Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

1. NOT TONIGHT, JOSEPHINE

Sexual love is “harmful to society and to the individual happiness of men”, wrote the young Napoleon — but then he was kind of mixed up. His first sexual fumblings may not even have been heterosexual ones.

At military school in Brienne, the fourteen-year-old Napoleon was well known for his inability to make friends. He did, however, become very close to one boy named Pierre Francois Laugier de Bellecour, a pretty aristocrat from Nancy. It was rumoured that Pierre Francois was, in Brienne slang, a “nymph” and Napoleon got rather jealous when Pierre Francois widened his circle. He demanded that Pierre Francois assure him that he was still his best friend.

The two of them went together to the Ecole Militaire in Paris. As Pierre Francois was quickly sucked into overtly homosexual circles, Napoleon renounced his friendship and told Pierre Francois never to speak to him again. Napoleon wrote to the Minister of War suggesting that the “rigours of Spartan youth” be introduced into military academies, but he was advised to drop the matter.

During his first posting, to Valence in 1785, the sixteen-year-old Second Lieutenant Bonaparte grew close to a Madame du Colombier. A long way from home, the middle-aged Madame du Colombier provided a comforting mother-figure for him. She also had a pretty daughter named Caroline and, during the summer of 1786, romance blossomed.

Napoleon recalled the affair from exile in St Helena thirty years later: “no one could have been more innocent than we were. We often used to arrange little assignations and I recollect one in particular, which took place at daybreak one morning in the middle of summer. You may not believe it, but our sole delight on that occasion consisted of eating cherries together.”

Twenty years after that summer of young love, he wrote to Caroline and they met in Lyons. She could scarcely believe that her lanky boy soldier was now Emperor.

“She watched his every movement with an attention that seemed to emanate from her very soul,” a courtier recorded.

But in his eyes, his pretty young love had turned into a fat and boring housewife. He regretted arranging the meeting. Nevertheless, he gave her husband a government post, made her brother a lieutenant and appointed her lady-in-waiting to his mother, or Madame Mere, as she was officially known.

Napoleon did not lose his virginity until he was eighteen, with a prostitute he picked up in the Palais Royal in Paris. It was a deliberate act — “une experience philosophique” as he wrote in his notebook. The Palais Royal was a well-known centre for prostitution throughout the Revolution. The more expensive prostitutes took rooms on the mezzanine. From the half-moon windows, they would lean out and shout to passersby, or strike suggestive poses. Better-known harlots sent out runners who would hand out leaflets describing their specialities and their prices to the crowd below, while the cheap whores would work the garden outside.

The young Napoleon had just collected his back pay. As he walked in the Palais Royal gardens he noted that he was “agitated by the vigorous sentiments which characterize it, and it made me forget the cold”. He recorded that he was stopped by a frail young girl to whom he explained the nature of his philosophical quest. Apparently she was used to earnest young men undertaking such arduous research assignments. He asked her how she lost her virginity and why she had turned to prostitution. She told him the usual story — she had been seduced by an officer, kicked out of the house by an angry mother, taken to Paris by a second officer and abandoned there to fend for herself. She then suggested that they go back to his hotel.

“What shall we do there?” he asked naively.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll get warm and you’ll have your fill of pleasure.”

Napoleon found the experience disappointing and he remained shy around women.

It is widely rumoured that Napoleon had a tiny penis. The evidence comes from the autopsy report performed by the British and was probably largely propaganda. His pubis was described as feminine in appearance, resembling “the Mons Veneris in women”; his body completely hairless; his skin soft and white; and his breasts plump and round such that “many amongst the fair sex would be proud of it.” The penis was removed and preserved at the time and came to auction at Christie’s in 1969. His member, referred to genteelly by the auctioneers at Christie’s as “Napoleon’s tendon”, was small and unsightly. But who would be at their best after 150 years in brine?

At twenty-five, he fell in love for the first time. The object of his affections was Desiree Clary, a renowned beauty. He called her Eugenie, finding Desiree too vulgar. She was dark-haired and slender, and had the characteristics that Napoleon most craved in a woman small hands and feet, and a large dowry. His brother had married Eugenie’s older sister and Napoleon hoped this would smooth the way. But when the question of marriage was broached, Eugenie’s wealthy parents said that one penniless Bonaparte in the family was quite enough.

Napoleon did not give up. He continued the affair, largely through correspondence. She was in Marseilles with her parents, while he was making his way in Paris. His letters were passionate. He even wrote her a flowery love story called Clisson et Eugenie to indicate the depth of his feelings for her. It is the tale of a brilliant young warrior, Clisson, who dies gloriously in battle after learning that his wife, the gentle Eugenie, has fallen in love with his best friend.

“Sometimes on the banks silvered by the star of love, Clisson would give himself up to the desires and throbbings of his heart,” Napoleon wrote. “He could not tear himself away from the sweet and melancholy spectacle of the night, lit by moonlight. He would remain there until she disappeared, till darkness effaced his reverie. He would spend entire hours meditating in the depths of a wood, and in the evening he would remain until midnight, lost in reveries by the light of the silver star of love.”

Who says tyrants have no heart. Even from the distance of his exile in St Helena, he recalled Eugenie as his “first love”. However, he suddenly withdrew his offer of marriage. The brush-off was delicately delivered. Napoleon wrote that one day, he knew, her feelings towards him would change. That being the case, he could not hold her to her vow of eternal love. The very day she no longer loved him, she must tell him. And if she fell in love with someone else, she must give way to her emotions. He would understand.

Eugenie was heartbroken.

“All that is left to me now is to wish for death,” she wrote.

