The War of Wars (97 page)

His vanity and conviction of his own omniscience were childlike. Although he possessed the directness of a supremely important political leader and military commander, as well as his own acute intelligence, his absolute lack of modesty was abhorrent and even highly comical to the more subtle, if sometimes crass and stupid, dynastic monarchs he sought to ape.

Whether it was Napoleon’s splendid surroundings in the Schönbrunn Palace that had gone to his head that summer – he delighted in the cool spring water in the garden – is uncertain: he was certainly playing the part of conqueror and imperial proconsul denied him in Paris, where he was always nervous of plots against him and the derision of his peers and the barbs of polite society. His bombast often reflected insecurity and paranoia, especially towards his fellow marshals. Some twenty plays and operas were performed for him as well as ballets by the great impresario Filippo Taglioni.

Meanwhile the Countess Marie Walewska had been summoned from Warsaw as his mistress and dallied with him every evening until August, becoming pregnant. He also pursued an affair with a nineteen-year-old Austrian girl who also became pregnant. He was delighted, not because he intended to marry either – although he entertained the idea that his son by Marie Walewska would become King of Poland one day – but because it was proof that he could father an heir. This
was much on his mind: he had been wounded at Ratisbon, and was anxious for the future of his dynasty.

More recently, a young man from Saxony had succeeded in getting close to him at a military parade and attempted to stab him, being deflected at the last moment by one of Napoleon’s aides. The Emperor was highly disturbed and personally interrogated the boy, the seventeen-year-old Fredrick Staps.

‘What did you want of me?’

‘To kill you.’

‘What have I done to you? Who made you my judge?’

‘I wanted to bring the war to an end.’

‘Why didn’t you go to the Emperor Francis?’

‘He? What for? He doesn’t count. And if he died another would succeed him; but after you the French would disappear from Germany.’

‘Do you repent?’

‘No!’

‘Would you do it again?’

‘Yes!’

‘What, even if I spared you?’

Napoleon wrote to Fouché:

The wretched boy, who seems to be fairly well educated, told me that he wanted to assassinate me to rid Austria of the presence of the French. I could find in him no traces of religious or political fanaticism. He seemed to have no clear idea of who Brutus was. His excitement prevented my finding out more. He will be questioned after he has cooled down and fasted. Possibly it all amounts to nothing. I have sent you the news of this incident to prevent its importance being exaggerated. I hope nothing will be said about it; if there should be talk, make out that the fellow is insane. If there is none, keep the matter a close secret. There was no scene at the parade; I myself had no notion that anything had happened.

The young man was executed shouting ‘Long live Germany! Death to the tyrant!’

Perhaps the saddest chapter in Napoleon’s personal life now occurred, again fuelled by the humiliation and megalomania after Wagram. The extraordinary thing was that his near-miss at Wagram did at least seem to dispel – albeit temporarily – his massive complex of personal insecurity. He really did believe he had confounded his foes both at home and abroad, with the exception of the running sore or ulcer of the Iberian Peninsula. At the age of forty, when he publicly considered himself too old to dance, he could afford to relax, to think of becoming
primus inter pares
among the great families of Europe, of a peaceful, respectable existence presiding wisely over the greatest European empire ever forged. It was time to think of a son and the succession to a French imperial dynasty that would preside over Europe for generations.

The sacrifice had to be made – and Napoleon was convinced it was his sacrifice primarily – of the woman he truly loved, in the interests of France: Josephine. The marriage between Napoleon and Josephine has often been portrayed as a loveless one of convenience marked by cynicism and infidelity on both sides. Yet it is hard to read Napoleon’s early letters to Josephine without concluding that there was great passion, indeed profound love on his side at first harshly matched by her own indifference. As the relationship progressed his own attitude grew more realistic and bitter, while this hardened woman softened towards him. As two tough survivors, their relationship was extraordinarily complex, but it would be wrong to view their hatreds and quarrels and passions as reflecting an absence of love; quite the reverse.

