Love affairs of the Courts of Europe Part 8

"It is in _Crocelle_," he writes a little later, "that you will make people happy by your presence, and where you will recuperate your health, regain your gaiety, and forget an Irishman; and a holy Bishop, more worthy of your affection, on account of the deep attachment he has for you, will take his place."

In June, 1796, this senile lover writes, "In an hour I depart for Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say: 'This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath which I shall inhale, the perfume of the breath of my dear Wilhelmine.'"

But these days of dallying with her legion of lovers, of regal fetes and pleasure-chasing, were brought to an abrupt conclusion when news came to her at Venice that her "husband," the King, was dying, with the Royal family by his bedside awaiting the end. Such news, with all its import of sorrow and tragedy, set the Countess racing across the Continent, fast as horses could carry her, to the side of her beloved King, whom she found, if not _in extremis_, "very dangerously ill and pitifully changed" from the robust man she had left. Her return, however, did more for him than all the skill of his doctors. It gave him a new lease of life, in which her presence brought happiness into days which, none knew better than himself, were numbered.

For more than a year the Countess was his tender nurse and constant companion, ministering to his comfort and arranging plays and tableaux for his entertainment. She watched over him as jealously as any mother over her dying child; but all her devotion could not stay the steps of death, which every day brought nearer. As the inevitable end approached, her friends warned her to leave Charlottenburg while the opportunity was still hers--to escape with her jewels and her money (a fortune of 150,000)--but to all such urging she was deaf. She would stay by her lover's side to the last, though she well knew the danger of delay.

One November day in 1797 Frederick William made his last public appearance at a banquet, with the Countess at his right hand; and seldom has festival had such a setting in tragedy. "None of the guests," we are told, "uttered a word or ate a mouthful of anything; the plates were cleared at the hasty ringing of a bell. A convulsive movement made by the sick man showed that he was suffering agonies. Before half-past nine every guest had left, greatly troubled. The majority of those who had been present never saw the unfortunate monarch again. They all shared the same presentiment of disaster, and wept."

From that night the King was dead, even to his own Court. The gates of his palace were closed against the world, and none were allowed to approach the chamber in which his life was ebbing away, save the Countess, his nurse, and his doctors. Even his children were refused admittance to his presence. As the Marquis de Saint Mexent said, "The King of Prussia ends his days as though he were a rich benefactor. All the relations are excluded by the housekeeper."

A few days before the end came the Countess was seen to leave the palace, carrying a large red portfolio--a suspicious circ.u.mstance which the Crown Prince's spies promptly reported to their master. There could be only one inference--she had been caught in the act of stealing State papers, a crime for which she would have to pay a heavy price as soon as her protector was no more! As a matter of fact the portfolio contained nothing more secret or valuable than the letters she had written to the King during the twenty-seven years of their romance, letters which, after reading, she consigned to the flames in her boudoir within an hour of the suspected theft of State doc.u.ments.

A few days later, on the night of the 16th of November (1797), the King entered on his "death agony," one fit of suffocation succeeding another, until the Countess, unable to bear any longer the sight of such suffering, was carried away in violent convulsions. She saw him no more; for by seven o'clock in the morning Frederick William had found release from his agony in death, and his son had begun to reign in his stead.

At last the long-delayed hour of revenge had come to Frederick William III., who had always regarded his father's favourite as an enemy; and his vengeance was swift to strike. Before the late King's body was cold, his successor's emissaries appeared at the palace door, Unter den Linden, with orders to search her papers and to demand the keys of every desk and cupboard. Even then she scorned to fly before the storm which she knew was breaking. For three days and nights her carriage stood at her gates ready to take her away to safety; but she refused to move a step.

Then one morning, before she had left her bed, a major of the guards, with a posse of soldiers, appeared at her bedroom door armed with a warrant for her arrest; and for many weeks she was a closely guarded prisoner in her own house, subject to daily insults and indignities from men who, a few weeks earlier, had saluted her as a Queen.

At the trial which followed some very grave indictments were preferred against her. She was charged with having betrayed State secrets; with having robbed the Royal Exchequer; stolen the King's portfolio; and removed the priceless solitaire diamond from his crown, and the very rings from his fingers as he lay dying. To these and other equally grave charges the Countess gave a dignified denial, which the evidence she was able to produce supported. The diamond and the rings were, in fact, discovered in places indicated by her where they had been put, by the King's orders, for safe custody.

