“I shall always remember one of those dismal balls, at which I felt like I was dancing on graves. I don’t feel like dancing any more,” Marie Louise confessed to a friend.
She was never crowned empress. Times had become too dire for another lavish coronation. Instead, on March 30, 1813, Marie Louise swore an oath of fidelity to the emperor and to the constitution at a ceremony in the Elysée Palace, during which Napoleon conferred on her the title of Regent. She had not been named regent during any of his other absences from France. In any event, Napoleon had never intended her duties to be much more than ceremonial, believing she possessed “too young” a mind for the ugly and often unpleasant business of state. Instead, the emperor’s sixty-year-old Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès handled the actual duties of regent.
Napoleon’s empire was in danger. By the Treaty of Chaumont, Prussia, Britain, Russia, and Marie Louise’s homeland of Austria had allied their forces to destroy it. But Marie Louise’s father hastened to assure her that he bore her husband no personal ill will. The same was true of Napoleon’s opinion of Francis. Although Austria had joined the coalition to destroy Napoleon, neither emperor wanted Tsar Alexander to end up holding the best hand and becoming the arbiter for peace.
On January 24, 1814, Napoleon departed Paris in an effort to halt the allied advance. This time when he named his wife to the Regency Council he intended for her to assume a more important role. And she did prove quite competent, providing her husband with detailed reports of government business. In one of her dispatches to him she wrote, “I am growing very brave since your last success . . . I hope I no longer deserve to be called a child—that’s what you liked to call me before you went away.”
When Napoleon was exiled to Elba in 1814, his twenty-two-year-old wife wished to join him, but her father refused to permit it. Although she was an empress and a mother, Marie Louise remained the pawn of two strong men, enemies on the battlefield, each of whom sought to control her. Rather than allow her to travel to Elba, Emperor Francis insisted that his daughter visit her family in Vienna for a couple of months. From there she could journey to Italy, where she had been created Duchess of Parma according to the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, by which Napoleon abdicated on April 11, 1814.
Marie Louise wrote to her husband, “You know by now that orders have been given to prevent my joining you, and to use force if necessary. Be on your guard, my darling. We are being duped. I am in the utmost anxiety about you.”
On April 13, at Fontainebleau, Napoleon wrote a farewell letter to Marie Louise assuring her that he loved her “more than anything in the world.” Then he tried to poison himself with a cocktail of belladonna, hellebore, and opium, but after suffering a fearful stomachache he recovered the following day.
Napoleon sailed for Elba on April 19, 1814, in the aptly named frigate Undaunted. After visiting her Austrian relations, in June Marie Louise traveled to Aix-les-Bains for the waters. There she met thirty-nine-year-old Adam Adalbert, Graf von Neipperg. The charming and cultivated Neipperg had been a general in the Austrian army but had also served as his country’s ambassador to Stockholm. Having lost his right eye in a saber duel he wore a black cloth tied about his head, which hid the injury and lent him a mysterious air. Personally selected as her equerry by Emperor Francis and Metternich, Neipperg was to see that not only did Marie Louise never reach Elba but that she “forget France and consequently the Emperor.”
It didn’t take long for him to accomplish his mission, aided and abetted by members of Marie Louise’s entourage, who convinced her of Napoleon’s numerous extramarital infidelities, assuring her that the imperial marriage itself had been purely political. By September 1814, Marie Louise was Neipperg’s lover. She returned to Vienna with him, having abandoned all thoughts of joining her husband on Elba. By then, she declared she would never again set foot in France, “that horrible country, for anything in the world.” She even forwarded Napoleon’s letters, unopened, to her father, although she asked him to be kind to her husband, writing, “It is the only request I feel I can make and it is the last time I shall concern myself with his fate. I owe him a debt of gratitude for the calm unconcern in which he allowed me to spend my days with him instead of making me unhappy. . . . I hope that we shall have a lasting peace now that the Emperor will no longer be able to disturb it.”
