Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (48 page)

Marie Louise had been prepared since childhood for a foreign marriage, and had been tutored in Spanish, English, Latin, Italian, and French, the language of the enemy. Although no great beauty, she was tall and fair and accomplished at painting landscapes and playing the piano and harp. She was also an enthusiastic reader, unlike Josephine. Spirited and not easily dominated, she had been brought up to hate the French people, who had executed her great-aunt Marie Antoinette. The archduchess rather resembled Marie Antoinette, thanks to her protruding Hapsburg lip, clear complexion, and fine golden hair, although she was taller and more robust. Her mother had died in 1807, when Marie Louise was fifteen, and her father soon married his cousin Maria Ludovika, only twenty-three herself. Marie Louise had been a much beloved, spoiled child—and now she was set to wed Napoleon, the bloodthirsty monster with a terrifying reputation. In Britain, Lord Castlereagh drily remarked that “a virgin must now and then be sacrificed to the Minotaur.”
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The proxy marriage took place in Vienna, the banquets were thrown, and the archduchess departed for France.

N
APOLEON ORDERED A
round of balls and receptions to celebrate his union with Marie Louise. Unfortunately, the public refused to play his game; the newspapers were still filled with articles about Josephine. “I told you to arrange that the journals do not speak of the Empress Josephine, but they do little else,” he railed at Fouché. “See to it that they do not repeat this new publicity.”
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As he feared, the French populace had been disappointed by the news of his divorce. With the break from Josephine, it was to them as if the emperor had thrown his revolutionary past aside. He had claimed the glory of the Republic and now was divorcing to produce a hereditary line. Josephine was esteemed by the older generals and ministers who had participated in the Revolution, and the aristocrats and royalists saw her as their own. In a way, Marie Louise was Marie Antoinette all over again.

Josephine was beloved, but she was lonely. Napoleon refused to allow her to come to the balls and dances to celebrate the wedding. The dignitaries were too occupied to visit her, and Napoleon did not wish to do so. Every piece of news about the preparations for the archduchess’s arrival was a blow to her. All Paris seemed to be at the glittering receptions and dances—everyone except her. Napoleon even asked Hortense to be a lady-in-waiting to the new empress, a position she reluctantly accepted. One of Josephine’s few regular visitors, Hortense told her mother the details of the plans for the wedding.

Napoleon’s first marriage had been conducted speedily, during a break in composing military strategy, and had not been blessed until the night before the coronation. His second marriage, he decreed, would be very different. He demanded that it follow in exact detail the wedding of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1770, and he pored over the archives and the records to ensure that he missed none of the finer points. Spies told him that his fiancée was clumsy, her bosom too large, and her walk graceless. Her French was good but formal and she found small talk trying. She could not have been more unlike Josephine if she’d tried. Napoleon didn’t care.

The hardened fighter was behaving like a young man in love once
more. He took waltzing lessons and had new clothes made, ordered a huge redecoration of the palaces, and devoted hours to Marie Louise’s trousseau. He had the contents laid out for him in the Tuileries and inspected court gowns, riding habits, ball dresses, shawls, shoes adorned with mink, diamond-encrusted fans, and the exquisite satin and ermine wedding dress. The Château de Compiègne, where Louis XVI had met Marie Antoinette, was chosen as the place for the first encounter between the emperor and archduchess, and Napoleon had it entirely redecorated. He studied the etiquette for the reception of Marie Louise with as much care as his battle plans, and sent his sister Caroline and a hundred attendants to meet the archduchess at Munich. Caroline was a disastrous choice: Marie Louise hated her for taking the throne of her aunt Maria Carolina of Naples, and Caroline detested the idea of her brother marrying at all. As the Bonapartes were finally realizing, their thirteen-year campaign against Josephine had not been in the family’s interest: If Napoleon produced a litter of children, they and their offspring would be thrust from the succession. They had underestimated Napoleon, hoping they might be able to marry him to a woman under their influence—and that he would struggle to have a child.