The trial had a happier ending than, from the malignity of her enemies, especially of the King, might have been expected. After three months of durance she was removed to a Silesian fortress. Her houses and lands were taken from her; but her furniture and jewels were left untouched, and with them she was allowed to enjoy a pension of four thousand thalers a year. Such was the judgment of a Court which proved more merciful than she had perhaps a right to expect. And two months later, the influence and pleading of her friends set her free from her fortress-prison to spend her life where and as she would.

The sun of her splendour had indeed set, but many years of peaceful and not unhappy life remained for our ex-Queen, who was still in the prime of her womanhood and beauty and with the magnetism that, to her last day, brought men to her feet. At fifty she was able to inspire such pa.s.sion in the breast of a young artist, Francis Holbein, that he asked and won her hand in marriage. But this romance was short-lived, for within a year he left her, to spend the remainder of her days in Paris, Vienna, and her native Prussia. Here her adventurous career closed in such obscurity, at the age of sixty-eight, that even those who ministered to her last moments were unaware that the dying woman was the Countess who had played so dazzling a part a generation earlier, as favourite of the King of Prussia and Queen of her loveliest women.

CHAPTER XII

THE CORSICAN AND THE CREOLE

Of the many women who succeeded one another with such bewildering rapidity in the favour of the first Napoleon, from Desiree Clary, daughter of the Ma.r.s.eilles silk-merchant, the "little wife" of his days of obscurity, to Madame Walewska, the beautiful Pole, who so fruitlessly bartered her charms for her country's salvation, only one really captured his fickle heart--Josephine de Beauharnais, the woman whom he raised to the splendour of an Imperial crown, only to fling her aside when she no longer served the purposes of his ambition.

It was one October day in the year 1795 that Josephine, Vicomtesse de Beauharnais, first cast the spell of her beauty on the "ugly little Corsican," who had then got his foot well planted on the ladder, at the summit of which was his crown of empire. At twenty-six, the man who, but a little earlier, was an out-of-work captain, eating his heart out in a Ma.r.s.eilles slum, was General-in-Chief of the armies of France, with the disarmed rebels of Paris grovelling at his feet.

One day a handsome boy came to him, craving permission to retain the sword his father had won, a favour which the General, pleased by the boy's frankness and manliness, granted. The next day the young rebel's mother presented herself to thank him with gracious words for his kindness to her son--a creature of another world than his, with a beauty, grace and refinement which were a new revelation to his bourgeois eyes.

The fair vision haunted him; the music of her voice lingered in his ears. He must see her again. And, before another day had pa.s.sed, we find the pale-faced, grim Corsican, with the burning eyes, sitting awkwardly on a horse-hair chair of Madame's dining-room in her small house in the Rue Chantereine, nervously awaiting the entry of the Vicomtesse who had already played such havoc with his peace of mind. And when at last she made her appearance, few would have recognised in the man, who made his shy, awkward bow, the famous General with whose name the whole of France was ringing.

It was little wonder, perhaps, that the little Corsican's heart went pit-a-pat, or that his knees trembled under him, for the lady whose smile and the touch of whose hand sent a thrill through him, was indeed, to quote his own words, "beautiful as a dream." From the chestnut hair which rippled over her small, proudly poised head to the arch of her tiny, dainty feet, "made for homage and for kisses," she was, "all glorious without." There was witchery in every part of her--in the rich colour that mantled in her cheeks; the sweet brown eyes that looked out between long-fringed eyelids; the small, delicate nose; "the nostrils quivering at the least emotion"; the exquisite lines of the tall, supple figure, instinct with grace in every moment; and, above all, in the seductive music of a voice, every note of which was a caress.

Sixteen years earlier, Josephine had come from Martinique to Paris as bride of the Vicomte de Beauharnais, with whom she had led a more or less unhappy life, until the guillotine of the Revolution left her a widow, with two children and an empty purse. But even this crowning calamity was powerless to crush the sunny-hearted Creole, who merely laughed at the load of debts which piled themselves up around her. A little of the wreckage of her husband's fortune had been rescued for her by influential friends; but this had disappeared long before Napoleon crossed her path. And at last the light-hearted widow realised that if she had a card left to play, she must play it quickly.

Here then was her opportunity. The little General was obviously a slave at her feet; he was already a great man, destined to be still greater; and if he was bourgeois to his coa.r.s.e finger-tips, he could at least serve as a stepping-stone to raise her from poverty and obscurity.

As for Napoleon, he was a vanquished man--and he knew it--before ever he set foot in Madame's modest dining-room. When he left, he "trod on air,"

for the Vicomtesse had been more than gracious to him. The next day he was drawn as by a magnet to the Rue Chantereine, and the next and the next, each interview with his divinity forging fresh links for the chain that bound him; and at each visit he met under Madame's roof some of the great ones of that other world in which Josephine moved, the old _n.o.blesse_ of France--who paid her the homage due to a Queen.

