Chapter 7

Pauline--or, as they called her in those days, Paulette--wore unbecoming hats and shabby gowns, and shoes that were full of holes. None the less, she was sought out by several men of note, among them Freron, a commissioner of the Convention. He visited Pauline so often as to cause unfavorable comment; but he was in love with her, and she fell in love with him to the extent of her capacity. She used to write him love letters in Italian, which were certainly not lacking in ardor. Here is the end of one of them:

I love you always and most passionately. I love you for ever, my beautiful idol, my heart, my appealing lover. I love you, love you, love you, the most loved of lovers, and I swear never to love any one else!

This was interesting in view of the fact that soon afterward she fell in love with Junot, who became a famous marshal. But her love affairs never gave her any serious trouble; and the three sisters, who now began to feel the influence of Napoleon's rise to power, enjoyed themselves as they had never done before. At Antibes they had a beautiful villa, and later a mansion at Milan.

By this time Napoleon had routed the Austrians in Italy, and all France was ringing with his name. What was Pauline like in her maidenhood? Arnault says:

She was an extraordinary combination of perfect physical beauty and the strangest moral laxity. She was as pretty as you please, but utterly unreasonable. She had no more manners than a school-girl--talking incoherently, giggling at everything and nothing, and mimicking the most serious persons of rank.

General de Ricard, who knew her then, tells in his monograph of the private theatricals in which Pauline took part, and of the sport which they had behind the scenes. He says:

The Bonaparte girls used literally to dress us. They pulled our ears and slapped us, but they always kissed and made up later. We used to stay in the girls' room all the time when they were dressing.

Napoleon was anxious to see his sisters in some way settled. He proposed to General Marmont to marry Pauline. The girl was then only seventeen, and one might have had some faith in her character. But Marmont was shrewd and knew her far too well. The words in which he declined the honor are interesting:

"I know that she is charming and exquisitely beautiful; yet I have dreams of domestic happiness, of fidelity, and of virtue. Such dreams are seldom realized, I know. Still, in the hope of winning them--"

And then he paused, coughed, and completed what he had to say in a sort of mumble, but his meaning was wholly clear. He would not accept the offer of Pauline in marriage, even though she was the sister of his mighty chief.

Then Napoleon turned to General Leclerc, with whom Pauline had for some time flirted, as she had flirted with almost all the officers of Napoleon's staff. Leclerc was only twenty-six. He was rich and of good manners, but rather serious and in poor health. This was not precisely the sort of husband for Pauline, if we look at it in the conventional way; but it served Napoleon's purpose and did not in the least interfere with his sister's intrigues.

Poor Leclerc, who really loved Pauline, grew thin, and graver still in manner. He was sent to Spain and Portugal, and finally was made commander-in-chief of the French expedition to Haiti, where the famous black rebel, Toussaint l'Ouverture, was heading an uprising of the negroes.

Napoleon ordered Pauline to accompany her husband. Pauline flatly refused, although she made this an occasion for ordering "mountains of pretty clothes and pyramids of hats." But still she refused to go on board the flag-ship. Leclerc expostulated and pleaded, but the lovely witch laughed in his face and still persisted that she would never go.

Word was brought to Napoleon. He made short work of her resistance.

"Bring a litter," he said, with one of his steely glances. "Order six grenadiers to thrust her into it, and see that she goes on board forthwith."

And so, screeching like an angry cat, she was carried on board, and set sail with her husband and one of her former lovers. She found Haiti and Santo Domingo more agreeable than she had supposed. She was there a sort of queen who could do as she pleased and have her orders implicitly obeyed. Her dissipation was something frightful. Her folly and her vanity were beyond belief.

But at the end of two years both she and her husband fell ill. He was stricken down by the yellow fever, which was decimating the French army. Pauline was suffering from the results of her life in a tropical climate. Leclerc died, the expedition was abandoned, and Pauline brought the general's body back to France. When he was buried she, still recovering from her fever, had him interred in a costly coffin and paid him the tribute of cutting off her beautiful hair and burying it with him.

"What a touching tribute to her dead husband!" said some one to Napoleon.

The emperor smiled cynically as he remarked:

"H'm! Of course she knows that her hair is bound to fall out after her fever, and that it will come in longer and thicker for being cropped."

Napoleon, in fact, though he loved Pauline better than his other sisters--or perhaps because he loved her better--was very strict with her. He obliged her to wear mourning, and to observe some of the proprieties; but it was hard to keep her within bounds.

Presently it became noised about that Prince Camillo Borghese was exceedingly intimate with her. The prince was an excellent specimen of the fashionable Italian. He was immensely rich. His palace at Rome was crammed with pictures, statues, and every sort of artistic treasure. He was the owner, moreover, of the famous Borghese jewels, the finest collection of diamonds in the world.

