fever, and that it will come in longer and thicker for being cropped."
Napoleon, in fact, though he loved Pauline better than his other
sisters--or perhaps because he loved her better--was very strict
with her. He obliged her to wear mourning, and to observe some of the
proprieties; but it was hard to keep her within bounds.
Presently it became noised about that Prince Camillo Borghese was
exceedingly intimate with her. The prince was an excellent specimen of
the fashionable Italian. He was immensely rich. His palace at Rome was
crammed with pictures, statues, and every sort of artistic treasure.
He was the owner, moreover, of the famous Borghese jewels, the finest
collection of diamonds in the world.
Napoleon rather sternly insisted upon her marrying Borghese.
Fortunately, the prince was very willing to be connected with Napoleon;
while Pauline was delighted at the idea of having diamonds that would
eclipse all the gems which Josephine possessed; for, like all of the
Bonapartes, she detested her brother's wife. So she would be married and
show her diamonds to Josephine. It was a bit of feminine malice which
she could not resist.
The marriage took place very quietly at Joseph Bonaparte's house,
because of the absence of Napoleon; but the newly made princess was
invited to visit Josephine at the palace of Saint-Cloud. Here was to be
the triumph of her life. She spent many days in planning a toilet that
should be absolutely crushing to Josephine. Whatever she wore must be a
background for the famous diamonds. Finally she decided on green velvet.
When the day came Pauline stood before a mirror and gazed at herself
with diamonds glistening in her hair, shimmering around her neck, and
fastened so thickly on her green velvet gown as to remind one of a
moving jewel-casket. She actually shed tears for joy. Then she entered
her carriage and drove out to Saint-Cloud.
But the Creole Josephine, though no longer young, was a woman of great
subtlety as well as charm. Stories had been told to her of the green
velvet, and therefore she had her drawing-room redecorated in the most
uncompromising blue. It killed the green velvet completely. As for the
diamonds, she met that maneuver by wearing not a single gem of any kind.
Her dress was an Indian muslin with a broad hem of gold.
Her exquisite simplicity, coupled with her dignity of bearing, made
the Princess Pauline, with her shower of diamonds, and her green velvet
displayed against the blue, seem absolutely vulgar. Josephine was most
generous in her admiration of the Borghese gems, and she kissed Pauline
on parting. The victory was hers.
There is another story of a defeat which Pauline met from another lady,
one Mme. de Coutades. This was at a magnificent ball given to the most
fashionable world of Paris. Pauline decided upon going, and intended,
in her own phrase, to blot out every woman there. She kept the secret of
her toilet absolutely, and she entered the ballroom at the psychological
moment, when all the guests had just assembled.
She appeared; and at sight of her the music stopped, silence fell upon
the assemblage, and a sort of quiver went through every one. Her costume
was of the finest muslin bordered with golden palm-leaves. Four bands,
spotted like a leopard's skin, were wound about her head, while these in
turn were supported by little clusters of golden grapes. She had copied
the head-dress of a Bacchante in the Louvre. All over her person were
cameos, and just beneath her breasts she wore a golden band held in
place by an engraved gem. Her beautiful wrists, arms, and hands were
bare. She had, in fact, blotted out her rivals.
Nevertheless, Mme. de Coutades took her revenge. She went up to Pauline,
who was lying on a divan to set off her loveliness, and began gazing at
the princess through a double eye-glass. Pauline felt flattered for a
moment, and then became uneasy. The lady who was looking at her said to
a companion, in a tone of compassion:
"What a pity! She really would be lovely if it weren't for THAT!"
"For what?" returned her escort.
"Why, are you blind? It's so remarkable that you SURELY must see it."
Pauline was beginning to lose her self-composure. She flushed and looked
wildly about, wondering what was meant. Then she heard Mme. Coutades
say:
"Why, her ears. If I had such ears as those I would cut them off!"
Pauline gave one great gasp and fainted dead away. As a matter of fact,
her ears were not so bad. They were simply very flat and colorless,
forming a contrast with the rosy tints of her face. But from that moment
no one could see anything but these ears; and thereafter the princess
wore her hair low enough to cover them.
