Citizen Emperor (109 page)

The tryst smacks of comic-opera.
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He had a little hermitage at Marciana restored and renovated for the purpose; it was about as far away as anyone could get on the island. In an attempt to avert prying eyes, he ordered the brig bringing her to the island at the beginning of September 1814 to moor off the coast, which immediately aroused the curiosity of the townspeople of Portoferraio; they imagined that Marie-Louise and her son had at last landed. Maria Walewska was obliged to travel to Marciana in the evening. When she got there, she had supper with Napoleon, possibly with Bertrand’s wife Fanny acting the hostess. Maria slept at the hermitage while Napoleon slept in a tent outside. On the nights he was there, Napoleon came out of his tent in a dressing gown and went to her room where he stayed until daybreak.
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His behaviour was a tad hypocritical. Those officers who had been lucky enough to come to the island to live with girlfriends or mistresses were not received at the Villa Mulini.
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Apart from Maria Walewska, Napoleon does not appear to have taken any lovers before the autumn of 1814, after he had given up hope of ever seeing Marie-Louise and his son. Maria had been on the island for almost two weeks before she was again unceremoniously sent away – rumour of her presence had spread throughout the island and he supposedly wanted to avoid any scandal – never again to see Napoleon. She divorced her old husband in 1812 and remarried in 1816. She died one year later of a kidney disease at the age of thirty-one.

Part of the problem was that Napoleon still had no idea whether Marie-Louise would come to join him or not. He wanted to have her by his side, of that there is no doubt, not only because he loved Marie-Louise and his son, but also because it would have been a powerful political gesture. Communications between the two were bad at best, sometimes intercepted by the Austrian secret police and simply not passed on. Napoleon did not receive any letters from her until July; four others that she had written never reached him at all. He complained bitterly to the British about the Austrian Emperor preventing his daughter from joining him.
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In August he nevertheless wrote to her to say that ‘Your accommodation is ready and I am waiting for the month of September for the harvest . . . Come then. I am waiting impatiently. You know all the feelings I have for you.’
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He must have known, however, that the allied powers were not favourably disposed to seeing Marie-Louise leave for the island.
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Napoleon simply hoped, something that ran counter to past experience, that she would be strong-willed enough to impose herself on her father.

It is true that she still held feelings for Napoleon, and that she wrote to him during her voyage from France to Vienna, letters Napoleon never got.
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When she arrived in Vienna on 21 May 1814, amid the hurly-burly that was the Congress, she and her son were warmly received. She did not take part in any of the social activities underpinning the Congress, which suited her just fine after the stuffy atmosphere of the French imperial court. It did not even cross her mind that she could have lobbied on behalf of her husband. A simple life is what she hankered after and it is what she was accorded.
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In July, after being at Vienna for only two months, she was given permission to take the waters at Aix-en-Provence, but she had to leave her son behind. To take him to France, ‘one might think I wanted to disturb the peace, which could cause me and my son problems’. In the same letter, however, she wrote that Napoleon should ‘reserve a small lodging, because you know I intend to come as soon as I can’.
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Her plan was to travel to Parma after Aix, and from there to Elba. Along the way to Aix, she made a point of meeting members of the Bonaparte family – Louis in Baden, Jérôme in Payerne in Switzerland and Joseph at the Swiss Château d’Allaman. Is it true that she appeared calm and imperturbable in public but that she cried when alone?
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All of this gives the impression that as late as August she was still pining for her husband. Her circumstances, however, were about to change.

Waiting for her when she arrived at Aix on 17 July was a young, dashing officer, Adam Adalbert von Neipperg, whom she had met briefly in Paris in 1810 and again in 1812. It has been assumed, usually by French historians, that Metternich deliberately chose Neipperg to escort her so that he could seduce her to help her forget Napoleon, and that he had indeed received secret instructions to that effect, but there is nothing to support this claim.
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On the contrary, it would appear that the names of other officers were put forward to accompany Marie-Louise in order to keep Vienna informed about her progress and whereabouts, to make sure that she did not head off for Elba. It was General Schwarzenberg who suggested Neipperg.
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Metternich instructed Neipperg to turn her away, ‘by any means whatsoever’, from ‘all ideas of a journey to Elba’, naturally with the greatest tact, and to provide detailed reports on her.
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Marie-Louise was no doubt of a sensuous nature, but it is unfair to suggest that she could simply be seduced by the first comer. Even if Neipperg had had a reputation for being a rake in his youth, he was now forty years old with a wife and children and perhaps did not cut as dashing a figure as he once had.
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He had lost an eye in battle, so he always wore a black eye band.

