Another advantageous suitor soon materialized, and Pauline wed Prince Camillo Borghese, a Roman citizen of high birth and huge wealth. Leclerc died of yellow fever within a year, and Pauline returned to Paris to join her vastly enriched family, elevated by Napoleon’s position as first consul for life.

Native resistance and the pestilential climate quickly defeated the French. Marginalized as Napoleon’s star rose, Leclerc was sent to quell Toussaint Louverture’s uprising in Saint-Domingue in 1802. Instead, her brother chose his loyal second-in-command, brigade general Victor Emmanuel Leclerc, who proved an honorable, upright man but no match for his sensual, spoiled teenaged spouse.

She fell in love with the wealthy, much older Stanislas Fréron, but Napoleon came down firmly against the match-luckily, it turned out, as Fréron was denounced as an embezzler and disgraced. In 1796, with her brother fresh from victories as head of the Army of Italy, Pauline was a vivacious, unschooled 15-year-old refugee from Corsica, living with her widowed mother and large close-knit family in Marseille.

Their fates moved in tandem: Napoleon determined whom his favorite sister would wed, and the two marriages he arranged would mark her fortune, mostly for good. The author relies on Napoleon’s riveting odyssey to propel the insipid life story of Pauline Bonaparte (1780–1825), whose legendary milk baths were the most interesting thing about her. Napoleon’s younger sister-beautiful but not particularly compelling-receives effusive treatment from English biographer Fraser ( Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, 2005, etc.).

The washingtons by flora fraser