But after a while her heart mended and she married another up-and-coming soldier, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte. He went on to become a Marshal of France and, in 1810, ascended to the Swedish throne. Eugenie became the Queen of Sweden and her descendants sit on the Swedish throne to this day.

Eager to marry, Napoleon shifted his attention to more mature women. He proposed at least five times one of the women, Mademoiselle de Montansier, was sixty — but, shabby and badly dressed, the young Napoleon was not a very savoury prospect. He wore his battered round hat crammed down over his ears while his lank, ill-powdered hair hung down over the collar of his greatcoat. His boots were cheap, shoddy and unpolished, and he never wore gloves, condemning them as a “useless luxury”. In truth, he could not afford any. What’s worse, he was a bore, making frequent outbursts against the iniquities of the rich.

Madame Permon was one of the few women who allowed Napoleon to attend her salon, and this was largely because she was a fellow Corsican. There he would dance with Madame Permon’s daughter, Laure.

“At that time,” Laure wrote, “Bonaparte had a heart capable of devotion.”

Napoleon’s fortunes improved out of all recognition when he led a detachment that shot down a column of royalists who were marching on the National Assembly. Overnight, Napoleon became the “saviour of the Republic”. He was made a full general with command of the Army of the Interior. He had a brand new uniform and moved out of his shabby hotel and into a house on the Rue des Capucines. He even had his own carriage.

When Monsieur Permon died, Napoleon visited the house regularly to comfort the widow. On one occasion, finding himself alone with her, he suggested that they united their two families. Her son Albert, Napoleon suggested, should marry his pretty young sister Pauline. But Albert might have plans of his own, Madame Permon said.

Then her daughter Laure should marry his brother Jerome, Napoleon suggested. They were too young, said Madame Permon. In that case, the two of them should marry, Napoleon proposed. They would, of course, have to wait until a decent period of mourning had been observed.

Madame Permon took this proposal as a joke. She was forty and much too old for him. But it was no joke and after he was refused, Napoleon never visited the house again.

Soon after that he met Josephine Tascher Beauharnais. A thirty-two-year-old former vicomtesse from Martinique, she had been imprisoned and her husband guillotined during the Terror. When she was released, like the rest of Paris, she was determined to have some fun.

The city was in the grip of a dance craze. Over six hundred dance halls opened. Determined to put the excesses of the Revolution behind them, women wore their hair a la guillotine, cropped or pinned up, leaving the neck exposed. To enhance the macabre effect, the fashion was to wear a thin, blood-red ribbon around their necks. There was even a Bal a la Victime, a dance to which only the relatives of those who had been guillotined were invited.

Josephine fostered out her thirteen-year-old son, Eugene, to General Hoche, a fellow prisoner and former lover. Then she began borrowing money to fund an extravagant lifestyle, squandering it on carriages, furniture, exotic food, flowers and fashionable clothes.

With her slender build, topped by a riot of chestnut curls, Josephine had the perfect seductive figure for the new Directoire style. Although she did not go quite as far as her friend Madame Hamelin who walked down the Champs-Elysees naked to the waist, she could be seen bare-armed and practically bare-breasted in flimsy gowns over flesh-coloured body stockings.

She used her well-displayed charms to persuade those in authority to give back the property that had been confiscated from her during the Terror. Her Paris apartment was unsealed and her clothes, jewels and furnishings returned. She was granted access to her late husband’s chateau and was richly compensated for the furniture, silver-ware and books that had already been sold. She was also reimbursed for the horses and equipment her husband had lost when he was stripped of his command of the Army of the Rhine. This exercise gave her all sorts of important contacts. Josephine made such a habit of sleeping with the important men in postrevolutionary France that the security services paid her for the pillow talk she garnered. It was truly amazing, a contemporary wit remarked of Josephine, that bountiful nature had the foresight to put “the wherewithal to pay her bills beneath her navel”.

One of Josephine’s closest friends was another fellow prisoner, Therese de Fontenay. She was the daughter of a Spanish banker who distributed her favours so liberally around high government circles that she was said to have been stamped “government property”. She was the mistress of financier Gabriel Ouvard, government minister Jean Tallien, to whom she was later briefly married, and the Director himself, Paul Barras.

Barras was a former nobleman who had joined the Revolution when he saw which way the wind was blowing. He supported the Terror; then, when the time was right, engineered Robespierre’s downfall. He became the most important man in post-revolutionary Paris and he lived in the Luxembourg Palace in a style as lavish as any pre-revolutionary salon. His taste for pleasure, a contemporary remarked, was like that of “an opulent, extravagant, magnificent and dissipated prince”.

Therese introduced Josephine to Barras — indeed, the two of them had danced naked before him. When Barras grew tired of Therese, Josephine took her place in his bed. Some of her acquaintances were shocked, but to Josephine this was perfectly natural. Both her husband and father had been tireless adulterers and she had an aunt who slept with her father-in-law. Besides, Barras was a very handsome man.

Josephine was definitely not the type of woman Napoleon was looking for. He was quite dismayed by the way powerful men seemed to be controlled by feckless and immoral women.

“Women are everywhere,” he wrote to his brother, disapprovingly, “applauding in the theatre, strolling in the parks, reading in the bookshops. You will find these lovely creatures even in the wise man’s study. This is the only place in the world where they deserve to steer the ship of state. The men are mad about them, think of nothing else, and live only for them.”

As commander of the Army of the Interior, Napoleon was now invited to all the important salons. Although there was still some debate about his charms, some young women were impressed by his classical “Grecian” features and his large eyes that seemed to light up when he spoke.

“You would never have guessed that he was a military man,” wrote one. “There was nothing dashing about him, no swagger, no bluster, nothing rough.” Most agreed that he looked painfully thin.

