Napoleon - Christopher Hibbert

This fresh account of the private life of Napoleon provides an authoritative, up-to-date account of the women in Napoleon's life at all stages of his developing and extraordinary career, based on the fruits of modern research. Hibbert looks at Napoleon's marriages to the charming Creole from Martinique, Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, and the plain and pliant Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise, as well as his affairs with his various mistresses, from the pretty, 20-year-old milliner's apprentice Pauline Foures, who was smuggled out to Egypt wearing the uniform of her husband's regiment, to the young Polish Countess Marie Walewska who resisted him at first but, persuaded by her elderly husband and other Polish patriots to submit, eventually fell in love with him. From his time as an unknown young Corsican officer to First Consul, Emperor and finally exile on St Helena, Napoleon's string of brief liaisons led him to proclaim to Josephine that the "ordinary rules of morality and propriety" did not apply to him.;As well as the wives and mistresses, the book examines Napoleon's relationship with the women of his family, all of whom disliked and envied Josephine: his beloved, parsimonious mother and his three sisters, Elisa, Caroline and Pauline.