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Barras, whom Carnot described as possessing ‘the tastes of an opulent prince, generous, magnificent and dissipated’, embarked on an affair with Josephine de Beauharnais. When she became too demanding and expensive, he said he was ‘tired and bored’ of that ‘cajoling courtesan’. He promoted the pale, long-haired Bonaparte, whose ‘emaciated thinness was converted into a fullness of face’ and ‘a smile always agreeable’ and now encouraged Josephine to focus on his protégé. After sending her little son Eugène to deliver a message, she finally met Napoleon and he fell wildly in love with her. She was six years older than him but much less innocent – her charm, chestnut hair and hazel eyes, allied with a sophisticated sexual technique that Bonaparte called le zigzag, outweighed the toothlessness that prevented her from smiling, her incontinent extravagance and her supposed lack of intelligence: ‘No one,’ laughed Talleyrand, ‘ever managed better without it.’

‘I awake full of you,’ wrote Bonaparte that December. ‘Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses.’ In March 1796, Barras presided over their marriage and, convinced of Bonaparte’s devoted loyalty, chose him to command the Army of Italy. Left in Paris, Josephine started an affair with a young hussar and tried to regain possession of her estates on Saint-Domingue.

In April, Toussaint celebrated his alliance with Laveaux, who called him ‘the black Spartacus, the leader announced by the philosophe Raynal to avenge the crimes perpetrated against his race’, and appointed him deputy governor. Toussaint was much favoured by the wives of the French colons. Married to Suzanne and father of beloved sons, Toussaint was the lover of Madame Fisson, ‘a white girl of rare beauty’, whose colon husband became one of his agents, and of Marguerite Descahaux, another colon’s wife. He was bombarded with locks of blonde hair and notes that called him ‘my prince’ from planters’ wives and he encouraged his white officials to marry black women, including his own paramours.

Yet his real challenge was to unite his people, most of them bossales from Africa still identifying as Kongos or Ibos. ‘I’m the person black people see when they look in the mirror,’ he said, ‘and it’s to me they must turn if they wish to enjoy the fruits of liberty.’ Yet the Directoire distrusted Toussaint, who retorted that Africans had ‘used their weapons and bare hands to keep the colony French’. Barras was not convinced, sending a general named Hédouville to disarm the black militias. ‘Who’s the greater defender of your freedom?’ Toussaint asked his people, ‘General Hédouville, former marquis, or Toussaint Louverture, the slave from Bréda?’

Toussaint’s revolt was terrifying a nearby coterie of slave owners. ‘I feel sincerely those sentiments of sympathy,’ wrote President Washington, ‘for the distresses of suffering brethren [slave masters].’ In February 1793, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, permitting the pursuit of escaped slaves. Jefferson too, convinced that ‘all the West India islands will remain in the hands of the people of color’, declared that ‘we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of Potomac), will have to wade through’.

British slave owners were afraid too, but Pitt had held up Wilberforce’s 1792 Slave Trade Bill, instead focusing on fighting France and seeking imperial gains. In September 1793 he sent a large expedition to seize a rich French asset, Saint-Domingue, and re-establish slavery in order to safeguard British sugar plantations in Barbados and Jamaica. Toussaint led furious resistance, defeating two British expeditions with the aid of rampaging yellow fever.

In May 1796, turning to India, where the French were conspiring against Britain, Pitt appointed a close friend from Eton and Oxford, the thirty-seven-year-old Richard Wellesley, earl of Mornington, as governor-general of the presidency of Fort William (Calcutta). One of Pitt’s first acts, in 1784, had been to take control of the EIC: henceforth the prime minister would appoint the India Board of Control and the governor-general who actually ran the three Indian presidencies.^* Although Clive had secured Bengal, Britain’s territories were limited and most of India was ruled by the Marathas, enjoying huge revenues. It was only now that Wellesley, dynamic and autocratic, libertine and spendthrift, studied how to lay ‘the foundations of our Empire in Asia’, aided by two younger brothers, one serving as his adjutant, the other as trusted commander. Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, handsome, frosty, laconic and talented, complemented Richard’s overblown schemes and explosive impetuosity. Between them the two sons of an undistinguished Anglo-Irish landowner would establish British power in India and Europe.

A HEAP OF EYEBALLS: TIGER TIPU, THE WELLESLEY BROTHERS AND THE AVENGING EUNUCH OF PERSIA