What could be more romantic than that?
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
1769–1821
RULED AS EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH: 1804–1814 AND 1815
Born in Ajaccio, Corsica, to an attorney and a domineering mother a year after the island lost its fight for independence to the French, Napoleone Buonaparte was ambitious from the start. He was sent to the mainland to learn French and was enrolled at a military academy in May 1779, where his scrappy but studious demeanor caught his teachers’ attention. They were impressed, but wished he wouldn’t get into so many fights. Little Napoleone wished the larger boys wouldn’t mock his Corsican accent or his country manners. He’d teach those arrogant kids a lesson one day. He’d succeed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
He was intense in everything, and his dedication to his studies paid off handsomely. He Francofied his name to Napoleon Bonaparte, but at first he didn’t clean up too well. His full height (measured in the Parisian foot) was 21.789 inches, or five feet, six inches, slightly shorter than average for the day. His lanky dark hair was “ill combed and ill powdered,” his “complexion yellow and seemingly unhealthy,” and his insistence on wearing a tattered oversize overcoat everywhere lent him a “slovenly look,” said Laure Permon, a friend who knew him throughout his youth.
But appearances are deceptive. At the age of twenty-four, he successfully blockaded the British at Toulon in 1793, despite their additional aid from the Kingdom of Naples. By 1795, Napoleon was Commander of the Interior and, through the assistance of his friend Paul Barras, secured a job with the influential Committee of Public Safety in Paris. Then he fell in love with Barras’ lover Rose de Beauharnais, a widowed Creole society darling who had been married to one of the movers and shakers of the French Revolution. Passionately in love, he renamed her Josephine. They were wed on the evening of March 9, 1796, in the gloomy office of the mayor of the second arrondissement. Both Napoleon and Josephine lied about their ages on their marriage certificate.
Napoleon had just been appointed commander of the Republican Army in Italy, and a few days after his wedding he set off for headquarters. While he was off campaigning, Josephine, who found her husband’s intensity overwhelming, had an affair. News of her infidelity changed Napoleon’s character in one key way: From then on, as an act of revenge, he was determined to be unfaithful to her with whatever woman struck his fancy.
Politically, he behaved similarly, taking France and then adding to his list of conquests as much of the rest of the world as he could obtain. In November 1799, his bold entrance into France’s legislative body, the Council of Five Hundred, and his announcement that it was time for a change, resulted in an entire reorganization of the government into a consulate of three men, one of whom was himself. Before long Napoleon became First Consul, and the most powerful man in the Republic. In 1802, he was made Consul for Life.
Two years later, his hunger for power not yet sated, he became everything the revolutionaries had fought to destroy: royalty. On May 28, 1804, the Senate bestowed upon Napoleon the incongruous title of Emperor of the French Republic. He and Josephine were crowned on December 2, in a ceremony so opulent that most kings would have envied its extravagance.
Fortuitous in having a large family, Napoleon appointed his brothers and brothers-in-law his viceroys as he continued to expand his empire. By the summer of 1808, his domain extended from the Tagus River on the Iberian Peninsula to the Russian steppes, and from Hamburg and the North Sea to the boot of Italy. The empire reached its zenith in 1810, by which time it also encompassed the Confederation of the Rhine and the Duchy of Warsaw.
More than one of Napoleon’s female conquests had given him children, but throughout their marriage Josephine had never been able to conceive, though she had borne her first husband a son and daughter. Desperate for an heir, as he believed that without one Europe would ultimately revert to its previous boundaries and kingdoms, Napoleon believed the only remedy was to find a new wife. Although he professed to adore Josephine, they were divorced on January 10, 1810.
Both were emotionally distraught over the proceedings, but the emperor bounced back quickly, marrying eighteen-year-old Marie-Louise of Austria less than three months later, on April 1. She bore him the yearned-for son on March 20, 1811.
Napoleon’s campaign to take Russia in 1812 would fail miserably, and after that, it was all downhill. By the Treaty of Chaumont, the forces of Russia, Prussia, Britain, and Austria allied to destroy his empire. Paris was taken by the coalition, and Napoleon was compelled to abdicate on April 11, 1814. The Treaty of Fontainebleau exiled him to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean.
