Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (51 page)

Marie sat outside the closed door of Napoleon’s library for the remainder of the day and throughout the night, awaiting the emperor’s summons to enter. Constant Wairy, who had advised his master of her arrival, recalled, “I could not bear to watch her grief, so I went away and walked in the gallery.” When the door never opened, she returned to Paris as quietly as she had come, not wishing to be discovered lurking about unwanted.

Less than an hour after her departure Napoleon emerged, asking for Marie, and Constant informed him of her patient, silent vigil. The emperor was visibly upset that he had missed her. “Poor woman, she must have felt humiliated. I must tell her how sorry I am. I have so many problems here,” he added, rubbing his forehead.

Marie wrote to him that day. The following reply survives:

Marie—I have received your letter of the fifteenth and I am deeply touched by your sentiments. They are worthy of your lovely soul and the goodness of your heart. When you have settled your affairs in Paris and decide to take the waters at Lucca or Pisa, it would give me the greatest pleasure to see you and your son again [on Elba]. My feelings for you both remain unchanged. Keep well; don’t worry. Think affectionately of me and never doubt me.

Marie did travel to Italy that summer, and received a letter from Napoleon dated August 9 while she was in Florence.

I will see you here with the same pleasure as always—either now or on your return from Naples. I will be very glad to see the little boy, of whom I hear many nice things, and look forward to giving him a good kiss. Adieu Marie.

He signed it, “Your affectionate Napoleon.”

Meanwhile, her former lover was also encouraging his wife, Empress Marie-Louise, to visit him on Elba and to bring
their
son with her.

Traveling with her sister Antonia and brother Theodore as chaperones, Marie and Alexander embarked for Elba from the port of Livorno on August 31, planning to remain on the island for as long as Napoleon would have her. Whatever intentions of fidelity the ex-emperor might have had toward his wife may have melted away when he beheld Countess Walewska again, because others detected the chemistry between them. They were fairly certain that if the couple hadn’t already resumed their love affair, they were about to do so as soon as they had the opportunity. Alexander called Napoleon
Papa l’Empereur
and the pair of them romped and roughhoused on the lawns like a typical boy and his dad. Napoleon’s chef, Louis-Etienne Saint-Denis, observed, “The young boy looked a bit pale and his features were very like the Emperor’s; he was rather serious for his age.”

That night Napoleon visited Marie’s room. The following day he
received word that the whole island was talking about the arrival of a heavily veiled blond woman and an equally towheaded little boy. Napoleon’s local doctor, Fourreau de Beauregard, donned his Sunday best to pay a special call on the imperial family and found Napoleon sitting with a little blond child on his knee, who the doctor assumed was his son by Marie-Louise. Beauregard paid his compliments to the little boy and asked Napoleon to please convey his respects to the empress. Napoleon, who had given the impression to the islanders of Elba that he was a fine, upstanding family man, had to do some swift damage control before the rumors continued to fly and the gossip spread over the waters and reached the real Marie-Louise. Obviously, Countess Walewska and Alexander had to depart immediately. Brokenhearted, Marie packed her things. She offered Napoleon her jewelry in case he should need money, but he refused it. The weather provided a dramatic backdrop for a truly Napoleonic farewell; the lovers said adieu before Marie and Alexander boarded their boat as the wind whipped about them in a gathering storm.

Marie-Louise would never arrive. Her father had forbidden her all further contact with her husband. By this time she had embarked on an extramarital affair of her own with the man her papa had sent to prevent her from reuniting with Napoleon, the one-eyed Adam Adalbert, Graf von Neipperg.

Marie Walewska remained in Naples for the rest of 1814. In January 1815, she learned of Count Walewski’s death. By April she was back in Paris. She saw Napoleon on June 11, one week before the Battle of Waterloo, when he summoned her to the Elysée Palace to give her some financial advice. The next time she entered the palace, a few days after the fateful battle, it was to help with the pack-out. On June 22, Napoleon abdicated for the second time.

At Malmaison on June 28, he and Marie said their final farewells. “[T]he atmosphere was very sad. I can still see the Emperor…. He took me in his arms and I remember a tear ran down his face,” Marie later recalled. She spent an hour with Napoleon, and when it was time for her to depart she collapsed into his arms and remained there for several moments.

