THE BONAPARTES by David Stacton. 382 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.
"All Italians are scoundrels!" Napoleon once exclaimed in a fit of pique with his compatriots. "Not all," an Italian noblewoman slyly replied, "but a good part (non tutti, ma buona parte)."
It was a good pun and a useful one in a century overburdened with Bonapartes. Like a swarm of corpulent drones they rose from the thickets of Corsica and fell with a sodden thump on the sinecures of empire. Noisy, ugly, greedy, provincial, quarrelsome, ostentatious, lewd and downright criminal, they terrorized Europe off and on from 1801 to 1870 and frightened Napoleon himself almost as much as the Grand Alliance did. All through his reign they ridiculed, insulted and cheated him, and when he needed them most a number of them cynically betrayed him to his enemies. Of all modern dynasties, the Bonapartes were without doubt the most squalid.
And the most entertaining. Evidence of that sequins every page in this almost too insistently scintillating biography of the Bonaparte family. David Stacton, a well-known historical novelist (Sir William, People of the Book), employs his flair for research and penchant for the trenchant style to present the Napoleonic drama as an immense and mordant Molieresque comedy in which the Bonapartes personify le bourgeois grotesquely attempting to become a gentilhomme.
The principal characters, as Stacton presents them:
> Madame Mère, Napoleon's mother, was the most impressive personage on the Napoleonic scene. Tiny, skinny, weasel-eyed and taciturn, she looked like a witch in a fairy tale and held her family under an unshakable spell.
Her husband Carlo, a foppish ne'er-do-well, died in 1785; Napoleon was essentially his mother's creation. "France is ablaze," she told him as a youth, "but it is a noble bonfire, my son, and worth the risk of getting burnt." Icily realistic, she threw cold water on his early sizzling success. "Let's hope it lasts," she said at his coronation. Later she advised against involvement in Spain and Russia, Napoleon's two biggest mistakes. Eerily vatic, she was "informed" of his death on the very day it happened, 5,000 miles away, and proclaimed with Napoleonic theatricality: "Inexorable history is seated on his coffin." She died in Rome at 86, alone except for a few passing strangers who had paid the janitor a penny for the privilege of watching her last throes. >Louis, the third of Napoleon's four brothers, was a double-gaited dandy who knew a thing or two about bad luck. His wife fell in love with his boy friend. To console himself, Louis wrote wispy verses. In 1809, to spite his brother, he quit his job as King of Holland and ran away to sulk for a couple of years in Austria. In 1814, when the allies invaded France, he had no time to fight—he was too busy correcting proofs of his novel (Marie, ou les Peines de l'Amour). At 60, though syphilitic and confined to a wheelchair, he is said to have married a beautiful 16-year-old girl. In his entire life, he did only one thing of importance: he begot Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III)—and was not really sure he had done even that.