But one evening the following February, Bonaparte made the abrupt decision to return to France and reclaim his empire. He arrived in Paris on March 1, and his sovereignty lasted a hundred days before he was defeated on June 18 by Lord Wellington’s forces at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium.
Napoleon was exiled for the second and final time, dispatched by British warship to the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, where he died at 5:49 p.m. on May 6, 1821. His autopsy revealed a grossly enlarged liver, a large gastric ulcer, and a perforated stomach.
It was said that among his last words was the faintly murmured “Josephine.” But of his numerous extramarital romances, there was only one woman with whom the little corporal and great dictator truly fell in love.
Her name was Marie Walewska.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE AND
MARIE WALEWSKA (1786–1817)
When the object of Countess Marie Walewska’s girlhood hero worship was presented as a romantic reality, she panicked. Yet over eight years she made a remarkable journey, both geographical and emotional, from shy though impassioned patriot to passionate paramour.
During the last third of the eighteenth century, the kingdom of Poland, lacking natural boundaries, had thrice been the victim of its bordering neighbors’ greed and aggression. Partitioned in 1772, 1793, and 1795 when the imperial powers of Austria, Prussia, and Russia carved away Polish territories (either by force, by treaty, or both), Poland was subsumed into their respective empires. By the final partition in 1795, Poland, in name, was erased from the map of Europe. Her last king, Stanislas Poniatowski (a former lover of Catherine the Great, who had recommended him for the job), was compelled to abdicate. But with the example of the French Revolution right in front of them, educated Poles craved nothing more than to reclaim their independence. Little more than a decade later, they were firmly convinced that the one man who could deliver their renewed autonomy was the Emperor of the French, then on the march through Western Europe.
Back in 1794, seven-year-old Marie Łaczyńska’s father, Matthias Łaczyński, was mowed down by Cossacks as he tried to aid a wounded friend in the Battle of Maciejowice, one of the Polish Volunteer Army’s unsuccessful bids for independence. Her mother was left a widow with seven children to care for on her own.
Madame Łaczyńska placed Marie at a Warsaw convent shortly before her fourteenth birthday in order to complete her education. A contemporary described the petite Marie at the time as “very beautiful, with incredibly blue eyes, blond hair which she wore down to her waist and a particularly sweet expression on her face. She made me think of an angel or a wood nymph.”
Marie’s best friend at school was Elizabeth Grabowska, the daughter of the deposed Polish king and his morganatic wife. As teenage girls are wont to do, they mooned over their mutual hero Napoleon Bonaparte, certain that he was their savior and future liberator. The patriotic Marie’s puppy love took the form of her scratching his name in the frost on the windowpanes of their dorm room.
She returned to the family estate of Kiernozia at the age of sixteen and a half, greeted with the news that as the youngest and prettiest of her sisters she would have to marry as soon as possible. The target was any suitable wealthy landowner who would be able to support the Łaczyńskis and save them from financial ruin.
Cultured, dapper, pompous, and the for
mer chamberlain to the king of Poland, the sixty-eight-year-old, twice-widowed Count Anastase Colonna Walewski had the largest local real estate holdings. He undertook to court the teenage Marie, perhaps because he was vain enough to believe that he was still a lady-killer, or possibly because he thought that, as her family was so eager to marry her off, he’d score an adorable little wife at a bargain-basement price. The May-December pair had but one thing in common: a fierce Polish patriotism.
To a girl still in her mid-teens, the contemplation of wedlock to a man pushing seventy must have seemed like a death sentence. After Marie’s mother explained that marriage to Count Walewski was the only way to help lift the family out of its financial quicksand, Marie became physically ill with a psychosomatic pneumonia. But she could not forestall the inevitable forever. Several weeks later, on June 17, 1804, she wed Count Walewski. She was seventeen years old, although the day would come when she would alter the date of the marriage documents by a year, to make herself appear underage at the time.
