2023-11-25 05:23:47
Napoleon, now famous thanks to good old Joaquin Phoenix, and Josephine met in 1795, when the future Emperor was nothing more than a provincial general who had not yet earned his stripes on the battlefield. For this woman – whom historians define as a lady not excessively beautiful, although she did have a loving smile and an elegant figure – life had not held anything good either. In addition to having had a number of lovers that could have filled the east wing of the palace of Versailles, she had just been released from prison after being arrested for having fought against the French Revolution. Out of prison, in charge of two children born from her first marriage to Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais, and without a coin in her purse, things were not looking good for this thirty-year-old. It was then that the Little Corsican appeared in her life, a young man inexperienced in matters of love and six years younger than her.
«They met when she had just been released from prison after the Thermidor coup. Josefina was then part of a group of many other beautiful women who, having become impoverished during the Revolution, sought to marry powerful men,” she explains to ABC. Angeles Case –historian, journalist, writer and author of ‘Napoleon and Josephine. Letters in love and war– (Forcola). In the words of this Spanish expert, Napoleon was then a general without a destiny, impoverished – they had to leave him money to buy his uniform – and who lived in miserable conditions. However, he was also an officer who was predicted to have a great military career and who had good and important friends in politics. «Josefina saw him as his salvation. Like a man who, when he ascended, could watch over her. “She knew that she had relationships with big politicians, so she went after him,” she adds.
a lot of fallacy
Although legend tells us that it was Napoleon who noticed Josephine and managed to make her fall in love with his arts, Caso is of a different opinion. She is in favor of the fact that the future Emperor really fell in love with the Spanish woman. Teresa Cabarrus. However, Beauharnais stood between them and managed to dazzle Bonaparte through her “feminine arts.” «In him he saw the opportunity to have a future. He deceived him by telling him that he was younger than he really was and Napoleon, who was extremely young and with little experience, fell into his arms. “He fell madly in love with her,” the writer completes. The author is also in favor of the idea that this thirty-year-old was an adventurer in the most immoral sense of the word, although she says she does not want to judge her from the current point of view, since her social context was totally different. «She couldn’t work, she had two children…she could do little with her life. “I can’t comment on her and her way of acting,” she determines.
A year later, the happy couple married in a ceremony attended by a good part of the political cast of the time. Almost as if Josephine were a talisman, Bonaparte was sent by the Directory two days after his wedding to Italy, where he had orders to fight and expel the Austrians at the command of a powerful army. Luck was beginning to smile on the Gaul both in his love life and in his military career. In the following months, possessed by the romantic spirit of ‘belle Italie’, the Frenchman sent dozens and dozens of letters to his beloved, who lived in Paris. All of them pointing out the great love he felt for her and her desperation to be in her arms again. «Napoleon used the most exalted romanticism imaginable in his letters. It was the first phase that their relationship experienced: he was extremely in love and crawling like a dog in front of his wife,” states Caso.
Napoleon’s letters are still preserved and clearly show a Little Corsican hit squarely by Cupid’s arrow. This is clear, for example, in a letter sent on July 17, 1796 in which he wrote the following: «Since I left you I have always been sad. My happiness consists of living with you. I constantly review in my memory your kisses, your tears, your kind jealousy, and the charms of the incomparable Josefina always feed a living and burning flame in my heart and in my senses. “When will I be able, free from worries and business, to spend all my moments in your company!” The same thing happens in the following writing sealed just ten days later in Milan: «You are the soul of my life and the feeling of my heart. Beautiful and virtuous without equal, divine Josefina; a thousand loving kisses.
From love to hate
But while the general was traveling through Italian lands, his wife preferred to enjoy the good time in Paris, also giving him an imposing antler with a lover who had been captivated by her beauty. «While he was writing, totally in love with her, she was buying jewelry and clothes in Paris. “She spent a lot of money on whims,” adds Caso. She also did not return the letters to her husband, who ended up reproaching her attitude in several of her messages. Some as harsh as the following, sent on August 31:
«I hoped to have received a letter from you, and your silence plunges me into a horrible anxiety. I beg you, do not leave me in such unrest any longer. […] You, to whom nature has given sweetness, amenity and all attractions, how can you forget him who loves you so ardently? I have been without a letter from you for three days, and yet I have written to you many times. Absence is horrible, the nights are long, boring and dull.