This may be seen in the statue of her by Canova. It was considered a
very daring thing for her to pose for him in the nude, for only a bit of
drapery is thrown over her lower limbs. Yet it is true that this
statue is absolutely classical in its conception and execution, and its
interest is heightened by the fact that its model was what she afterward
styled herself, with true Napoleonic pride--"a sister of Bonaparte."
Pauline detested Josephine and was pleased when Napoleon divorced her;
but she also disliked the Austrian archduchess, Marie Louise, who was
Josephine's successor. On one occasion, at a great court function, she
got behind the empress and ran out her tongue at her, in full view of
all the nobles and distinguished persons present. Napoleon's eagle eye
flashed upon Pauline and blazed like fire upon ice. She actually took to
her heels, rushed out of the ball, and never visited the court again.
It would require much time to tell of her other eccentricities, of her
intrigues, which were innumerable, of her quarrel with her husband, and
of the minor breaches of decorum with which she startled Paris. One of
these was her choice of a huge negro to bathe her every morning. When
some one ventured to protest, she answered, naively:
"What! Do you call that thing a MAN?"
And she compromised by compelling her black servitor to go out and
marry some one at once, so that he might continue his ministrations with
propriety!
To her Napoleon showed himself far more severe than with either Caroline
or Elise. He gave her a marriage dowry of half a million francs when she
became the Princess Borghese, but after that he was continually checking
her extravagances. Yet in 1814, when the downfall came and Napoleon was
sent into exile at Elba, Pauline was the only one of all his relatives
to visit him and spend her time with him. His wife fell away and went
back to her Austrian relatives. Of all the Bonapartes only Pauline and
Mme. Mere remained faithful to the emperor.
Even then Napoleon refused to pay a bill of hers for sixty-two
francs, while he allowed her only two hundred and forty francs for the
maintenance of her horses. But she, with a generosity of which one would
have thought her quite incapable, gave to her brother a great part of
her fortune. When he escaped from Elba and began the campaign of 1815
she presented him with all the Borghese diamonds. In fact, he had them
with him in his carriage at Waterloo, where they were captured by the
English. Contrast this with the meanness and ingratitude of her sisters
and her brothers, and one may well believe that she was sincerely proud
of what it meant to be la soeur de Bonaparte.
When he was sent to St. Helena she was ill in bed and could not
accompany him. Nevertheless, she tried to sell all her trinkets, of
which she was so proud, in order that she might give him help. When
he died she received the news with bitter tears "on hearing all the
particulars of that long agony."
As for herself, she did not long survive. At the age of forty-four her
last moments came. Knowing that she was to die, she sent for Prince
Borghese and sought a reconciliation. But, after all, she died as she
had lived--"the queen of trinkets" (la reine des colifichets). She asked
the servant to bring a mirror. She gazed into it with her dying eyes;
and then, as she sank back, it was with a smile of deep content.
"I am not afraid to die," she said. "I am still beautiful!"
THE STORY OF THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE AND COUNT NEIPPERG
There is one famous woman whom history condemns while at the same time
it partly hides the facts which might mitigate the harshness of the
judgment that is passed upon her. This woman is Marie Louise, Empress
of France, consort of the great Napoleon, and archduchess of imperial
Austria. When the most brilliant figure in all history, after his
overthrow in 1814, was in tawdry exile on the petty island of Elba,
the empress was already about to become a mother; and the father of her
unborn child was not Napoleon, but another man. This is almost all that
is usually remembered of her--that she was unfaithful to Napoleon, that
she abandoned him in the hour of his defeat, and that she gave herself
with readiness to one inferior in rank, yet with whom she lived for
years, and to whom she bore what a French writer styled "a brood of
bastards."