He met Josephine after an order had been issued that all weapons in private hands were to be handed in to the authorities. Josephine’s son, Eugene, had a sword that had belonged to his father. Eugene did not want to hand this memento in, so he approached the General commanding the Army of the Interior to ask if he could keep it. Impressed by the child’s filial devotion, Napoleon gave his consent.

The next day, Josephine came to thank General Bonaparte in person. Napoleon admitted later that he was bowled over by her “extraordinary grace and her irresistibly sweet manner”. He asked if he could call on her.

Josephine can hardly have been impressed with what she saw. This short, skinny man, with gaunt, angular features and lank hair, was hardly the sort to turn a girl’s head. But she spotted that Bonaparte was the coming man and invited him to one of her regular Thursday receptions.

Napoleon was not comfortable in such surroundings. He was appalled that the money she spent on flowers and food for one of these soirees would have been enough to keep his family for a week. Josephine’s house, a neighbour noted, was stacked with luxuries — “only the essentials are missing”.

Josephine’s salon was full of actors and playwrights, leaving Napoleon tongue-tied; and the beautiful women intimidated him.

“I was not indifferent to the charms of women, but up to this time they had not spoiled me,” he said, “and my disposition made me shy in their company.”

But with Josephine, it was different. Her attentiveness reassured him. A friend noted later that there was “a certain intriguing air of languorousness about her — a Creole characteristic apparent in her attitudes of repose as well as in her movements; all these qualities lent her a charm which more than offset the dazzling beauty of her rivals”. Before long, Napoleon was hopelessly in love.

He must have known about her relationship with Barras — all of Paris did. They were hardly discreet. When she entertained him at her house in Croissy which he paid for- the neighbours would see baskets of luxuries turning up from early in the morning. Then a detachment of mounted police would arrive, followed by Barras and a huge party of friends.

Barras himself said: “Bonaparte was as well acquainted with all of the lady’s adventures as we were; I knew he knew, because he heard the stories in my presence. And Madame de Beauharnais was generally recognized as one of my early liaisons. With Bonaparte a frequent visitor to my apartment, he could not have remained ignorant of such a state of affairs, nor could he have believed that everything was over between her and me.”

Napoleon also knew of her affair with General Hoche. One evening at a party given by Therese Tallien, in a playful mood, Napoleon pretended to read palms, but when he got to General Hoche’s hand, his mood changed.

“General, you will die in your bed,” he said darkly. This was an insult, coming from one soldier to another. Only Josephine’s speedy intervention prevented it developing into a full-scale row.

Plainly, Napoleon could not handle his feelings and he stopped seeing her. Josephine wrote to him: “You no longer come to see a friend who is fond of you. You have completely deserted her, which is a great mistake, for she is tenderly devoted to you. Come to lunch tomorrow. I must talk to you about things that will be of advantage to you. Goodnight, my friend. A fond embrace.”

Napoleon replied immediately.

“I cannot imagine the reason for the tone of your letter,” he wrote. “I beg you to believe me when I say that no one so yearns for your friendship as I do, that no one can be more eager for the opportunity to prove it. If my duties had permitted, I would have come to deliver this note in person.”

Soon he was visiting her more than ever.

“One day, when I was sitting next to her at table,” he recalled later, “she began to pay me all manner of compliments on my military expertise. Her praise intoxicated me. From that moment I confined my conversation to her and never left her side.”

Josephine’s thirteen-year-old daughter Hortense confirmed his puppy-like devotion. One evening she accompanied her mother to a dinner party being held by Barras at the Luxembourg Palace.

“I found myself placed between my mother and a general who, in order to talk to her, kept leaning forward so often and with so much vivacity that he wearied me and obliged me to lean back,” she wrote. “In spite of myself, I looked attentively at his face, which was handsome and expressive, but remarkably pale. He spoke ardently and seemed to devote all his attention to my mother.”

Soon after that they became lovers. For Josephine, making love was a pleasant way to round off a memorable evening together. For Napoleon, it was transcendent. At seven o’clock the next morning, he wrote breathlessly: “I wake full of you. Between your portrait and the memory of our intoxicating night, my senses have no respite. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what is this strange effect you have on my heart? What if you were to be angry? What if I were to see you sad or troubled? Then my soul would be shattered by distress. Then your lover would find no peace, no rest. But I find none, either, when I succumb to the profound emotion that overwhelms me, when I draw from your lips, from your heart, a flame that consumes me… I shall see you in three hours. Until then, mio dolce amor, I send you a thousand kisses — but send me none in return, for they set my blood on fire.”

Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Auguste Marmont witnessed the effect this consummation had: “He was madly in love, in the full sense of the word, in its widest possible meaning. It was, apparently, his first real passion, a primordial passion, and he responded to it with all the vigour of nature. A love so pure, so true, so exclusive had never before possessed a man. Although she no longer had the freshness of youth, she knew how to please him, and we know that to lovers the question of “why” is superfluous. One loves because one loves and nothing is less susceptible to explanation and analysis than this emotion.”

Long after they divorced, Napoleon embittered by defeat and exile, stood on St Helena and admitted still: “I was passionately in love with her, and our friends were aware of this long before I ever dared to say a word about it.”

Many were shocked at his love for Josephine who, they considered, had “lost all her bloom”. Napoleon was twenty-six. She was thirty-two, though she thoughtfully shaved four years off her age for the marriage certificate while he, gallantly, added two years to his.

Full of the optimism of young love, Napoleon wrote to Josephine: “You could not have inspired in me so infinite a love unless you felt it too.”

