Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (49 page)

As Marie still appeared to be hesitating, Henriette then deputized one of Prince Poniatowski’s other mistresses, who was also a friend of the countess, to tag-team her into submission. Raven-haired Emily Cichoka managed to persuade Marie that she didn’t have to have sex with Napoleon. “Nothing need happen,” Emily assured her; Marie could just
talk
to the emperor—talk to him about Poland.

To make sure she didn’t chicken out, on the chosen day both Henriette and Emily remained with Marie until dark, when Marshal Duroc came to fetch her in a carriage. Heavily veiled, the countess was conveyed to a side entrance of the castle. She arrived “in a terrible state,” according to Duroc. “Pale, trembling, her eyes full of tears…she could hardly walk unaided…. Later, while she was with the emperor, I heard her sobbing…my heart ached for her.” Duroc formed the impression that Napoleon didn’t get “any satisfaction” from Marie that night, meaning that she didn’t succumb.
Evidently, all they did, to the emperor’s frustration, was converse, as he called Marie
“ma douce colombe”
—“my sweet dove”—and endeavored to put her at ease.

Napoleon allowed the distraught countess to depart unmolested, but her hysteria had only fueled, rather than cooled, his ardor for her. Tears “tug at my heart-strings,” he admitted. He’d extracted her promise to return, and the following day a red leather jewelry case arrived for her accompanied by this letter:

Marie, my sweet Marie—my first thought is for you—my first desire of the day is to see you again. You will return, won’t you? If not, the eagle will fly to the dove…. I will be seeing you at dinner tonight—I am told. Please accept this bouquet, as a secret link between us among the surrounding crowd. Whenever my hand touches my heart, you will know what I mean, and I want you to reciprocate the gesture at once. Love me, my sweet Marie, and don’t let your hand ever leave your heart.

The “bouquet” was a cluster of diamonds. Marie refused the gift, hurling the jewelry box to the floor with the words, “He treats me like a prostitute.” The hero of her adolescent fantasies was in real life revealing himself to be a pushy creep.

Marie was livid; after their discussion the night before, all the man still wanted from her was sex! She refused to wear his diamond brooch at the dinner party, but when she read the choler in his face, her hand flew to her breast in fear.

Later that night, too afraid to refuse the emperor again, Countess Marie Walewska finally went to him. Historians disagree on what occurred, just as the players themselves gave divergent accounts of the event.

According to Marie’s memoirs, penned many years later, which is the version given credence by the prolific biographer Christopher Hibbert, angry at being thwarted again in his efforts to seduce her, and mortally insulted that she did not desire him, Napoleon threw a spectacularly unsexy temper tantrum in front of the countess, vowing as he fumed and spumed, to utterly
demolish
Poland rather than save the former kingdom! “If you persist in refusing me your love I’ll
grind your people into dust, like this!” To illustrate his point he threw his pocket watch to the floor and crushed it beneath his heel. Marie fainted at the violence of his temper. When she revived, she realized he had raped her and wept copiously over the loss of her honor.

The emperor told a different story in which Marie remained compos mentis during their first sexual encounter, didn’t cry or “struggle overmuch,” and that after she dried her few tears he promised to do all he could for Poland.

From this point on, Countess Marie Walewska became Napoleon’s mistress, her indifferent sexual submission eventually metamorphosing into genuine love. In time she became as enthusiastic and ardent a lover as he was. For her part, this married mom in some respects nearly domesticated the great conqueror, as he fantasized about a cozy relationship with her (though in truth it was anything but that), and affectionately referred to her as his “little Polish wife.”

Meanwhile, his real wife continued to write, anxiously suggesting that she join him. Josephine had already come as far as Mainz, in Germany, when she received the following letter:

Mon amie
, I am touched by all that you tell me; but this is no time of year to travel. It is cold and the roads are bad and unsafe…. Go back to Paris…. Believe me, it is more painful for me than for you, to have to postpone for several weeks my happiness in seeing you.