Evidently, Napoleon did not blame his wife for her wavering loyalty. Toward the end of his life he astutely observed, “I believe that Marie Louise is just as much a state prisoner as I am myself . . . I have always had occasion to praise the conduct of my good Louise, and I believe it is totally out of her power to assist me. Moreover she is young and timorous.”
On August 28, 1814, Napoleon received a letter from Marie Louise dated April 10, containing a lock of her hair—her gift to him for his forty-fifth birthday and the last he would ever receive from her.
One evening in February 1815, Napoleon made the abrupt decision to return to France. Within twenty-four hours, he had boarded a brig. On March 1, the ironically named Inconstant sailed into Antibes and Napoleon’s invasion force of approximately one thousand men, forty horses, and two cannon were disembarked. The deposed emperor announced that he had come to attack the King of France—Louis XVIII, the younger brother of Louis XVI—and to conquer his kingdom.
On June 18, Napoleon’s army was defeated at Waterloo. By the 1815 Treaty of Paris, Austria took possession of several territories in Northern Italy, making Emperor Francis’s empire half again as large as it was in 1812.
Before the decisive battle Napoleon had written to Marie Louise from Belgium asking her once more to meet him there. By then he was ill, suffering from piles. He’d grown rotund and his breathing was labored, causing him to pause on occasion to lick the saliva from his lips. General Thiebault commented that “everything about him seemed twisted, shriveled. The normal pallor of his skin had been replaced by a noticeably greenish tinge.”
A fortnight later, Napoleon abdicated. He made plans to dispose of all his wealth and considered moving to America. But on June 27, he found the port at Rochefort blockaded by British warships. In concordance with Britain’s allies, the Prince Regent denied his request for asylum in England.
Instead, the Royal Navy’s Northumberland brought Napoleon to the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, a British colonial outpost thousands of miles from any major land mass. He was accompanied by a small entourage, including his chef, Monsieur La Page. Apart from his first few weeks on the island, Napoleon resided at Longwood, a musty and mildewed residence open to the elements and affording no shade from the subtropical sun. Rats swarmed everywhere in packs so thick their bodies often obscured the floorboards, and various species of biting insect tortured the island’s inhabitants, who were also subject to violent illnesses, including dysentery, liver infections, and raging fevers.
On St. Helena Napoleon had plenty of time to reflect on his life, writing his memoirs, and taking up horticulture. He confided to General Henri-Gratien Bertrand, the manager of his household, that if Josephine had given him a child, he’d have never divorced her. He’d chosen her out of desire and affection; they’d come up in the world together. He ruefully admitted that marrying Marie Louise was “the greatest mistake of my life,” adding, “I should have married a Russian.”
By the end of 1819 Napoleon’s health was failing. He had headaches and insomnia as well as scabies and dermatitis, and was also plagued by ague, nausea, vomiting, a distended stomach, and the occasional convulsive fit. He had always been derailed by stress-induced petit mals.
After a carriage ride on March 17, 1821, Napoleon suffered continuous vomiting and was certain he was dying of stomach cancer, the same disease that had killed his father. By mid-April, he realized he did not have much longer to live.
In a final version of his will, Napoleon wrote, “My death is premature. I have been assassinated by the English oligarchy and their hired murderer.” In this document he also set about making bequ
ests to his family. On his sixteenth birthday his son, “Napoleon II,” was to receive his most cherished possessions—the blue cloak he wore at the battle of Marengo, the sword he wielded at Austerlitz, his uniforms and accompanying military trappings. Marie Louise, of whom he had such “tender memories” (despite whatever eleventh hour regrets Napoleon may have harbored about having married her), was to receive a bracelet bound together by his hair, as well as his heart—in a cask preserved by spirits. It was a spirited gesture to give Marie Louise his heart for all eternity, even if it would no longer beat for her, but his British jailers ultimately prevented that final request from coming to fruition.
On April 25 the fifty-one-year-old deposed emperor became violently ill. A Corsican priest administered extreme unction on May 2, despite the protests of Napoleon’s valet, who insisted that his master was a freethinker.
