• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2559 0

attached to the Army of Italy happened to be Augustin Robespierre and, further, that the latter had taken him under his wing as a rising star, Napoleon had become more closely associated with the Terror than was wise. For this he now paid the price. First to move against him was his patron Saliceti, who was attached to the Army of the Alps rather than the Army of Italy and seems to have become eager to cut his protégé down to size. Terrified by the manner in which many southern towns were erupting against anyone linked with the Robespierres - there were massacres in Marseilles, Aix and Nimes - the Corsican seized on the fact that Napoleon had just participated in a secret mission to the neutral Republic of Genoa as an excuse to arrest him, the mere fact that he had crossed the frontier being sufficient to suggest that he must be involved in some foreign plot. That there was no case against Napoleon is beside the point and for a few days he was in deadly danger. In the end Saliceti relented and proclaimed his innocence, apparently on the grounds that having his sometime friend and client executed would not win him any favours with the new government in Paris, but Napoleon was not allowed to rejoin the army. Instead, he was given the thankless and in the end futile task of drawing up plans for an invasion of Corsica. Even in love he was unsuccessful, a bid to make the daughter of a wealthy local nobleman his wife being firmly rejected on the grounds of lack of prospects.

Frustration, then, was heaped on frustration, and all the more so as 1794 had been a year in which France had triumphed on all fronts. Aided by a series of great victories, her armies had cleared the Spaniards from Roussillon, occupied the northern fringes of Catalonia, seized the Rhineland and definitively reconquered Belgium. With some of the forces involved in these campaigns very large indeed, Toulon was beginning to look like very small beer. And, of course, it was yesterday’s news: the heroes of the hour were now not Napoleon, but Pichegru and Jourdan. At the beginning of 1795, then, Napoleon was a bitterly frustrated man.

A second romance - this time with the sister of Joseph Bonaparte’s wife, Julie Clery - was making no better progress than the first one, while the expedition to Corsica was dispersed by a British naval squadron. On top of this there then came a posting to command the artillery of the Army of the West in distant Brittany. For the time being relatively quiet, the west was hardly a welcome billet for a soldier of fortune, and Napoleon therefore immediately set off for Paris to attempt to secure something better. However, the Minister of War was a moderate who had not forgiven Napoleon his association with the Robespierres, and the only response was a switch to an infantry brigade. In response to this demotion, Napoleon claimed that he was ill - on sick leave he would at least be able to remain in Paris and cast around for something better. By all accounts it was a miserable time. The cost of living was very high, and Napoleon was forced to live very frugally in the most miserable of lodgings; indeed, he would not have been able to survive at all had not Joseph, who had retained his post in the commissariat, sent him occasional remittances. Privation and worry, meanwhile, told on his physical appearance. The future General Thiébault, for example, remembered him as ‘a little man . . . looking nothing but a victim [whose] untidy dress, long, lank hair and . . . worn-out dress . . . betrayed his straits’, whilst Laure Junot’s memories were very similar.

At this point in his life Napoleon was ugly . . . His skin was so yellow . . . and he looked after himself so little, that, with his uncombed and badly powdered hair, he had a disagreeable aspect. His small hands . . . were thin . . . and grimy . . . Whenever I compare the picture that I have of Napoleon entering the courtyard of the Hotel de la Tranquillité . . . with an awkward and uncertain step, wearing a cheap round hat rammed down over his eyes, from which two ‘spaniels ears’ of unkempt