In 1801, the French colony of Saint Domingue — now Haiti — was overrun by the slave rebellion of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Leclerc was sent to put down the uprising. Pauline did not want to leave Paris and her several lovers. (One of them wrote later: “Before she left for Saint Domingue, there were no fewer than five of us in the same house sharing Pauline’s favours. She was the greatest tramp imaginable and the most desirable.”) She locked herself in her bedroom for three days and only consented to go to Saint Domingue when Napoleon promised to send her regular shipments of Paris gowns.
Leclerc successfully put the rebellion down in 1802. Soon after, he caught yellow fever and died. Pauline returned to France, and back in Paris her mourning was shortlived.
Napoleon quickly found her a second husband, Count Camillo Borghese. He was an enormously wealthy Italian, with one of the world’s biggest collections of diamonds. Pauline liked his money and his title, but there was one great drawback: sexually he did not measure up. Pauline wrote to an uncle from the Villa Borghese in Rome, saying: “I would rather have been Leclerc’s widow on just 20,000 francs a year than be married to a eunuch.”
Pauline, however, managed to bounce from one extreme to the other. Back in Paris, she fell for Louis Philippe Auguste de Forbin, a society painter. He was reportedly hugely well endowed and Pauline could not get enough of him; but his size caused her acute vaginal distress. A doctor was called in, who found the poor girl on the verge of exhaustion. Her uterus was swollen by constant excitement and her vagina was showing signs of damage due to friction. For the sake of Pauline’s health, Forbin was persuaded to join the army and was posted out of harm’s way.
Pauline soon found comfort. In Nice she hired a young musician named Felix Blangini to “conduct her orchestra”. She understudied the leading actor of the day, Francois Talma, and bedded the twenty-five-year-old aide to Napoleon’s chief of staff, Colonel Armand Jules de Canouville. Again, Napoleon stepped in and posted the unfortunate man to Danzig. He died in 1812 during the retreat from Moscow with a locket containing her picture hanging around his neck. Pauline was inconsolable for days.
She shared her brother’s exile to Elba and, after the “Hundred Days”, expressed a desire to go with him to St Helena. When the British prevented it, she returned to her husband and died of cancer, mirror in hand, at the Villa Borghese, aged forty-four.
But there is a lasting monument to her beauty. In her heyday, she had been sculpted famously as Venus reclining on a couch by Antonio Canova. Asked how she could have posed nude, she replied: “It wasn’t cold. There was a fire in the studio.”
Her last wish was that, at her funeral, her coffin should be closed. Instead, Canova’s nude statue was brought out of storage and displayed in the church.
Louis Napoleon, the son of Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who he installed as King of Holland, and Josephine’s daughter Hortense, became the dictator Napoleon III in 1852.
After the fall of Napoleon, the Bonaparte family was exiled from France and Louis Napoleon was brought up in Switzerland. From an early age, he had a string of lovers and illegitimate children.
Once the Duke of Reichstadt (Napoleon’s only legitimate son and consequently considered to be Napoleon II) died, Louis Napoleon headed the family claim to the throne of France. To strengthen his claim, he proposed marriage to his cousin Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. However, his hopes of marriage were dashed by his abortive attempt to overthrow the French government in 1836 and he was exiled to England.
Trying again in 1840, he landed with a small force at Boulogne and was immediately captured. Imprisoned in the fortress of Ham, he begged for female company. The French government allowed him visits from a voluptuous twenty-year-old named Alexandrine Vergeot. She was officially employed to iron the guards” clothes but became known as “bedmaker to the number one state prisoner”. Louis Napoleon spent six years in prison at Ham, during which time Alexandrine bore him two sons.
In 1846, Louis Napoleon managed to escape and fled back to England. In London, he lived with English beauty Elizabeth Howard, who kept him for the next two years. She also financed his return to France in 1848, where he seized power. He rewarded her with the title Comtesse de Beauregard and five million francs.
In 1853, Louis married the Spanish aristocrat Eugenie de Montijo, but Eugenie was positively the last person he should have married. She thought that sex was disgusting. A devout Catholic, she believed that it should only be tolerated as an act of procreation. Princess Mathilde believed she should have been a nun.
She was a twenty-seven-year-old virgin when they met and married and, two years later, after the birth of their only son, sex between them ceased. Nevertheless, she was jealous of her husband’s lovers, accusing him of sleeping with the “scum of the Earth” just to embarrass her. Indeed, he had a taste for courtesans and prostitutes. He once paid £10,000 for a single night with the English prostitute Corn Pearl. She was notorious. When Bertie, the Prince of Wales, asked to see her, she had herself served up al his dinner table on a silver salver. When the cover was removed, she was naked except for a string of pearls and a sprig of parsley.
Another courtesan Napoleon III shared with the Prince of Wales was “La Barucci”, a beautiful Italian girl called Giulia Beneni. She kept a silver goblet in her salon, engraved with the letter “N” and the imperial crest. He also had a long-running affair with the famous French actress, Rachael.
Napoleon III did not just sleep with working girls; he had aristocratic lovers too. The Marquise Taisey-Chatenoy reported Napoleon turning up in her bedroom one night, wearing mauve silk pyjamas. With little conversation and no foreplay, they began having sex. After a bit of sweating and grunting, the deed was done and he left. He also seduced Madame Walewska, the wife of his foreign minister.
His last mistress was a sturdy peasant woman, Marguerite Bellanger. Napoleon III was already ill and Eugenie was convinced that a new love affair would kill him, so she persuaded Marguerite to give him up.
Asked why he had so many mistresses, Napoleon III replied: “I need my little amusements.”
However, his “little amusements” were a constant political danger. His ministers begged him to be careful and warned him that he might end up in the hands of an adventurers. Indeed he did. The beautiful nineteen-year-old Contessa di Castiglione was sent by the prime minister of Sardinia to enlist his help in the struggle to unify Italy. She accomplished this in bed.
Napoleon III lacked political judgement all round. He embroiled France in several disastrous wars and defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 lost him his throne. He died in exile in England in 1873.
2. TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE BED
Vladimir Ilyich Ulynov — better known as Lenin — was a bit of a ladies” man, but he was only attracted to women who were involved in the revolutionary struggle. His first lover was Nadezhda Konstantina Krupskaya. She was a year older than him and already a committed Marxist. When as a young girl she read the first volume of Das Kapital, she said she heard “the knell of capital sound — the expropriators are expropriated” and her “heart beat so that it could be heard”. Obviously, she was a romantic.
Nadya was dark-haired and attractive, and she was impressed by the ardour of the young Lenin’s revolutionary zeal. They would walk along the banks of the Neva and he would talk about the overthrow of capitalism and avenging his brother who had been hanged for attempting to assassinate the Tsar.
Lenin, however, also had eyes for one of Nadya’s friends, the quick-witted and adventurous Apollinaria Yakubova. Lenin proposed to Apollinaria just before he was arrested for subversion. From his prison cell, he wrote to Apollinaria and Nadya, asking them to stand on Shpalernaya Street outside the prison, where he might be able to catch a glimpse of them from a window. Apollinaria did not come and Nadya took up the vigil alone. Lenin took this to mean that his proposal had been rejected.