Josephine did not know that Napoleon was by then spending as much time as possible in the soft white arms of Marie Walewska. Wife and new mistress could not have been more temperamentally different. Where the slender, dusky Josephine was extravagant, the petite, pink, and golden Marie was modest, declining to accept expensive gifts from her lover. She was cautious, intellectual, and reserved to the point of shyness, while the empress was barely educated but streetwise, headstrong, and flirtatious.

Marie was not coy; nor was she a designing woman. In fact, she fled from Napoleon’s advances, anxious to remain a faithful wife, even though she was not in love with her husband. She took her religion
seriously, unlike some of the jaded ladies of the era who kept lovers with impunity. Contemporary accounts refer to Marie’s lack of sophistication, but in a complimentary way. Also praised were her innocent and unspoiled nature and her sweetness of expression. And while Countess Walewska was not exceptionally intelligent, she had received an excellent education for a Polish woman of her era and was passionately political, capable of arguing articulately and convincingly. Napoleon had become captivated not only by her fragile, pale beauty, but by the fire in her deep blue eyes when she expounded upon her one true love—the liberation of her homeland. If anyone understood the passion for conquest (or reconquest), it was Bonaparte.

On January 17, 1807, Napoleon created a provisional government for Poland, naming Prince Joseph Poniatowski Minister of War. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the hyperbole he had promised Marie if she became his mistress. The countess was now at the emperor’s side as often as practicable; he never wanted her to leave his sight. She would often join the midmorning crowds that watched him review his troops. Now that they were paramours, the tone of his frequent love notes had softened, from intense (if not outright threatening) to tender and romantic. Not since the early days of his courtship with Josephine had Napoleon been such a sentimental sap.

You were so beautiful yesterday, that for long in the night I could still see you in my mind…. I reproached myself for having insisted you come to the parade…it was so cold.

Naturally shy, Marie took a while to grow accustomed to having people gawk at her, and to the instant notoriety she had achieved. Distinguished visitors came to call on her—to the astonishment and delight of Count Walewski, who now behaved toward Marie more like a benevolent old uncle than a spouse. And every night, she would visit Napoleon at the castle where he was in residence.

Though she drew respect wherever she went, it seemed that the only one who still struggled with the moral dilemmas of her doubly adulterous romance was herself.

In early April, just weeks after France had scored a “memorable
victory” (in Napoleon’s words to Josephine) at the bloody Battle of Eylau between France and the Russo-Prussian army on February 8, 1807, Marie moved into an apartment in the emperor’s new military headquarters at Schloss (castle) Finckenstein in East Prussia (part of modern-day Poland). Aware of the scandal it would engender for a respectable Polish woman, the mother of the old chamberlain Walewski’s son, to be seen slinking about an army HQ, Marie discreetly arrived and departed from a side entrance so that she would not be seen by Napoleon’s officers and troops. Nor, she was cautioned, could Josephine learn of her presence there. But the empress, who by now was receiving letters from her husband addressing her with the formal
vous
, rather than the familiar
tu
for “you,” had a sixth sense for Napoleon’s infidelities and had already surmised that he was having an affaire de coeur. Her supposition was confirmed as she headed back to Paris from Mainz. Two Polish women she encountered in Strasbourg boasted of the emperor’s new mistress. Painfully aware that Napoleon was contemplating divorce, and mourning the death of her grandson (and her husband’s potential heir), Josephine’s one consolation was that at least the Polish charmer had yet to give Boney a baby.

Years later, Marie’s older brother Benedict would claim that his sister viewed her sojourn to Finckenstein as yet another patriotic mission. But was he just blowing smoke to mask her reputation—or was Marie herself using that as a cover story so she could rush into the arms of her lover? Because by this time, the pair
were
deeply in love. When Napoleon sat down to cards in the evenings, even though Marie did not play, “he always wanted her in the room within his sight,” according to her friend Anna Potocka. Call it true love, or his overweening desire to micromanage her life, taking care to keep other men out of the picture. This, too, was part of Napoleon’s megalomania.

