‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘She was in love with herself alone, and her sole occupation was pleasure’. Metternich was not quite fair. Pauline, as sculpted in Canova’s famous statue of the barely clad reclining princess, was indeed extremely beautiful. But along with her undisputed love of herself, she was also devoted to her brother Napoleon, delighting in his victories, and fretting over his defeats. She went with him into exile on Elba, sought to join him on Saint Helena, and campaigned frantically to have the punitive conditions under which the British kept him ameliorated. When Napoleon died, she was devastated. Loyalty was probably her nicest trait.
Born in Corsica in 1780, the sixth of eight children, Maria Paoletta was 11 years younger than Napoleon, and was his favourite sister. She was 16 when she married General Leclerc, his second-in-command in Italy. A French courtier noted at the time that she was deeply unreasonable, impudent and childish and that she had no decorum — all characteristics that were to mark her not very long life.
Despatched, on Napoleon’s orders, to Saint-Domingue, where General Leclerc had been sent to put down the slave uprising of Toussaint Louverture, Pauline was excruciatingly bored. Rumours circulated that, to while away the six weeks her husband was away fighting, she had affairs with both men and women. Both on Saint-Domingue and later in Paris and Rome, after her unhappy second marriage to Camillo Borghese, Pauline remained spoilt and imperious, changing lovers with the seasons and tormenting those around her with her whims. When she discovered that her brother-in-law, Jean-Louis Leclerc, had no shower in his house when she arrived to stay with him, she demanded that a hole be made in the ceiling of her bathroom through which water could be poured over her.
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