Napoleon rather sternly insisted upon her marrying Borghese. Fortunately, the prince was very willing to be connected with Napoleon; while Pauline was delighted at the idea of having diamonds that would eclipse all the gems which Josephine possessed; for, like all of the Bonapartes, she detested her brother's wife. So she would be married and show her diamonds to Josephine. It was a bit of feminine malice which she could not resist.

The marriage took place very quietly at Joseph Bonaparte's house, because of the absence of Napoleon; but the newly made princess was invited to visit Josephine at the palace of Saint-Cloud. Here was to be the triumph of her life. She spent many days in planning a toilet that should be absolutely crushing to Josephine. Whatever she wore must be a background for the famous diamonds. Finally she decided on green velvet.

When the day came Pauline stood before a mirror and gazed at herself with diamonds glistening in her hair, shimmering around her neck, and fastened so thickly on her green velvet gown as to remind one of a moving jewel-casket. She actually shed tears for joy. Then she entered her carriage and drove out to Saint-Cloud.

But the Creole Josephine, though no longer young, was a woman of great subtlety as well as charm. Stories had been told to her of the green velvet, and therefore she had her drawing-room redecorated in the most uncompromising blue. It killed the green velvet completely. As for the diamonds, she met that maneuver by wearing not a single gem of any kind. Her dress was an Indian muslin with a broad hem of gold.

Her exquisite simplicity, coupled with her dignity of bearing, made the Princess Pauline, with her shower of diamonds, and her green velvet displayed against the blue, seem absolutely vulgar. Josephine was most generous in her admiration of the Borghese gems, and she kissed Pauline on parting. The victory was hers.

There is another story of a defeat which Pauline met from another lady, one Mme. de Coutades. This was at a magnificent ball given to the most fashionable world of Paris. Pauline decided upon going, and intended, in her own phrase, to blot out every woman there. She kept the secret of her toilet absolutely, and she entered the ballroom at the psychological moment, when all the guests had just assembled.

She appeared; and at sight of her the music stopped, silence fell upon the assemblage, and a sort of quiver went through every one. Her costume was of the finest muslin bordered with golden palm-leaves. Four bands, spotted like a leopard's skin, were wound about her head, while these in turn were supported by little clusters of golden grapes. She had copied the head-dress of a Bacchante in the Louvre. All over her person were cameos, and just beneath her breasts she wore a golden band held in place by an engraved gem. Her beautiful wrists, arms, and hands were bare. She had, in fact, blotted out her rivals.

Nevertheless, Mme. de Coutades took her revenge. She went up to Pauline, who was lying on a divan to set off her loveliness, and began gazing at the princess through a double eye-glass. Pauline felt flattered for a moment, and then became uneasy. The lady who was looking at her said to a companion, in a tone of compassion:

"What a pity! She really would be lovely if it weren't for THAT!"

"For what?" returned her escort.

"Why, are you blind? It's so remarkable that you SURELY must see it."

Pauline was beginning to lose her self-composure. She flushed and looked wildly about, wondering what was meant. Then she heard Mme. Coutades say:

"Why, her ears. If I had such ears as those I would cut them off!"

Pauline gave one great gasp and fainted dead away. As a matter of fact, her ears were not so bad. They were simply very flat and colorless, forming a contrast with the rosy tints of her face. But from that moment no one could see anything but these ears; and thereafter the princess wore her hair low enough to cover them.

This may be seen in the statue of her by Canova. It was considered a very daring thing for her to pose for him in the nude, for only a bit of drapery is thrown over her lower limbs. Yet it is true that this statue is absolutely classical in its conception and execution, and its interest is heightened by the fact that its model was what she afterward styled herself, with true Napoleonic pride--"a sister of Bonaparte."

Pauline detested Josephine and was pleased when Napoleon divorced her; but she also disliked the Austrian archduchess, Marie Louise, who was Josephine's successor. On one occasion, at a great court function, she got behind the empress and ran out her tongue at her, in full view of all the nobles and distinguished persons present. Napoleon's eagle eye flashed upon Pauline and blazed like fire upon ice. She actually took to her heels, rushed out of the ball, and never visited the court again.

It would require much time to tell of her other eccentricities, of her intrigues, which were innumerable, of her quarrel with her husband, and of the minor breaches of decorum with which she startled Paris. One of these was her choice of a huge negro to bathe her every morning. When some one ventured to protest, she answered, naively:

"What! Do you call that thing a MAN?"

And she compromised by compelling her black servitor to go out and marry some one at once, so that he might continue his ministrations with propriety!

To her Napoleon showed himself far more severe than with either Caroline or Elise. He gave her a marriage dowry of half a million francs when she became the Princess Borghese, but after that he was continually checking her extravagances. Yet in 1814, when the downfall came and Napoleon was sent into exile at Elba, Pauline was the only one of all his relatives to visit him and spend her time with him. His wife fell away and went back to her Austrian relatives. Of all the Bonapartes only Pauline and Mme. Mere remained faithful to the emperor.

