PAULINE BONAPARTE

Napoleon’s younger sister—beautiful but not particularly compelling—receives effusive treatment from English biographer Fraser (Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, 2005, etc.).

The author relies on Napoleon’s riveting odyssey to propel the insipid life story of Pauline Bonaparte (1780–1825), whose legendary milk baths were the most interesting thing about her. Their fates moved in tandem: Napoleon determined whom his favorite sister would wed, and the two marriages he arranged would mark her fortune, mostly for good. In 1796, with her brother fresh from victories as head of the Army of Italy, Pauline was a vivacious, unschooled 15-year-old refugee from Corsica, living with her widowed mother and large close-knit family in Marseille. She fell in love with the wealthy, much older Stanislas Fréron, but Napoleon came down firmly against the match—luckily, it turned out, as Fréron was denounced as an embezzler and disgraced. Instead, her brother chose his loyal second-in-command, brigade general Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, who proved an honorable, upright man but no match for his sensual, spoiled teenaged spouse. Marginalized as Napoleon’s star rose, Leclerc was sent to quell Toussaint Louverture’s uprising in Saint-Domingue in 1802. Native resistance and the pestilential climate quickly defeated the French. Leclerc died of yellow fever within a year, and Pauline returned to Paris to join her vastly enriched family, elevated by Napoleon’s position as first consul for life. Another advantageous suitor soon materialized, and Pauline wed Prince Camillo Borghese, a Roman citizen of high birth and huge wealth. He was also a “booby,” notes Fraser, as ignorant and good-looking as Pauline, but not as cunning. The match proved disastrous, and Pauline ran through lovers until nearly the last year of her life. She remained loyal to the end to her brother, even setting up a household for him on Elba.

Pauline’s blandishments grow quickly tedious, but Fraser does a lively job of delineating the story of her audacious clan.