Napoleon has just conquered Egypt from the British in early 1798, and dealt with the ensuing unrest. By November 30 Cairo had sufficiently returned to normality to allow Napoleon to open the Tivoli pleasure gardens, where he noticed an ‘exceedingly pretty and lively young woman’ called Pauline Fourès, the twenty-year-old wife of a lieutenant in the 22nd Chasseurs, Jean-Noël Fourès.
If the beautiful round face and long blonde hair described by her contemporaries are indeed accurate, Lieutenant Fourès was unwise to have brought his wife on campaign. It was six months since Napoleon had discovered Josephine’s infidelity and within days of his first spotting Pauline they were having an affair. Their dalliance was to take on the aspect of a comic opera when Napoleon sent Lieutenant Fourès off with allegedly important despatches for Paris, generally a three-month round trip, only for his ship to be intercepted by the frigate HMS Lion the very next day. Instead of being interned by the British, Fourès was sent back to Alexandria, as was sometimes the custom with military minnows. He therefore reappeared in Cairo ten weeks before he was expected, to find his wife installed in the grounds of Napoleon’s Elfey Bey palace and nicknamed ‘Cleopatra’.
According to one version of the story, Fourès threw a carafe of water on her dress in the subsequent row, but another has him horsewhipping her, drawing blood. Whichever it was, they divorced and she thereafter became Napoleon’s maîtresse-en-titre in Cairo, acting as hostess at his dinners and sharing his carriage as they drove around the city and its environs. (The deeply chagrined Eugène was excused from duty on those occasions.)
The affair deflected charges of cuckoldry from Napoleon, which for a French general then was a far more serious accusation than adultery. When Napoleon left Egypt he passed Pauline on to Junot, who, when injured in a duel and invalided back to France, passed her on to Kléber.
She later made a fortune in the Brazilian timber business, wore men’s clothing and smoked a pipe, before coming back to Paris with her pet parrots and monkeys and living to be ninety.
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