failed him; he made no account of the weather; he rode the wildest
horses the longest distances. His chest and throat became seriously
affected, but it made no difference; he still wanted to command at the
reviews. His voice was lost: soon he could not even speak; but his
illness did not depress, it only annoyed him. His energetic character
could not accustom itself to the idea of abandoning the struggle. He
fought against suffering as he had fought against fate. "Oh!" he said,
"how I despise this wretched body which cannot obey my soul!" Dr.
Malfatti said, "There seems to be in this unfortunate young man an
active principle impelling him to a sort of suicide; reasoning and
precaution are of no avail against the fatality which urges him on."
The end drew near; the completion of the sacrifice approached. The
victim did not pray that the cup might pass from his lips. He ceased to
struggle against the inevitable, and submitted to his fate, becoming
as gentle and peaceful as a child. As the earth left him, he turned to
heaven. "I understood and felt," said Count Prokesch-Osten, "all the
sublimity there is in religion, which alone could throw a light on this
man's path, through the uncertainty and darkness that surrounded him....
Religion is our staff. We can find no surer support in our journey
through the darkness of our life on earth." He had received from the
Emperor and Empress of Austria a book of prayers, called _Divine
Harmonies_, which he read over and over on his bed of suffering. It
contained these words written by his grandfather's hand: "In every
incident of your life, in every struggle of your soul, may God aid you
with His light and strength; this is the most ardent wish of your loving
grandparents." "This book is very dear to me," the prince said to his
friend, after a serious talk on religious matters; "those words, written
by relatives whom I sincerely respect and thoroughly love, have an
inestimable value for me, and yet I give it to you. I want what I most
value to go to you, in memory of what seems to me the most important of
our conversations."
When he was dying, he wanted to gaze at the crucifix, in order not to
complain of his sad lot, dying thus at the very threshold of a career
which promised to be brilliant and glorious; to go down so early to the
gloomy tomb of the Hapsburgs! To exchange his glowing visions for this
untimely end; to find an Austrian tomb instead of the throne of France!
He accepted his fate, but he wished as few witnesses as possible of his
last sufferings. He did not want to show to the world a son of Napoleon
so weak and broken. He could scarcely lift the weak, worn hand which
should have wielded Charlemagne's sword and sceptre. "I am so weak,"
he said; "I beg of you not to let any one see me in my misery!" His
sumptuous cradle he had given to the Imperial Treasury of Vienna, which
is near the Church of the Capuchins, where he was to be buried. "My
cradle and my grave will be near each other," he said. "My birth and my
death--that's my whole story." In the overthrow, by lightning, of one
of the eagles surmounting the palace of Schoenbrunn, the populace saw a
prophecy of the death there of Napoleon's son, and in fact it was there
that he died, in the room which his father had occupied in 1809, when
possibly for the first time he thought of this Austrian marriage, which
should--such at least was his dream--guarantee to the Napoleonic dynasty
unlimited power and glory. The prince desired only one thing,--to see
his mother. She came, and he greeted her with tenderness. He had also
near him his young and beautiful relative, the Archduchess Sophia, the
mother of the present Emperor of Austria. This charming princess, who
was very fond of the young man who was approaching his end, told him
that the time had come for him to receive the last sacraments. "We will
pray together," she said; "I will pray for you, and you shall pray for
me and for my unborn child." The prince, consoled and strengthened by
the aid of religion, died in the enjoyment of a firm faith and thorough
piety. "Mother, mother!" were his last words. General Hartmann said:
"Having passed my life on battle-fields, I have often seen death, but
I never saw a soldier die more bravely." The 22d of July was a very
momentous date in the career of this young prince. It was July 22, 1818,
that the title of Duke of Reichstadt was substituted for his name of
Napoleon Bonaparte; July 22, 1821, he heard of his father's death;
and July 22, 1832, he died at the age of twenty-one years four months
and two days.
