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January 13, 2002 Issue 
The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B by Sandra Gulland 
Josephine - Role Model from the Past
(Volume 1 of the fictionalized biography of Josephine Bonaparte) Now that the debate about the actual beginning of the new century and millennium is behind us we can occupy our New Year's thoughts with other things. We can of course, do the usual New Year resolution thing, but many people have began to view resolutions as repetitive platitudes which do not merit even a minute of the time devoted to them in books and conversations. For myself, I have become totally obsessed with noting in everything I read the changes in behavior, beliefs, attitudes, mores and lifestyles society has undergone through the ages. Recently I was able to do just that while reading the new fictionalized three-volume biography of Josephine Bonaparte by Sandra Gulland. I became enamored with the story of Josephine and Napoleon when I read Emil Ludwig's biography of Napoleon during my last summer in the Balkan country where I was born and grew up. Josephine was renowned for her compassion and big heart, for her extraordinary grace and gentility. Even as a child in Martinique she gave away her allowance to the slaves and other less fortunate people. She saved many from the guillotine through her influence with some of the important leaders of the French Revolution and always championed the underdog and the disadvantaged. She was considered beautiful and certainly evoked unparalleled passion in Napoleon, yet she was not really a beauty. Much has been written about her lovely eyes, long curling eyelashes and rotten teeth. She hid her bad teeth by smiling with her lips closed or behind her fan. Napoleon believed that she brought him luck and called her his Lady of Victories. As his armies conquered in the name of "liberte, egalite, fraternite", she became also France's Lady of Victories. In all three of Gulland's volumes, it is Josephine that narrates the story through writing in her diary. The first volume, "The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B." takes us on a spellbinding journey of Josephine's life from her fourteenth birthday in Martinique to her marriage to Napoleon. She was born Marie-Josephe-Rose in 1763 in Martinique to an impoverished aristocratic French family and was called Rose until Napoleon proclaimed "I shall call you Josephine, after the heroine in "Le Sourd". "I am fourteen today and unmarried still," Rose begins her life's story. But a voodoo fortuneteller predicts that someday Rose will be Queen. Due to her younger sister's tragic death, it is Rose who is sent to France to marry the Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, the arrogant and handsome son of the Marquis de Beauharnais, her aunt Desiree's long time lover. Although an impassioned Republican and a revolutionary, Alexandre still loses his head during the Reign of Terror. Rose too is imprisoned during the same time and is saved from the guillotine through an oversight. Other books suggest that as a widow Rose became the mistress of Barras, one of the most powerful and influential of the five directors of the Directory. But this book does not even hint at that. Instead it tells of her friendship with Barras from which they both benefited. She acted as a hostess for his lavish and elegant soirees and provided him with important financial contacts; he paid many of her expenses including the tuition for her children's schools. Napoleon was his protégé and Rose married him to oblige Barras. This is only a cursory overview of the book leaving out all the tantalizing details, hoping to entice you to read the complete book. Make no mistake, in spite of being fiction, all three books are based on extensive research and most of the information is historically accurate. The author does not speculate about things for which there is no documentation, but only about the dialogue that might have taken place between people. When I first read about Josephine and Napoleon, their time did not seem so far removed from mine because life during the first decade of communism in Bulgaria when I was a child, was rather primitive. We heated with wood-burning stoves and lived with routine power outages during which we read and studied by the light of kerosene lamps and candles. Today - it seems that the time distance is enormous. I try to imagine writing in a journal by candlelight and living in the humid tropics without air-conditioning while wearing wigs, hooped skirts and tons of suffocating clothing, receiving letters and emergency messages through couriers instead of e-mail and telephones and having servants to take care of my wardrobe and dress me and my hair. But then, there are also similarities. The French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century along with its many other liberties brought on a certain freedom in dress for both - men and women -just as the technological revolution at the end of the twentieth century has enabled us to dress more casually. Today's flimsy see-through fashions that resemble lingerie are very similar to the flimsy and revealing lingerie-like dresses of Josephine's time. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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