Even then Napoleon refused to pay a bill of hers for sixty-two francs, while he allowed her only two hundred and forty francs for the maintenance of her horses. But she, with a generosity of which one would have thought her quite incapable, gave to her brother a great part of her fortune. When he escaped from Elba and began the campaign of 1815 she presented him with all the Borghese diamonds. In fact, he had them with him in his carriage at Waterloo, where they were captured by the English. Contrast this with the meanness and ingratitude of her sisters and her brothers, and one may well believe that she was sincerely proud of what it meant to be la soeur de Bonaparte.

When he was sent to St. Helena she was ill in bed and could not accompany him. Nevertheless, she tried to sell all her trinkets, of which she was so proud, in order that she might give him help. When he died she received the news with bitter tears "on hearing all the particulars of that long agony."

As for herself, she did not long survive. At the age of forty-four her last moments came. Knowing that she was to die, she sent for Prince Borghese and sought a reconciliation. But, after all, she died as she had lived--"the queen of trinkets" (la reine des colifichets). She asked the servant to bring a mirror. She gazed into it with her dying eyes; and then, as she sank back, it was with a smile of deep content.

"I am not afraid to die," she said. "I am still beautiful!"

THE STORY OF THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE AND COUNT NEIPPERG

There is one famous woman whom history condems while at the same time it partly hides the facts which might mitigate the harshness of the judgment that is passed upon her. This woman is Marie Louise, Empress of France, consort of the great Napoleon, and archduchess of imperial Austria. When the most brilliant figure in all history, after his overthrow in 1814, was in tawdry exile on the petty island of Elba, the empress was already about to become a mother; and the father of her unborn child was not Napoleon, but another man. This is almost all that is usually remembered of her--that she was unfaithful to Napoleon, that she abandoned him in the hour of his defeat, and that she gave herself with readiness to one inferior in rank, yet with whom she lived for years, and to whom she bore what a French writer styled "a brood of bastards."

Naturally enough, the Austrian and German historians do not have much to say of Marie Louise, because in her own disgrace she also brought disgrace upon the proudest reigning family in Europe. Naturally, also, French writers, even those who are hostile to Napoleon, do not care to dwell upon the story; since France itself was humiliated when its greatest genius and most splendid soldier was deceived by his Austrian wife. Therefore there are still many who know little beyond the bare fact that the Empress Marie Louise threw away her pride as a princess, her reputation as a wife, and her honor as a woman. Her figure seems to crouch in a sort of murky byway, and those who pass over the highroad of history ignore it with averted eyes.

In reality the story of Napoleon and Marie Louise and of the Count von Neipperg is one which, when you search it to the very core, leads you straight to a sex problem of a very curious nature. Nowhere else does it occur in the relations of the great personages of history; but in literature Balzac, that master of psychology, has touched upon the theme in the early chapters of his famous novel called "A Woman of Thirty."

As to the Napoleonic story, let us first recall the facts of the case, giving them in such order that their full significance may be understood.

In 1809 Napoleon, then at the plenitude of his power, shook himself free from the clinging clasp of Josephine and procured the annulment of his marriage to her. He really owed her nothing. Before he knew her she had been the mistress of another. In the first years of their life together she had been notoriously unfaithful to him. He had held to her from habit which was in part a superstition; but the remembrance of the wrong which she had done him made her faded charms at times almost repulsive. And then Josephine had never borne him any children; and without a son to perpetuate his dynasty, the gigantic achievements which he had wrought seemed futile in his eyes, and likely to crumble into nothingness when he should die.

No sooner had the marriage been annulled than his titanic ambition leaped, as it always did, to a tremendous pinnacle. He would wed. He would have children. But he would wed no petty princess. This man who in his early youth had felt honored by a marriage with the almost declassee widow of a creole planter now stretched out his hand that he might take to himself a woman not merely royal but imperial.

At first he sought the sister of the Czar of Russia; but Alexander entertained a profound distrust of the French emperor, and managed to evade the tentative demand. There was, however, a reigning family far more ancient than the Romanoffs--a family which had held the imperial dignity for nearly six centuries--the oldest and the noblest blood in Europe. This was the Austrian house of Hapsburg. Its head, the Emperor Francis, had thirteen children, of whom the eldest, the Archduchess Marie Louise, was then in her nineteenth year.

