Venus Of Empire: The Life of Pauline Bonaparte

THE eight Bonaparte children, led by the second eldest Napoleon, became the fastest social climbers the world has ever seen.

The story of Bonaparte s twittering sister would make a wonderful film The story of Bonaparte's twittering sister would make a wonderful film

Launching themselves from a modest family home in Corsica, for a decade or two they divided half of Europe into personal kingdoms and invented a style of flummery to go with it.

Everything collapsed like a house of cards in 1815 but the resonance of that spectacular folie de grandeur lingers still.

Known at the time as “the most beautiful woman in Europe”, Pauline bore all the hallmarks of the indulged baby of the family, although she had a younger sister and brother.

It was Pauline’s self-appointed role to be chief airhead of the group, avoiding hands-on politics and devoting astonishing attention to her wardrobe.

Born in 1780, by page 40 she’s had three lovers, broken off an engagement and married one of Napoleon’s trusted generals, Leclerc, and she’s still in her teens.

The birth of a son seems to have triggered health problems from which she suffered for the rest of her life and when not reclining on an ottoman, waiting in her demi-negligée for an admirer, she is usually being carried in a sedan chair to the waters of some spa.

Reluctant to accompany her husband to the Caribbean where he was charged with putting down rebellions in the French colonies, she was persuaded by the suggestion that she’d look pretty in Creole clothes. Indeed she did and was said to have had lesbian and black lovers as well as the conventional sort. Leclerc died from yellow fever.

Mortified, she returned to Paris where Prince Camillo Borghese had recently arrived from Rome. Though small and stupid, his coach and horses were the finest in town. The Bonaparte boys successfully hooked him for Pauline – but she hated Rome where she always seemed to have a cold. Being laden with diamonds didn’t help.

After Napoleon crowns himself Emperor of the French it all goes into manic overdrive, with fiefdoms, palaces and treasures being handed out to “the imperial family” like sweets.

The Princess Borghese is immortalised in marble by Canova – horizontal of course – but goes off her second husband in a big way when the son by her first dies from fever.

She leaves Camillo and wanders through palaces and villas and health resorts with increasing eccentricity, the sensitivity of her fallopian tubes exacerbated by too much love-making and venereal disease.

Her fame increases accordingly but the admirers are ever more rapidly devoured, the Paris fashions insufficiently rapid to distract her, the milk baths ineffectual against time.

Upon the fall of Napoleon she follows her brother to Elba but after his escape and final defeat at Waterloo Pauline rushes to Rome to salvage what she can of her Borghese rights.

She lobbies the Vatican, outwits her idiotic husband who wants to give her nothing and lives in high style for the rest of her days, dying from cancer in 1825.

It’s a flamboyant story and Flora Fraser, no stranger to dizzy titled females, marshalls all her resources to make it work. Her model would seem to be the historical biographies of Nancy Mitford.

The chief problem is that Pauline didn’t really do anything except connive in the salon and twitter in the boudoir. The effect in the end is weirdly, sadly empty. But it would make a wonderful film.

By Flora Fraser

John Murray, £20

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