by Mark Braude
Napoleon wanted to combine finding a new mate with some alliance building and had calculated that more political value lay in marrying a Habsburg than a Romanov, though he briefly considered Tsar Alexander’s fourteen-year-old sister, Annette. When the archduchess Maria Luisa learned that the newly divorced emperor wanted to meet her, she told a friend “that to see this creature would be for me a worse torture than all the martyrdoms.” She read the papers, hoping to find news of his engagement to anyone but her. “I’m only sorry for the poor princess he will choose,” she wrote to a friend, “for I’m sure I won’t be the victim of politics. . . . Napoleon is too much afraid of a refusal and too bent upon doing us further harm to venture upon such a request. And Papa is too kind to coerce me in so important a matter.”
She told her father that learning about Napoleon’s search for a wife had compelled her to reveal a secret: she’d fallen in love with her cousin, Archduke Francis. “I’m certain he has all the qualities that would make me happy,” she wrote. “I’ve confided in Mama and she shares my unbounded confidence and has had the kindness to suggest that I write to you about my sentiments.” Though she pledged to respect his final decision on the matter as “a loving obedient daughter,” she reminded her “dearest Papa” of his promise never to force his eldest and favorite daughter to marry against her will.
Francis was unmoved by his daughter’s newfound interest in her cousin, which was likely an invention prompted by “Mama,” her stepmother, Maria Ludovica, who was not much older than the archduchess, who had recently turned seventeen. He had Metternich advise Maria Luisa of the political advantages of a match that would simultaneously cement an alliance with France and stop Napoleon from marrying a Romanov to strengthen Russian ties that could threaten Austria. He told his daughter that she alone was in charge of deciding her fate. But given her time, place, and station, she would have known that any talk of freedom carried no weight. “I desire only what my duty commands me to desire,” she told Metternich.
A few days later Napoleon sent Maria Luisa his first letter, which he’d handwritten (terribly, the letter is barely legible) rather than dictating, as was his usual practice. This was, after all, a marriage proposal. He said that her “brilliant qualities” had inspired him to approach her father with “the request that he shall entrust us to the happiness of your Imperial Highness. May we hope that the feelings which prompt us to take this step will be acceptable to you? May we flatter ourselves with the belief that you will not be guided solely by the duty of obeying your Parents?” He promised to care for her and please her in every way, “with the hope of succeeding some day in winning your regard.”
He’d never met her, but an Austrian ambassador had told him that she was in good health, had a light complexion, and was pleasant to look at. She could play the piano and the harp and liked to paint. Her mother had given birth to thirteen children, her great-grandmother twice that number. “When I heard Louise was fair I was very glad,” Napoleon later remembered.
Maria Luisa received a second letter two days after the first, this time dictated. In an elaborate ceremony at the Hofburg palace, the French chief of staff, Marshal Berthier, handed her the message along with a diamond-encrusted portrait of Napoleon:
Madame my Sister, the successful issue of my request to His Majesty the Emperor, your Father, to be joined to you in marriage is a most precious token of the esteem and regard in which he holds me. I highly appreciate the consent you yourself bestow upon a union that fills me with the most heartfelt joy and which will embellish the whole of my life. I look forward with the greatest impatience to the moment when its conclusion will be in sight.
Maria Luisa asked Berthier if he thought she would be allowed to keep a garden in Paris, and also did Napoleon have any great love for music. A proxy wedding took place three days later, with a Habsburg uncle standing in for Napoleon and Berthier serving as witness, eating the post-wedding feast on the groom’s behalf.
A few days later, Marie Louise (as she was known from then on, though Napoleon, who liked to alter the names of the women in his life, preferred to call her Louise) reached Compiègne in her golden berlin to meet her new husband, who’d been trying to master the waltz to surprise his Austrian bride but had abandoned the lessons given by his stepdaughter with Joséphine, Hortense, after two nights, saying that he wasn’t “meant to excel as a dancer.”