At 5:49 p.m. on May 6, 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte died. Purportedly, among his faintly murmured last words was “Josephine.” An autopsy revealed a grossly enlarged liver, an ulcerated and perforated stomach, and a large gastric ulcer. Walter Henry, one of the attending doctors, noted that the corpse was hairless with white, delicate skin, and well-defined breasts. “The pubis resembled the Mons Veneris in women,” and he had exceptionally small genitalia, “like a boy’s.” Napoleon had previously boasted of his feminine assets to his physician on St. Helena. “As you can see, doctor, beautiful arms, rounded breasts, soft white skin, not a hair. . . . More than one beautiful lady would glory in a bosom like mine.”
The hairlessness of Napoleon’s corpse was also consistent with signs of arsenic poisoning. Samples of his hair contained both antimony and arsenic. Of the thirty-one symptoms that present for arsenic poisoning, Napoleon suffered from twenty-eight. Arsenic was widely used at the time to treat many common ailments. It was also an ingredient of rat poison and those vermin were abundant at Longwood. Additionally, arsenic was found in the coloring of the Longwood wallpaper, a popular shade known as Schalers Green, which contains copper arsenite. But the enormous dose of calomel administered shortly before Napoleon’s death, plus the accumulation of arsenic in his system, might have combined to produce fatal strychnine poisoning instead.
Five days after his death, Napoleon’s body, ensconced in four coffins, was buried in Geranium Valley on St. Helena.
Marie Louise read about her husband’s passing on July 18, 1821, in the Gazzetta Piemontese. Her matchmaker, Metternich, hadn’t even bothered to give her the news. In a letter Marie Louise wrote soon afterward to her childhood friend Victoria de Poutet, she eulogized her royal marriage: Although I never felt strong sentiments of any kind for him, I cannot forget that he is the father of my son, and far from treating me badly as most people suppose he did, he always showed the deepest regard for me, the only thing one can hope for in a political marriage, so I am very affected, and although I ought to be thankful that his miserable existence is over, I could have wished him many years of a contented life—provided it could have been spent far away from me.
Apart from the late emperor’s mother, the one who most mourned Napoleon’s passing was the ten-year-old Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon and Marie Louise’s son, known by his Austrian title after 1818. No family member sought to break the news of his father’s death; instead, his under-tutor informed him of it, and admitted that he was surprised by his charge’s crying jag. Marie Louise was more moved by her son’s tears than by her husband’s demise; the duke’s sorrow had caused her to reconsider her own feelings. “Death wipes out all one’s unpleasant memories, as I found on this occasion. I could think only of the good he had done me, of the agony of his death, and of his last unhappy years; and I wept bitter tears for him.”
The duke would later write, “If Josephine had been my mother, my father never would have been sent to St. Helena and I would not be languishing here in Vienna.”
Soon after Napoleon’s death, Marie Louise secretly wed her lover, Adam Adalbert, Graf von Neipperg. She’d already given him two children and was pregnant with their third. The former empress was at the apex of happiness, claiming she deserved it because “God knows all I have suffered in life.”
She became an enlightened ruler of Parma, where her subjects referred to her as la buona duchessa. But Neipperg died on February 22, 1829, and soon after, disturbances in Parma caused Marie Louise to decamp with her children to Piacenza. Her son by Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, who had been raised in Austria, died of tuberculosis on July 22, 1832, at the age of twenty-one.
On February 17, 1834, Marie Louise wed her third husband, Comte Charles de Bombelles, the majordomo of her court. They were married for thirteen and a half years. Marie Louise died at the age of fifty-six on December 17, 1847, and was buried beside the bodies of her father and the Duke of Reichstadt in the vault of the Kapuzinerkirche in Vienna.
In 1840, Napoleon’s body was exhumed and taken to Paris, where it lies entombed beneath the dome of Les Invalides. One hundred years later Adolf Hitler ordered the remains of the emperor’s sole legitimate son to be interred alongside his father. The duke’s coffin left Vienna for Paris on December 12, 1940, which would have been the hundred and forty-ninth birthday of his mother, Marie Louise.
