The Corsican Mafia

THE BONAPARTES by David Stacton. 382 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

"All Italians are scoundrels!" Napoleon once exclaimed in a fit of pique with his compatriots. "Not all," an Italian noblewoman slyly replied, "but a good part (non tutti, ma buona parte)."

It was a good pun and a useful one in a century overburdened with Bonapartes. Like a swarm of corpulent drones they rose from the thickets of Corsica and fell with a sodden thump on the sinecures of empire. Noisy, ugly, greedy, provincial, quarrelsome, ostentatious, lewd and downright criminal, they terrorized Europe off and on from 1801 to 1870 and frightened Napoleon himself almost as much as the Grand Alliance did. All through his reign they ridiculed, insulted and cheated him, and when he needed them most a number of them cynically betrayed him to his enemies. Of all modern dynasties, the Bonapartes were without doubt the most squalid.

And the most entertaining. Evidence of that sequins every page in this almost too insistently scintillating biography of the Bonaparte family. David Stacton, a well-known historical novelist (Sir William, People of the Book), employs his flair for research and penchant for the trenchant style to present the Napoleonic drama as an immense and mordant Molieresque comedy in which the Bonapartes personify le bourgeois grotesquely attempting to become a gentilhomme.

The principal characters, as Stacton presents them:

> Madame Mere, Napoleon's mother, was the most impressive personage on the Napoleonic scene. Tiny, skinny, weasel-eyed and taciturn, she looked like a witch in a fairy tale and held her family under an unshakable spell.

Her husband Carlo, a foppish ne'er-do-well, died in 1785; Napoleon was essentially his mother's creation. "France is ablaze," she told him as a youth, "but it is a noble bonfire, my son, and worth the risk of getting burnt." Icily realistic, she threw cold water on his early sizzling success. "Let's hope it lasts," she said at his coronation. Later she advised against involvement in Spain and Russia, Napoleon's two biggest mistakes. Eerily vatic, she was "informed" of his death on the very day it happened, 5,000 miles away, and proclaimed with Napoleonic theatricality: "Inexorable history is seated on his coffin." She died in Rome at 86, alone except for a few passing strangers who had paid the janitor a penny for the privilege of watching her last throes. >Louis, the third of Napoleon's four brothers, was a double-gaited dandy who knew a thing or two about bad luck. His wife fell in love with his boy friend. To console himself, Louis wrote wispy verses. In 1809, to spite his brother, he quit his job as King of Holland and ran away to sulk for a couple of years in Austria. In 1814, when the allies invaded France, he had no time to fight--he was too busy correcting proofs of his novel (Marie, ou les Peines de l'Amour). At 60, though syphilitic and confined to a wheelchair, he is said to have married a beautiful 16-year-old girl. In his entire life, he did only one thing of importance: he begot Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III)--and was not really sure he had done even that.

>Elisa, Napoleon's eldest sister, was a shrewd, bald bluestocking with "the soul of a libertine in the body of a spinster" and only two claims to fame: 1) she made a fortune selling marble busts of her brother, and 2) to preserve her properties, she turned traitor and delivered Florence to the allies in 1814.

> Pauline, Napoleon's second sister, generally considered the most likable of the Bonapartes, was a nymphomaniac who, according to Stacton's account, "treated men as she treated clothes: if she did not like them, she wore them only once; if she did, she wore them out." In Auguste de Forbin, a society painter "endowed with a usable gigantism," she found a man who wore her out. To the horror of her husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, she went through money even faster than men, but she always found cash when Big Brother needed it. Were she and Napoleon lovers? Several members of the family always liked to think so. In any case, Pauline was burnt out at 40. Her circulation became permanently deranged, and to warm her cold toes, she tucked them under the bare breasts of a lady-in-waiting. At 44, she died of abdominal cancer.

>Jerome, Napoleon's youngest brother, a pretty-faced punk known as Fifi, was the black sheep of the family. At 21, when Napoleon balked at his marriage to a Baltimore heiress named Betsy Patterson, he blithely abandoned the girl--with child--and concluded an alliance with Catherine of Wurttemberg. As King of Westphalia, he employed so many mistresses and staged such lavish entertainments (among them an operetta performed stark naked) that the kingdom went bankrupt within seven years. In 1812 he deserted his troops in Russia, and in 1840 he sold his 20-year-old daughter for several million francs to a notorious Russian sadist who tortured her nightly until the Czar intervened. In 1860, after a last grand fling under Napoleon III, Fifi died of a stroke --while gambling.

> L'Aiglon, the only son of Napoleon and Empress Marie Louise, was the principal martyr of the Bonapartist tradition. The child was only four when his father was sent to St. Helena, but it was already clear, says Stacton, that he was "preternaturally intelligent, as precocious as Macaulay or J. S. Mill." In Austria, however, he was placed with tutors who were instructed to retard his development as much as possible. After a few years of repressive treatment, the boy became withdrawn and watchful. At 16, he developed tuberculosis. At 21, ignored by his mother and surrounded by doctors who tried to make him eat 64 live snails as a pick-me-up, L'Aiglon died. "Between my cradle and my tomb," he said not long before the end, "there is a great null." He had to be buried with a hat on because souvenir hunters had snipped off all his hair.

> Louis Napoleon, son of Brother Louis, was the second and last of the Bonaparte emperors (L'Aiglon was proclaimed Emperor in 1815, but he never actually ruled). In Stacton's opinion, he was merely "a paper demagogue" who wrote lively pamphlets and had "the dignity of a toy lion." Carried into office on a flood tide of Bonapartism, he soon made it clear that his resemblance to Napoleon was merely nominal. He became a sort of Gallic Coolidge decorated with Continental charm, and he presided over an era of prosperous inanition that collapsed in the debacle of the Franco-Prussian war. Surrounded at Sedan, Napoleon III lost his army but preserved his charm. "I seem," he said, "to have abdicated."

After that, the Bonapartes seem to have disappeared. In all branches of the family, almost all the children came up girls. The last of the American line, a descendant of Fifi and Betsy Patterson named Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, achieved some prominence as a Man of Distinction in the Calvert whisky ads, but he died in 1945 of injuries sustained in Central Park, where he tripped over the leash of his wife's dog. The only male Bonapartes alive today are a 16-year-old boy (Charles Napoleon Bonaparte) and his 52-year-old father (Napoleon Louis Jerome Victor Bonaparte), a prosperous Parisian who drives expensive sports cars--scarcely a Napoleonic occupation, but (as one of the conqueror's nieces remarked) it beats "selling oranges on the quayside at Ajaccio."

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