From the Italian Campaign

They had been married in Paris in March 1796. He was twenty-six, newly given the Army of Italy. She was thirty-two, a widow, Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, whom he called Joséphine. He left. The campaign that made him famous is also the campaign that produced the letters in which he cannot bear that she is not in the tent.

From Nice, in the spring of that year, he writes that he has not spent a day without loving her, nor a night without holding her, nor a cup of tea without cursing the ambition that keeps him from the soul of his life. The cadence is superb. The situation is a general on a stolen Italian map, demanding a woman's body as if it were a dispatch. She writes less than he wants. She has a life in Paris. She has, soon enough, a lover. His letters heat into jealousy, insult, the theater of not-loving-you which is only another order to love him.

Do not confuse the heat with goodness. He wants her wholly his while he is not wholly anyone's but the army's. Possession is the grammar. Italy is not a backdrop; it is a conquest running in parallel. The same season that gives French museums their Napoleonic glow gives Joséphine a husband who reads her silence as crime.

The later story, empress, divorce for an heir, her name said on Saint Helena, is often used to redeem 1796. This office will not. A deathbed murmur does not unwrite a campaign of jealous letters. What is worth keeping is the French itself, and the clarity that a sentence can be fine while the will inside it is not.