Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (47 page)

The duchesse de Fitz-James’s vehement negation of a royal romance was printed in
La Vie Contemporaine
, a French periodical, in 1893, a full century after Marie Antoinette’s death.

I desire first of all to do away with the lying legend, based on a calumny, which distorted the relations between Marie Antoinette and Fersen, relations consisting in absolute devotion, in complete abnegation on one side, and on the other in friendship, profound, trusting and grateful. People have wished to degrade to the vulgarities of a love novel, facts which were otherwise terrible, sentiments which were otherwise lofty.

It is precisely because of their connection to the count that these Victorian-era descendants may protest too much. Or perhaps not, but the possibility remains that they had every reason to whitewash their ancestor’s adulterous passion for a once-unpopular queen. It was certainly not to be discussed during an age when her reputation was about to be rehabilitated, or in an era of unmitigated primness.

What is undeniable is that Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen loved each other, and that he risked his own life on more than one occasion in an effort to save hers, personally financed her rescue attempts, and never stopped devising plans to free her. He mourned the date of June 20 every year, because he had obeyed Louis and left Marie Antoinette to journey toward Montmédy without him. She was the woman who came first in his heart, and whose existence was more precious than his own. After her death, Fersen wrote to his sister Sophie, “I have never ceased to love her…how I long to have died at her side…the sole object of my interest has ceased to exist; she alone meant everything to me; and now for the first time do I fully grasp how passionately I was devoted to her. I can think of nothing but her…. I have arranged for agents in Paris to buy anything of hers which may be obtainable, for whatever I can get of this sort will be sacred to me.”

What could be more romantic than that?

N
APOLEON
B
ONAPARTE

1769–1821

R
ULED
AS
E
MPEROR
OF
THE
F
RENCH:
1804–1814
AND
1815

B
orn 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.

N
APOLEON
B
ONAPARTE
AND
M
ARIE
W
ALEWSKA
(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 former 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.