We desire to make five studies of the second wife and the son of
Napoleon I. The first, which we are now beginning, covers a period of
brilliancy of infatuation, of fairy-like splendor, which in all its glow
forms a striking contrast with the dreadful shadows that follow. With
the aid of eye-witnesses whose memoirs abound with most valuable
recollections--such as Prince Metternich, who had the principal charge
of the Archduchess's marriage; M. de Bausset and General de Ségur, both
attached to the Emperor Napoleon's household, so that they saw him
nearly every day; Madame Durand, the Empress's first lady-in-waiting;
Baron de Méneval, his private secretary--with their aid we shall try to
recall the brilliant past, taking for our motto that phrase of Michelet:
"History is a resurrection." An excellent work, which deserves
translation, Von Helfert's _Marie Louise, Empress of the French_, throws
a great deal of light on the early years of the mother of the King of
Rome. In the archives of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs--thanks to the
intelligent and liberal control which facilitates historic research--we
have found a great number of curious documents which had never been
published, such as letters written to Napoleon by the Emperor and
Empress of Austria, and despatches from his ambassador at Vienna, Count
Otto. This first study will carry us to the beginning of the Russian
campaign, that glorious period when the unheard-of prosperity promised
to be eternal. No darker night was ever preceded by a more brilliant
sun. Napoleon said on the rock of Saint Helena: "Marie Louise had a
short reign; but she must have enjoyed it; the world was at her feet."
I.
EARLY YEARS.
Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria, Empress of the French, Queen of
Italy, afterwards Duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, was born
in Vienna, December 12, 1791, the daughter of Archduke Francis, Prince
Imperial, who a year later became Emperor of Germany under the name of
Francis II., and of Marie Thérèse, Princess of Naples, daughter of King
Ferdinand IV. and Queen Marie Caroline.
Marie Louise's father was born February 12, 1768, a year and a half
earlier than the Emperor Napoleon. He was the grandson of the great
Empress Marie Thérèse, and son of the Emperor Leopold II., who was the
brother of the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and whom he succeeded
March 1, 1792; his mother was a Spanish princess, a daughter of Charles
III. of Spain. He had four wives. He was an excellent husband, but his
family affections were so strong that he could not remain a widower. In
1788 he married his first wife, Princess Elizabeth Wilhelmina Louisa
of Wurtemberg, who died February 17, 1790, in giving birth to a
daughter who lived but six months. The same year he married by proxy
at Naples, August 15, and September 19 in person at Vienna, the young
Neapolitan princess Marie Thérèse, daughter of Ferdinand IV. and of
Marie Caroline, who ruled over the Two Sicilies.
The young princess, who was born June 6, 1772, was then eighteen years
old. She was kind, virtuous, and well educated, and her influence at the
court of Vienna was most excellent. Her mother, who during her reign of
thirty-six years endured many trials and exhibited great qualities as
well as great faults, was a remarkable woman.
Marie Caroline, the Queen of Naples, was energetic to excess, courageous
to the point of heroism; she believed that severity and sometimes
even cruelty was demanded of a sovereign; her religion amounted to
superstition, her love of authority to despotism; she alternated between
passionate devotion to pleasure and earnest zeal for her duty; she was
ardent in her affections and implacable in resentment, intense in her
joys and in her sorrows; she was often an unwise queen, but as a
mother she was beyond reproach. Like the matrons of antiquity and her
illustrious mother, the Empress Marie Thérèse, she was proud of her
large family; she had no fewer than seventeen children, and political
cares never prevented her actively and intelligently caring for their
moral and physical welfare. If she had not the happiness of seeing them
all grow up, those who survived were yet the constant object of her
tender solicitude. She took a prominent part in the education of her two
sons, the Duke of Calabria and the Prince of Salerno, and still more
in that of her five daughters: Marie Thérèse, the wife of the Emperor
Francis II.; Marie Louise, who married the Archduke Ferdinand, Grand
Duke of Tuscany; Marie Christine, wife of Charles Felix, Duke of Genoa,
later King of Sardinia; Marie Amélie, Duchess of Orleans, then Queen of
France; Marie Antoinette, first wife of the Prince of Asturias, later
Ferdinand VII., King of Spain.
