I read about it on the BBC website a couple of weeks ago, and finally saw the episode on YouTube (Français) this morning: Mme. Chirac giving a little speech about one or the other of her charities, while behind her, her husband Jacques is making such a fuss over a young woman--getting her seated next to him, making gallant smalltalk with her--that it is interrupting Mme. Chirac's speech. Mme. Chirac stops, turns around and looks at them, and yells something at them (a single word that sounded like "Gouls!"*), like someone calling a dog to heel, which causes M. Chirac to jump, and shut up for a minute till his wife finishes her speech. Mme. Chirac then steps back and sits down on the other side of her husband, still quite visibly annoyed with him, while he acts somewhat apologetically towards the young woman--whom he has never ceased bird-dogging for a second--like a kid whose mother has just publicly reprimanded him. It is, maybe, funny. It is certainly real.
Bernadette Chirac (née Chodron de Courcel) is every bit the equal--and a little more--of her husband, and doesn't mind reminding him of the fact. She has said as much in her unprecedentedly frank memoirs. She says, and says she often says to him, "Remember, when Napoléon abandoned Joséphine was when he lost everything." The reason I've been so long deliberating and reflecting on this blog is that I've been investigating the likelihood of Mme. Chirac's oft-repeated reminder's being in any real or metaphoric sense true. I have concluded that it is not true--although it might be true that, without Joséphine, Napoléon wouldn't have been given command of the French armies in Italy, and that the Napoleonic Empire would never have happened. At any rate Joséphine de Beauharnais is a very interesting person--actually more interesting, and more of a person, than Napoléon ever thought of being. 'Tis said that when she married Alexandre de Beauharnais, in 1779 (she was 18 years old), he was so ashamed of her rustic creole manners that he refused to have her presented at the French royal court; but somehow, in the years between then and his beheading (along with his cousin) in 1794, Joséphine's manners had so entirely improved that she would also have been beheaded as a ci-devant, had not the abrupt end of Robespierre and his reign of terror forestalled it. What she did in the interval between her release from prison in July of 1794 and the regaining of her late husband's property in June of 1795 I can find no specific account of, though 'tis said that this 30-something creole beauty (with bad teeth) became the mistress of "several politicians" of the Directory; one of whom, Paul Barras, then head of government, "shared" her with Napoléon--and the rest, as they say, is history. Joséphine seems to have been, for all her matter-of-fact willingness to sleep her way to the top, a remarkably frank, unaffected, and honest woman, with her own concerns and her own interests, which she would suffer no attempts to conceal or regulate. She would not, for example, much to Napoléon's chagrin, pretend that his teeny weenie ("like a child's" according to the British autopsy) could satisfy her, or disguise the fact that several others' could. And she was, much to the world's benefit, a thoroughly devoted amateur botanist, whose greenhouses at Malmaison were the first of their kind, and whose dedication to the cultivation of roses resulted ultimately in the hybrid tea roses of the later 19th century. All honor and all glory.
*"Ta gueule!" is what Mme. Chirac said, meaning "Shut up!"
