History's greatest conqueror or a hopeless romantic?

Napoleon feels less like a man from history and more like a character from an epic poem. Alexander the Great won 9 battles. Julius Caesar won 16. Napoleon? 38. A league of his own. And yet beneath an extraordinary military life lay one tortured heart pining for his Joséphine...

Joséphine was an aristocrat’s daughter, a widow, mother of 2. Also 6 years older than Napoleon. On the marriage certificate she increased napoleon’s age by 1.5 years and decreased hers by 4. Wedding was officiated by an illegitimate priest. Napoleon was just an army officer.

Napoleon’s love for her - despite her age, previous children, and his family’s great disapproval - could only be described as wild and profound. From a love letter: “The remembrance of last night’s delirium have robbed my senses of repose. My waking thoughts are all of thee.”

Joséphine hardly ever wrote back. In 1796 Napoleon wrote: “You do not write me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters afford him, and you do not write him six lines of even haphazard scribble.” Future Emperor, left on “read.”

As Napoleon led his men to impossible victories, his spirit stayed agitated and morose. He wrote to Joséphine, telling her he can’t muster a response to “How did you sleep?” without knowing how she slept. He wanted his “genius” to protect her, and leave him “unguarded.”

The thought of Joséphine kept Napoleon sane in the midst of inhuman emotional and physical turmoil: “When I’m weary of the worries of my profession, when men disgust me, when I’m ready to curse my life, I put my hand on my heart where your portrait beats in unison.”

Napoleon was haunted by the suspicion that Joséphine loved him “less” with each passing day. This idea, he wrote, “blights my soul, stops my blood, makes me wretched without even leaving me the courage of fury.” He was right. She was cheating on him immediately after marriage.

N to J: “I have not so much as drunk one cup of tea without cursing the pride and ambition which force me to remain apart from the moving spirit of my life. If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days our meeting."

Joséphine had the gall to come visit Napoleon with the man she was cheating on him with. And when Napoleon came for her, she was nowhere to be seen: “I arrive at Milan, I rush into your apartment, I have left everything to see you, to press you in my arms…you were not there.”

Napoleon’s last words: “France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine.” He divorced her but never got over her. Affairs didn’t help. The pain of not being loved back by her lingered on.

I’m reminded of a line from a letter he wrote in 1796: “I had the right to be spared this.”