His refusal of Marie’s offer to join him in his second exile on St.
Helena devastated her. The man who had been the center of her world for more than eight years was now exiting it forever.

Marie continued to live quietly in Paris. Napoleon’s dashing cousin General d’Ornano wanted to marry her, but she needed time for her emotional wounds to heal before moving on. They were finally wed on September 7, 1816, in Brussels. On June 9, 1817, she bore d’Ornano a son, Rodolphe Auguste. The infant was strong and healthy, but Marie remained frail. Although she didn’t know it, she had already been suffering from advanced kidney problems for a few years.

Her acute toxemia grew worse during the autumn of 1817. On December 11, at the age of thirty-one, she died with all three of her sons at her side. When Napoleon learned of her passing he was still wearing the ring she had given him bearing the inscription,
“When you cease to love me, I will love you still
.”

Napoleon died in 1821. His will stipulated that Alexander Walewski join the French army. Alexander did both of his parents proud; he became the French ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and served as foreign minister under his half cousin Napoleon III.

Marie’s romance with Napoleon was born out of her Polish patriotism. He had promised her that he would do much for her homeland, but despite his florid pledges made in the urgent heat of desire, Poland got very little out of the liaison. And Napoleon’s policies were not at all influenced by her.

However, their royal romance may have changed the course of history. Marie’s pregnancy proved Napoleon capable of siring a son. It precipitated his divorce from Josephine and led to his marriage with Marie-Louise of Austria. Countess Walewska undoubtedly meant much to the emperor during their love affair, but politics always came first.

“[T]he hero, in order to be interesting, must be neither completely guilty nor completely innocent.” This was Napoleon’s view of the protagonist in a classic drama, and he applied the formula to himself as well. Marie also qualifies. She knew she was violating Church doctrine by committing adultery, and yet she was then, and is still, viewed as a Polish patriot. Her face even graced a postage stamp in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Marie Walewska had worshiped Napoleon Bonaparte since girlhood and carried her genuine passion for him to her grave. Throughout her life, her destiny, it seems, was to be a sacrifice: as a teenage bride to save her family’s estate; as a young wife and mother to save Poland; and finally, as the test womb that proved her lover’s virility, sacrificed on the altar of his dynastic and political ambitions.

L
UDWIG
I
OF
B
AVARIA

1786–1868

R
ULED
: 1825–1848

T
hough a monarch of the progressive nineteenth century, Ludwig seemed to be a man of another place and time, looking backward for inspiration. Perhaps it’s because his godparents were Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, for whom he had been named. Born into a minor branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty, which ruled Bavaria for a thousand years, Ludwig was the oldest son of the count palatine Maximilian at the Zweibrücken court in Strasbourg and the princess Wilhelmine Auguste of Hesse-Darmstadt. He eventually became king of Munich upon the death of his father in 1825. Having traveled extensively throughout Greece and Rome, Ludwig was enamored of classicism, art, and antiquities, and it was his ambition to transform Munich into the Athens of Bavaria.

Ludwig had soft features, wide-set blue eyes, and a proud mouth, but his face bore several marks as a result of his having survived smallpox at the age of eleven. He was also profoundly deaf and spoke with a stammer, which may have been related to his loss of hearing. Despite his aural deficiency he fought with distinction and courage, though not with passion, for Napoleon—whom he intensely disliked. Ludwig was delighted when the tide eventually turned against the emperor in 1814 and Napoleon lost Germany, even though Ludwig’s sister, Princess Augusta of Bavaria, had married the emperor’s stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais. Ludwig’s joy in Napoleon’s defeat was dampened only by the fact that because of their family connection to the emperor, his father had prohibited him from actively taking up the sword for the enemy allied forces.

