Written in History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Separated from all I hold dear in this world what is the use of living if indeed such an existence can be called so, nothing could alleviate such a separation but the call of our Country but loitering time away with nonsense is too much. No separation no time my only beloved Emma can alter my love and affection for you, it is founded on the truest principles of honor, and it only remains for us to regret which I do with the bitterest anguish that there are any obstacles to our being united in the closest ties of this world’s rigid rules, as we are in those of real love. Continue only to love your faithful Nelson as he loves his Emma. You are my guide I submit to you, let me find all my fond heart hopes and wishes with the risk of my life. I have been faithful to my word never to partake of any amusement: or to sleep on shore.

  * * *

  Thursday January 30th: we have been six days from Leghorn and no prospect of our making a passage to Palermo, to me it is worse than death. I can neither eat nor sleep for thinking of you my dearest love, I never touch even pudding you know the reason. No I would starve sooner. My only hope is to find you have equally kept your promises to me, for I never made you a promise that I did not as strictly keep as if made in the presence of heaven, but I rest perfectly confident of the reality of your love and that you would die sooner than be false in the smallest thing to your own faithful Nelson who lives only for his Emma.

  Friday, I shall run mad we have had a gale of wind that is nothing but I am 20 Leagues farther from you than yesterday noon. Was I master notwithstanding the weather I would have been 20 Leagues nearer but my Commander in Chief knows not what I feel by absence. Last night I did nothing but dream of you altho’ I woke 20 times in the night. In one of my dreams I thought I was at a large table. You was not present, sitting between a Princess who I detest and another, they both tried to seduce me and the first wanted to take those liberties with me which no woman in this world but yourself ever did, the consequence was I knocked her down and in the moment of bustle you came in and taking me in your embrace whispered I love nothing but you my Nelson. I kissed you fervently and we enjoy’d the height of love. Ah Emma I pour out my soul to you. If you love any thing but me you love those who feel not like your N.

  * * *

  Sunday noon, fair Wind which makes me a little better in hopes of seeing you my love my Emma is tomorrow, just 138 miles distant, and I trust to find you like myself, for no love is like mine toward you.

  Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine, 24 April 1796

  Theirs is a love match. He is the young victorious general of Revolutionary France; she is a Creole girl born in Martinique, the widow of an aristocrat guillotined during the Terror of the early 1790s. She became the mistress of Paul Barras, one of the ruling Directors of France who then introduced her to his rising general Napoleon, whom she married on 9 March 1796. Afterward, Napoleon defeated France’s enemies—the Austrians, the Russians, the Prussians, the Egyptians—and himself seized power in France. In 1804, he crowned himself and Josephine emperor and empress. But he needed an heir and the marriage had produced no children. He therefore divorced Josephine and married Archduchess Marie Louise, Habsburg daughter of the Emperor of Austria, with whom he had a son. When Napoleon lost his empire and went into exile in 1814, Josephine was admired by all for enduring all these blows with her characteristic style—but she died just months later.

  This letter finds her in Paris while General Bonaparte is fighting in Italy—just after their marriage, but already he is craving her, tormented with jealousy. She is fashionable and chic, flirtatious and unfaithful; he is obsessional, controlling, and puppyishly devoted, bombarding her with letters that praise, seduce, threaten, whine, and boast in equal parts. He raves about her body and her sexual technique, something called the “zigzag,” begging her not to wash so he could smell her. As we read in this letter, he always wants to kiss her on the heart as well as “lower down, much lower.”

  My brother will bring you this letter. I have the greatest love for him and I hope he will gain yours; he deserves it. Nature has given him a sweet and utterly good character; he is full of good qualities.

  I am writing to Barras to get him appointed consul in some Italian port. He wants to live with his little wife far away from the hurly-burly and political affairs; I commend him to you.

  I have your letters of the 16th and the 21st. There are many days when you don’t write. What do you do, then?

  No, my darling, I am not jealous, but sometimes worried. Come soon; I warn you, if you delay, you will find me ill.

  Fatigue and your absence are too much.

  Your letters are the joy of my days, and my days of happiness are not many.

  Junot is bringing twenty-two flags to Paris. You must come back with him, do you understand?

  Hopeless sorrow, inconsolable misery, sadness without end, if I am so unhappy as to see him return alone.

  Adorable friend, he will see you, he will breathe in your temple; perhaps you will grant him the unique and perfect flavor of kissing your cheek, and I shall be alone and far, far away.

  But you are coming, aren’t you? You are going to be here beside me, in my arms, on my breast, on my mouth.

  Take wing and come, come! But travel gently. The road is long, bad, tiring.

  Suppose you had an accident, or fell ill; suppose fatigue—come gently, my adorable love, but I think of you often.

  I have received a letter from Hortense [Josephine’s daughter who would marry Napoleon’s brother Louis, future king of Holland]. I will write to her. She is altogether charming. I love her and will soon send her the perfumes she wants.