Almost a year to the day from her wedding to Anastase, Marie gave birth to a son, Anthony Basil Rudolph Walewski. According to the local custom of placing aristocratic babies with wet nurses, the sickly infant was immediately given to a healthy peasant woman who would undertake his care.
Trapped in a loveless marriage, Marie had nothing else to focus on but her Catholic faith and her burning zeal for Polish independence. In this, her savior was her secret soul mate. On the advice of his foreign minister, the savvy Talleyrand, who believed that liberating Poland would be good for his boss’s empire as he marched eastward from Berlin to Warsaw, Napoleon declared, “It is in the interest of France, in the interest of Europe, that Poland exists.”
At the time, however, it was little more than empty rhetoric. Napoleon required the Poles’ help to defeat Russia, but was in a delicate situation: If they actively demonstrated for their freedom, it would push the Russians into military conflict with France prematurely, and Napoleon’s Grande Armée was not only unprepared to face Tsar Alexander’s troops, but needed Austria’s neutrality in a war against Russia, and could not risk antagonizing the Hapsburg empire either. And yet, when Napoleon dispatched his vanguard into Poland at the end of 1806, his marshals (among them, his brother-in-law Prince Joachim Murat, whom everyone expected to be named her next king) were given orders to enter as liberators, not as conquerors.
This was how the hopeful Poles viewed the emperor, even before his arrival. They were convinced that by defeating Austria and Prussia and uniting the former Holy Roman Empire under Napoleon’s imperial eagle, and in achieving his ambitions for a new Europe, Bonaparte could also manifest their dreams of renewed autonomy.
A number of festivities were organized to welcome the emperor, but the seventy-one-year-old Count Walewski, who still regaled anyone who would listen with tales of his glory days in the Bourbon court, had not been asked to help coordinate any of them. Still, he and his twenty-year-old wife, small and dainty, with a perfect figure, her waist-length, honey-hued hair piled atop her head in the manner of married ladies, were on every guest list. One of the most stunning women in the room, Marie was introduced by Count Charles de Flahaut, a lieutenant attached to the imperial staff, to his illustrious father, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the prince de Bénévent.
Both Charleses had been overheard remarking upon Marie’s beauty and intelligence. Talleyrand, a product of the ancien régime, considered Bonaparte a parvenu, but he understood him well and knew how to play him. It is commonly believed that it was Talleyrand’s brainchild to place her in Napoleon’s bed in order to further his foreign policy scheme, as the clever statesman recognized that Countess Marie Walewska’s patriotism coincided with his own ideas for Polish independence.
The emperor arrived in Warsaw on December 18, reviewed his troops, but left abruptly only four days later as tensions with Russian forces escalated into violence. Warsaw became a city on the front lines, and the unhappily married Marie, who, in her mother’s words, had been suffering from melancholia (the nineteenth-century word for depression) and was sleepwalking through life, found fulfillment at the hospitals tending to the wounded soldiers.
By the end of the month, Napoleon was back in Warsaw, settling in for the winter. His wife, the empress Josephine, had wished to join him. She already harbored uncomfortable premonitions of his infidelity. In October, Napoleon’s mistress Eléanore Denuelle had informed him that she was pregnant. The childless state of the imperial marriage had been a matter of great concern for some time. Josephine had given her first husband two children, but had never become enceinte by Napoleon. Eléanore’s news changed everything; to Bonaparte, it was the confirmation that Josephine’s infertility, and not his own issues, were to blame for their lack of an heir. The empress was devastated by this new turn of events. Terrified that her husband would make good on his intentions to divorce her for barrenness (and, in fact, she may have been going through menopause, as Napoleon claimed her physician told him that her menses had ceased), she cast a pall of doubt over the emperor’s suppositions by informing him that Eléanore had been two-timing him with his brother-in-law Joachim Murat. The child she carried might instead be his.
It was Napoleon’s turn to be shocked. Although he had sent Josephine passionate and erotic letters at the outset of their courtship, after she had been unfaithful to him once, early in their marriage, he never let her forget her single adulterous misstep, despite his own numerous affairs. He would continue to avenge her infidelity with another of his own.