Thus vanity and ambition fed the flames of the pa.s.sion which was consuming him; and within a fortnight he had laid his heart and his fortune, which at the time consisted of "his personal wardrobe and his military accoutrements" at the feet of the Creole widow; and one March day in 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte, General, and Josephine de Beauharnais, were made one by a registrar who obligingly described the bride as twenty-nine (thus robbing her of three years), and added two to the bridegroom's twenty-six years.

After two days of rapturous honeymooning Napoleon was on his way to join his army in Italy, as reluctant a bridegroom as ever left Cupid at the bidding of Mars. At every change of horses during the long journey he dispatched letters to the wife he had left behind--letters full of pa.s.sion and yearning. In one of them he wrote, "When I am tempted to curse my fate, I place my hand on my heart and find your portrait there.

As I gaze at it I am filled with a joy unutterable. Life seems to hold no pain, save that of severance from my beloved."

At Nice, amid all the labours and anxieties of organising his rabble army for a campaign, his thoughts are always taking wings to her; her portrait is ever in his hand. He says his prayers before it; and, when once he accidentally broke the gla.s.s, he was in an agony of despair and superst.i.tious foreboding. His one cry was, "Come to me! Come to my heart and to my arms. Oh, that you had wings!"

Even when flushed with the surrender of Piedmont after a fortnight's brilliant fighting, in which he had won half a dozen battles and reaped twenty-one standards, he would have bartered all his laurels for a sight of the woman he loved so pa.s.sionately. But while he was thus yearning for her in distant Italy, Madame was much too happy in her beloved Paris to lend an ear to his pleadings. As wife of the great Napoleon she was a veritable Queen, fawned on and flattered by all the great ones in the capital. Hers was the place of honour at every fete and banquet; the banners her husband had captured were presented to her amid a tumult of acclamation; when she entered a theatre the entire house rose to greet her with cheers. She was thus in no mood to leave her Queendom for the arms of her husband, whose unattractive person and clumsy ardour only repelled her.

When his letters calling her to him became more and more imperative, she could no longer ignore them. But she could, at least, invent an excellent excuse for her tarrying. She wrote to tell him that she was expecting to become a mother. This at least would put a stop to his importunity. And it did. Napoleon was full of delight--and self-reproach at the joyful news. "Forgive me, my beloved," he wrote. "How can I ever atone? You were ill and I accused you of lingering in Paris. My love robs me of my reason, and I shall never regain it.... A child, sweet as its mother, is soon to lie in your arms. Oh! that I could be with you, even if only for one day!"

To his brother Joseph he writes in a similar strain: "The thought of her illness drives me mad. I long to see her, to hold her in my arms. I love her so madly, I cannot live without her. If she were to die, I should have absolutely nothing left to live for."

When, however, he learns that Madame's illness is not sufficient to interfere with her Paris gaieties, a different mood seizes him. Jealousy and anger take the place of anxious sympathy. He insists that she shall join him--threatens to resign his command if she refuses. Josephine no longer dares to keep up her deception. She must obey. And thus, in a flood of angry tears, we see her starting on her long journey to Italy, in company with her dog, her maid, and a brilliant escort of officers.

Arrived at Milan, she was welcomed by Napoleon with open arms; but "after two days of rapture and caresses," he was face to face with the great crisis of Castiglione. His army was in imminent danger of annihilation; his own fate and fortune trembled in the balance. Nothing short of a miracle could save him; and on the third day of his new honeymoon he was back again in the field at grips with fate.

But even at this supreme crisis he found time to write daily letters to the dear one who was awaiting the issue in Milan, begging her to share his life. "Your tears," he writes, "drive me to distraction; they set my blood on fire. Come to me here, that at least we may be able to say before we die we had so many days of happiness." Thus he pleads in letter after letter until Josephine, for very shame, is forced to yield, and to return to her husband, who, as Ma.s.son tells us, "was all day at her feet as before some divinity."

Such days of bliss were, however, few and far between for the man who was now in the throes of a t.i.tanic struggle, on the issue of which his fortunes and those of France hung. But when duty took him into danger where his lady could not follow, she found ample solace. Monsieur Charles, Leclerc's adjutant, was all the cavalier she needed--an Adonis for beauty, a Hercules for strength, the handsomest soldier in Napoleon's army, a past-master in all the arts of love-making. There was no dull moment for Josephine with such a squire at her elbow to pour flatteries into her ears and to entertain her with his clever tongue.

