The Second Empress (42 page)

Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna

“
There is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men
.”

—NAPOLEON

I
WON
’
T LEAVE
.”

“You must, Your Majesty!”

“Under whose command?” I ask. Metternich watches me furiously, but he will never have power over my movements again. I look around the Council Chamber, crowded with faces I remember from my girlhood, and none of them dare to challenge me. I turn to Metternich. “You may have convinced Napoleon that I would make a fine bride in order to further your interests,” I say. “You may even act as my brother’s regent when I am gone. But you are finished controlling my destiny. I have a son, and it is my duty to keep him where I believe he is safest.”

The prince turns red with indignation. “And what, exactly, are these
interests
of mine, Your Majesty?”

“I’m sure your banker could tell us. Napoleon desperately needed a royal bride, and you were kind enough to provide him with one.” I savor my reply. Then I rise from the council table, and the men rise with me.
“If the British lose this battle,” I tell them, “I will leave Vienna. But until it is done, I will remain at Schönbrunn.”

There is stunned silence as I leave the Council Chamber to find Maria with Sigi and Franz in the gardens.

“What happened?” she asks when she sees my face.

I sit beside her next to the little pond and watch my son with the ducks. “Metternich wants us to flee,” I say quietly. “He believes this battle is a turning point.”

“Where is it being fought?”

“In the Netherlands, at Waterloo. He says it may decide this empire’s fate. There are two hundred thousand men.”

I don’t sleep. I pace the floors, thinking about Adam somewhere to the south and my father with his army in the north. But there is no word on Saturday, before the battle’s begun, and nothing on Sunday, despite my prayers in the church. Five days pass before Austria’s given any word.

And then he comes.

I open my chamber door, and Adam is there, dressed in Austria’s bright red and gold. For several moments, I am too afraid to ask. Then he smiles widely, and I begin to weep. He pulls me into his embrace, and all the strain of these past six years is lifted. I will never have to fear Napoleon again … Franz will never be taken …

“He lost the Battle of Waterloo,” he says. “Fifty thousand men dead. He will be banished to the island of Saint Helena to live out his days.”

I close my eyes and exhale. “And France?”

“Has been restored to the Bourbon king.”

So it is true. The world will never know Bonaparte rule again. I lead him inside, and we stand at the window overlooking the lake. Someday I will paint a scene of this moment, and I will call it
Liberation
.

E
PILOGUE

MARIE-LOUISE, DUCHESS OF PARMA

Parma, May 1821

I
KNOW BY THE WAY THE BOY WALKS ACROSS THE FIELD
that his message is urgent. It isn’t anything in his face, un-lined by worry and still supple with youth. It isn’t even the way he walks—his steps steady, his eyes focused. It’s something in the way he holds his letter, as if the contents are so searing, he can’t even bear to touch it.

He passes through the heather, and I admire the way the sun gleams in his hair, bronzing the tips of his dark curls. When he reaches my easel, he isn’t sure whom to approach. The father of my two youngest children, Count Neipperg, who is bouncing his son and daughter on his knees while I paint, or me, the Duchess of Parma. He looks from one of us to the other, then decides the message is best suited for me.

“From His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Francis.”

I glance at Adam, but my husband frowns. My father’s health is good, and there’s no reason to believe there’s political upset in Austria. I break open the seal and skim the contents. “It’s happened,” I whisper. I walk to where Adam is sitting on a blanket and show him the news.

The first line is all he needs. He puts down our children, who are four and two, leaving them with Sigi. Then he rises to comfort me, squeezing my hand. “Six years.”

“Does Your Majesty care to respond?” the boy asks.

I shake my head. “No. Not now.” I sit down at my easel and take a few moments to comprehend what has happened.

Napoleon is dead.

Never again will there be a night when I lie awake with Adam, wondering if the Bonapartes will return to seek vengeance on our family. Month after month, year after year, my husband’s shadow has loomed across the ocean to darken our lives. Today he is my husband no longer.

I look at my beautiful children, Albertine and William, who will never have to know the despair of always sleeping with one eye open. But my joy is not complete. For as relieved as I am, my eldest, Franz, is now without the father he was born to.

Adam raises my hand to his lips, then places it tenderly on his heart. “Austria can sleep well tonight.”