In a major descent from the sublime to the vengefully macabre, just after his demise Napoleon was emasculated by a Corsican priest surnamed Vignali. Centuries passed and what was allegedly the emperor’s organ changed hands, so to speak, until 1977, when John K. Lattimer, professor emeritus and former chairman of urology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, bought it at auction for $3,000. Lattimer passed away in May 2007. Presumably, Napoleon’s penis lives on.
QUEEN VICTORIA 1819-1901
RULED ENGLAND: 1837-1901
and
PRINCE ALBERT
OF SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA
1819-1861
married 1840-1861
“When day dawned (for we did not sleep much) and I beheld that beautiful angelic face by my side, it was more than I can express!”
—Queen Victoria’s diary entry, February 11, 1840, the morning after her wedding night
WHEN SHE WAS SIX DAYS SHY OF HER SEVENTEENTH birthday, on May 18, 1836, Victoria, not yet Queen of England, had the opportunity to meet her two Coburg cousins, Ernest and his younger brother, Albert. Authoritative males were lacking in her young life. Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, had died of a chill at the age of fifty-two, when she was only a few months old. Her mother, the German-born Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, deliberately shielded Victoria from her “wicked uncles” so that she could never be tainted with even the slightest whiff of the immorality that was the hallmark of the Hanoverian monarchy. Victoria was to represent a fresh start, the future of England, rather than an extension of its dissolute past.
However, Victoria was always in search of a father figure. When she was growing up, avuncular wisdom was dispensed long-distance by her mother’s brother Leopold, King of the Belgians—the former husband of George IV’s daughter, the late Princess Charlotte. And it was Leopold who played matchmaker between Albert and Victoria.
Victoria’s immediate reaction to her sixteen-year-old cousin was overwhelmingly positive. According to her diary entry, “. . . Albert . . . is extremely handsome; his hair is about the same color as mine; his eyes are large and blue, and he has a beautiful nose and a very sweet mouth with fine teeth; but the charm of his countenance is his expression, which is most delightful; c’est à la fois [it’s simultaneously] full of goodness and sweetness, and very clever and intelligent.”
However, Albert privately nursed some reservations regarding Victoria’s suitability as a future spouse. His mother had wed his significantly older father at the age of sixteen, but had run off with a handsome army lieutenant when Albert was just five years old. The incident soured his views on females and sex and undoubtedly helped to form Albert’s zero-tolerance policy regarding scandalous women and the men who enabled them. Victoria was ebullient
and vivacious; she enjoyed late nights and parties and also delighted in the trivialities and fripperies of court life and etiquette. Albert had also heard she was stubborn, and—perhaps even worse—that she was not terribly fond of nature, which was one of his passions.
Nevertheless, the visit progressed swimmingly. On June 7, Victoria wrote to Leopold with characteristic effusiveness, “I must thank you, my beloved Uncle, for the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me, in the person of dear Albert. Allow me . . . to tell you how delighted I am with him, and how much I like him in every way. He possesses every quality that could be desired to render me perfectly happy. He is so sensible, so kind, and so good, and so amiable, too. He has besides, the most pleasing and delightful exterior and appearance you can possibly see.”
The stage had been set for a genuine love match, that rarest of occurrences in the history of royal marriages. And how times had changed from the days of Henry VIII. As England was formally an Anglican country and the royal family all Protestants, there was of course no need for the couple to secure a papal dispensation before heading to the altar. Consanguinity, as it once applied to cousins—even first cousins—had become a nonissue.
On June 20, 1837, the eighteen-year-old Victoria acceded to the throne on the death of her uncle, William IV. By all accounts the diminutive sovereign possessed remarkable poise for one so young and with such enormous responsibility on her slim shoulders. Her modest yet regal demeanor quickly won Victoria the praise of her ministers as well as her subjects. And, almost immediately, those ministers began pressuring her to marry. But the queen felt unready to wed right away—if at all. “I said I dreaded the thought of marrying; that I was so accustomed to have my own way, that I thought it was 10 to 1 that I shouldn’t agree with anybody,” Victoria wrote in her journal on April 18, 1839. “Oh, but you would have it still,” the PM, Lord Melbourne, hastily assured the young sovereign.
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