William Sloane - The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (Vol. 1-4)

On the other hand, with no apparent regard for his personal advancement by marriage, he followed his own inclination, and in 1764, at the age of eighteen, gallantly wedded a beautiful child of fifteen, Maria Letizia Ramolino. Her descent, though excellent and, remotely, even noble, was inferior to that of her husband, but her fortune was equal, if not superior, to his. Her father was a Genoese official of importance; her mother, daughter of a petty noble by a peasant wife, became a widow in 1755 and two years later was married again to Francis Fesch, a Swiss, captain in the Genoese navy. Of this union, Joseph, later Cardinal Fesch, was the child. Although well born, the mother of Napoleon had no education and was of peasant nature to the last day of her long life—hardy, unsentimental, frugal, avaricious, and sometimes unscrupulous. Yet for all that, the hospitality of her little home in Ajaccio was lavish and famous. Among the many guests who were regularly entertained there was Marbeuf, commander in Corsica of the first army of occupation. There was long afterward a malicious tradition that the French general was Napoleon's father. The morals of Letizia di Buonaparte, like those of her conspicuous children, have been bitterly assailed, but her good name, at least, has always been vindicated. The evident motive of the story sufficiently refutes such an aspersion as it contains. Of the bride's extraordinary beauty there has never been a doubt. She was a woman of heroic mold, like Juno in her majesty; unmoved in prosperity, undaunted in adversity. It was probably to his mother, whom he strongly resembled in childhood, that the famous son owed his tremendous and unparalleled physical endurance.

After their marriage the youthful pair resided in Corte, waiting until events should permit their return to Ajaccio. Naturally of an indolent temperament, the husband, though he had at first been drawn into the daring enterprises of Paoli, and had displayed a momentary enthusiasm, was now, as he had been for more than a year, weary of them. At the head of a body of men of his own rank, he finally withdrew to Monte Rotondo, and on May twenty-third, 1769, a few weeks before Paoli's flight, the band made formal submission to Vaux, commander of the second army of occupation, explaining through Buonaparte that the national leader had misled them by promises of aid which never came, and that, recognizing the impossibility of further resistance, they were anxious to accept the new government, to return to their homes, and to resume the peaceful conduct of their affairs. This at least is the generally accepted account of his desertion of Paoli's cause: there is some evidence that having followed Clement, a brother of Pascal, into a remoter district, he had there found no support for the enterprise, and had thence under great hardships of flood and field made his way with wife and child to the French headquarters. The result was the same in either case. It was the precipitate naturalization of the father as a French subject which made his great son a Frenchman. Less than three months afterward, on August fifteenth, the fourth child, Napoleone di Buonaparte, was born in Ajaccio, the seat of French influence.

The resources of the Buonapartes, as they still wrote themselves, were small, although their family and expectations were large. Charles himself was the owner of a considerable estate in houses and lands, but everything was heavily mortgaged and his income was small. He had further inherited a troublesome law plea, the prosecution of which was expensive. By an entail in trust of a great-great-grandfather, important lands were entailed in the male line of the Odone family. In default of regular descent, the estate was vested in the female line, and should, when Charles's maternal uncle died childless, have reverted to his mother. But the uncle had made a will bequeathing his property to the Jesuits, who swiftly took possession and had maintained their ownership by occupation and by legal quibbles. Joseph, the father of Charles, had wasted many years and most of his fortune in weary litigation. Nothing daunted, Charles settled down to pursue the same phantom, virtually depending for a livelihood on the patrimony of his wife. Letitia Buonaparte, being an only child, had fallen heir to her father's property on the second marriage of her mother. The stepfather was an excellent Swiss, a Protestant from Basel, thoroughly educated, and interested in education, and for years a mercenary in the Genoese service. On his retirement he became a Roman Catholic in order to secure the woman of his choice. He was the father of Letitia's half brother, Joseph. The retired officer, though kindly disposed to the family he had entered, had little but his pension and savings: he could contribute nothing but good, sound common sense and his homely ideas of education. The real head of the family was the uncle of Charles, Lucien Buonaparte, archdeacon of the cathedral. It was he who had supported and guided his nephew, and had sent him to the college founded by Paoli at Corte. In his youth Charles was wasteful and extravagant, but his wife was thrifty to meanness. With the restraint of her economy and the stimulus of his uncle, respected as head of the family, the father of Napoleon arrived at a position of some importance. He practised his profession with some diligence, became an assessor of the highest insular court, and in 1772 was made a member, later a deputy, of the council of Corsican nobles.

The sturdy mother was most prolific. Her eldest child, born in 1765, was a son who died in infancy; in 1767 was born a daughter, Maria-Anna, destined to the same fate; in 1768 a son, known later as Joseph, but baptized as Nabulione; in 1769 the great son, Napoleone. Nine other children were the fruit of the same wedlock, and six of them—three sons, Lucien, Louis, and Jerome, and three daughters, Elisa, Pauline, and Caroline—survived to share their brother's greatness. Charles himself, like his short-lived ancestors—of whom five had died within a century—scarcely reached middle age, dying in his thirty-ninth year. Letitia, like the stout Corsican that she was, lived to the ripe age of eighty-six in the full enjoyment of her faculties, known to the world as Madame Mère, a sobriquet devised by her great son to distinguish her as the mother of the Napoleons.

Table of Contents

Birth of Nabulione or Joseph—Date of Napoleon's Birth—Coincidence with the Festival of the Assumption—The Name of Napoleon—Corsican Conditions as Influencing Napoleon's Character—His Early Education—Childish Traits—Influenced by Traditions Concerning Paoli—Family Prospects—Influence of Marbeuf—Upheavals in France—Napoleon Appointed to a Scholarship—His Efforts to Learn French at Autun—Development of His Character—His Father Delegate of the Corsican Nobility at Versailles.

1768–79.

The trials of poverty made the Buonapartes so clever and adroit that suspicions of shiftiness in small matters were developed later on, and these led to an over-close scrutiny of their acts. The opinion has not yet disappeared among reputable authorities that Nabulione and Napoleone were one and the same, born on January seventh, 1768, Joseph being really the younger, born on the date assigned to his distinguished brother. The earliest documentary evidence consists of two papers, one in the archives of the French war department, one in those of Ajaccio. The former is dated 1782, and testifies to the birth of Nabulione on January seventh, 1768, and to his baptism on January eighth; the latter is the copy, not the original, of a government contract which declares the birth, on January seventh, of Joseph Nabulion. Neither is decisive, but the addition of Joseph, with the use of the two French forms for the name in the second, with the clear intent of emphasizing his quality as a Frenchman, destroys much of its value, and leaves the weight of authority with the former. The reasonableness of the suspicion seems to be heightened by the fact that the certificate of Napoleon's marriage gives the date of his birth as February eighth, 1768. Moreover, in the marriage contract of Joseph, witnesses testify to his having been born at Ajaccio, not at Corte.