She did not. He was deluding himself. She was amusing herself with what she called her “funny little Corsican”.

But Barras was eager to shed the spendthrift Josephine and Josephine needed a new sugar daddy — all the better if he was young and naive.

Napoleon later admitted that it was Barras who advised him to marry Josephine. He made it clear that Napoleon would gain both socially and financially. Barras also encouraged Napoleon’s mistaken idea that Josephine was rich. In fact, her dowry would be a stack of unpaid bills. But she was from an aristocratic family and Napoleon was an incurable snob.

Josephine was quite taken aback when Napoleon proposed. She had expected to be his mistress for a while, not his wife. She admitted to a friend that she did not love him, feeling only “indifference, tepidness”. Frightened by his ardour, she accused him of having some ulterior reason for marrying her. He was mortified:

Eventually, the force of his passion overwhelmed her.

“I don’t know why,” she said to a friend, “but sometimes his absurd self-confidence impresses me to the point of believing anything is possible to this singular man — anything that might come to his mind to undertake. With his imagination, who can guess what he might undertake?”

Later, on St Helena, Napoleon gave a more objective account of his reasons for marrying Josephine: “I really loved Josephine, but I had no respect for her… Actually, I married her only because I thought she had a large fortune. She said she had, but it was not true.”

Napoleon’s family opposed the match. They disapproved of Josephine’s frivolous ways and her outre clothes. Josephine’s children were also against it.

“Mama won’t love us so much,” Hortense told her brother. But they were eventually persuaded that having a General as a stepfather would be a help to Eugene, who was planning to be a soldier. Even so, Hortense never quite reconciled herself to the marriage. Later, when her headmistress — and the rest of France — were lauding his victories, Hortense said: “Madame, I will give him credit for all his other conquests, but I will never forgive him for having conquered my mother.”

When they went to draw up the marriage contract, the homme d’affaires who dealt with the property settlement advised Josephine against tying herself to a penniless young soldier who might get killed in battle leaving her nothing but “his cloak and his sword”. Nevertheless, she went ahead.

Barras gave her away. Napoleon was two hours late for the ceremony — the mayor had gone home — but at ten o’clock on 9 March, 1796, Napoleon and Josephine were married by a minor official who did not even have the proper authority to conduct the two-minute ceremony.

Barras was as good as his word. The marriage did advance Napoleon. A week before the ceremony, Barras had made him commander of the Army of Italy.

After the wedding Napoleon moved into Josephine’s new house at 6 Rue Chanterine. It was a secluded house set in a wooded garden. The walls and ceiling of her boudoir were mirrored, but the gilded swans gliding through a sea of pink roses on the ceiling of her bedroom had to go. In honour of Napoleon, Josephine had her bedroom redecorated like a soldier’s tent.

On their wedding night, while they were consummating the marriage, Josephine’s pug dog Fortune, fearing that his mistress was being attacked, bit Napoleon on the leg. The dog and his insatiable mistress were all too much for Napoleon. After the necessary deed had been done, he refused further enticement and retreated to his books of strategy and tactics. After thirty-six hours, he cut the honeymoon short and went to take up his posting in Italy. It was definitely a case of “Not tonight, Josephine”.

While Napoleon threw himself into war, the voracious Josephine amused herself with a score of generous lovers. Among them was a handsome young cavalry officer, Lieutenant Hippolyte Charles. He was tall, dashing and handsome, and she immediately fell head-over-heels in love with him.

But Napoleon was missing his darling Josephine and summoned her to Milan.

“Come and join me as soon as you can,” he wrote, “so that at least before we die we can say we were happy for a few days.”

He assured her that “never was a woman loved with more devotion, more fire or more tenderness. Never has a woman been in such complete mastery of another’s heart.”

She was busy with Charles and did not respond. When he returned one day to find that, yet again, she had not arrived “sorrow crushed my soul”, he wrote. He begged her to write to him and told her: “I love you with a love beyond the limits of imagination, that every minute of my life is consecrated to you, that never an hour passes without my thinking of you, that I have never thought of another woman.”

Josephine eventually arrived, but was bored. Napoleon was occupied with the siege of Mantua at the time and she wrote home, saying how much she missed her other lovers. Napoleon, on the other hand, could hardly concentrate on the battle for kissing, teasing, fondling and caressing her “beautiful body”, even in front of a room full of people.

He did not mind going even further. The French diplomat, Miot de Melito, wrote an account of a carriage ride around Lake Maggiore. He and General Berthier sat in a state of shock, he said, while on the seat opposite, Napoleon took “conjugal liberties” with his wife. The visit made him the happiest man in the world.

“A few days ago, I thought I loved you,” he wrote afterwards, “but now since I have seen you again I love you a thousand times more. Everyday since I met you I have loved you more. Thousands of kisses — even one for Fortune, wicked beast that he is.”

This was precious little comfort for Josephine.

“My husband does not love me,” she wrote. “He worships me. I think he will go mad.”

When Napoleon and his army advanced, he wrote to her begging her to come to Brescia where “the tenderest of lovers awaits you”. She went immediately, but only because her lover, Lieutenant Charles was now attached to Napoleon’s command.

When the campaign turned disastrously against the French, Josephine, back in Milan, feared for the lives of her husband and her lover. Things may have been going badly because, instead of concentrating on the battle, Napoleon was taking the time to write long, passionate love letters to Josephine once or twice a day. There was just one thing on his mind.

“A kiss upon your heart, another a little lower, another lower still, far lower!” he wrote. On another occasion, he wrote: “I kiss your breasts, and lower down, much lower down.” It is hard to strike out decisively against the enemy when all you can think of is oral sex.

