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| Illustration: Robert Lefèvre, c. 1806 |
“I do not believe that any man in the world is more unfortunate in his family than I am.”—attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
Born upon this day in 1780 was Pauline Bonaparte—Napoleon’s younger sister and, by the common testimony of her age, the most resplendently ungovernable spirit of that singular house. Beauty and scandal clung to her as fragrance to the rose; she was at once enchantress and provocation—adored and exasperating in the same breath.
From girlhood she displayed an audacity rare even amidst the licentious airs of post-revolutionary France: quick of wit, irreverent in laughter, her appetites untamed by convention or consequence. Marriage to General Leclerc did little to school her passions; widowhood, yet less. When she later became Princess Borghese, it was less an elevation than an improvisation—a courtesan’s art reborn beneath the veil of nobility.
In Rome she became as a living fable. Her snow-white steeds were shod with silver; her raiment so diaphanous that even the world-wearied salons of the Eternal City blushed for shame. Painters adored her; prelates despaired; and ambassadors, once masters of intrigue, found their composure scattered before her smile.
At last, rumour’s tide did reach Paris. Napoleon, ever the jealous sentinel of family decorum, addressed to her a missive befitting a patriarch grown weary—a letter of admonition couched in the language of exile and restraint. She obeyed in semblance, for a season; in spirit, never. No imperial edict could subdue a nature so gloriously insubordinate.
In Pauline the contradictions of the Bonapartes found their most glittering consummation—grace entwined with folly, splendour interlaced with ruin. She was, as one astonished contemporary styled her, ‘a goddess sculpted in scandal’. And perchance, in the vast theatre of human history, she grasped the meaning of fame with an instinct swifter and truer than that of her conquering brother himself. —Arthur Newhook, 20 October 2025.
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