The Roman Catholic Ludwig’s October 12, 1810, wedding to the
Protestant princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen had marked the occasion of the first Oktoberfest. It was a political alliance, although Therese, a tall, fresh-faced, serious-minded brunette, was said at the time to be the prettiest catch in Europe. She bore Ludwig nine children, one of whom died in infancy. Determined to preserve the lifestyle he had enjoyed as a bachelor, Ludwig, then crown prince, maintained a separate bedroom, sleeping apart from Therese unless he made conjugal visits to her boudoir. He continued to take his daily constitutionals alone, frustrated that he could no longer enjoy a conversation with every pretty woman he chanced to meet during his strolls.

A poet long before he was a king, Ludwig had the acquisitive collector’s eye for beauty, which encompassed everything from art and architecture to gorgeous women. His wife was a popular queen who endeavored to turn a blind eye to Ludwig’s numerous extramarital infidelities, although she displayed her displeasure in discreet ways, once leaving town during one of his affairs. Therese would, however, draw the line at his infatuation with Lola Montez.

As a sovereign, Ludwig was an eccentric workaholic. He would often rise by five a.m., and his was always the first lamp to be lit in the palace as he tackled the pile of official documents awaiting his perusal, comfortably attired in the green banyan, or dressing gown, that he had worn for the past forty years. Ludwig went out among his subjects, which was unusual for a ruler of his day, shopping and strolling, visiting museums and enjoying concerts, dressed like a rumpled professor and always carrying an umbrella.

Despite his sartorial oddities, he was an able administrator, rescuing Bavaria from the financial disarray in which his father had left it. Not only did he turn the kingdom around, but he transformed it into one of the most fiscally sound monarchies in Europe by micromanaging its cash flow—which often involved a good deal of penny-pinching.

He was a good steward, using that money to make Munich a showpiece of culture, art, and design. Although Ludwig’s aesthetics were rooted in the classical antiquities of the past, his pragmatic eye was firmly on the future. He built Bavaria’s first railway, launched her first steamship, and constructed a canal that linked the beautiful blue Danube with the Main River, which allowed for access to both
the North and the Black seas, extensively broadening Bavaria’s trade possibilities.

But a pair of flashing blue eyes proved to be Ludwig’s undoing when his penchant for pretty women allowed other parts of his anatomy to cloud his judgment. His affair with the Spanish dancer Lola Montez, a self-made Irish-born adventuress who passed herself off as an exotic Iberian of noble birth and a victim of the Carlist civil war, brought down his monarchy, forcing his humiliating abdication in favor of his son, the crown prince Maximilian.

At the age of eighty in 1866, Ludwig acted as an adviser for his grandson, who by then had assumed the throne as Ludwig II. The second Ludwig was the “Mad King” who built Neuschwanstein Castle and whose crush on the composer Richard Wagner earned the latter the nickname “Lolus,” a direct reference to Ludwig I’s royal favorite, Lola Montez.

On February 29, 1868, Ludwig I died at the age of eighty-one after a leg infection became gangrenous. His will stipulated the wish to be buried beside Queen Therese, who had passed away thirteen and a half years earlier.

L
UDWIG
I
OF
B
AVARIA
AND
L
OLA
M
ONTEZ
(1821–1861)

The maxim “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets” did not originate with the Broadway musical
Damn Yankees
. It was the angry protest of a group of nineteenth-century Munich university students against the malignant influence of a seductive foreigner upon their sovereign.

Lola Montez—her greed, her immorality, and her anti-Jesuitical ideas—were, in their view, the ruination of the nation, and they wanted her gone.

But King Ludwig I, who was old enough to be Lola’s grandfather, was smitten, so blinded by his infatuation that he refused to believe his “Lolitta,” with her sultry looks, fiery temper, and passion for politics, was perhaps the finest grifter of the age. “Lola Montez” was her greatest role—one that she lived so well and so fully that she began to believe her own lies.

By the time the woman born as Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert met the sixty-year-old king of Bavaria in October 1846, she had already lived a wildly colorful life. She was born in 1821 in County Sligo, Ireland, to an infantryman and his sixteen-year-old wife, who were almost immediately posted to India. Gilbert died soon after their arrival, and his widow wed one of his fellow officers, an upright Scot named Craigie. As soon as she learned to walk, little Eliza ran about India nearly unsupervised, an ungovernable hoyden even then, soaking up the exotic sights, sounds, and scents.