Despite the passion of his letters, Josephine rarely wrote back. When she did, she would address him as “vous” rather than the familiar “tu”. However, in her letters to Lieutenant Charles, she expresses an ardour that matches anything Napoleon came up with.

Josephine was happy to share her husband’s intimate thoughts with others. One friend she showed his letters to noted:

Napoleon finally turned the tide at Rivoli; and his passion for her did seem to spur him on.

“My every action is designed with the sole purpose of reuniting with you,” he wrote. “I am driving myself to death to reach you again.”

Two days after the battle, he wrote to her in relief:

Six days later he was back in 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:

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 that the “little idiot” did not know how to have a child. She said that it was not her fault and pointed out that, in the two years they had been married, Josephine had not had a baby either, though she had had two by her previous husband.

After the Battle of the Nile, in August 1799, Napoleon left Madame Foures in Cairo and slipped through the British blockade of Egypt. He never saw Pauline Foures again, though during the Empire he bought her a house and gave her a liberal allowance. She died at the age of ninety, in 1869, during the reign of Napoleon III.

Josephine found out about the affair in the most embarrassing possible way. Letters describing the intimate details of the liaison had been captured by the British and published in London, where correspondents for the French papers soon picked them up.

Meanwhile, a scandal over the army contracts she had secured for Lieutenant Charles had brought about an end to their relationship. So Josephine had no choice but to attempt a reconciliation with her husband. She heard that Napoleon had left Egypt and she raced for the coast, ahead of his brothers.

She got as far as Lyons before hearing that she had missed him on the road and turned back for Paris. Napoleon arrived back at their home in Rue de la Victoire to find the house empty. A few hours later, his brothers turned up. They told him everything and urged a divorce. But Napoleon loved Josephine so much he still found it hard to deal with the fact that she really had been unfaithful to him. When she finally arrived home, three days later, Napoleon had locked himself in his study. No amount of knocking or pleading would get him to open the door. She remained outside sobbing all night. In the morning, the maid suggested she get Hortense and Eugene. Napoleon loved his stepchildren and eventually he opened the door. His eyes were red with weeping and while he embraced Eugene, Josephine and Hortense knelt on the floor and hugged his knees. Soon he was unable to resist her. When his brother Lucien dropped round later, he found Napoleon and Josephine in bed together, totally reconciled.

However, the relationship had been turned on its head. Josephine now tried desperately to hold on to his love while Napoleon sought pleasure elsewhere though he never allowed the name of Hippolyte Charles to be mentioned in his presence. After the coup that made Napoleon military dictator in 1800, his chief aide-de-camp, Duroc, would procure young women and take them up to a bedroom next to Napoleon’s study. They would be told to strip and get into bed, so that they could attend to le pent general’s needs as soon as he had finished working. He even fell in love two or three times.

He made no excuse for his behaviour, telling Josephine simply: “You ought to think it perfectly natural that I am allowed amusements of this kind.”

Adultery, he said, was “a joke behind a mask… not by any means a rare phenomenon but a very ordinary occurrence on the sofa”.

Desperate to secure her position, Josephine decided that her daughter Hortense should marry his brother Louis. That way, if she could not be mother of Napoleon’s heir, she could at least be grandmother. She won Napoleon around to the scheme by “the influence exerted in the boudoir, by her repeated entreaties and her caresses”, one of Napoleon’s aides said. However, the marriage foundered when Louis heard the rumour that eighteen-year-old Hortense was having an affair with her stepfather — Napoleon himself.

During Napoleon’s second Italian campaign, in the afternoons, Napoleon would regularly send for an Italian girl “to pass the time agreeably”. He also seduced La Grassini, the prima donna of La Scala, and installed her in a house in Paris. But having a triumphant affair with the conquering hero in Milan was one thing; being the official mistress of a head of state was quite another, and Napoleon was quickly replaced by a violinist named Rhode.

Next came Louise Rolandeau of the 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 passed unnoticed, but his liaison with Marguerite Weymer (later called the “whale” because she became immensely fat) caused quite a scandal. When Napoleon knew her, she was a voluptuous sixteen-year-old actress from the Comedie-Francaise. In the evenings, Marguerite would be smuggled into a room near his study where, after his day’s work was over, he would amuse himself with her before finding his way back to his own bedroom.

Josephine would sometimes find the waiting unbearable. One night she tried to catch Napoleon and Marguerite together, only to find her way barred by Roustam, Napoleon’s fierce Mameluke guard.

On another occasion, just as Napoleon and Marguerite were starting to make love, he blacked out with an epileptic convulsion. Marguerite let out a scream that woke the whole household. Napoleon came round to find Josephine, Claire de Remusat and a dozen members of the palace staff crowded around the bed. In bed beside him was a naked Marguerite.

If this was not bad enough, Marguerite Weymer was also known in Parisian society as Mademoiselle Georges. Napoleon finally dropped her when an erotic book was published showing her engaged in homosexual acts with her lesbian lover, Raucort.

Napoleon did nothing to hide his lovers from Josephine. In front of the court, he would recount the virtues, physical imperfections and anatomical peculiarities of his latest lover “with the most indecent openness”. Soon the details would be winging their way via diplomats” couriers to the governments of Europe. But Josephine was so determined to hang on to her position as consort that she tolerated this humiliation. She even helped him get rid of women he had tired of.

Although pamphlets circulated making out that Napoleon was a Hercules among lovers, the truth was far more mundane. In her memoirs, Mademoiselle Georges said it was only at their third meeting that they went to bed together. He was not very physical and never forced himself on her, though he occasionally displayed outbursts of jealousy over former lovers. Once, she recalled, he pranced about the bedroom naked with a wreath of white roses on his head.

