Although Georgiana told Maret that she hoped "her general" could bathe in wine and be thoroughly disinfected inside and out, no one would actually do such a thing to the First Consul of France.
Besides France, military courts in places like Britain and Prussia had a punishment known as running the gauntlet. Soldiers would form two lines and make the offending soldier walk between them. France had once had it too, but it was abolished after the French Revolution.
As Georgiana accompanied Bonaparte in an open carriage along the Champs-Élysées and the tree-lined boulevards of Paris, citizens lined the route, cheering toward the carriage.
She did not know how other women would feel in such a situation. She only knew that she was terrified some hotheaded young man might appear, or that a sniper might be hiding in one of the buildings along the street. She still remembered that Colonel Fournier, the sharpshooter of the 12th Light Cavalry, was still at large.
Napoleon being wounded in an assassination attempt was no news, nor was it the first time he had been targeted by a sniper. In June 1800, Desaix and Kléber died on the same day. Napoleon mourned both of them and planned to erect two statues in Victory Square in their memory. At the groundbreaking ceremony on September 23, the Jacobins hired a crack shot and rented a house near the square, intending to carry out a sniper attack. But after taking position, the marksman discovered that ribbons on the scaffolding around the platform blocked his view. Under pressure from his employers, he reluctantly fired one shot and missed. The ceremony was canceled amid the panic, and the statues for the two men were shelved as well.
Furious, the Jacobins planned another assassination. This time, it would be at