Desperate to see his beloved, Bonaparte asked her on several occasions to join him in Italy. However, Josefina always had an excuse to avoid this meeting and stay in Paris with her lover. In fact, she invented a false pregnancy to escape from her husband. Napoleon – who, although in love, was by no means a fool – began to suspect what had happened a few months later. It was then that he sent the occasional letter, totally spiteful. One of the most famous was written on November 13, 1796 from Milan:
Napoleon and Josephine Bonaparte ABC
“I do not love you anymore; On the contrary, I hate you. You are mean, clumsy, rude. You do not write me […], you don’t love your husband. What do you do all day, miss? What important business takes away your time to write to your beloved lover? What affection stifles and makes you forget the love, the tender and constant love that you have promised him? Who could be that prodigious new lover who absorbs all your moments? […] Josefina, take your precautions. One of these beautiful nights the doors will fall and I will be there.
In 1798, when Napoleon, a general already recognized for his success in the Italian campaigns, was sent to Egypt, the relationship between the two was very damaged. «Egypt was a turning point for both of us. To begin with, because Napoleon found out that she was cheating on him financially. He learned that Josefina had started a series of shady deals with army suppliers to save costs and take a cut. This is how, for example, there were boots that arrived to the soldiers with cardboard soles or shipments of food in very poor condition. All of this made Josefina earn money with which she bought jewelry and clothes,” adds Caso. Her greatest disappointment, however, came when his generals told her that his wife had a lover. At that moment the Frenchman felt so disappointed that he had the first (of several) adventures with him. He also began to write shorter missives, one or two paragraphs long and cold and lacking in feeling. All of this, according to Caso, despite the fact that he continued to love her.
sadness and despair
When he had himself named emperor on May 28, 1804, the relationship had little sign of being saved. «That was when the situation was reversed. She, who had always ignored him, became more and more pleading. Josephine realized that, by not having children with her husband, her role as her empress was in jeopardy. That’s why he became a frightened, pleading, destroyed, jealous being. She tried to use her so-called ‘feminine weapons’ to hold him back. The roles had changed. For her part, Napoleon went from having Josephine at an altar to hating her. “He took a horrible mania and never wrote her one of those saccharine letters again,” the expert determines.
Hatred then unhinged both of them. Josefina, to begin with, began to affirm in the small circles of the court that she had not been able to have children because of the sexual ineptitude of her husband. «Seeing that her marriage was in danger and that she was not able to give birth to a child, she wanted to blame him. There are several witnesses from the time who stated that Josephine questioned Napoleon’s virility, although she never records this directly. “It was a ploy to make a possible divorce difficult and ridicule him in front of others,” adds Caso. However, and in the words of the writer, this argument was refuted at the time when Bonaparte began to have children with his lovers. For his part, the Sire, moved by fleeting moments of anger, repeatedly abused his wife in front of several people. «It was a love hate relationship. “He also covered her with jewelry, which she hit him,” the expert adds to this newspaper.
In the end, the Little Corsican filed for divorce in December 1809. He asked for separation from the woman he had loved for 13 years. So, he went from writing her bawdy letters talking about spending the night with her in her “dark garden” to detesting her; from telling her that he would want him to take off her shoes to make her enter his heart entirely, to considering her a traitor. Divorced him – according to the chronicler of the time Philippe Paul Count of Segur– was especially hard for the Sire, who gave up the true love of his life. However, at an official level it was said that both had agreed to separate for the good of France because they had not managed to have children. «On December 15, the Emperor appeared at the senate with his wife. […] The two consorts made their declaration, Napoleon’s based on the need to have descendants, and Josephine’s, on the obligation to sacrifice herself for France,” this French historian determines in his writings.
Months later, after marrying Marie Louise of Habsburg, Napoleon once again remembered the love he felt for Josephine and began to regularly send her money so that she could continue living like an empress. «It seems that he remembered that Josephine whom he loved in Italy. For this reason, an epistolary relationship also began between the two,” adds Caso. Thus, until our protagonist left this world in 1814 due to pneumonia. However, in the end Napoleon decided to make himself “worthy” of his exile in Saint Helena and write, shortly before leaving for the other neighborhood, the following about his true love: “I truly loved Josephine, although I did not love her.” . She was too much of a liar. But she had something that I really liked; she was a real woman; “She had the most beautiful ass in the world.”
#unbridled #sex #hatred #cuckolding