#Comte de Marbeuf

[captainknell]

So while I'm trapped on the couch holding and feeding a sick baby, I have started reading Napoleon A Biography by Frank McLynn. So far it's like a rush of questionable information. He mentioned several theories about Napoleon's birth, including that he was actually the eldest - not Joseph, that his father wasn't Carlo but actually the Comte de Marbeuf, and one super outrageous idea that Napoleon didn't actually exist and he was just an embodiment of the French people. Okay okay, I wasn't there so there could be some sort of chance that the first two *could* be true but I'm pretty sure everyone that has written memoirs and books and painted portraits and passed down stories to their descendants didn't collectively make up some fictional dude called Napoleon. That's so wild to say that I'm not sure if I can believe what other stuff he's putting in this book. Like, why even throw that in there?? O.o

[napoleondidthat]

What was Napoleon's relationship with his brother Louis? I heard Napoleon practically raised Louis through his teenage years, so he must have been at least very disappointed to see his health deteriorating at a young age. I believe there was a movie where Napoleon dismissed Louis as "a cripple", do you think that's an accurate representation of how he felt?

From what I have read over the years, in the beginning their relationship was a positive one. He did “raise” him when he too was sent over from Corsica to attend military school. Napoleon took charge of him. He wrote to Joseph that Louis would turn out to be the best of all of them, he was the perfect kid, perfect mannered, everyone liked him and he was good looking etc. Louis later followed Napoleon to Egypt and served as one of his aide-de-camps.

Something happened to Louis and there have been various reasons stated for it. A common one is that Louis caught an STD, maybe syphilis that caused him to mentally decline. Some have speculated that he was also homosexual, not that it caused his deterioration, but that due to his station in life, these things he had to hide from and hide from others, caused his already fragile stability to weaken further. Either way, his relationship with Napoleon soured. His marriage to Hortense was nothing short of a nightmare of abuse. Louis became paranoid, locked her in rooms and took as a remedy sleeping in the nightclothes of diseased men from the hospital and made Hortense sleep next to him. Napoleon couldn’t understand him, wrote to him saying, “you treat your regiments like how you should treat your wife, and your wife like you should treat your regiments.”

Louis did become more and more paranoid and mentally unbalanced as he aged and did become crippled in one of his arms.

There is some speculation that Louis is actually the son of Letizia and her alleged affair with the Comte de Marbeuf. If you read the biography on Napoleon that the French historian, Patrice Gueniffey, he puts out a pretty compelling case that Louis is the son of this relationship, going as far as saying Napoleon acknowledged it.  Marbeuf fell for Letizia when he was governor of the Corsica and had her moved into his place, had her portrait hung and she accepted his advances. Gueniffey documents a scene where Letizia rode in the carriage with Marbeuf around Corsica with Carlos, her husband and Napoleon’s father, rode on horseback at the very back of the procession. He being aware of the affair and having no issue with it (that being said, Carlos was also said to have had affairs, the marriage between Letizia and Carlos was a political match, not a love match).