(2 of 3)
>Elisa, Napoleon's eldest sister, was a shrewd, bald bluestocking with "the soul of a libertine in the body of a spinster" and only two claims to fame: 1) she made a fortune selling marble busts of her brother, and 2) to preserve her properties, she turned traitor and delivered Florence to the allies in 1814.
> Pauline, Napoleon's second sister, generally considered the most likable of the Bonapartes, was a nymphomaniac who, according to Stacton's account, "treated men as she treated clothes: if she did not like them, she wore them only once; if she did, she wore them out." In Auguste de Forbin, a society painter "endowed with a usable gigantism," she found a man who wore her out. To the horror of her husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, she went through money even faster than men, but she always found cash when Big Brother needed it. Were she and Napoleon lovers? Several members of the family always liked to think so. In any case, Pauline was burnt out at 40. Her circulation became permanently deranged, and to warm her cold toes, she tucked them under the bare breasts of a lady-in-waiting. At 44, she died of abdominal cancer.
>Jerome, Napoleon's youngest brother, a pretty-faced punk known as Fifi, was the black sheep of the family. At 21, when Napoleon balked at his marriage to a Baltimore heiress named Betsy Patterson, he blithely abandoned the girl—with child—and concluded an alliance with Catherine of Wurttemberg. As King of Westphalia, he employed so many mistresses and staged such lavish entertainments (among them an operetta performed stark naked) that the kingdom went bankrupt within seven years. In 1812 he deserted his troops in Russia, and in 1840 he sold his 20-year-old daughter for several million francs to a notorious Russian sadist who tortured her nightly until the Czar intervened. In 1860, after a last grand fling under Napoleon III, Fifi died of a stroke —while gambling.
> L'Aiglon, the only son of Napoleon and Empress Marie Louise, was the principal martyr of the Bonapartist tradition. The child was only four when his father was sent to St. Helena, but it was already clear, says Stacton, that he was "preternaturally intelligent, as precocious as Macaulay or J. S. Mill." In Austria, however, he was placed with tutors who were instructed to retard his development as much as possible. After a few years of repressive treatment, the boy became withdrawn and watchful. At 16, he developed tuberculosis. At 21, ignored by his mother and surrounded by doctors who tried to make him eat 64 live snails as a pick-me-up, L'Aiglon died. "Between my cradle and my tomb," he said not long before the end, "there is a great null." He had to be buried with a hat on because souvenir hunters had snipped off all his hair.