The novelist Stendhal knew Napoleon and described the Emperor in the evening, sitting at a small table signing decrees. “When a lady was announced, he would ask her — without looking up from his work — to go and wait for him in the bed. Later, with a candlestick in his hand, he would show her out of the bedroom and return to his table and his endless decrees.

The essential part of the rendezvous had not lasted three minutes.”

One nervous actress was greeted curtly with: “Come in. Undress. Lie down.”

Sometimes it did not even get that far. Once he sent a servant to get Mademoiselle Duchesnois, another actress from the Comedie-Francaise. When she arrived at his apartment in the Tuileries she was told to wait. After two hours, the servant went to Napoleon to remind him that Mademoiselle Duchesnois was waiting. He said: “Tell her to get undressed.”

She stripped off. For another hour, she sat there nude. Then the servant went to Napoleon to remind him again. This time the Emperor said: “Tell her to go home.” She dressed and left.

Josephine actually made things easier for him. She liked to be surrounded by pretty young ladies-in-waiting. When Napoleon was in what he called his “rutting season”, he would take his pick.

“Love is a singular passion, turning men into beasts,” he said. “I come into season like a dog.”

As Napoleon’s power increased, his lovemaking became more perfunctory; but it was important for him to keep up his image. In later life, he admitted his “feebleness in the game of love; it did not amount to much”.

Napoleon’s confidant General Louis de Caulaincourt summed up the situation: “It was rarely that he felt any need of love, or indeed pleasure in it. The Emperor was so eager to recount his amorous successes that one might almost have imagined he only engaged in them for the sake of talking about them.”

In fact, Napoleon did not like women very much. He was candid in his opinions: “We treat women too well and by doing so have spoilt everything. We have been very wrong indeed to raise them to our own level. The Orientals are much more intelligent and sensible making women slaves.”

Men, he thought, should have several wives.

“What do most ladies have to complain of? Don’t we acknowledge they have souls… They demand equality! Pure madness! Woman is our property.. just as the fruit tree belongs to the gardener.”

Napoleon was also convinced of the “weakness of the female intellect”. His brother Joseph, he complained, was “forever shut away with some woman reading Torquato Tasso and Aretino”. No doubt the flames of Napoleon’s romanticism had certainly been dampened by Josephine’s affair with Hippolyte Charles.

Not only did Josephine have to worry about her husband’s infidelity at home, he was frequently abroad where she could not keep an eye on him. After a successful campaign against the Prussians in 1806, he moved on into Poland and Josephine began to fret about “Polish beauties”.

“Here in the wastes of Poland, one gives little thought to beauties,” he wrote back. “Besides there is only one woman for me. Do you know her? I could describe her to you but I don’t want you to become conceited; yet, in truth, I could say nothing but good about her. The nights are long here, all alone.”

But he was not all alone for long. After a minor victory over the Russians at Pultusk, Napoleon was hailed as the liberator of Poland. At a huge reception given for him in the Palace of the Kings in Warsaw, Napoleon spotted the twenty-year-old Countess Marie Walewska. She looked up to him as her hero. He made it clear that she was the sort of woman that he wanted to see later, in private.

She was married to a seventy-year-old count and was reputed to be chaste, modest and deeply religious. She refused his profuse invitations to share his bed. Expensive gifts did not work. When he sent her a box of jewels, she threw it on the floor.

“He must take me for a prostitute,” she said.

Impassioned letters did not work either; neither did veiled threats.

“Think how much dearer your country would be to me if you take pity on my poor heart,” he wrote.

A delegation begged Count Walewski to force Marie to “surrender herself for Poland. He did so and she went unwillingly to Napoleon’s private apartments in Warsaw. There, he flung his watch on the floor and crushed it under his heel, saying that he would grind her people into the dust if she did not succumb. Then he “swooped” on her like “an eagle on a dove”. She fainted. So he raped the unconscious woman, merely noting that “she did not struggle overmuch”.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, the affair lasted for three years and contemporaries maintained that the charming and devoted Marie was the only woman he ever really loved.

During his stay in Poland they lived together in Schloss Finckenstein and Napoleon called her his “Polish wife”. The only problem was that, despite the fact that she had had one child by her seventy-year-old husband, Napoleon did not seem to be able to make her pregnant. But eventually, after he had returned to France, she sent word that she had had a son.

While there had always been some doubt over the paternity of Eleonore Denuelle’s child, Napoleon believed that Marie’s child was his. Marie’s husband gave the child his name and, as Count Alexandre Walewski, he rose to prominence under Napoleon III. However, Countess Walewska’s “sacrifice” was seen to be in vain. Later, Napoleon made a treaty with the Czar, agreeing that the very words “Poland” and “Polish” be “obliterated not only from any transaction, but from history itself”.

Convinced, at last, that he was not sterile, Napoleon decided to divorce Josephine and marry someone who could give him a legitimate heir. Tired of war, he decided that dynastic alliance was a better policy. He fancied marrying a Russian Grand Duchess. The Dowager Empress was against it, claiming that Napoleon was “not as other men”. If the Grand Duchess did marry him, she warned, in order to have children she would have to entertain another man in her bed.

Prince Frederick Louis of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was despatched to Paris to investigate. Josephine, terrified of divorce as ever, lost Napoleon his Romanov bride by telling the Prince that Napoleon was impotent — “Bonaparte est bon a faire rien [Bonaparte is good for nothing],” she said.

Later, after her divorce, the twenty-nine-year-old Prince Frederick proposed marriage to the forty-seven-year-old Josephine. She refused.