Precisely because of an essential similarity in their makeup, their relationship went deeper than the idealized romantic love the Emperor believed he felt for Marie Walewska. Napoleon married Josephine when he was inexperienced sexually, and was certainly passionately in love with her brand of worldly wise, older sensuality, clinging to her in the teeth of fierce opposition from his own family and others, and despite his intense jealousy when bruised by her infidelities. Certainly she married him initially for convenience: she was a widow with her
most beautiful years behind her, marrying a somewhat unprepossessing but already highly successful young man.

It was only on Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign that he appeared to fall out of love with her, when the evidence of her infidelity became overwhelming and his cuckoldry public knowledge. But he must have known before, and his angry reaction then seems as much a show staged for the benefit of his public image as a true reflection of his feelings: he was angry because he had been humiliated by her before others. Although by no means always faithful to her before then – which was typical of most men of his class at that time – his own sexual incontinence now became chronic and public, presumably in an act of revenge.

His Egyptian dalliances were succeeded by a string of girlfriends (he and his wife now slept in separate apartments) including the beautiful young Louise Rolandeau, the more mature Marguerite George, Josephine Raffin and Mlle Bourgoin, all of them actresses. By the time of his coronation he even had a ‘love nest’ on the rue de Vennes. A more serious liaison was with the twenty-year-old Adele Duchâtel, which Josephine tried to stop, arousing Napoleon’s fury. Another passion was the twenty-year-old Auna Roche de la Coste, followed by the eighteen-year-old Eleonore Denuelle, who was also Murat’s mistress. Napoleon also lusted after Josephine’s famously beautiful niece Stephanie de Beauharnais, whom however he never bedded.

When he fell in love with Marie Walewska in December 1806 and Josephine learnt of their passion the following April, Napoleon went overboard to assure his wife that he still loved her.

Maybe this was because he feared her continuing political influence, sometimes with the Jacobins, sometimes with Murat’s supporters; but it is more probably the action of a man genuinely devoted to his oldest love, although wise to her faults and incapable of fidelity himself. She also possessed a psychological power over him, however all-powerful he was politically, and was adept at bending his often childlike emotional nature to her will. By this time Josephine’s infidelities had calmed down a good deal and she would throw jealous rages at her husband, which he occasionally reinforced by violent acts such as breaking the chairs or the furniture.

In the second part of the relationship it seemed that Napoleon behaved to her with enormous affection, treating her as a sister, never ceasing to write to her, and that she reciprocated by forgiving him for his sexual excesses, even overlooking his mistresses, while behaving with surprising dignity as Empress. She was a tolerant and worldly wise woman who treated the younger and more emotionally immature Napoleon as a naughty boy, putting up with his tantrums, girlfriends and his extraordinarily brutal initial treatment of her (indeed he treated most of his women as sexual playthings).

Josephine was not a particularly attractive woman in many ways: hard, calculating, manipulative, cynical and often conspiring; but she fuelled a need in this strange man. By the end it is possible to believe that deep in the thickets of her own self-interest there lay a genuine affection for a man who in many ways was another hardbitten conspirator. In 1807 Josephine had a brief liaison with the thirty-year-old Duke Frederick Louis of Mecklenburg, a man half her age, which roused Napoleon to fury. But he adored her nevertheless. ‘I truly loved her, although I didn’t respect her. She was a liar, and an utter spendthrift, but she had a certain something which was irresistible. She was a woman to her very fingertips.’ On learning of her death in 1814 Napoleon’s
cri de coeur
was too agonized to be dismissed: ‘I have not passed a day without loving you. I have not passed a night without clasping you in my arms . . . No woman was ever loved with more devotion, ardour and tenderness . . . only death could break a union formed by sympathy, love and true feeling.’

Truly there was an element of the Macbeths in this strange relationship. But at this moment Josephine was about to fall victim to Napoleon’s
folie de grandeur
. For years Fouché and Talleyrand had been pressing him to divorce Josephine on the grounds that she could not provide him with an heir to the throne. Both had previously considered her politically dangerous, but now a largely spent force.