For many observers the union was a debacle, the kind of inappropriate match that in a more rural society might have been met by the clanging pots and disapproving horn blasts of charivari, rough music. At court in Vienna they were already saying that Austria had been humiliated by a foreign rival, just as the archduchess would be despoiled by the Corsican ogre in the marital bed.
Yet according to the later recollections of the bride and groom, it was a happy honeymoon. Marie Louise painted Napoleon’s portrait in oil. He liked to pinch her cheeks and smack her backside in front of the staff. Marie Louise had grown up in a household where naked bodies had been cut out of her books and she had been given only female pets so that no one would have to explain to her the mechanics of sex. In his final exile, Napoleon boasted about their first night together, saying that “she liked it so much that she asked me to do it again.”
A few months later the family physician, Corvisart, told the couple to expect a child sometime around the first day of spring. Another Napoleonic offspring had recently entered the world, as Marie Walewska had given birth to a son, Alexandre, on her ex-husband’s estate outside Warsaw that May. Count Walewski, nearly eighty years old, had recognized the boy as his own. Napoleon sent some Brussels lace as a gift.
Marie Louise went into a difficult labor on the last day of winter. Though any birth at that time was dangerous, one “by irons,” as forceps were known, was especially risky. Napoleon advised the doctor to “save the mother, it’s her right. We can have another child.” The baby that arrived showed no apparent signs of life, but then cried out seven minutes after delivery. The commandant of ceremonial artillery gave the sign for the 101-gun salute to celebrate the birth of Napoléon François Charles Joseph, the new King of Rome.
“Never would I believe I could be so happy,” Marie Louise wrote to her father while recovering from the labor. “My love for my husband grows all the time and when I remember the tenderness I can scarcely prevent myself from crying. Even had I not loved him previously, nothing can stop me from loving him now.”
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THREE YEARS LATER, in the spring of 1814, Marie Louise was again following her father’s orders concerning her husband, though now Francis wanted to break the union he’d helped to create, since it no longer served Austrian purposes. Citing her recent fevers, Francis told her that if she rushed off to join her husband in her condition it would only cause her and Napoleon more anxiety. He promised that after regaining her strength in Vienna she could travel to Parma to establish her rule there and then, if she wanted, could go on to Elba.
Just before Marie Louise left the chateau at Rambouillet for Vienna, Tsar Alexander visited her to pledge his friendship. “Would you ever have believed I should still have to face meeting the man chiefly responsible for all the ill that has befallen us?” she wrote to Napoleon just after their meeting. She wanted him to know that her “heart was dead” when she received the tsar.
In her letter she outlined her “plan of campaign,” advising Napoleon not to mention any detail of it in his replies since his letters were no doubt being read by others before they reached her. She said she would stay in Vienna as briefly as possible and would then travel to the French resort of Aix-les-Bains, under the pretense of taking the waters there for her health. Once out of her father’s reach she would go on to set up her rule in Parma and then, along with their son, would be reunited with him on Elba. “I’m hoping to be able to join you in July,” she wrote. “I haven’t mentioned such a thing to these gentleman [at Ramb
ouillet] but I’ve set my heart on it. My health is going from bad to worse. I’m so wretched that I just don’t know what to say to you. I beg you again not to forget me and to believe that I’ll always love you and that I’m deeply unhappy.”
Her letters never revealed how badly she was treated after fleeing Paris. In notes omitted from his published memoir, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Caulaincourt alludes to Joseph Bonaparte’s trying to force himself on Marie Louise once or more during this time. Though she’d earlier sworn to Caulaincourt that she would join the exile, she told him “that she was willing to die with him, but not to go to Elba with him because of his family.”
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THE ROBINSON CRUSOE OF ELBA
CAPTAIN USSHER WOKE TO drum rolls and shouts of “Long Live the Emperor!” The sun had yet to rise on what would be his first full day on Elba. Napoleon was already up and eager to inspect some of Portoferraio’s fortifications and storehouses. The two men toured the town on foot, escorted by a dozen soldiers. They visited with some veterans of Napoleon’s campaigns at the barracks, who traded battle stories for his benefit: Cairo, Jaffa, Marengo, Austerlitz, Moscow, Leipzig. “He liked every bit of vulgar chit-chat,” wrote Pons of Napoleon’s fondness for soldierly scuttlebutt. “All kinds of foolishness.”