Napoleon had resented the rebuff which the Czar had given him. He turned, therefore, the more eagerly to the other project. Yet there were many reasons why an Austrian marriage might be dangerous, or, at any rate, ill-omened. Only sixteen years before, an Austrian arch-duchess, Marie Antoinette, married to the ruler of France, had met her death upon the scaffold, hated and cursed by the French people, who had always blamed "the Austrian" for the evil days which had ended in the flames of revolution. Again, the father of the girl to whom Napoleon's fancy turned had been the bitter enemy of the new regime in France. His troops had been beaten by the French in five wars and had been crushed at Austerlitz and at Wagram. Bonaparte had twice entered Vienna at the head of a conquering army, and thrice he had slept in the imperial palace at Schonbrunn, while Francis was fleeing through the dark, a beaten fugitive pursued by the swift squadrons of French cavalry.

The feeling of Francis of Austria was not merely that of the vanquished toward the victor. It was a deep hatred almost religious in its fervor. He was the head and front of the old-time feudalism of birth and blood; Napoleon was the incarnation of the modern spirit which demolished thrones and set an iron heel upon crowned heads, giving the sacred titles of king and prince to soldiers who, even in palaces, still showed the swaggering brutality of the camp and the stable whence they sprang. Yet, just because an alliance with the Austrian house seemed in so many ways impossible, the thought of it inflamed the ardor of Napoleon all the more.

"Impossible?" he had once said, contemptuously. "The word 'impossible' is not French."

The Austrian alliance, unnatural though it seemed, was certainly quite possible. In the year 1809 Napoleon had finished his fifth war with Austria by the terrific battle of Wagram, which brought the empire of the Hapsburgs to the very dust. The conqueror's rude hand had stripped from Francis province after province. He had even let fall hints that the Hapsburgs might be dethroned and that Austria might disappear from the map of Europe, to be divided between himself and the Russian Czar, who was still his ally. It was at this psychological moment that the Czar wounded Napoleon's pride by refusing to give the hand of his sister Anne.

The subtle diplomats of Vienna immediately saw their chance. Prince Metternich, with the caution of one who enters the cage of a man-eating-tiger, suggested that the Austrian archduchess would be a fitting bride for the French conqueror. The notion soothed the wounded vanity of Napoleon. From that moment events moved swiftly; and before long it was understood that there was to be a new empress in France, and that she was to be none other than the daughter of the man who had been Napoleon's most persistent foe upon the Continent. The girl was to be given--sacrificed, if you like--to appease an imperial adventurer. After such a marriage, Austria would be safe from spoliation. The reigning dynasty would remain firmly seated upon its historic throne.

But how about the girl herself? She had always heard Napoleon spoken of as a sort of ogre--a man of low ancestry, a brutal and faithless enemy of her people. She knew that this bold, rough-spoken soldier less than a year before had added insult to the injury which he had inflicted on her father. In public proclamations he had called the Emperor Francis a coward and a liar. Up to the latter part of the year Napoleon was to her imagination a blood-stained, sordid, and yet all-powerful monster, outside the pale of human liking and respect. What must have been her thoughts when her father first told her with averted face that she was to become the bride of such a being?

Marie Louise had been brought up, as all German girls of rank were then brought up, in quiet simplicity and utter innocence. In person she was a tall blonde, with a wealth of light brown hair tumbling about a face which might be called attractive because it was so youthful and so gentle, but in which only poets and courtiers could see beauty. Her complexion was rosy, with that peculiar tinge which means that in the course of time it will become red and mottled. Her blue eyes were clear and childish. Her figure was good, though already too full for a girl who was younger than her years.

She had a large and generous mouth with full lips, the lower one being the true "Hapsburg lip," slightly pendulous--a feature which has remained for generation after generation as a sure sign of Hapsburg blood. One sees it in the present emperor of Austria, in the late Queen Regent of Spain, and in the present King of Spain, Alfonso. All the artists who made miniatures or paintings of Marie Louise softened down this racial mark so that no likeness of her shows it as it really was. But take her all in all, she was a simple, childlike, German madchen who knew nothing of the outside world except what she had heard from her discreet and watchful governess, and what had been told her of Napoleon by her uncles, the archdukes whom he had beaten down in battle.

When she learned that she was to be given to the French emperor her girlish soul experienced a shudder; but her father told her how vital was this union to her country and to him. With a sort of piteous dread she questioned the archdukes who had called Napoleon an ogre.

"Oh, that was when Napoleon was an enemy," they replied. "Now he is our friend."

Marie Louise listened to all this, and, like the obedient German girl she was, yielded her own will.

Events moved with a rush, for Napoleon was not the man to dally. Josephine had retired to her residence at Malmaison, and Paris was already astir with preparations for the new empress who was to assure the continuation of the Napoleonic glory by giving children to her husband. Napoleon had said to his ambassador with his usual bluntness:

"This is the first and most important thing--she must have children."

To the girl whom he was to marry he sent the following letter--an odd letter, combining the formality of a negotiator with the veiled ardor of a lover: