Oh Mistress Mine

EMPRESS JOSEPHINE by Ernest Knap-ton. 359 pages. Harvard. $6.95.

Marie-Josephe-Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie had two great loves. One was "Napoleon Bonaparte, who called her "my matchless little mother" and made her his Empress; the other was Paul Barras, revolutionist and member of the Directory, who remarked that "she would have drunk gold out of the skull of her lover" and referred to her as "the lewd Creole." Barras' estimate of Josephine was the one accepted by most 19th century biographers of Napoleon --chiefly, suggests Historian Ernest Knapton, because she left behind so few words in her own defense (only one "certain and authentic" letter from Josephine to Napoleon survives). Knapton's sympathetic, scrupulously detailed biography tidies up Josephine's image a bit but raises a question it never adequately answers: What in Josephine's pliant personality and monotonous mind held Napoleon for 14 years?

On the Fringes. She was born in Martinique, the eldest daughter of an impoverished planter, and might easily have spent her life there except for a happy accident. An aunt became the mistress of the Marquis de Beauharnais.

Governor of Martinique, and soon decamped with him for France. There, to strengthen her position, she contrived a marriage between Beauharnais's son Alexander and her niece, Josephine, just turned 16. When Alexander met his bride on her arrival at Brest, he wrote cautiously to his father: "Mademoiselle will perhaps seem less pretty to you than you expect." She was, in fact, an awkward, unschooled girl from the colonies. Alexander tried, without success, to teach his wife to spell and to tutor her in history, but soon lost interest and was living away from home by the time their second child was born.

By the time she met Bonaparte, Josephine had been living for a decade on the fringes of Parisian society, and was being supported by various well-heeled lovers--the most favored of whom was Barras. Bonaparte, at 26, was six years younger than Josephine, but he had a hankering for older women; he had already proposed to an unwilling widow nearly twice his age. "Madame de Beauharnais," he recalled on St. Helena, "was the first woman who gave me a sense of security." He proposed almost immediately. After "inner struggles and long reluctance," Josephine accepted. "You will ask me if I love him," she wrote a friend. "Well, no. I am in a state of indifference."

Two Chapters. The marriage had two chapters--the first belonging to Josephine, the second to Bonaparte. While Bonaparte led his armies across the Alps to the first great victories of the Italian campaign, Josephine lingered in Paris, refusing to join him or to answer his impassioned letters. "Make fun of me," wrote Bonaparte. "Stay on in Paris, have lovers of whom the whole world may know, never write to me, and--for all that, I will only love you ten times more. If this is not madness, fever, delirium!" When Bonaparte sailed for Egypt, Josephine plunged into an affair with a cavalry officer nine years her junior, and through him accumulated a small fortune speculating in shoddy military supplies.

But the complexion of the marriage changed after Bonaparte returned a national hero, besieged by well-wishers and idolized by women ("Genius has no sex!" cried Madame de Stael, trying to rush past a startled footman to surprise Bonaparte in his bath). Threatened with divorce, Josephine meekly settled down to the role of dutiful wife.

The intellectual indolence that infuriated Beauharnais served her well as Empress. She kept out of Bonaparte's affairs, obediently attended any functions she was instructed to, conscientiously memorized the remarks Bonaparte composed for her to use on public occasions. Otherwise, she entertained herself with the theater and with sentimental novels, frequently only sampling them and having others tell her the ending. Her personal expenditures came to about a million francs ($200,000) a year. Her two great extravagances were clothes and Malmaison, the estate outside Paris where she collected exotic flowers, romantic paintings, and such oddities as male and female mummies--relics of the Egyptian campaign. In a reversal of their former roles, it was Josephine who now wrote imploring letters to Bonaparte when he was away campaigning, asking permission to join him. Bonaparte, engaged with a string of mistresses, never granted it.

Last Chill. What ended the marriage was Napoleon's belated discovery that he could father an heir. For years he had assumed, on the evidence of Josephine's two children by her first marriage, that he was responsible for the fact that his own marriage had been childless. In 1806, however, he became the father of an illegitimate son, and in 1809 his mistress of the moment, Polish Countess Maria Walewska, revealed that she was pregnant. Several months later, Bonaparte announced his decision to divorce Josephine for the good of the state. Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria gave him the legitimate son he wanted; Josephine retired on a handsome pension to Malmaison. When she died at 50 in May 1814, after contracting a chill at an outdoor reception, 20,000 people filed past her bier and Paris was flooded with pamphlets hailing la bonne Josephine. Bonaparte was virtually the last to get the news. A valet clipped the story out of a Genoa newspaper and sent it to the former Emperor on Elba.

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