Hoping to spot a building worthy of an imperial residence—the existing governor’s house was deemed too small—Napoleon rode out with Ussher to survey some of the island. They returned to Portoferraio that afternoon having seen no more worthy candidate than a run-down structure just a few hundred feet from the town hall from where they’d started. The structure was actually two squat buildings that were being used in tandem as a mess hall. They sat on the ridge above Portoferraio’s main settlement. The locals called the site I Mulini, for the two windmills that had once stood there. Decades earlier, the governor’s gardener had made the place his cottage; now grain was being stored in what had been his outhouse.
It was a modest property, better suited to a provincial lord than to an emperor, and it would put Napoleon near enough to his subjects to hear the clinking of their dishes and smell the frying of their fish. But it had clear military advantages, sitting as it did atop a sea cliff with a face sheer enough to discourage anyone brandishing grapple and hook, a hundred feet above the shoreline. The guns of Fort Stella stood just to the east, abutted by a lighthouse, while to the west stood another citadel, Fort Falcone, and some batteries. Along with a hexagonal watchtower guarding the harbor, Forts Stella and Falcone had formed the “three backbones” of Portoferraio’s defense since the time of Cosimo de’ Medici, who had funded their construction to protect his maritime trade, and for a time Elba had been one of the most secure places in the Mediterranean. Napoleon thought the two buildings comprising the mess hall could be connected and made livable in a few weeks. By the end of summer it could be transformed into a proper palace, with a second story added for his wife and child. Bertrand was to draw up plans and figure out how to complete renovations at the least possible cost.
After surveying the grounds, Ussher thought Napoleon had “made a better bargain than most people imagine and may be comfortable if his imagination will allow himself to be so.” From his back garden he could survey the open sea and from his front door he could wander out and look down at the town and marina. His subjects, in turn, only had to look up to see where power resided on Elba. Portoferraio was all zigzagging muck-strewn lanes, winding, disjointed staircases, and shadowy corners, the product of an architecture of fear, designed to misguide outsiders. The best a ruler could do was to perch himself at the top of that wild maze.
Having secured the site of his main residence in the closest thing Elba had to a metropolis, Napoleon next wanted to find a country house. He set off again with Ussher on another long ride, “about two leagues into the country,” wrote Ussher, “over mountains and precipices, but nothing is impassable to him.” They stopped at the shop of a village wine merchant for lunch, where there were fresh strawberries for dessert. When Ussher commented favorably on the wine, Napoleon ordered two thousand bottles to be sent to the crew of the Undaunted. Years later, Napoleon recalled the pleasures of Elban wine, which he claimed the people of Tuscany preferred to all the other wines of Italy.
They returned to Portoferraio after sunset, unimpressed by any of the houses they’d seen. Following a starlit stroll around the grounds of what he’d taken to calling the Palazzo dei Mulini, Napoleon returned to his room in the Biscotteria. He sent a messenger to summon the mining administrator. It was just after midnight.
On approaching Napoleon’s bedchamber, Pons heard his name and the sounds of arguing. Entering, he saw General Dalesme, who with a nod indicated that he should answer yes to whatever question would be asked of him, while Bertrand signed that he should answer no. Napoleon, oblivious to the pantomiming taking place behind him, asked Pons if he could arrange a tour of the iron mines in Rio for nine in the morning and if he could tell him where to find a good breakfast somewhere in town before the visit.
Pons said he would be honored to guide the tour himself and to host him at his own table, so long as he could be forgiven for the sorry state of his house. He’d deserted Rio a few weeks earlier after deciding to shut down the mines until it was clear who was in charge of Elba, moving his family to Portoferraio, which he thought safer than a town full of out-of-work miners. Pleased by the answer, Napoleon turned to Bertrand and chastised him for having doubted that Pons would be willing to grant such a reasonable request. Watching Bertrand leave in a sulk, Napoleon told Pons that the grand marshal suffered from the affliction of thinking everything impossible.