Marie Caroline was very fond of her eldest daughter, Marie Thérèse; and
when the princess had, in 1790, married the Archduke Francis, two years
later Emperor of Germany, the mother and daughter kept up an active and
affectionate correspondence in French. They were forever consulting each
other about their babies, which were born at about the same time. When
the daughter had given birth to her first child, the future French
Empress, the Queen congratulated her most warmly: "I congratulate you on
your courage. I am sure that when you look at your baby, which I hear
is large, sturdy, and strong, that you forget all that you have been
through." Scarcely was this child born than the Queen, who was most
anxious to have a number of descendants, besought her daughter to give
the Archduchess Marie Louise a little brother. April 17, 1793, there
was born an Archduke Ferdinand, later Emperor of Germany; and his
grandmother, Queen Marie Caroline, wrote: "I wept for joy! Thank Heaven
for the birth of this boy!" Indeed, the wife of the Emperor Francis
II. followed her mother's example with regard to her own children.
Her eldest daughter, the Archduchess Marie Louise, she educated most
carefully. The little princess, who had a most amiable disposition, was
an eager student, and acquired a good knowledge of French, English,
Italian, drawing, and music. She was brought up to respect religion and
to detest revolutionary ideas.
Her grandmother, Queen Marie Caroline, who in 1800 came to visit the
Austrian court and stayed there two years, had many conversations with
Marie Louise, which certainly were unlikely to inspire her with any
taste for the French Revolution or for General Bonaparte. It is easy to
understand how extremely the high-spirited and haughty Queen of the Two
Sicilies must have been distressed and revolted by the sufferings and
death of her sister, Marie Antoinette. There was something very solemn
in the way in which she told her children what took place in Paris
October 16, 1793. She had them all summoned. They found her dressed in
deep black, with tears in her eyes; and she led them without a word to
the chapel in the royal palace of Naples, and there, before the altar,
she told them that the people of regicides had just put their aunt to
death upon the scaffold. Then she bade them all to pray together for
the peace of the victim's soul, and probably there mingled with Marie
Caroline's prayer thoughts of wrath and vengeance. From that time
she waged against the principles and the spread of the Revolution a
relentless, implacable war, of varying result, which filled her more and
more with detestation of the new France. On the occasion of Bonaparte's
expedition to Egypt, she deemed the time ripe for a general uprising in
Italy against the French. But Championnet had taken possession of Naples
when the Parthenopean Republic had been proclaimed, and the Queen had
been obliged, with her family, to take refuge at Palermo.
In the next year, 1799, the conditions of things changed; and while
Milan was recovered by Austria, and the Russian army, led by Suwarow,
completed the expulsion of the French from Northern and Southern Italy,
the Parthenopean Republic expired, and the Bourbon flag waved once more
over the walls of Naples.
Early in 1800 the French cause seemed forever lost in Italy; General
Masséna alone held out at Genoa. Queen Marie Caroline had triumphed; and
she conceived the plan of going to Austria to visit her daughter, the
Empress, and to make the acquaintance of her grandchildren, whom she
had never seen, and at the same time to demand an enlargement of her
territory in return for the sacrifices of the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies in behalf of the common cause of the crowned heads and the
Pope. She set sail from Palermo, June 9, 1800, with her second son, the
Prince of Salerno, and her three unmarried daughters, Marie Christine,
Marie Amélie, and Marie Antoinette.
The ideas, the feelings, the principles, the prejudices, the hates, the
hopes, the interests, of Queen Marie Caroline were the same as those of
her son-in-law, the Emperor, of her daughter, the Empress, and of her
other daughter, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. At Vienna she found the
same political feelings as at Naples. On her way thither she had a great
joy,--the news of the surrender of the French at Genoa, which caused
her to utter cries of delight; and a great sorrow,--the tidings of
the Austrian defeat at Marengo, which was such a blow that she fell
unconscious and narrowly escaped dying of apoplexy. We may readily
understand the influence which a woman of this character must have
had on the mind of her daughter, the Empress of Germany, and of her
granddaughter, the future Empress of the French. Doubtless the young
Marie Louise would have been much astonished if any one had prophesied
to her that she would marry this Bonaparte who was represented to her as
a monster. Marie Caroline did not leave Schoenbrunn to return to her own
kingdom until July 29, 1802. For two years she had worked persistently
and not without success, to augment, if that was possible, the
detestation which the court, the aristocracy, and the whole Austrian
people felt for France and French ideas. When Marie Louise was a child,
and with her little brothers and sisters used to play with toy-soldiers,
the ugliest, blackest, and most repulsive of them was always picked out
and called Bonaparte, and this one they used to prick with pins and
denounce in every way.