Naturally enough, the Austrian and German historians do not have much
to say of Marie Louise, because in her own disgrace she also brought
disgrace upon the proudest reigning family in Europe. Naturally, also,
French writers, even those who are hostile to Napoleon, do not care
to dwell upon the story; since France itself was humiliated when its
greatest genius and most splendid soldier was deceived by his Austrian
wife. Therefore there are still many who know little beyond the bare
fact that the Empress Marie Louise threw away her pride as a princess,
her reputation as a wife, and her honor as a woman. Her figure seems to
crouch in a sort of murky byway, and those who pass over the highroad of
history ignore it with averted eyes.
In reality the story of Napoleon and Marie Louise and of the Count von
Neipperg is one which, when you search it to the very core, leads you
straight to a sex problem of a very curious nature. Nowhere else does
it occur in the relations of the great personages of history; but in
literature Balzac, that master of psychology, has touched upon the theme
in the early chapters of his famous novel called "A Woman of Thirty."
As to the Napoleonic story, let us first recall the facts of the
case, giving them in such order that their full significance may be
understood.
In 1809 Napoleon, then at the plenitude of his power, shook himself free
from the clinging clasp of Josephine and procured the annulment of his
marriage to her. He really owed her nothing. Before he knew her she had
been the mistress of another. In the first years of their life together
she had been notoriously unfaithful to him. He had held to her from
habit which was in part a superstition; but the remembrance of the wrong
which she had done him made her faded charms at times almost repulsive.
And then Josephine had never borne him any children; and without a
son to perpetuate his dynasty, the gigantic achievements which he
had wrought seemed futile in his eyes, and likely to crumble into
nothingness when he should die.
No sooner had the marriage been annulled than his titanic ambition
leaped, as it always did, to a tremendous pinnacle. He would wed. He
would have children. But he would wed no petty princess. This man who in
his early youth had felt honored by a marriage with the almost declassee
widow of a creole planter now stretched out his hand that he might take
to himself a woman not merely royal but imperial.
At first he sought the sister of the Czar of Russia; but Alexander
entertained a profound distrust of the French emperor, and managed to
evade the tentative demand. There was, however, a reigning family far
more ancient than the Romanoffs--a family which had held the imperial
dignity for nearly six centuries--the oldest and the noblest blood in
Europe. This was the Austrian house of Hapsburg. Its head, the Emperor
Francis, had thirteen children, of whom the eldest, the Archduchess
Marie Louise, was then in her nineteenth year.
Napoleon had resented the rebuff which the Czar had given him. He
turned, therefore, the more eagerly to the other project. Yet there were
many reasons why an Austrian marriage might be dangerous, or, at any
rate, ill-omened. Only sixteen years before, an Austrian arch-duchess,
Marie Antionette, married to the ruler of France, had met her death
upon the scaffold, hated and cursed by the French people, who had always
blamed "the Austrian" for the evil days which had ended in the flames
of revolution. Again, the father of the girl to whom Napoleon's fancy
turned had been the bitter enemy of the new regime in France. His troops
had been beaten by the French in five wars and had been crushed at
Austerlitz and at Wagram. Bonaparte had twice entered Vienna at the head
of a conquering army, and thrice he had slept in the imperial palace
at Schonbrunn, while Francis was fleeing through the dark, a beaten
fugitive pursued by the swift squadrons of French cavalry.
The feeling of Francis of Austria was not merely that of the vanquished
toward the victor. It was a deep hatred almost religious in its fervor.
He was the head and front of the old-time feudalism of birth and blood;
Napoleon was the incarnation of the modern spirit which demolished
thrones and set an iron heel upon crowned heads, giving the sacred
titles of king and prince to soldiers who, even in palaces, still showed
the swaggering brutality of the camp and the stable whence they sprang.
Yet, just because an alliance with the Austrian house seemed in so many
ways impossible, the thought of it inflamed the ardor of Napoleon all
the more.
"Impossible?" he had once said, contemptuously. "The word 'impossible'
is not French."