The duplicitous Eléanore might now be yesterday’s news, but Josephine worried that her husband would remain so long in Poland that he would fall in love, and hinted as much in her correspondence to him. Napoleon’s provocative reply of January 7, 1807, is typical of the long-distance emotional cruelty he would inflict upon her.
I don’t know what you mean by ladies I am supposed to be involved with. I love only my dear little Josephine who is so good, though sulky and capricious…and lovable except when she is jealous and becomes a little devil…. As for these ladies, if I needed to occupy my time with one of them I assure you I would want her to have pretty rosebud nipples. Is this so with the ladies you write to me about?
The truth was, however, that by the time she received the letter, Josephine’s prescient fears had borne fruit, and the gray-eyed, broad-chested, sallow-complected emperor was already smitten by one of these beauties: Countess Marie Walewska. They had been introduced at a soiree on the night of January 7, presumably just hours after Napoleon had written that note.
When Talleyrand first met the Walewskis at the welcome reception for Prince Joachim Murat in late December, he flattered the old count by pretending to remember him from the court of Louis XVI. But he immediately sensed that the luscious Marie would be a tempting morsel for the thirty-seven-year-old Napoleon. And after Talleyrand had heavily buttered up Count Walewski, wild horses could not have kept Anastase from meeting His Imperial Majesty.
Excited beyond measure at the prospect, he asked Marie to have a new evening gown made up and to wear the Walewski sapphires, which would complement the color of her eyes. The count then engaged Henriette de Vauban, an old friend from his Versailles days, to give Marie some pointers on court etiquette.
Perhaps it was due to the doubtful paternity of Eléanore Denuelle’s fetus, but Napoleon’s valet Louis Constant Wairy, known as Constant, had noted that lately his employer’s opinion of the fair sex had grown even more bitter. “They belong to the highest bidder. Power is what they like—it is the greatest of all aphrodisiacs…. I take them and forget them.”
Did Napoleon conveniently forget that the reason he’d scored so often was because he played the power card?
On the evening of January 7, wearing a new velvet gown, Marie stood in the receiving line waiting to meet the emperor. According to the memoirs of another guest, Madame Anna Nakwaska,
[A]s he looked around, his face gradually softened, the powerful
brow relaxed…as he surveyed us with evident approval. “Ah, qu’il y a des jolies femmes à Varsovie!” [“Ah, there are such pretty women in Warsaw!”] I heard him say as he stopped in front of Madame Walewska, the young wife of the old Chamberlain Anastase, who happened to be standing next to me.
No doubt her “skin of dazzling whiteness” and “beautifully proportioned figure” (in Constant’s words) grabbed his attention. What a couple they would make, the emperor might have thought—and the diminutive blonde wouldn’t even tower over his five-foot-six-inch frame. Guests noticed Napoleon pausing as he met Marie and gazing at her later in the evening as Talleyrand gave him the lowdown on her background. His comment about the beautiful women of Warsaw zinged about the ballroom, though gossips were quick to add that it had been directed straight at the Countess Walewska.
A few days later, Talleyrand hosted another ball, ostensibly to inaugurate the carnival season, but his true aim was to throw Napoleon and Marie together again.
Too overcome with excitement at the prospect of seeing and speaking with her hero so soon, Marie tried to beg off. But Count Walewski, who knew nothing of the backstory, and evidently had no clue that the emperor had become smitten with his wife, wouldn’t hear of it.
Napoleon had given his staff orders to find Marie as soon as she arrived and to escort her to him so that she could be his partner in the contra dance. In an eightsome formed of three other Warsaw belles, the emperor’s chief of staff, and two of his brothers-in-law (the princes Borghese and Murat), Marie danced the night away. This time, instead of being jealous of all the attention his wife was garnering from other men, Count Walewski beamed with proprietary delight. All eyes were upon Marie as they watched the emperor watch her. She was gowned in white tulle over white satin lined with pink and gold. A coronet of laurel leaves wreathed her honey blond curls as though she herself were a prize, the spoils of war awarded to the conquering hero. Even the shell-like colors of her evening dress could have been an erotic metaphor for the vestal sacrifice she was poised to become.
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 36
