
In any case, Napoleon affirms in the written letter that he met the aforementioned prostitute after having enjoyed a good opera. She “she had just left the Italian Opera and was walking briskly through the alleys of the Palais Royal.” In his words, it was night and the cold had just taken over the capital. «My spirit, agitated by the vigorous feelings that are natural to it, was indifferent to the cold, but, when it subsided, I felt the rigor of the climate and took refuge in the galleries».
It was then, with the wind chilling his bones in the vicinity of the Royal Palace of Paris, the cradle of culture and home to many of the Gallic prostitutes, when he ran into a woman who captivated him. “As I walked through the metal doors my eyes stopped on a person of the opposite sex.” The girl was young and beautiful. “The time of night, her figure and her youth left me in no doubt as to her occupation. I looked at her and she stopped, not with a reckless air common to her class, but in a way that harmonized with the charm of her appearance.
The young man and the prostitute
Napoleon, still a middling soldier, was amazed by her beauty and, despite the fact that he was (and had been throughout his youth) clumsy, introverted and shy with women, he decided to exchange a few words with his new friend. “Her shyness of hers emboldened me and I spoke to her. I spoke to her, who am more sensitive than anyone to the horror of her condition, who had always felt tainted even by looking at such a person. But his paleness, his fragility, his soft voice did not allow me a moment of uncertainty », she adds in her letter.
Without much doubt, the ‘Little Corsican’ entered the gardens of the Royal Palace with her. According to him, to ask her if she could not have an “occupation more in keeping with her health.” “No sir, you have to live,” she replied. Bonaparte, who habitually felt a certain awe of women, asked him several questions. “I was amazed, at least he had given me an answer, a success that I had not achieved until then,” he adds.
Napoleon abdicating at Fontainbleau
The first thing Bonaparte asked her new friend was where she came from, because of breaking the ice. She limited herself to blurting out a terse “Nantes.” Then, since the young woman did not hesitate to give him an answer, the ‘Little Corsican’ urged him to tell him how he had lost his virginity (“A soldier spoiled me”) and if this had bothered him ( “Yes a lot”). Her last question to gain her trust was how she had gotten to Paris.
They had connected. Afterwards, the future Sire decided to ask him once and for all the question he really longed for: if he wanted to accompany him to his chambers to “warm up so that he could fulfill his wishes”. Napoleon ends the missive as follows: ‘At this point, I had no intention of being carried away by scruples. He had tempted her not to think of running away from her when he pressed her with the reasons he had put before her, and he did not want her to start feigning an honesty that I had wanted to show he did not possess.’
In the words of Andrews, everything indicates that this short text was autobiographical: «Although he was not looking for such an encounter, the fact that he considered it worth mentioning suggests that this may have been the occasion in which he lost his virginity. The conversational method of unloading a barrage of questions was pure Napoleon.”
Doubts and more doubts
The authors of ‘The last days of the queens’ are also of this opinion, where it is explained that, before going to bed with his first wife, he had only known the love of a young prostitute in the Royal Palace. “He was the wife of a representative on mission, if we believe his words, and his girlfriend, Désirée Clary, whose virginity he boasts in Saint Helena.” However, some authors are against the idea that he lay with this prostitute and affirm that the future Sire only captured a fictitious text on the lines.
Portrait of Napoleon in his study, in 1812
What leads historians to believe that Napoleon’s letter could have been a mere fictional account? Apparently, since his childhood Napoleon wrote dozens of little short stories in which he let his imagination run wild. “He was a frustrated writer, the author before the age of thirty-six of some seventy essays, philosophical pieces, chronicles, treatises, pamphlets, and public letters,” Andrews notes.
The expert is not without reason since, back in 1786, Bonaparte signed a philosophical treatise on suicide in which he mixed the oratory of the great classics with a nationalist tone and, later, also created an article of no less than 15,000 words charging against Rousseau (one of the most outstanding of his life). Based on these data, authors such as Dwyer question the veracity of the content of the work: «This text is taken by most historians literally, but it is possible that the story is fictitious, just an exercise in imagination of the pen.