His fathering of a child with Marie Walewska proved to him that he was capable of siring an heir and that Josephine, having produced two children by her previous husband, was now barren. Fouché, whose hands were stained with Bourbon blood, wanted an heir to prevent the dynasty’s return. Talleyrand wanted to regularize the line of succession;
both agreed that any of Napoleon’s brothers would be a disaster. Napoleon himself longed for the respectability that marriage into one of the old European dynastic royal families would give him, which was not surprising for one of his background. First, he sought the hand of one of the Tsar’s sisters; Alexander replied that the decision was his mother’s. A fortnight later the sister was engaged to another. It could hardly have been a more blatant snub, but it did not deter Napoleon. Snubbed by the Russians, he began to consider other possible links – in particular a marriage to one of the daughters of his oldest enemy in Europe, the Emperor Francis of Austria.

On his return to Paris from one of his amorous dalliances with Marie Walewska, he treated Josephine with coldness, walling up the connecting door between their apartments at Fontainebleau and passing his time with his favourite sister Pauline. He asked Josephine’s daughter Hortense and her son, the loyal and able Eugène, to inform their mother that the marriage was at an end, and then did so himself, for political necessity and for ‘the welfare of the nation’. She screamed and fell to the floor ‘weeping and moaning’.

On 14 December he announced the dissolution of the marriage at a ceremony in the throne room of the Tuileries. He presented her with honours, presents and an income of 3 million francs a year. He wrote with stomach-churning self-pity:

The ceremony took place in the state apartments of the Tuileries and was very touching; all those present wept.

The policy of my Empire, the interests, the needs of my people, which have guided all my actions, demand that I should leave after me, to my children – the heirs of my affection for my people – the throne on which Providence has placed me. I have, however, for some years past, lost hope of having children from my marriage with my beloved wife the Empress Josephine: and it is this that has brought me to sacrifice my dearest affections, to consider only the good of the state, and to wish the dissolution of our marriage. At the age of forty I may yet hold the hope of living long enough to bring up in my own way of thinking the children which it may please Providence to grant me. God knows how much my present resolve
has cost me, but no sacrifice goes beyond my courage when it can be shown to be for the interests of France . . .

I think, dear friend, [Josephine] that you were weaker than you should have been today. You have shown courage; you must keep it up; you must not give way to a dangerous melancholy; you must be happy, and look after your health, which is so precious to me. If you are attached to me, if you love me, you must show strength. You cannot doubt my constant and loving friendship, and you would only show how little you know me if you thought that I could be happy unless you are. Goodbye, dear friend, sleep well – remember that I want you to.

Napoleon was no less crude and insensitive in the foolish way he now determined to ‘marry a womb’. First he persuaded his ambassador to Russia, Caulaincourt, to seek the hand of the Tsar’s youngest sister Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna, who was only fourteen, following the botched marriage pass at the older Catherine. The Tsar claimed that she was too young yet for such a match. Impatiently, Napoleon sent Eugène de Beauharnais – of all people, Josephine’s son, in another demonstration of the Emperor’s quasi-sadistic insensitivity – to ask for the hand of the nineteen-year-old Marie Louise of Austria. The Austrians were told they had to agree within days. He treated the humiliated Francis contemptuously as a vassal over whom he could exercise droit de seigneur.

As repellent as was Napoleon’s behaviour, Francis’s cold-bloodedness was perhaps even worse. Marie Louise was by that time a tall blonde with a strikingly pink and pretty complexion, full-cheeked and with beautiful eyes, a sensuous, vulnerable mouth and a touch of the long Habsburg nose and chin, enough to lend distinction but not to spoil her looks. She carried herself in the haughty Austrian manner that befitted the daughter of an Emperor: her bosom was well developed and her figure slim and attractive. In short, she was a thoroughly desirable match – quite apart from being the daughter of the Emperor of Austria.

This girl had twice been evacuated from Vienna as Napoleon’s armies had approached: to her he was the anti-Christ, the devil
incarnate, the bogeyman who had haunted her life ever since she was aware of the world outside her palace. Almost as bad, he was an upstart, a commoner whom no aristocratic woman, let alone a royal or Habsburg, could consider with anything but contempt. As a child she once wrote of swatting an enormous bug in her bedroom which she called Napoleon. When it was suggested that he might meet the Habsburgs she wrote, ‘I assure you that to meet this creature will be for me a worse torture than all the martyrdoms.’