BOOK REVIEW : Napoleon’s Court: One Catty View

At the Court of Napoleon Memoirs of the Duchesse de’Abrantes. Foreword by Katell le Bourhis. Introduction by Olivier Bernier (Doubleday; 387 pp.)

I once knew an old Frenchman who was a marquis. Eric was also a duke, but he was too much of a snob to use the title. His marquisate was a sound Bourbon lineage going well back before the Revolution. The dukedom was Napoleonic. “Upstarts, my dear,” he would say. “Vulgar people.”

Up to this moment, I never thought I would be taking so etiolated a distinction. One of the virtues, or perhaps vices, of book reviewing is that it gets you into a lot of arguments that don’t belong to you. In any case, reading this abridged version of the memoirs of Laure Permon--she became a duchess when Napoleon made dukes of some of his lieutenants--I can see Eric’s point.

To put the writing of the Duchesse de’Abrantes alongside that of such aristocratic predecessors as the Duc de Rochefoucauld or Mme. de Sevigne is to paste a gossip column into a history of literature. She was the Suzy, the Liz Smith of her time. Except that she lacked their lone virtue of timeliness.

Her memoirs of Napoleon’s court were written long after the fact, when she was poor and needed the money. Gossip, unlike soft cheese, does not benefit from aging. Furthermore, hers lacks gossip’s second virtue, which is spontaneity. It is tactical gossip and if it possesses gossip’s third virtue--malice--it is tactical malice, as well.

Sometimes her mixture of saccharine and venom makes an interesting instability. But the reader senses her carefully choosing her proportions according, not to what she experienced at the time--1810, say--but to what she felt she could get away with 25 years later, at the time of writing. Reticence and frankness are doctored measurements; and the writing is also doctored. Balzac, her friend, took a hand in it. It is a literary version of chaptalization, where you add sugar to the wine, increasing the kick and, according to some, coarsening the flavor.

Laure was the daughter of a Corsican family that was friendly with the Bonapartes. Her parents set up a comfortable establishment in Paris, on the fringes of pre-Revolutionary society. Napoleon, a young and penniless lieutenant, was an occasional sulky house-guest.

He sensed that Laure’s mother patronized him, which she did; and he never got over her making fun of him when, a widow, she turned down his proposal of marriage at the time he began his rise to power. He had hoped her connections with the aristocratic set would give him respectability.

He resented the connections, though, and his treatment of Laure was a mix of resentment and support. He called her “little pest” but agreed to let her marry Gen. Junot, one of his intimates; and he saw to it that they had enough money to live lavishly and give fancy parties. Having become the all-powerful first consul, he needed to create a court.

Later, after he crowned himself Emperor, he would get some of the old nobility back; meanwhile, he formed a rattly and fairly uncouth society out of his generals and collaborators and their wives. Sporadically, he called upon Laure to teach them manners.

He begged her to have a word with Cambacieres, the absurdly pretentious second consul, who had become the subject of cartoons in the English press. “It is only a woman that can tell a man he is ridiculous,” Napoleon said. “If I meddle I shall tell him he is mad.”

Laure’s presentation of Napoleon is worshipful and damning by turns. Her sensibility is not large enough to make a portrait out of a paradox. It is his nastiness that mainly comes across, though. When she is staying alone at Malmaison, he makes several dawn visits, sitting on her bed and reading aloud letters from women proposing trysts. It seems to have been an unsuccessful attempt at seduction; all she tells us explicitly is that he would pinch her feet under the bedclothes.

Finally, she persuaded Junot to spend the night. Napoleon was greatly offended at seeing another head in the bed; he scolded her afterwards and demanded to know whether she had told her husband anything. As for the latter, a thick and sometimes brutal man with a dog-like devotion to his master, his only reaction to the morning visit was to be grateful that Napoleon had not objected to his presence.

Laure’s portraits of the ladies of the court are venom laced with sugar. She reports that Napoleon’s sister, Pauline, who was fond of her own good looks, was devastated to hear another woman criticize the size of her ears. Another sister, Catherine, is described as beautiful, apart from thick hips and a short neck. True, she was Junot’s mistress; later, she made a further raid on Laure’s bed by taking Metternich, her lover, away from her.

What comes across is far removed from the lethal but elegant games in Laclos’ 18th-Century “Liaisons Dangereuses.” It is a Balzasian stew in a simpering disguise. The friend of Laure’s old age should, perhaps, have written more; or stayed away altogether.

This drastically shortened version of the memoirs has both a foreword and an introduction. The first, by Katell le Bourhis, who is credited as “originator” of the selection, is brief and factual. The second, by Olivier Bernier, who is listed as editor, is longer, more highly colored and reads like an article in Vanity Fair. The translation is nearly a hundred years old. Nobody involved seems to have bothered much.