  Read Ossian’s poem “Carthon” carefully, and sleep well and happily far from your good friend, but thinking of him.

  A kiss on the heart, and one lower down, much lower!

  B.

  I don’t know if you need money; you have never talked about your business matters. If so, you can ask my brother, who has 200 louis of mine.

  Alexander II to Katya Dolgorukaya, January 1868

  Alexander II’s correspondence with Katya is probably the most explicit ever written by a political leader. But the letters are also poignant, passionate, and political. He is around forty years old, the most attractive of the Romanov emperors—a reformer who has just liberated the serfs—when he falls in love with a teenage girl about to leave school: Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya. One day in January 1865 they bump into each other in the park outside her boarding school minutes before a terrorist tries to assassinate the tsar. Alexander regards their love as sacredly sanctioned, her as a guardian angel. Bored with his prim wife and heartbroken after the death of his eldest son, Alexander finds himself under astonishing pressure as terrorists launch an assassination campaign against him. His consolation is Katya, with whom he shares the comfort of love and a mutually intense eroticism. In several letters a day, scrawled in French, they relish their sexual sessions together using the code word bingerle for sex.

  In their letters, Alexander remembers the first time they met in secret: “I’ll never forget what happened on the sofa in the mirrored room when we kissed on the mouth for the first time, and you made me go out while you removed your crinoline which was in our way and I was surprised to find you without your pantaloons. Oh, oh quelle horreur? I was almost mad at this dream but it was real and I felt HE was bursting. I felt a frenzy. That’s when I encountered my treasure….I would have given anything to dip inside again….I was electrified that your saucy crinoline let me touch your legs that only I had ever seen….We fell on each other like wild cats….” She is just as enthusiastic, writing: “You know I want you. I received immense pleasure and feel overwhelmed by it, pleasure incomparable to everything else,” and he often replies: “compliments from mon bingerle which is fully armed.” But they also discuss politics and war and share the happiness of their growing family of children.

 
When Alexander’s wife died in 1880, he married Katya, now Princess Yurovskaya, but in 1881, terrorists assassinated Alexander. Katya retired to Paris. Here’s one of the bingerle letters from early in their relationship:

  At ten in the morning.

  Bonjour my angel, I love you more than life and am happy to love you, my heart belongs to you totally forever….I await your letter with a feverish impatience and can’t understand what delays it.

  * * *

  At four in the afternoon.

  I want you more madly than ever my adored angel….The ceremony went well but I swear I am still exhausted from our delicious bingerles and the exertions of this morning, but we could once again experience the happiness that we know together, I would certainly not rush and never interrupt our bingerle. Yes certainly I feel that I have become your life and I’d only like it that you don’t forget that you are mine and I’ve only everywhere one idea in my head—it’s you my angel, joy, happiness, consolation, courage, my everything. Nothing else exists for me. Thank you for telling me that your life has become something thanks to me. You couldn’t give me a greater pleasure because that tells me that you feel loved and you understand what you’ve become for me. Without you, my existence would be impossible and I would follow you in into the tomb. May God pity us and give us one day the possibility of only living for us. There couldn’t be a couple more loving. Thanks to our delicious evening and our encounter of the morning, I feel totally impregnated with the brilliant and joyous moments that come to me without ceasing. I see myself in my imagination lying in the arms of my adorable pixie and adoring your [illegible word] that I adore like all the rest of your darling being and I can’t forget the expression in your adorable eyes during our bingerles which reflects the pleasure that you give and that you share with the very being, body and soul, more than ever. How can I not be mad for you after that, my angel, my everything? So tomorrow we have the chance to see each other in the morning during my promenade and the evening at the wedding where our looks will express what we feel. Monday morning you tell what you can do and in the evening I hope to meet to complete our interrupted bingerle….I want you to know that you delight my being, which belongs to you for ever, it’s love for you more than ever. I would like to eat you, kiss you taste you….

  Josef Stalin to Pelageya Onufrieva, 29 February 1912

  The pleasure of private letters is that they sometimes reveal lost aspects of familiar characters. Here in 1912, Josef Djugashvili, a Bolshevik revolutionary of Georgian origins who later adopts the name “Stalin,” writes a love letter of passionate “kiiissssing” to his schoolgirl mistress Pelageya. They have met in Vologda where Stalin is in exile and she is the mistress of one of Stalin’s friends. She is around sixteen; he is thirty-four. He lectures her about Shakespeare, art, and philosophy. He calls her “Hot Polya,” and she calls him “Oddball Osip”—a diminutive for Josef. She knows that when he leaves they would never meet again. As the future tyrant of the Soviet Union catches a late train to Moscow, to vanish again and return to his work in the revolutionary underworld, he buys a postcard of Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss—a couple kissing—and sends this to Polya.

