This was another one of Pam's book group books. She recommended it to me and I ended up reading the whole series. I started with this one, which is actually the middle, but it was a good one to start with. It left me with questions for books one and three. The series tells the story of Josephine Bonaparte. Honestly I had very little interest in Napoleon prior to reading this book, but Sandra Gulland paints him as an interesting character. We see him through Josephine as a very opportunistic general who is not anything like emperor material. He is also very arrogant. He carries his own hard-boiled eggs to dinners so that no one can poison him. He even changes her first name from Rose. Josephine is no saint either. She has tons of debts and a weakness for laudanum. Upon telling her aunt she has married:
"Why...that's wonderful," she said, crossing herself, "but to whom?"
"To a military man by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. He's--"
"What type of name is that?" my aunt demanded, frowning suspiciously.
"It's a Corsican name, Aunt Désirée, and--"
"You married a Corsican?" She reached for a brass bell and rang it vigorously...(she calls for smelling salts and insults the corsicans thoroughly)...
"A church ceremony, Rose?" she asked, pulling and twistingng the green handkerchief, worrying it.
"No," I admitted. Bonaparte was anti-Church, but I wasn't going to tell her that.
I heard a sniff. Oh dear! Was she weeping? Dismayed, I reached out to comfort her, but she turned on me like a hawk. "Rose how could you?" she wept, dabbing her cheeks. "How could you have married a man with such a horrible name!"
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