The Austrian alliance, unnatural though it seemed, was certainly quite
possible. In the year 1809 Napoleon had finished his fifth war with
Austria by the terrific battle of Wagram, which brought the empire of
the Hapsburgs to the very dust. The conqueror's rude hand had stripped
from Francis province after province. He had even let fall hints that
the Hapsburgs might be dethroned and that Austria might disappear from
the map of Europe, to be divided between himself and the Russian Czar,
who was still his ally. It was at this psychological moment that the
Czar wounded Napoleon's pride by refusing to give the hand of his sister
Anne.
The subtle diplomats of Vienna immediately saw their chance.
Prince Metternich, with the caution of one who enters the cage of a
man-eating-tiger, suggested that the Austrian archduchess would be a
fitting bride for the French conqueror. The notion soothed the wounded
vanity of Napoleon. From that moment events moved swiftly; and before
long it was understood that there was to be a new empress in France, and
that she was to be none other than the daughter of the man who had been
Napoleon's most persistent foe upon the Continent. The girl was to be
given--sacrificed, if you like--to appease an imperial adventurer. After
such a marriage, Austria would be safe from spoliation. The reigning
dynasty would remain firmly seated upon its historic throne.
But how about the girl herself? She had always heard Napoleon spoken of
as a sort of ogre--a man of low ancestry, a brutal and faithless enemy
of her people. She knew that this bold, rough-spoken soldier less than a
year before had added insult to the injury which he had inflicted on
her father. In public proclamations he had called the Emperor Francis a
coward and a liar. Up to the latter part of the year Napoleon was to
her imagination a blood-stained, sordid, and yet all-powerful monster,
outside the pale of human liking and respect. What must have been her
thoughts when her father first told her with averted face that she was
to become the bride of such a being?
Marie Louise had been brought up, as all German girls of rank were then
brought up, in quiet simplicity and utter innocence. In person she was
a tall blonde, with a wealth of light brown hair tumbling about a face
which might be called attractive because it was so youthful and so
gentle, but in which only poets and courtiers could see beauty. Her
complexion was rosy, with that peculiar tinge which means that in the
course of time it will become red and mottled. Her blue eyes were clear
and childish. Her figure was good, though already too full for a girl
who was younger than her years.
She had a large and generous mouth with full lips, the lower one
being the true "Hapsburg lip," slightly pendulous--a feature which has
remained for generation after generation as a sure sign of Hapsburg
blood. One sees it in the present emperor of Austria, in the late Queen
Regent of Spain, and in the present King of Spain, Alfonso. All the
artists who made miniatures or paintings of Marie Louise softened down
this racial mark so that no likeness of her shows it as it really was.
But take her all in all, she was a simple, childlike, German madchen
who knew nothing of the outside world except what she had heard from her
discreet and watchful governess, and what had been told her of Napoleon
by her uncles, the archdukes whom he had beaten down in battle.
When she learned that she was to be given to the French emperor her
girlish soul experienced a shudder; but her father told her how vital
was this union to her country and to him. With a sort of piteous dread
she questioned the archdukes who had called Napoleon an ogre.
"Oh, that was when Napoleon was an enemy," they replied. "Now he is our
friend."
Marie Louise listened to all this, and, like the obedient German girl
she was, yielded her own will.
Events moved with a rush, for Napoleon was not the man to dally.
Josephine had retired to her residence at Malmaison, and Paris was
already astir with preparations for the new empress who was to assure
the continuation of the Napoleonic glory by giving children to her
husband. Napoleon had said to his ambassador with his usual bluntness:
"This is the first and most important thing--she must have children."
To the girl whom he was to marry he sent the following letter--an odd
letter, combining the formality of a negotiator with the veiled ardor of
a lover:
MY COUSIN: The brilliant qualities which adorn your person have inspired
in me a desire to serve you and to pay you homage. In making my request
to the emperor, your father, and praying him to intrust to me the
happiness of your imperial highness, may I hope that you will understand
the sentiments which lead me to this act? May I flatter myself that it
will not be decided solely by the duty of parental obedience? However
slightly the feelings of your imperial highness may incline to me, I
wish to cultivate them with so great care, and to endeavor so constantly
to please you in everything, that I flatter myself that some day I shall
prove attractive to you. This is the end at which I desire to arrive,
and for which I pray your highness to be favorable to me.