“And Parma,” I say, since this is now our home, nestled between the Kingdom of Sardinia and Tuscany. “Do you remember that Francesco Guardi painting?” I ask him.

“In Vienna,” he replies.

“There were ships being tossed by the waves. Dangerous, but beautiful somehow.”

“Yes.” He loves paintings as I do.

“The sea is finally calm.”

AFTERWORD

Napoleon

A year after signing the Treaty of Fontainebleau, Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena, a remote island half the size of Elba located in the Atlantic. This time only thirty people accompanied him. He arrived with more than two thousand books and spent much of his time reading plays and dictating his memoirs to General Bertrand. One of his recollections was the fact that he had “never loved … except perhaps Joséphine, [and only a little at that].” He also regretted his marriage to Marie-Louise, particularly after news arrived that she was living openly with Adam Neipperg in her new Duchy of Parma.

All these regrets did not stop him, however, from forging new relationships with women. Even on the island of Saint Helena, he managed to seduce Madame de Montholon, his dearest friend’s wife, resulting in the woman’s separation from her husband on her return to France. But Napoleon’s days of romancing did not last long. The island—cold, damp, and infested with both mosquitoes and rats—did little for Napoleon’s health. He began to complain of stomach pain and experienced severe vomiting and chills. When he was diagnosed with hepatitis, he began to use leeches and large doses of calomel, making him even sicker.

On May 6, 1821, six years after he arrived on Saint Helena, the
former emperor of France and self-proclaimed successor to Alexander the Great died at fifty-one years old. Reportedly, his last words included “Joséphine,” just as Joséphine’s last words were “Bonaparte … Elba … the king of Rome.” An autopsy performed by British doctors concluded that the emperor had died of stomach cancer. Since his death, some historians have argued that Napoleon was poisoned, citing the high levels of arsenic found in his hair and the numerous enemies he had made both on and off the island (one of them being Monsieur Montholon). Still others have suggested that the arsenic found in his hair was the result not of poison but of a coloring known as Schalers Green, which contained copper arsenite and could be found in the wallpaper on Saint Helena. In a comprehensive article published in 2011 by Dr. Alessandro Lugli et al., called “The Medical Mystery of Napoleon Bonaparte: An Interdisciplinary Exposé,” the authors present convincing evidence that in the last six months of his life, there was no dramatic rise in arsenic levels in Napoleon’s body, which would certainly have occurred had he been poisoned.

Whatever his final cause of death, Napoleon’s burial took place on the island, far from the empire he ruled and the family still plotting for his return back home. In 1840 the French king sent his son, Prince François, to retrieve the emperor’s body so it could be interred at Les Invalides in Paris. His tomb remains there to this day.

Marie-Louise

Once it became clear that Napoleon’s exile to Saint Helena would be permanent, Marie-Louise settled in Parma with her lover, Adam Neipperg, and their first child was born in 1817. Although much of Europe frowned on their relationship, a second child was born to them in 1819, and on Napoleon’s death two years later, Marie-Louise and Adam Neipperg were married. They went on to have one more child. This was clearly the happiest period of Marie-Louise’s life. “Were I not to commit the sin of pride,” the Duchess of Parma said, “I could say I
deserve it, because God knows all I have suffered in life.” Marie-Louise died at the age of fifty-six and is buried near her father and elder son, Napoleon II (who died of tuberculosis at twenty-one), in the Imperial Crypt.

Pauline

After her brother’s banishment to Saint Helena, Pauline and her mother moved to Italy, where Pauline’s husband, Camillo Borghese, was living happily with his mistress. On her arrival at Camillo’s home in Rome, Pauline ordered that her husband’s mistress be thrown out, and when Camillo refused, she appealed to the pope for help. When the pope instructed the hapless Camillo to return to Pauline, there was nothing for him to do but bid farewell to the woman who had been his companion for more than ten years.

There is strong evidence that during the last years of her life, Pauline was taking medication for venereal disease. At the time, one of the most popular medications for both syphilis and the clap (also known as gonorrhea) was mercury. Today we know that taking mercury can lead to mental deterioration and eventually madness. In fact, the term “mad as a hatter” was coined after hatters working with mercury were seen to develop dementia. It’s possible that some of Pauline’s more eccentric behaviors stemmed from mercury poisoning. If this is true, then she was suffering mentally as well as physically.