Sunday, October 22, 2006 Love letters By Leticia Suarez-Orendain
It was a time of war but there was also time for love. In fact, love letters.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a man who could hold the world in his hands, and he was also in love. He was in love with a woman, Josephine de Beauhamais, who consumed his thoughts. They married in 1796, but when she could not produce an heir, she agreed to a divorce that was devastating to both of them. He married Marie Louise of Austria in 1811.
Waterloo was still years away, yet already Napoleon had fallen to his lifelong weakness, Josephine, his consolation during his time of despair. One love letter of his, dated Dec. 29, 1795, full of passion swears: “I awake all filled with you. Your image and the intoxicating pleasures of last night, allow my senses no rest.
“Sweet and matchless Josephine, how strangely you work upon my heart.
Are you angry with me? Are you unhappy? Are you upset? My soul is broken with grief and my love for you forbids repose. But how can I rest any more, when I yield to the feeling that masters my inmost self, when I quaff from your lips and from your heart a scorching flame? . . . “
Another letter, undated: “If I am moving away from you with the speed of the Rhone torrent, it is only that I may see you again more quickly.
“If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days the arrival of my sweet love. . .”
Love draws the softness and the mush out of a man who rules the known world. But are such love letters still being written?
Have perhaps the electronic mail and instant messaging watered down the urgency to write on real paper thoughts “to express the hidden murmurings of the heart,” as one love letter told the intended.
A cursory survey among friends revealed that love letters are not as popular as they were in the early 1970s to relay what one lover can’t say to the face of his or her beloved---”I perspire as though I were under the sun even on a cold day such as this; and my heart beats fast though I am not afraid. . .”
Letters have given way to the faster and efficient electronic communication.
The modern modes of communication don’t nurture the kind of Napoleonic writing we just tasted. The computer itself is a colder tool compared to the pen and paper, which allows inkblots, smudges and scent to make it as distinct as the lover that sent it.
Computer communication makes you insecure. You fear that your neighbor might access your password and thus your secret longings. So you temper the raging hormones and settle for the charmless “take care” and the ubiquitous “I love you.”
One friend said that chatting online allows more steamy language, which a real love letter does not espouse. She said that one time while she was chatting with her fiancé, the woman beside her, without embarrassment, shouted out her allegiance to her man for all to hear.
Instant messages are not worth saving as they can nurture pornographic exchanges. A love letter is still the item worth keeping and should you become a marked person for history, an item for study.
We’ll never know why Josephine’s letters to Napoleon are non-existent. We do know she kept his. Modern day France’s government was influenced by Napoleon, but it is his letters that reveal his heart.
