All her life, Pauline wrote letters, or rather she dictated them, for she found the act of writing fatigued her. But they seem to have provided evidence of very little interest in anything beyond her lovers, fashion, jewels, expensive property, Napoleon and her own health. Because Napoleon, as Flora Fraser shows, managed to control not only every aspect of his empire, even when marching on Berlin or retreating from Moscow, but also the comportment of each member of his unruly family, he plays a prominent and engaging part in her book.
Pauline was always ill. Much of her life was spent travelling from spa to spa seeking relief from a malady variously ascribed to venereal disease or gynaecological ailments. As she grew older, her skin began to look more yellow than glowingly white, and after Napoleon’s death friends remarked on her ‘desiccated’ appearance. Rather touchingly, she banned visits to Canova’s statue, which had been artfully arranged so that it circled round under tasteful torches, showing off the perfect curves to their best advantage.
Scheming, self-obsessed and restless, Pauline seems to have lacked her brother’s genius and intellect. Hers was a sad life, and it is hard to warm to her. Her only son, Dermide, died at the age of six. Many of her glamorous lovers, officers in Napoleon’s armies, were killed in the military defeats of his last years. Pauline herself, a ‘consummate coquette’ to the bitter end, died in 1825, not long before her 45th birthday, apparently of a tumour on her stomach. There is no indication that she was much mourned.
Caroline Moorehead’s latest book, Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution is published by Chatto & Windus, £20.
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