Marie Louise arrived in Munich to the icy greeting of her awful sister-in-law. Suffering from a bad cold, Marie was not in the mood to pander to Caroline, and the two proceeded together in ill humor. In 1770 Marie Antoinette had been met on an island in the middle of the Rhine, stripped of her Austrian clothes, and re-dressed in French gowns. She had given up all her belongings, even her beloved pug. Forty years later, Caroline oversaw the same ritual undressing and re-dressing of Marie Louise and also insisted that her dog be sent back. Poor Marie Louise felt nothing but dread for her impending marriage.

Napoleon, for his part, tried to please his bride, sending regular missives assuring her of his affection. “You will find a husband who wants your happiness above all else,” he told her, and then “Nothing now interests me but you.”
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The emperor told Josephine that she would have to leave Paris for a château in Navarre before Marie Louise arrived. “I trust that you will be pleased with what I have done for Navarre,” he wrote. “You must see how anxious I am to make myself agreeable to you. Get ready to take
possession of Navarre, you will go there on 25 March, to pass the month of April.”
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The archduchess was due to arrive on March 27. Josephine, hardly able to stand the thought of such exile, did not leave until the very last minute, after Napoleon had departed to meet his bride. She had to go without Hortense and Eugène, as both were due to attend the wedding.

Josephine and her ladies traveled to Navarre overnight. They arrived at nine to be greeted by the entire town, the mayor, and a gun salute. Josephine was heralded as the “Duchess of Navarre” (something of a demotion from empress). They were then escorted to the château. So ugly that it was known locally as “the cooking pot,” or
la marmite,
the two-story building was sturdy and lumpen, topped with lead, and unhappily situated at the bottom of the valley. Inside, the vast reception room was paved in marble and lit only by slits in the dome of the ceiling, so it was impossibly gloomy. The ceilings were so high that the rooms were hard to heat, and the doors and windows would not close properly. Without the rugs, drapes, and curtains of the Tuileries, hot-blooded Josephine was constantly cold, even though her staff hauled in huge loads of wood and twenty-one cauldrons of coal every day. She found the other rooms small, the woodwork rotting, and she was scandalized by the state of the grounds. The castle’s situation in the dip of the valley meant that it was surrounded by puddles of rainwater. The garden had been laid out in the Chinese style, with crisscrossing canals and streams topped by bridges and pagodas, but the waterways had been severely neglected and the ground was entirely waterlogged. The walls of the palace smelled of damp. As her new lady Madame Ducrest put it, the building had been “left a mere ruin.”
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Josephine spent a hundred thousand francs on furnishings, but those obtained for her by one M. Pierlot were of poor quality—broken tables, torn armchairs, and tattered curtains.

She wrote to Napoleon begging for repairs and furniture. Her household was horrified by the château, and some demanded to leave, preferring to serve the new empress. Those who stayed found that the days passed so slowly, each seemed to last a lifetime. There was the occasional dinner for local dignitaries, but most evenings consisted of interminable games of patience or billiards, checkers with the elderly bishop of
Evreux, or a little needlework while one of the chamberlains read aloud. Josephine could not give up her addiction to telling fortunes, and she and her ladies whiled away hours with the tarot cards, attempting to find better fates than the ones they had been handed.

As she sat in the chilly rooms of Navarre, ruing her fate but never uttering a word against Napoleon, Josephine did not contact Paul Barras or Hippolyte Charles or any other old friends—although Madame Ducrest suspected she had received Thérésa in secret at Malmaison. Her most recent admirer, Prince Frederick Louis of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, raised the possibility of marriage, but she refused. Poor Frederick Louis was forlorn, but there was no hope. Not only was Josephine still in love with Napoleon, she also dreaded having to live abroad and make a new start in her mid-forties. Perhaps she should have thrown caution to the winds. Although it would have been a comedown to the former empress to live with him in dreary Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the alternative was to remain in Navarre, listening to the tales of Marie Louise and her triumphs. Even worse, she heard rumors that Napoleon wished her to go into exile and never return to Paris.

“I have cried only occasionally for some time past,” she wrote to Hortense. “I hope that the quiet life I lead here, far from intrigue and gossip, will strengthen me and that my eyes will get well.”