The lovers passed an idyllic six weeks together at Schloss Finckenstein, although Marie—kept like Rapunzel in the tower to preserve her honor and reputation—saw no one but her lover; Constant Wairy the valet; and Napoleon’s private secretary, the Baron de Méneval. Constant would bring the couple breakfast in their canopied bed, and later in the morning Marie would watch from the window,
half-hidden behind the red damask drapes, while the emperor reviewed his troops. When he returned to the room to work she’d sit and embroider or read in front of the fireplace or the tiled porcelain stove until Constant delivered the dinner tray at eleven. Supper was served at seven in the evening; the lovebirds ate at a cozy table before the fire, because Napoleon was always cold.

Ever the tyrant when it came to the subject of women’s fashion, he once scolded her for wearing black. “When you have restored Poland, I promise I’ll always wear pink,” she assured him, still waiting for him to keep
his
pledge.

“Politics is a slow business, it is not as easy as winning a battle…. You must give me more time,” he pleaded.

But as the days of their whirlwind spring romance progressed, Marie gradually grew less of a martyr to Polish liberation and increasingly more of a lover. “Her noble character, her serenity and her amazing lack of self-interest enchanted the Emperor…. Each day he became more and more attached to her,” Constant observed.

Winning the reluctant Marie had restored Napoleon’s confidence in his virility—although it was hardly his manly charms that had seduced her in the first place. Ambivalent at first, then shy in her return of his intense affections as well as in her lovemaking (after all, her only experience had been with an elderly man), she charmed the emperor with her hesitant, one-toe-at-a-time-in-the-water submission to him.

During the weeks at Schloss Finckenstein, Napoleon and Marie created an alternate reality for themselves, a domestic partnership devoid of any sordid connotations, in which the ugly facts of spouses and children or stepchildren evidently didn’t intrude. Marie had her husband’s blessing, and Napoleon had often declared himself a man apart from others, meaning that he could indulge in extramarital affairs with impunity. “I really felt I was married to him,” the countess later told her friend Elizabeth Grabowska. Marie sensed that beneath Napoleon’s bluster and bravado was a man yearning for a little tenderness and, well, perhaps a bit of stroking. And as his need for her grew, so did Marie’s love for him.

Marie Walewska was Napoleon’s ideal woman: beautiful, graceful,
feminine, intelligent and educated, but not a pushy, intellectual bluestocking. Most important, she made him her number one priority, which was essential for a man with such a massive ego. He boasted to his brother Lucien, “She is an angel…. Her soul is as beautiful as her features.” And to his older brother Joseph, the emperor kvelled, “My health has never been better…. I have become a very good lover…these days.”

But a lover sans results. Only one issue troubled the emperor about their romance: Marie had conceived almost immediately after wedding a senior citizen, yet in the nearly half year or so that she had been his paramour, she had failed to become pregnant. Unfortunately, their vernal honeymoon had to end before Napoleon’s motility, in a manner of speaking, could be definitively confirmed. Under cloak of darkness Marie departed Schloss Finckenstein in mid-May and returned to her childhood home of Kiernozia, while Napoleon prepared to return to the front.

In June, he conducted diplomatic negotiations in Tilsit with the strapping blond Tsar Alexander (the grandson of Catherine the Great) in an effort to avoid military conflict. Napoleon became so infatuated with the tsar, he declared that had Alexander been a woman, he’d have made him his mistress! Back in Poland, Marie feared for her countrymen and -women. What concessions might Bonaparte, enamored now not of her, but of the handsome blond giant Alexander, make with Russia? Would Napoleon sell out the Poles for the sake of his own empire? Sure enough, the emperor gave Alexander the prosperous Polish province of Bialystok as a peace offering. The Poles, whose fathers, sons, and brothers had enlisted in Napoleon’s Grande Armée upon the assurance that he would restore their independence, received only a semi-independent state to be called the Duchy of Warsaw. On this point the emperor never even consulted with the Polish provisional government he had set up just a half year earlier. Talleyrand was furious.

Back at Kiernozia, Marie felt wounded, too. She had forfeited her honor for a false promise. Yet she willingly accepted the present of a sapphire bracelet and a locket containing his portrait that Napoleon sent her in honor of her name day, August 15, which was also his
birthday. Less than three weeks earlier, on July 27, he had given himself an early birthday present, the title of Napoleon the Great. At the time, his empire stretched over most of Western Europe, and he ruled a population of seventy million people.