But Monsieur Charles had short shrift when Napoleon's jealousy was aroused. He was quickly sent packing to Paris; and Josephine was left to write to her aunt, "I am bored to extinction." She was weary of her husband's love-rhapsodies, disgusted with the crudities of his pa.s.sion.

She had, however, a solace in the homage paid to her everywhere. At Genoa she was received as a Queen; at Florence the Grand Duke called her "cousin"; the entire army, from General to private, was under the spell of her beauty and the graciousness that captivated all hearts. She was, too, reaping a rich harvest of costly presents and bribes, from all who sought to win Napoleon's favour through her.

The Italian campaign at last over, Madame found herself back again in her dear Paris, raised to a higher pinnacle of Queendom than ever, basking in the splendours of the husband whose glories she so gladly shared, though she held his love in such light esteem. But for him, at least, there was no time for dallying. Within a few months he was waving farewell to her again, from the bridge of the _Ocean_ which was carrying him off to the conquest of Egypt, buoyed by her promise that she would join him when his work was done. And long before he had reached Malta she was back again in the vortex of Paris gaiety, setting the tongue of scandal wagging by her open flirtation with one lover after another.

It was not long before the news of Madame's "goings-on" reached as far as Alexandria. The dormant jealousy in Napoleon, lulled to rest since Monsieur Charles had vanished from the scene, was fanned into flame. He was furious; disillusion seized him, and thoughts of divorce began to enter his brain. Two could play at this game of falseness; and there were many beautiful women in Egypt only too eager to console the great Napoleon.

When news came to Josephine that her husband had landed at Frejus, and would shortly be with her, she was in a state bordering on panic. She shrank from facing his anger; from the revelation of debts and unwifely conduct which was inevitable. Her all was at stake and the game was more than half lost. In her desperation she took her courage in both hands and set forth, as fast as horses could take her, to meet Napoleon, that she might at least have the first word with him; but as ill-luck would have it, he travelled by a different route and she missed him.

On her return to Paris she found the door of Napoleon's room barred against her. "After repeated knocking in vain," says M. Ma.s.son, "she sank on her knees sobbing aloud. Still the door remained closed. For a whole day the scene was prolonged, without any sign from within. Worn out at last, Josephine was about to retire in despair, when her maid fetched her children. Eugene and Hortense, kneeling beside their mother, mingled their supplications with hers. At last the door was opened; speechless, tears streaming down his cheeks, his face convulsed with the struggle that had rent his heart, Bonaparte appeared, holding out his arms to his wife."

Such was the meeting of the unfaithful Josephine and the husband who had vowed that he would no longer call her wife. The reconciliation was complete; for Napoleon was no man of half-measures. He frankly forgave the weeping woman all her sins against him; and with generous hand removed the mountain of debt her extravagance had heaped up--debts amounting to more than two million francs, one million two hundred thousand of which she owed to tradespeople alone.

But Napoleon's pa.s.sion for his wife, of whose beauty few traces now remained, was dead. His loyalty only remained; and this, in turn, was to be swept away by the tide of his ambition. A few years later Josephine was crowned Empress by her husband, and consecrated by the Pope, after a priest had given the sanction of the Church to her incomplete nuptials.

She had now reached the dazzling zenith of her career. At the Tuileries, at St Cloud, and at Malmaison, she held her splendid Courts as Empress.

She had the most magnificent crown jewels in the world; and at Malmaison she spent her happiest hours in spreading her gems out on the table before her, and feasting her eyes on their many-hued fires. Her wardrobes were full of the daintiest and costliest gowns of which, we are told, more than two hundred were summer-dresses of percale and of muslin, costing from one thousand to two thousand francs each.

Less than six years of such splendour and luxury, and the inevitable end of it all came. Napoleon's eyes were dazzled by the offer of an alliance with the eldest daughter of the Austrian Emperor. His whole ambition now was focused on providing a successor to his crown (Josephine had failed him in this important matter); and in Marie Louise of Austria he not only saw the prospective mother of his heir, but an alliance with one of the great reigning houses of Europe, which would lend a much-needed glamour to his bourgeois crown.

His mind was at last inevitably made up. Josephine must be divorced. Her pleadings and tears and faintings were powerless to melt him. And one December day, in the year 1809, Napoleon was free to wed his Austrian Princess; and Josephine was left to console herself as best she might, with the knowledge that at least she had rescued from her downfall a life-income of three million francs a year, on which she could still play the role of Empress at the Elysee, Malmaison, and Navarre, the sumptuous homes with which Napoleon's generosity had dowered the wife who failed.

CHAPTER XIII