She was the sixth child of Letizia Ramolino and Carlo Buonaparte, Corsica's representative to the court of King Louis XVI of France.

[4] Pauline's brother Lucien Bonaparte made seditious comments at the local Jacobin chapter in the summer of 1793, forcing the family to flee to the mainland.

[5] Napoleon, despite the fact that Pauline loved Stanislas, married her to General Charles Leclerc in French-occupied Milan on 14 June 1797.

[12] Laure de Permond—the future Duchesse d'Abrantès—and her mother welcomed Pauline into their salon at the rue Saint-Croix.

[17] The Governor-General ordered General Christophe, who commanded a force of 5,000 soldiers, to resign Le Cap to French authority.

[21] Leclerc had initially guaranteed that slavery, abolished by the Jacobin republic in 1794, would stay proscribed; however, the inhabitants caught wind of its re-establishment in another French colony, neighbouring Guadeloupe, in July.

[27] She did, however, find time to take numerous lovers, including several of her husband's soldiers, and developed a reputation for "Bacchanalian promiscuity.

When the Governor-General refused, she elected to stay in Saint-Domingue; observing that unlike in Paris, "Here, I reign like Josephine [Napoleon's wife]; I hold first place.

"[30] To occupy herself, Pauline compiled a collection of local flora and established a menagerie, inhabited by native animals.

[33] Parisian rumour had it that she extracted gold and jewels from the indigenous peoples in Saint-Domingue and brought the treasure back in Leclerc's sarcophagus, but this was not the case.

[36] Pope Pius VII's envoy, Giovanni Battista Caprara, suggested Camillo Borghese, 6th Prince of Sulmona, a Roman noble.

[39] On 28 August 1803, they were married by Caprara, but without the knowledge of Napoleon, who had wanted a November wedding for mourning protocol's sake.

Pauline, anxious to learn how to behave in Roman society, received tutorship in deportment and dancing.

[40] Biographer William Carlton suggests that Pauline— a minor noble from Corsica—would never have made such an advantageous match if it were it not for Napoleon's political eminence.

[42] Her son Dermide, always a delicate child, died on 14 August 1804 in the Aldobrandini villa in Frascati, after a violent fever and convulsions.

After Waterloo Pauline moved to Rome, where she enjoyed the protection of Pope Pius VII (who once was her brother's prisoner), as did her mother, Letizia, (then at a palace on the Piazza Venezia) and other members of the Bonaparte family.

Her husband, Camillo, lived in the Palazzo Borghese, but then moved to Florence to distance himself from her and had a ten-year relationship with a mistress.

Even so, Pauline persuaded the Pope to convince the prince to take her back only three months before her death from pulmonary tuberculosis.

[45] She died on 9 June 1825 at the age of forty-four at the Palazzo Salviati-Borghese in Florence, the cause of death being given as 'tumor on the stomach'[46] but it may have been pulmonary tuberculosis.