The war of 1805, which brought Austria to the brink of ruin, added to
the Archduchess's instinctive repulsion for Napoleon. At Vienna the
panic was extreme; the Imperial family was obliged to flee in different
directions. Marie Louise was only fourteen years old, and she was
already learning bitter lessons at the school of experience. Seeking
shelter in Hungary, and afterwards in Galicia, she prayed most warmly
for the success of the Austrians. She wrote: "Papa must be finally
successful, and the time must come when the usurper will lose heart.
Perhaps God has let him go so far to make his ruin more complete when
He shall have abandoned him." November 21, 1805, a few days before the
battle of Austerlitz, she wrote a letter to her governess's husband,
Count Colloredo, in which she said: "God must be very wroth with us,
since He punishes us so sorely. Perhaps at this very moment there is
living in one of our rooms at Schoenbrunn one of those generals who are
as treacherous as cats. Our family is all scattered: my dear parents are
at Olmütz; we are at Kaschan; there is a third colony at Ofen."
Every sort of misfortune combined to smite this suffering family. While
the Emperor Francis was losing the battle of Austerlitz, his wife, who
was in Silesia, with only one of her children, the little Archduchess
Leopoldine, who was born in 1797 and was not yet eight years old, fell
seriously ill with the measles, and dreaded giving the disease to her
little girl. "The only thing which would make death terrible," she wrote
to her husband, "would be to die without seeing you again.... Do not
take a step that will injure you or the country. Only don't let me be
taken to France." Nothing disturbed her so much as the dread of falling
into the hands of the enemy. The details which her husband wrote to her
about his interview with Napoleon did not allay her uneasiness. "I have
been as happy," he wrote, "as I could hope to be with a conqueror who
holds possession of a large part of my kingdom. With regard to his
treatment of me and mine, he has been very kind. It is easy to see that
he is not a Frenchman." Thus the Emperor Francis ascribed to Napoleon's
Italian birth the politeness with which the hero of Austerlitz treated
him. Does not this simple statement suffice to show in what esteem the
German sovereign held France and the French character?
The Imperial family was at last reunited in Vienna, after many
vicissitudes, early in 1806. But a new misfortune awaited them the
following year. The Empress, whose health was already delicate, had a
miscarriage April 9, 1807, and a pleurisy which seized her carried her
off in four days, in due odor of sanctity, after she had given her
blessing to Marie Louise and the rest of her children. She was only
thirty-five. The untimely death of the amiable and virtuous princess,
whose gayety and kindness had been the life and delight of the court,
plunged her whole family into deep grief.
The Emperor Francis was an excellent husband, but he was not an
inconsolable widower. April 13, 1807, he lost his second wife; but less
than nine months afterwards, January 6, 1808, he married his young
cousin, Marie Louise Beatrice of Este, daughter of the late Archduke
Ferdinand of Modena. This princess, who was born December 14, 1787, was
very short, but attractive in appearance and of an excellent character.
Her disposition was pleasant and her intelligence acute, but she was not
the woman to give Marie Louise any taste for France or the French; for
if in all Europe there was a princess who utterly detested the French
Revolution and all its works, it was the third wife of Francis II.
The new Empress was but four years older than her step-daughter, Marie
Louise, and at the age of twenty-one, she looked much more like the
sister than the step-mother of the young Archduchess, who was then
in her seventeenth year. Nevertheless, the Empress took hold of the
princess's education with a high hand, and displayed as much solicitude
as if she had been her real mother.
II.
1809.