Josephine also said publicly that Napoleon’s semen was “no use at all; it’s just like so much water”. He may look like other men, she said, but then so did the famous castrato tenors of the time. Napoleon’s bouts of impotence were also discussed openly in the family and news of it spread across Europe.

As Josephine had still failed to produce a son and heir, in 1809 Napoleon had their marriage annulled. Out of political necessity, Napoleon picked Marie Louise of Austria — Marie Antoinette’s niece — to be his second wife. Nevertheless, he concluded that the eighteen-year-old virgin was “the kind of womb I want to marry”.

He told his brother Lucien: “Naturally I would prefer to have my mistress [meaning Walewska] crowned, but I must be allied with sovereigns.”

The alliance with Austria was a political mistake. It soon led to war with Russia.

Although she had lost the battle over the divorce, Josephine continued to fight. She backed his marriage to Marie Louise in the hope that the young princess might look to her for advice. The three of them could set up a menage a trois, she thought. As the older of the two Empresses, she would naturally take precedence. However, two weeks after his marriage by proxy in March 1810, Napoleon banished Josephine from Paris. They met occasionally at Malmaison when both shed tears of joy.

Marie Louise was over twenty years Napoleon’s junior. On the evening they first met, she consented to go to bed with him. His behaviour was described at the time as “more rape than wooing”, but Marie Louise did not seem to mind. In fact, afterwards “she asked me to do it again,” Napoleon said in a celebrated quote.

Napoleon was very much in love with her and in 1811, she produced a son and heir, though there were rumours that artificial insemination was used. Napoleon was ecstatic. Even Josephine was pleased. Despite Marie Louise’s expressed orders, she managed to see the baby secretly. She also received Countess Walewska when she visited France with her son Alexei.

When Napoleon fell from power, Josephine wanted to accompany him to Elba, but was prevented “by his wife”. Marie Louise did not go with him either though. She became Grand Duchess of Parma. Her father sent Count von Neipperg as her aide. He seduced her and she remained his mistress until the day she died. By the time Napoleon returned from Elba, Josephine was dead. Then, after Waterloo, he was exiled to St Helena and took with him four friends, all men.

There has been a great deal of speculation that Napoleon was gay. He tolerated homosexuality in the army and refused to outlaw homosexual practices in his Napoleonic Code. Many men wrote of his “seductive charm”. General de Segur put it most succinctly: “In moments of sublime power, he no longer commands like a man but seduces like a woman.”

Napoleon himself admitted that his friendships with men usually began with physical attraction. General Caulaincourt said: “He told me that for him the heart was not, the organ of sentiment; that he felt emotions only where men experience feelings of another kind: nothing in the heart, everything in the loins and in another place, which I leave nameless.”

Napoleon was obsessed with the golden-haired young Czar Alexander I. This obsession eventually brought about Napoleon’s downfall after the disastrous Russian expedition in 1812. When they first met on a raft on the River Tilsit, Napoleon exclaimed: “It is Apollo!”

Afterwards, he wrote to Josephine, saying: “If he were a woman I would make him my mistress.”

Josephine’s maid talked about Napoleon’s “predilection for handsome men”. His aides were often young and effeminate, and he would caress them. His secretary Meneval said Napoleon would “come and sit on the corner of my desk, or on the arm of my armchair, sometimes on my knees. He would put his arm around my neck and amuse himself by gently pulling my ear.”

His aide Louis Marchand was referred to as “Mademoiselle Marchand” and Chevalier de Sainte-Croix — “a slightly built, dapper little fellow, with a pretty, smooth face more like a girl’s than that of a brave soldier” — was called “Mademoiselle Sainte-Croix”, while Baron Gaspard Gourgard, Napoleon’s orderly for six years, referred to the Emperor as “Her Majesty”.

After his disastrous campaign against Russia, Napoleon became impotent at the age of forty-two, probably due to the failure of his endocrine glands. He was also afflicted by “burning urine”, caused by deposits of calcium in his urethra.

While Napoleon may have been a little uncertain of his sexuality, his sister Pauline was one of the loveliest women of the age and, by all accounts, sexually insatiable.

“She was an extraordinary combination of perfect beauty and the strangest moral laxity,” said a contemporary. “She was the loveliest creature I had ever seen; she was also the most frivolous.”

The Countess Anna Potocka agreed:

“She combined the finest and most regular features imaginable with a most shapely figure, admired — alas! too often.”

In an age when most people rarely washed, Pauline’s bath-time was practically a public event. Every morning a bath tub would be filled with twenty litres of fresh milk. She would strip naked, then Paul, her black slave, would carry her to the tub. When people were shocked, she said brazenly: “Why not? Are you scandalized because he is not married?”

So Pauline married Paul off to one of her maids, but he continued to carry her, naked, to her bath.

At fifteen, Pauline fell in love with forty-year-old Louis Freron, who was known as the king of the dandies. The family thought that the match was unsuitable, so Napoleon had Freron removed. To get her own back, Pauline began flirting with his officers.

To reassert control, Napoleon found Pauline a husband — Victor Leclerc, the blond, clean-cut son of a miller. As a wedding present, Napoleon promoted him to Brigadier General. Although it was no great love match, Pauline was happy enough and bore him a son, Dremide, in 1798.

In 1801, the French colony of Saint Domingue — now Haiti — was overrun by the slave rebellion of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Leclerc was sent to put down the uprising. Pauline did not want to leave Paris and her several lovers. (One of them wrote later: “Before she left for Saint Domingue, there were no fewer than five of us in the same house sharing Pauline’s favours. She was the greatest tramp imaginable and the most desirable.”) She locked herself in her bedroom for three days and only consented to go to Saint Domingue when Napoleon promised to send her regular shipments of Paris gowns.