Her first meeting with him did not make a very agreeable impression on her, but that did not last long.
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A few days later she was writing that he was ‘full of attention’ and that his manner pleased her very much.
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Neipperg, who at first seemed a bit of a nuisance, knew how to make himself indispensable so that, very soon, she started to have feelings for him. It naturally tormented her. ‘I am’, she confided in her secretary, Claude François de Méneval, in August, ‘in a very critical and very unhappy position. There are times when my head turns so that I think the best thing to happen would be for me to die.’
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That is not the confession of a woman entering into an affair lightly; it is a woman attempting to come to grips with conflicting feelings. That is why she was still able to confide in Méneval on Napoleon’s birthday (15 August), ‘How can I be happy . . . when I am obliged to pass the feast day, so solemn to me, so far from the two people who are dearest to me?’
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Aix was amusing, full of balls, garden parties and excursions, but not only did she have to contend with her own feelings, she was also being bombarded with unflattering stories about Napoleon, portrayed as a bad husband who had always been unfaithful. This fell on what was now fertile ground. Napoleon had been sending letters to her directly, through his officers, first a Colonel Laczynski and then a Captain Hurault de Sorbée, whose wife was Marie-Louise’s Austrian reader, saying that a ship was waiting for her at Genoa and that Hurault de Sorbée would arrange everything.
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Marie-Louise baulked at this. To Napoleon she answered that she had to go to Vienna and that it would be impossible to go to the island without her father’s permission. To her father she wrote to say that she ‘felt less than ever like wanting to take the trip’.
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Napoleon’s imperious tone, ordering her to set out with Hurault de Sorbée, was the excuse used not to go, unless her father obliged her to. There was little chance of that. It was Metternich, and her father, who wrote to her to say that, at the Congress, the House of Bourbon – that is, Spain and France – did not want a Habsburg princess to reign in Parma. She should, therefore, return to Vienna to defend her interests and the interests of her son. In fact, it is possible that the idea of journeying to Elba inspired more fear in her than either her father or Metternich could instil. If then Marie-Louise was writing to Napoleon to say that she was being obliged to return to Vienna from Aix, she was only half telling the truth. It was on the return voyage from Aix to Vienna (she left on 5 September) that her party, surprised by a storm on the 24th, was obliged to find refuge in the town of Küsnacht at an inn called the Soleil d’Or. It was probably during that night that she consummated her relationship with Neipperg.
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In Vienna, her father showed her a letter from Napoleon addressed to her uncle, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, pleading with him to forward letters to his wife. It was the request of a desperate man. Francis then instructed her not to reply to Napoleon’s letters. As she told Méneval, she had the choice of bending to her father’s will or rebelling against him and her whole family, with what would have been serious consequences.
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The last letter to him was dated the beginning of January 1815.
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It is possible that by this stage, with a new lover by her side, she was learning to forget her husband. The change in attitude was spotted by those in Vienna; a secret police report noted that she was still ‘attached’ to Napoleon, but that she was no longer the same.
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Letizia arrived on Elba on 2 August 1814, having embarked from Leghorn amid the jeers of the mob.
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She was sixty-four years of age, but looked twenty years younger, and had decided to join her son from Rome where she had taken refuge after the collapse of the Empire.
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Her son was not there to greet her; expecting her to arrive the previous day he had gone to the country. She was a fairly unpretentious woman, but she was nevertheless, like her son, a bit of a stickler for form and refused to go ashore until a guard of honour had been arranged and enough people had been gathered together to give a semblance of a cheering crowd.
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She settled into the Vantini house, a spacious residence originally destined for Pauline below the Villa Mulini. Napoleon was delighted by her arrival and spent a number of hours with her, visibly happy on his return to the Mulini. Letizia as we know had a formidable character, something that did not fail to impress itself upon those who came into contact with her. Although ‘very pleasant and unaffected’,
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more ‘eminent people were intimidated in front of her than in front of the Emperor’.
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Napoleon also treated her with deference, visited her every day, something that he had never been able to do when in Paris, dined once a week at her residence, spent evenings playing cards with her and accorded her a role befitting her former title. When he cheated at cards, which was often, his mother was the only person to pull him up with a brusque, ‘Napoleon, you are cheating!’
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The Decision

When he was not keeping himself busy with one building project or another or frittering away his energies on trivial matters, Napoleon had time to mull over the events of the past year. In his inimitable fashion, he proved incapable of anything like self-reflection or self-critique. Instead, he tended to dwell on his own ‘feats’ during the last campaign, to argue that France had not suffered all that much because the bulk of lives expended were foreign, and to abuse Marmont whose defection he believed had obliged him to give up the struggle.
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Napoleon was encouraged, it is generally argued, by the stories from France that were filtering back to him about how unpopular Bourbon rule was proving, but one wonders just how much encouragement he needed. Yes, it is obvious that the army was not overly impressed with its new Bourbon masters. Not only had many veterans found themselves out of work or on half-pay – which the government then proceeded to reduce by imposing a number of taxes – and many experienced officers who had campaigned and fought for France had been replaced by men whose only qualification was to have connections at court, but soldiers returning from captivity in Germany, Britain and Russia (the lucky few) now circulated horror stories about their time in captivity. Most of these returning veterans were still loyal to Napoleon; their reinsertion into French society was, therefore, bound to create problems.
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They fed into the core of loyal supporters who would never accept the return of the Bourbons, creating enormous tensions between royalists and Bonapartists.
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Other reasons are put forward to help us understand Napoleon’s state of mind around this time. The knowledge that Marie-Louise and his son were not going to join him was a factor. So too was Louis’ refusal to pay him the pension he had been promised by the Treaty of Fontainebleau (along with every other member of the Bonaparte family). To be fair to Louis, the new king simply did not feel obliged to conform to a treaty he had no part in elaborating, not to mention the fact that the financial circumstances in which he found France were dire; Napoleon had saddled the Bourbons with an enormous debt. But then Louis was essentially a spiteful man who would have resented having to pay Napoleon at all. Nevertheless, deliberately withholding the funds was a calculated move, not particularly astute as it turned out but calculated nonetheless. Louis and his government wanted Napoleon gone and they mistakenly believed that by withholding funds they would oblige him to reduce his staff and his guard, so that he would be more easily moved at a later date.
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