Romantic but True

Back in pre-WAG days, when teenaged girls’ fantasies could be expressed by the song, ‘Some day my prince will come’, I read and reread the perfect wish-fulfilment tale. Annemarie Selinko’s Désirée is a historical novel told in diary form by its eponymous heroine, Désirée Clary. She begins writing in 1794 when she is 15. It is five years since the Revolution, and the guillotine is in daily use all over France.

Désirée’s father, a Marseilles silk merchant, has died and her brother has been arrested. Désirée goes to the Town Hall to plead for her brother’s life and while there befriends a Corsican refugee, Joseph Buonaparte, who soon becomes engaged to her sister Julie. His charismatic brother, Napoleon, proposes to Désirée but almost at once goes off to war, and then to Paris where he jilts her and marries Joséphine Beauharnais. Four years later Désirée marries General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, and through his eventual election to the throne of Sweden becomes a princess and eventually a queen. Désirée records the elevation of Napoleon to First Consul and then to the imperial throne, his military and political career, and his personal life. She is given an insider’s view of the travails of the First Republic and the establishment of the empire, the Russian campaign, the Hundred Days and Napoleon’s eventual exile to St Helena; and she witnesses first-hand Napoleon’s ruthless jettisoning of Joséphine and marriage to the Habsburg princess, Marie-Louise. The film of the book, made in 1956 with Marlon Brando as a wooden Napoleon and Jean Simmons as an eternally ingénue Désirée, treated the novel as though its principal subject was the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. But for a romantic teenage reader devouring this tale of gorgeous dresses, robes, crowns, curtsies, court balls and cheering crowds, the drama of Napoleon’s extraordinary career seemed entirely secondary to the story of a middle-class girl who is loved by the two great men of her time, and ends up on a throne. In a way the book can be seen as a 512-page Cinderella story – which, like all such fairy tales, represents an archetypal dream. ‘You shall go to the ball,’ the fairy godmother says; and as a consequence, Cinderella will meet her prince, marry him, have his children and become royal herself. No wonder this book hits the romantic reader’s spot, showing that the dream is not an impossible one and that some day her prince might, just might, come. But if that were the only appeal of this novel, it would hardly be one which I have gone on rereading and enjoying throughout my adult life. That’s not to say that one necessarily grows out of fantasizing, merely that one grows out of that particular fantasy, which, in any case, becomes ever less attractive with each new revelation of what actually does happen to the girls whose prince did come. But Désirée is no fairy story. It is closely based on actual fact. In 1795 Napoleon Bonaparte really did propose to a silk merchant’s daughter, Bernadine Eugénie Désirée Clary. The 1798 portrait of her by Gérard shows a pretty, snub-nosed girl with curly hair and round dark eyes. Napoleon may well have fallen in love with her as well as with her substantial dowry. At the time he was a 26-year-old artillery officer, shabby, suffering from the itch and malaria, who wanted to be a novelist. Inspired by his affair with Désirée he wrote a story called Clisson et Eugénie, of which twenty-two pages survive; unpublished in his lifetime and long thought to be part of a non-fiction text about a historical figure called Clisson, this fragmentary romance was only identified and published in 2007. Clisson is a French general of Corsican origin, aged 26. Sickened by the fighting, he retreats to a spa town where he meets 15-year-old Eugénie, whom he likens to the song of the nightingale. Their relationship is one of unalloyed happiness until the General is recalled to service. When he is wounded he sends Berville, one of his officers, to tell Eugénie. Berville does not return and Eugénie does not come. Doubly betrayed, Clisson throws himself back into the fighting and is killed. As he was finishing his novel, the young General Bonaparte was sent off to Paris to suppress a royalist uprising, so marking the beginning of a meteoric career. In 1798 Désirée Clary married Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte (1763–1844), a long-serving soldier who was made a marshal of France in 1804. Bernadotte and Napoleon had ideological differences and became openly hostile after the Swedish parliament elected Bernadotte as successor to the throne of Sweden and he was adopted into the royal family. As Crown Prince, Bernadotte arranged an alliance between Sweden and Russia and helped to defeat Napoleon in the Battle of the Nations in 1813. In 1818, he was crowned King Charles XIV of Sweden and Carl III Johan of Norway. So Désirée became the Crown Princess of Sweden and then Queen of Sweden and Norway. Bernadotte and Désirée’s son Oscar succeeded to the throne, and the reigning monarchs of Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Belgium are her direct descendants. Some of the details in Selinko’s book are pure fiction – for example, history does not relate that Désirée comforted Joséphine after her divorce nor that it was into her hands that Napoleon surrendered his sword after Waterloo. Placing her narrator centre stage was the novelist’s prerogative, but the story is so remarkable and romantic, and the dramatis personae so memorable, that there was no need to stray far from fact. Much of the information derived from Désirée is correct, as I realized on a visit to the Palace of Fontainebleau, where the Bonaparte portraits are displayed. I could immediately identify all the members of Napoleon’s family – Joseph, Pauline, Caroline, Louis, Elisa, his mother, Madame Mère, among them – because all are described in Désirée’s journal. Annemarie Selinko began collecting material for the novel as a refugee in Sweden during the Second World War. She was born in Vienna in 1914, studied history at the university there and became a political writer and correspondent. On an assignment to Geneva she met a Danish student, Erling Kristiansen, whom she married in 1938. When war broke out, Annemarie and her husband were living in Denmark. They escaped the Gestapo by sailing to Sweden in a fishing boat, and stayed in Stockholm until moving, after the war, to live in various European capitals. She died in Copenhagen in 1986. Annemarie’s war work was as a German-language interpreter with the Swedish Red Cross, translating for former inmates of the concentration camps who had been brought to Sweden through CountFolke Bernadotte’s negotiations with Himmler. It is said that she was inspired by one of these refugees to write the story of Désirée Clary. The novel was originally published in 1951 in German. Most people who read at all reread some books again and again. It might be those staples of Desert Island Discs, the Bible and Shakespeare; the Eng. Lit. graduate’s Victorian classics; or less exalted ‘books to read with flu’. On my own emergency shelf, beside other escapist old faithfuls – historical novels by Georgette Heyer (see SF, No. 16), Dorothy Dunnett and Patrick O’Brian – stands Annemarie Selinko’s Désirée: the story of a bourgeois Cinderella who goes to the ball, marries the Prince, and founds a dynasty; proof that fairytales can come true after all.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 25 © Jessica Mann 2010