Ten Reasons Why Napoleon and Josephine Were Actually Kind Of Shippable
1. Although her feelings for him were initially lukewarm at best, Josephine eventually fell so utterly in love with Napoleon that she proudly declared that “I love him more than my life, and much more than the throne.”
2. When Lucien Bonaparte visited his brother and Josephine the morning after the Annual Marriage Rift Between the Bonapartes, he was confronted by the sight of the two of them in bed together, bodies entangled, in a state of “unmistakable, total reconciliation.“
3. Upon encountering a particularly lovely Josephine at her toilette (a “vision in misty-white, with curls spilling out of a golden circlet”), Napoleon kissed her shoulders and asked her why she was looking so beautiful. When she sweetly said that it was only because she knew he liked her in white, Napoleon replied, “If it was to please me, you have indeed succeeded,” and kissed her again.
4. A particularly astute lady in waiting of Josephine’s summed up Napoleon’s feelings for his wife rather poetically: “If he was ever really stirred by any emotion, it was by her and for her.”
5. One morning, Napoleon bid goodbye to Josephine by playfully patting her naked shoulder and kissing her. When he left the room, Josephine sat up in bed and rubbed her hands together gleefully, informing her ladies that “I am late rising this morning, but then, you see, Bonaparte has spent the night with me!” CONGRATSONTHESEX.GIF
6. Napoleon’s decision to divorce Josephine did little to squelch her love. As she succinctly put it, “There are feelings which are life itself, and which can only end with it.”
7. The night the divorce was finalized, Josephine found that she was unable to bear her grief alone. She ran through the palace to Napoleon’s bedroom, “her hair in disarray and her face contorted. She fell onto the bed, put her arms around His Majesty’s neck and lavished upon him the most touching caresses.” Sobbing bitterly, she remained in the room for another hour. Napoleon returned the favor the next morning, right before Josephine’s departure from the Tuileries. When he entered her room, still in his dressing gown, Josephine leapt from her bed and threw herself against his chest. He held her until she fainted, but when she revived and realized that an anguished Napoleon had fled the room, she began to weep.
8. Josephine was devastated by Napoleon’s fall from grace, and didn’t hesitate to let everyone around her know it. Even her doctor was aware of her grief, and he duly reported the news to Napoleon: “She said that had she still been Empress of France she would have driven straight through occupied Paris to go to you at Fontainebleau, never again to be parted from you.” Napoleon, with the weight of everything that had occurred in the wake of their divorce on his shoulders, simply replied, “And I believe she would have done it.”
9. When fellow Fabulous Lady Madame de Stael had the effrontery to ask Josephine whether or not she still loved Napoleon, Josephine lost her cool and dismissed her friend from the room. When she had calmed down sufficiently, she reflected on the absurdity of the question: “As if I could feel less ardently for him today, in his misfortune — I who never ceased loving the Emperor in the days of his good fortune!”
10. When Josephine was on her deathbed (dressed in a rose silk peignoir and dripping with rubies, naturally), her daughter made out Napoleon’s name in her final moments. As for Napoleon, the very last word he uttered before dying was Josephine’s name.
“unmistakable, total reconciliation” that’s a fancy way to say you caught your brother and his rather unusual choice in lady friend going at it, Lucien.