  Dear PG,

  I got your letter today….Don’t write to the old address since none of us are there any more….I owe you a kiss for the kiss, passed on to me by Peter. Let me kiss you now. I’m not simply sending a kiss but am kiiissssing you passionately (it’s not worth kissing any other way),

  Josef

  Family

  Elizabeth I to Mary I, 16 March 1554

  This is the letter that saves a princess. It is the reign of Queen Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon—a dangerous time for her semilegitimate half sister Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and his short lived queen Anne Boleyn, executed as an adulteress and regarded by Mary as a whorish Protestant heretic.

  In 1553, when Henry’s successor Edward VI died young, powerful factions tried to impose a Protestant monarch with a tenuous claim: Lady Jane Grey. But Mary was a king’s daughter, even if she was a Catholic one, and she was accepted as rightful queen. Once she started to reimpose Catholicism and agreed to marry the Catholic King Philip of Spain, she faced a rebellion led by Thomas Wyatt, who planned to replace her with Elizabeth. To force him to implicate Elizabeth, Wyatt was tortured. He was then executed.

  Elizabeth is arrested, but the intelligent and vigilant twenty-one-year-old shrewdly appeals directly to her sister. As she is about to be transferred to the sinister and looming Tower of London, where princes and princesses of royal blood have been executed or murdered, she writes this letter. She cites the recent case of the duke of Somerset, Lord Protector under the young Edward VI, who allowed the execution of his own brother Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour for conspiracy—and for trying to marry Elizabeth herself. It is known as the “Tide Letter” because Elizabeth deliberately writes it so slowly that the tide has turned before it is finished, delaying her remand to the Tower for a day. In its well-chosen words, we can hear one of Henry VIII’s daughters begging for her life from another. Elizabeth was later taken to the Tower, but then released. On Mary’s death, she succeeded to the throne, becoming perhaps England’s greatest monarch. Her survival would confirm the independent and Protestant path of English history.

  If any ever did try this old saying, “that a king’s word was more than another man’s oath,” I most humbly beseech your Majesty to verify it to me, and to remember your last promise and my last demand, that I be not condemned without answer and due proof, which it seems that I now am; for without cause proved, I am by your council from you commanded to go to the Tower, a place more wanted for a false traitor than a true subject, which though I know I desire it not, yet in the face of all this realm it appears proved. I pray to God I may die the shamefullest death that any ever died, if I may mean any such thing; and to this present hour I protest before God (Who shall judge my truth, whatsoever malice shall devise), that I never practiced, counselled, nor consented to anything that might be prejudicial to your person anyway, or dangerous to the state by any means. And therefore I humbly beseech your Majesty to let me answer afore yourself, and not suffer me to trust to your Councillors, yea, and that afore I go to the Tower, if it be possible; if not, before I be further condemned. Howbeit, I trust assuredly your Highness will give me leave to do it afore I go, that thus shamefully I may not be cried out on, as I now shall be; yea, and that without cause. Let conscience move your Highness to pardon this my boldness, which innocency procures me to do, together with hope of your natural kindness, which I trust will not see me cast away without desert, which what it is I would desire no more of God but that you truly knew, but which thing I think and believe you shall never by report know, unless by yourself you hear. I have heard of many in my time cast away for want of coming to the presence of their Prince; and in late days I heard my Lord of Somerset say that if his brother had been suffered to speak with him he had never suffered; but persuasions were made to him so great that he was brought in belief that he could not live safely if the Admiral lived, and that made him give consent to his death. Though these persons are not to be compared to your Majesty, yet I pray to God the like evil persuasions persuade not one sister against the other, and all for that they have heard false report, and the truth not known. Therefore, once again, kneeling with humbleness of heart, because I am not suffered to bow the knees of my body, I humbly crave to speak with your Highness, which I would not be so bold as to desire if I knew not myself most clear, as I know myself most true. And as for the traitor Wyatt, he might peradventure write me a letter, but on my faith I never received any from him. And as for the copy of the letter sent to the French King, I pray God confound me eternally if ever I sent him word, message, token, or letter, by any means, and to this truth I will stand in till my death.

  Your Highness’s most faithful subject, that hath been from the beginning, and will be to my end,


  ELIZABETH

  I humbly crave but only one word of answer from yourself.

  Vilma Grünwald to Kurt Grünwald, 11 July 1944

  Few letters survive from the death camps built by the Nazis to exterminate the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Here is an almost unreadably poignant short note, from the Czech prisoner Vilma Grünwald to her doctor husband Kurt. She, Kurt, and their two children, John and Frank (Misa), were arrested like thousands of other innocent Jewish families and transported to Auschwitz. At the selection, the SS doctor Josef Mengele sends the limping John to the left—for instant execution in the extermination camp. His mother, knowing what this means, chooses to join him in an act of maternal love. She writes this note moments after she and John have been separated from the other two, then hands it to a guard and asks him to convey it to Kurt, who would be set to work in the neighboring slave labor camp as a physician responsible for restoring injured prisoners to a state that they might work again. Vilma and John are gassed moments later.

  Amazingly, the letter reached Kurt, who survived the Holocaust, and upon his release was reunited with his surviving son Frank, who eventually donated the letter to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.