While Josephine languished, the plans for Napoleon’s marriage sped ahead. On the evening of March 27, Napoleon arrived at the Château de Compiègne, counting the hours like the world’s most eager bridegroom (even though he had been with an Italian mistress until the night before). Unable to wait any longer, he catapulted off to meet Marie Louise while she was en route. He had his coachman flag down her carriage, then jumped in to embrace her. Unlike Louis XVI, who reported succinctly in his journal, “Meeting with Madame la Dauphine” regarding his encounter with Marie Antoinette at Compiègne in 1770, Napoleon was determined to celebrate his decision.

At the Tuileries, kings and queens, courtiers, little girls with bouquets, and assembled ladies had been waiting for hours. Napoleon pushed past them all and swept Marie Louise and Caroline upstairs, where he ordered supper for the three of them. He then demanded of his uncle Cardinal Fesch whether he and his new wife were properly
married. Fesch told him they were married in a civil sense but not a religious one. That was enough for Napoleon; he bundled Marie Louise off to bed. He thought the evening had gone without a hitch—and for the bride, it was not as bad as she had expected. “She asked me to do it again,” Napoleon later said on St. Helena.
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Next morning, Hortense found Marie Louise’s expression “sweet but a little embarrassed.”
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Nearly a week later, Napoleon and Marie Louise were married formally in a blaze of festivities in Paris. The pair drove into the city followed by thirty-two carriages of their household. The fountains were running with wine, and food was laid out at intervals across the route, but the people were not cheering wildly. Some spectators even mistook the fat little emperor, resplendent in feathers and lace, for Marie Louise’s governess. As for the future empress, she stared nervously at the people who had hated and murdered her great-aunt, with only a teenager’s idealistic hope to reassure her.

During the ceremony at the Tuileries, Hortense was to carry Marie Louise’s train, along with the dreaded Bonaparte sisters and Joseph’s wife, Julie, now the queen of Spain. Elisa, Caroline, and Pauline could hardly bear to hold the train and pretended to be ill. Marie Louise’s wedding dress suited her rather sturdy figure. “Once she is properly dressed and arranged, she will be perfectly all right,” Metternich decided. Others noted that the bride was taller than the groom.

The Austrian prince Schwarzenberg, who had been instrumental in the marriage negotiations, invited the court to a ball at his home. He erected a huge ballroom in his garden, but disastrously, when the evening was in full swing, gauze drapes caught fire from a candle, and the blaze spread through the ballroom. Napoleon and Marie Louise escaped, but other guests perished, including Schwarzenberg’s sister-in-law. Napoleon was terrified by the bad omen and was mollified only when his advisers declared that Schwarzenberg was the unlucky one. Not long after, the emperor had a piece of good news to console him. On May 10, Marie Walewska gave birth to a son, Alexandre Florian Joseph. Her husband, Count Walewski, agreed to acknowledge him as his child—accepting his responsibility for pushing his wife into Napoleon’s arms four years previously.

A
FTER THE WEDDING
, Napoleon reveled in his marriage and spent his days at hunts and his nights at balls and the opera, leaving his study papers untouched and even coming late to council meetings. He directed all his attention to pleasing his new bride. “I am not afraid of Napoleon, but I am beginning to think he is afraid of me,” Marie Louise told Metternich with some pride. The emperor was intimidated by real royalty. Marie Louise, unlike most of the court, was not fearful of him and spoke to him with the courage of a confident teenager. The new empress loved eating, and Napoleon arranged lengthy banquets to please her, with fourteen choices of dessert. His bolted meals were largely a thing of the past, as was the work that had made them necessary. He had no desire to go to Spain to command the army. He wished to be by Marie Louise’s side, and indeed, there was no other way for him to conceive his longed-for legitimate son. “The Emperor is very much taken with his wife,” reported Metternich, “and if the Empress continues to dominate him, she could render very great services to herself and to all of Europe. He is so evidently in love with her that his habits are subordinated to his wishes.”