Immediately everything was done to dazzle the imagination of the girl.
She had dressed always in the simplicity of the school-room. Her only
ornaments had been a few colored stones which she sometimes wore as a
necklace or a bracelet. Now the resources of all France were drawn upon.
Precious laces foamed about her. Cascades of diamonds flashed before her
eyes. The costliest and most exquisite creations of the Parisian shops
were spread around her to make up a trousseau fit for the princess who
was soon to become the bride of the man who had mastered continental
Europe.
The archives of Vienna were ransacked for musty documents which would
show exactly what had been done for other Austrian princesses who had
married rulers of France. Everything was duplicated down to the last
detail. Ladies-in-waiting thronged about the young archduchess; and
presently there came to her Queen Caroline of Naples, Napoleon's sister,
of whom Napoleon himself once said: "She is the only man among my
sisters, as Joseph is the only woman among my brothers." Caroline, by
virtue of her rank as queen, could have free access to her husband's
future bride. Also, there came presently Napoleon's famous marshal,
Berthier, Prince of Neuchatel, the chief of the Old Guard, who had just
been created Prince of Wagram--a title which, very naturally, he did not
use in Austria. He was to act as proxy for Napoleon in the preliminary
marriage service at Vienna.
All was excitement. Vienna had never been so gay. Money was lavished
under the direction of Caroline and Berthier. There were illuminations
and balls. The young girl found herself the center of the world's
interest; and the excitement made her dizzy. She could not but be
flattered, and yet there were many hours when her heart misgave her.
More than once she was found in tears. Her father, an affectionate
though narrow soul, spent an entire day with her consoling and
reassuring her. One thought she always kept in mind--what she had said
to Metternich at the very first: "I want only what my duty bids me
want." At last came the official marriage, by proxy, in the presence of
a splendid gathering. The various documents were signed, the dowry was
arranged for. Gifts were scattered right and left. At the opera
there were gala performances. Then Marie Louise bade her father a sad
farewell. Almost suffocated by sobs and with her eyes streaming with
tears, she was led between two hedges of bayonets to her carriage, while
cannon thundered and all the church-bells of Vienna rang a joyful peal.
She set out for France accompanied by a long train of carriages filled
with noblemen and noblewomen, with ladies-in-waiting and scores of
attendant menials. The young bride--the wife of a man whom she had never
seen--was almost dead with excitement and fatigue. At a station in the
outskirts of Vienna she scribbled a few lines to her father, which are a
commentary upon her state of mind:
I think of you always, and I always shall. God has given me power to
endure this final shock, and in Him alone I have put all my trust. He
will help me and give me courage, and I shall find support in doing my
duty toward you, since it is all for you that I have sacrificed myself.
There is something piteous in this little note of a frightened girl
going to encounter she knew not what, and clinging almost frantically
to the one thought--that whatever might befall her, she was doing as her
father wished.
One need not recount the long and tedious journey of many days over
wretched roads, in carriages that jolted and lurched and swayed. She was
surrounded by unfamiliar faces and was compelled to meet at every town
the chief men of the place, all of whom paid her honor, but stared at
her with irrepressible curiosity. Day after day she went on and on. Each
morning a courier on a foaming horse presented her with a great cluster
of fresh flowers and a few lines scrawled by the unknown husband who was
to meet her at her journey's end.
There lay the point upon which her wandering thoughts were focused--the
journey's end! The man whose strange, mysterious power had forced her
from her school-room, had driven her through a nightmare of strange
happenings, and who was waiting for her somewhere to take her to
himself, to master her as he had mastered generals and armies!
What was marriage? What did it mean? What experience still lay before
her! These were the questions which she must have asked herself
throughout that long, exhausting journey. When she thought of the past
she was homesick. When she thought of the immediate future she was
fearful with a shuddering fear.