Leclerc successfully put the rebellion down in 1802. Soon after, he caught yellow fever and died. Pauline returned to France, and back in Paris her mourning was shortlived.

Napoleon quickly found her a second husband, Count Camillo Borghese. He was an enormously wealthy Italian, with one of the world’s biggest collections of diamonds. Pauline liked his money and his title, but there was one great drawback: sexually he did not measure up. Pauline wrote to an uncle from the Villa Borghese in Rome, saying: “I would rather have been Leclerc’s widow on just 20,000 francs a year than be married to a eunuch.”

Pauline, however, managed to bounce from one extreme to the other. Back in Paris, she fell for Louis Philippe Auguste de Forbin, a society painter. He was reportedly hugely well endowed and Pauline could not get enough of him; but his size caused her acute vaginal distress. A doctor was called in, who found the poor girl on the verge of exhaustion. Her uterus was swollen by constant excitement and her vagina was showing signs of damage due to friction. For the sake of Pauline’s health, Forbin was persuaded to join the army and was posted out of harm’s way.

Pauline soon found comfort. In Nice she hired a young musician named Felix Blangini to “conduct her orchestra”. She understudied the leading actor of the day, Francois Talma, and bedded the twenty-five-year-old aide to Napoleon’s chief of staff, Colonel Armand Jules de Canouville. Again, Napoleon stepped in and posted the unfortunate man to Danzig. He died in 1812 during the retreat from Moscow with a locket containing her picture hanging around his neck. Pauline was inconsolable for days.

She shared her brother’s exile to Elba and, after the “Hundred Days”, expressed a desire to go with him to St Helena. When the British prevented it, she returned to her husband and died of cancer, mirror in hand, at the Villa Borghese, aged forty-four.

But there is a lasting monument to her beauty. In her heyday, she had been sculpted famously as Venus reclining on a couch by Antonio Canova. Asked how she could have posed nude, she replied: “It wasn’t cold. There was a fire in the studio.”

Her last wish was that, at her funeral, her coffin should be closed. Instead, Canova’s nude statue was brought out of storage and displayed in the church.

Louis Napoleon, the son of Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who he installed as King of Holland, and Josephine’s daughter Hortense, became the dictator Napoleon III in 1852.

After the fall of Napoleon, the Bonaparte family was exiled from France and Louis Napoleon was brought up in Switzerland. From an early age, he had a string of lovers and illegitimate children.

Once the Duke of Reichstadt (Napoleon’s only legitimate son and consequently considered to be Napoleon II) died, Louis Napoleon headed the family claim to the throne of France. To strengthen his claim, he proposed marriage to his cousin Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. However, his hopes of marriage were dashed by his abortive attempt to overthrow the French government in 1836 and he was exiled to England.

Trying again in 1840, he landed with a small force at Boulogne and was immediately captured. Imprisoned in the fortress of Ham, he begged for female company. The French government allowed him visits from a voluptuous twenty-year-old named Alexandrine Vergeot. She was officially employed to iron the guards” clothes but became known as “bedmaker to the number one state prisoner”. Louis Napoleon spent six years in prison at Ham, during which time Alexandrine bore him two sons.

In 1846, Louis Napoleon managed to escape and fled back to England. In London, he lived with English beauty Elizabeth Howard, who kept him for the next two years. She also financed his return to France in 1848, where he seized power. He rewarded her with the title Comtesse de Beauregard and five million francs.

In 1853, Louis married the Spanish aristocrat Eugenie de Montijo, but Eugenie was positively the last person he should have married. She thought that sex was disgusting. A devout Catholic, she believed that it should only be tolerated as an act of procreation. Princess Mathilde believed she should have been a nun.

She was a twenty-seven-year-old virgin when they met and married and, two years later, after the birth of their only son, sex between them ceased. Nevertheless, she was jealous of her husband’s lovers, accusing him of sleeping with the “scum of the Earth” just to embarrass her. Indeed, he had a taste for courtesans and prostitutes. He once paid £10,000 for a single night with the English prostitute Corn Pearl. She was notorious. When Bertie, the Prince of Wales, asked to see her, she had herself served up al his dinner table on a silver salver. When the cover was removed, she was naked except for a string of pearls and a sprig of parsley.

Another courtesan Napoleon III shared with the Prince of Wales was “La Barucci”, a beautiful Italian girl called Giulia Beneni. She kept a silver goblet in her salon, engraved with the letter “N” and the imperial crest. He also had a long-running affair with the famous French actress, Rachael.

Napoleon III did not just sleep with working girls; he had aristocratic lovers too. The Marquise Taisey-Chatenoy reported Napoleon turning up in her bedroom one night, wearing mauve silk pyjamas. With little conversation and no foreplay, they began having sex. After a bit of sweating and grunting, the deed was done and he left. He also seduced Madame Walewska, the wife of his foreign minister.

His last mistress was a sturdy peasant woman, Marguerite Bellanger. Napoleon III was already ill and Eugenie was convinced that a new love affair would kill him, so she persuaded Marguerite to give him up.

Asked why he had so many mistresses, Napoleon III replied: “I need my little amusements.”

However, his “little amusements” were a constant political danger. His ministers begged him to be careful and warned him that he might end up in the hands of an adventurers. Indeed he did. The beautiful nineteen-year-old Contessa di Castiglione was sent by the prime minister of Sardinia to enlist his help in the struggle to unify Italy. She accomplished this in bed.

Napoleon III lacked political judgement all round. He embroiled France in several disastrous wars and defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 lost him his throne. He died in exile in England in 1873.