The Emperor Francis was not without distractions during his honeymoon
with his third wife, the young Empress, Marie Louise Beatrice. It was
evident to every one that the Peace of Presbourg, like that of
Lunéville, could be nothing more than a truce. Austria could never be
reconciled to its loss, between 1792 and 1806, of the Low Countries,
Suabia, Milan, the Venetian States, Tyrol, Dalmatia, and finally of the
Imperial crown of Germany; for the heir of the Germanic Caesars now
styled himself simply the Emperor of Austria, and a great part of
Germany had become the humble vassal of Napoleon. Of all the Austrians,
it was perhaps the Emperor who felt the least hatred of France. His
whole family and his whole people--nobles, priests, the middle classes,
and the peasantry--nourished an angry resentment against the nation that
was overturning Europe. The new Empress, whose family had been deprived
of the Duchy of Modena, was conspicuous for the bitterness of her
indignation and of her political feelings. In the eyes of all the
Austrians, great or small, poor or rich, the French were the hereditary
enemies, the invaders, the destroyers of the throne and the Church,
impious, sacrilegious, revolutionary,--the authors of every evil. It was
they who, for years, destroyed the harvests, shed torrents of blood,
smote with the sword or the axe of the guillotine, crowded war upon war,
heaped ruins upon ruins, bringing misery and disgrace to all mankind.
The old nobility, once so proud of its coats-of-arms and of its
sovereign rights, now enslaved, humiliated, shorn of its independence,
knew no limit to its abuse of the "Corsican savage," who had cut the
roots of the old Germanic tree, previously so majestic. The priests
denounced the nation which had dared to confiscate the patrimony of
Saint Peter, and they cursed in Napoleon the persecutor of the Holy
Vicar of Christ. Women who had lost their husbands or sons in the war
held France responsible for their afflictions. The Frenchmen,
overthrowing and despoiling everything, foes of the human race, the
enemies of morality and religion, brought suffering to princes in their
palaces, to workmen in their factories, to tradespeople in their shops,
to the priests in their churches, to the soldiers in their camps, to the
peasants in their huts. The war of wrath was irresistible. Every one
lamented the mistake that had been made in abandoning the struggle; all
felt that they should have fought to the end, at the cost of every man
and every florin; that a mistake had been made in not assisting Prussia
at the time of the campaign of Jena; and that the moment had come for
all the powers to combine against the common foe and to crush him. Did
he make any pretence of concealing his intention to overthrow every
throne, and to make himself the oldest sovereign? Had he not had the
insolence to say at Milan in 1805, to the Prince of Cardito, the
Neapolitan envoy extraordinary, "Tell your Queen that I shall leave to
her and her family only enough land for their graves"? Had he not
recently, under the walls of Madrid, uttered these significant words to
the Spaniards, "If you don't want my brother Joseph for king, I shall
not force him upon you. I have another throne for him; and as for you, I
shall treat you as a conquered country"? This other throne, it was said
at Vienna, this throne which Napoleon did not name, must be the throne
of the Emperor Francis II. himself. Already the Imperial crown of
Germany had been lost, and the Austrian crown was threatened. But, added
all the archdukes and officers, that would not be so easy as the French
imagined, and they would get a good lesson. The Hapsburgs were not so
compliant as the Spanish Bourbons, and the Bayonne ambush could not be
repeated. All Europe was thrilling with indignation; only a signal was
needed for it to rise, and this signal Austria would give. This time
there was every chance of success. Their cry was "Victory or Death!" but
victory was certain. The French army, scattered from the Oder to the
Tagus, from the mountains of Bohemia to the Sierra Morena, would not be
able to withstand so many people eager to break their yoke. Were not
Russia and Prussia as desirous as Austria of revenge? Was not the whole
of Germany ready for the fray? Napoleon boasted that he was the
Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine; but if the Confederate
Princes were under his command, in his pay, the people, more patriotic,
more truly German than their rulers, burned with a longing to expel the
French. Let Napoleon suffer but a single defeat, and then on which one
of his vassals would he be able to count? Could he even rely on his own
subjects? Were there not already in his overgrown Empire many germs of
decay and death? In Vienna in 1809 the same things were said as in
Berlin in 1806; the same feelings prevailed. The military ardor had
grown so intense that the greatest soldier of Austria, the Archduke
Charles, was looked upon as too cool, too moderate, and those who were
eager to begin the fight called this bold warrior, this famous general,
the "Prince of Peace." Even if he had wished it, the Emperor Francis
would not have been able to calm the warlike fever of his army and his
people.