Pons woke his wife and asked her to sew two Elban flags to be sent overnight along with any food she could scrounge up to add to whatever they’d left in their larder in Rio. He rode alone ten miles through the darkness. Arriving in Rio, he found no meat in his house and went out in the half-light to try his luck in the waters. He caught a whopping porgy right away, prompting some fishermen who witnessed this little miracle to call him a “conjurer” who cast his nets like spells.
At seven, Pons rode up into the hills of Rio Alta to meet Napoleon, Bertrand, Drouot, Dalesme, Koller, Campbell, and Ussher so they could all ride in to Rio Marina below. As with other twinned towns on the island, Rios Alta and Marina evolved out of an ancient practice of splitting coastal settlements into a fishing village at the shore and a fortified town above to which coastal dwellers could flee in the event of an attack by sea. Over the centuries the two Rios had developed into separate towns, each with its own customs and communities, who, as Pons put it, “have never agreed and . . . never will.”
Following instruction from Pons, the mining families had lined the red foothills bordering the road into Rio Marina. Two Elban flags that had arrived just in time care of Madame Pons flew at the main gate to town. A cortege of young girls presented Napoleon with flowers and took turns kissing his hand.
Despite the day’s encouraging start, it soon turned into one full of “gaucheries,” to use Pons’s term. First there was an uninspiring church service led by a bumbling priest, who struggled through even the most basic rituals. Next, while showing Napoleon and the others his office at the mines, Pons realized that his gardens were dominated by three-petaled lilies, fleurs-de-lys. Though they had been planted without malice months earlier, Pons was furious that no one had thought to pull up these Bourbon symbols. Worst of all, from Pons’s view, was the boisterous reception he received from the townspeople wherever he and Napoleon went. While there were customary cries of “Long Live the Emperor!,” the vivas for Pons were far louder. “Babbo! [Father!],” shouted the workers and their families, who hadn’t seen Pons in weeks. Napoleon bristled at the word, perhaps because it reminded him of Corsica, where a generation earlier the peasants had referred to their beloved patriot Paoli with the same epithet. He told Pons that it seemed that he and not Napoleon was the true “prince” in Rio. Pons demurred by
saying he was no sovereign but merely cared for his workers the way a father would for his children.
At lunch Napoleon asked detailed questions about the mines but directed them to everyone but Pons, even turning away from him as he spoke. Cut by the gesture, Pons made as if to leave, until Dalesme persuaded him to stay with an entreating tilt of the head. The meal went on for a while until it was Napoleon who left abruptly, standing up and exiting the dining room in silence before coffee had been served.
A few hours later he called on Pons for a private talk and now they had their coffee. “He asked if I wanted to stay with him,” wrote Pons. “I answered that nothing would please me more than to be useful to him. He misunderstood my words, thinking that I was trying to tell him he needed me.” Napoleon sipped his drink and glared. He said he didn’t care whether Pons thought he could be useful but only wanted to know if he wished to keep his job. “An old soldier must get straight to the point,” he said. “Are you staying or are you going?” Pons misinterpreted his tone as playful and so answered in what he thought was the same lighthearted manner that he would do whatever was wished of him. Napoleon said nothing, stood up, and left the room.
Unspoken but at the heart of this joust was the fate of roughly fifty thousand francs in mining profits that had accrued in the months since Elba was put under British naval blockade. As new owner of the mines, Napoleon felt entitled to what was in the coffers, while Pons thought it wrong to disobey his existing written orders, which dictated that the money should be sent, as it always had been, to the French treasury, where it helped provide pensions for soldiers decorated with the Legion of Honor. Napoleon had been the one to arrange this system in the first place, which was why Pons had been sent to revitalize Elba’s modest mining industry five years earlier. Pons had been so good at his job, introducing bonuses, an emergency medical fund, and a retirement program on one hand, while rooting out theft and corruption through brutal disciplinary measures on the other, that the mines were putting around three hundred thousand francs a year into the treasury.
