Another very good story is told of this extraordinary old lady by H. Noel Williams. It appears she persisted after the fall of the Empire in using the Imperial arms on her carriage.
"Why should I discontinue this symbol?" she asked. "Europe bowed to the dust before my son's arms for ten years, and her sovereigns have not forgotten it."
On one occasion she was out driving when a block occurred. Two Austrian officers, who were riding past, boldly looked into the carriage. Madame Mère, observing the Austrian uniform, to which she had an aversion, was excited to indignation, so letting down the window she exclaimed to them, "What, gentlemen, is your pleasure? If it is to see the mother of the Emperor Napoleon, here she is!" The officers were naturally crestfallen. They respectfully saluted and rode off. These stinging shots of hers were quite disturbing; they always went home, and reached too far for the comfort of her son's persecutors.
Her letter to the allied sovereigns who met at Aix-la-Chapelle is one of the most trenchant indictments that has ever been penned. Its logic, its brave, though courteous, appeal for justice and magnanimity, and above all the echo of motherly love which characterises it, stamp it as a document worth cherishing. The last paragraph will fascinate the imagination of generations yet to come, and heavy judgment will be laid on those that were committing the crime.
"Reasons of State," she says, "have their limits, and posterity, which forgets nothing, admires above everything the generosity of conquerors."
The allied sovereigns were afraid to answer the letter. Better for their reputations if they had obviated the necessity of writing it. The testimony of Pius VII. is that she was "a God-fearing woman who deserved to be honoured by every prince in Christendom."
A great joy came to Madame Mère in 1830, when they told her that the Government had decided to replace the statue of Napoleon on the Vendome Column. She went into ecstasies over this, but bewailed her lameness (she had broken her thigh that year) and total blindness, which would forever prevent her beholding the statue. She turned away from these painful reflections and comforted herself with a few words of sad humour, remarking that if she could have been in Paris as in former days, God would have given her strength to climb to the top of the column to assure herself that it was there. She refused to separate her lot from that of her children, and would not accept the proposal that the sentence of banishment should be repealed unless it included all her family. This remarkable woman died February 2, 1836, aged eighty-five, and Napoleon III. had the remains of his grandmother and Cardinal Fesch removed to Ajaccio in 1851. Six years later the remains were again removed and deposited in a vault constructed to receive them in a church which was built subsequent to the first interment at Ajaccio.
Pity and strange it is that the Emperor's faithless second wife should be noticed at all in history. Happily, very few even of those historians who are anti-Napoleon have anything very complimentary to say of her. She survived her son the King of Rome fifteen years, and the earth claimed her in December, 1847, her age being fifty-six. Had this amiable adulteress, who wished success to the allied armies against her husband, lived a little longer, she would have witnessed the humiliating spectacle of her father's successor being forced to abdicate his throne in favour of the nephew of her Imperial husband, whose memory all noble hearts revere, and whose sufferings, domestic and public, will ever lie at the door of this woman who allowed herself to be the base accomplice of a great assassination. The most fitting reference to her death appeared in the Times newspaper, which said that "nothing in her life became her like the leaving it." On April 15, 1821, in the third paragraph of his will, Napoleon, with consistent magnanimity, if not wilful indifference to this passive, icy female's abandonment of him, says: "I have always had reason to be pleased with my dearest Marie Louise. I retain for her, to my last moment, the most tender sentiments. I beseech her to watch, in order to preserve my son from the snares which yet environ his infancy." What irony!
It is quite a reasonable proposition to suppose that Napoleon must have had a secret suspicion of his wife's infidelity. It is even hard to believe that he had not a full knowledge of her actual association with Count Neipperg. It will be observed that while his reference to her is dutiful, not to say tender, there is still something lacking, as though he kept something snugly in the back of his head, something like the following:—"I cannot make this historical document without alluding to you for my son's sake, though I know full well you have wronged me and consorted with my enemies and betrayers. I know all this, but I am about to pass on, and true to my instincts of compassion and to my Imperial dignity, I must carry my sorrow and grief with me, and having given you as good a testimonial as I can, I must leave you to settle accounts with posterity as to your conduct towards me and your adopted country. I shall not do by you as you have done. I hope full allowance will be made for all you have made me suffer. Meanwhile, I am about to relieve the digestion of Kings by passing to the Elysian Fields, there to be greeted by Kleber, Desaix, Bessières, Duroc, Ney, Murat, Masséna, and Berthier, and we shall talk of the deeds we have done together. Yes, Marie Louise, I bend under the terrible yoke your father, his Chancellor, and the allied satellites have made for me, and yet I keep these incomparable warriors of Europe in a state of alarm. I wish you joy of your allies, who have behaved so nobly to your husband in captivity. I have often thought in my solitude, Louise, that it would have been a more popular national union had I carried out my intention of taking for my second wife a Frenchwoman. It may be that my marriage with you, consummated by every token of peace and goodwill, was really the beginning of my downfall. Ah! how much more noble of you to have followed me in my adversity to Elba. You might have done great service to France and to your native land, to say nothing of the possibility of breaking up the coalition against me and saving rivers of blood. Waterloo might never have been fought had you emulated your matchless sister-in-law, Catherine of Westphalia, in her attitude of supreme womanhood, and your fame might have surpassed that of Joan of Arc, and been handed down to distant ages as an example of heroic firmness and devotion, and then you would have been beatified by the Church and acclaimed a saint by the people to which you belong. You shared with me the unequalled grandeur of the most powerful throne on earth. I was devoted to you and you betrayed me. Your father insisted that you should break your marriage vow and found in you a willing accomplice in the outrage committed against me. You had shared my throne, and I had reason to expect that every human instinct would call you to my side in my exile, and the thought that burns into my soul is that in the infamy of years, posterity will not be reproached for averting its eye from you as well as from that heartless father who requested you to forsake me. Catherine of Westphalia did better. She defied her father, and clung more closely to her husband when he needed all the succour of a sympathetic being to comfort him in his hour of dire misfortune. These gloomy thoughts are forced upon me by every law of nature, and now that I have but a brief time left, I am impelled to bequeath to you in the third paragraph of my last will and testament some tender remembrance of you. I do this notwithstanding that you, Marie Louise, Empress of the French, prayed to God that He would bless the arms of the enemies of the land of your adoption. And then that letter which I sent you from Grenoble in a nutshell on my way from Elba to Paris to reclaim the throne which treason had deprived me of. I requested you to come to me with my son the King of Rome. You ignored that, as you did other communications which I sent, and which I am assured you received. I make no public accusation against you. That would be undignified and unkingly."
In spite of his apparent unaltered affection for his wife, Napoleon reflectively made occasional remarks during his exile which indicated that her conduct was much in his mind; and the foregoing portrayal of his sentiments towards her may be regarded as a human probability. The remarkable thing is that he should have made any reference at all to this erotic woman in his will. It puzzled his companions in exile, who knew well enough that she was the cause of much mental anguish to him. It afflicted him so keenly on two notable occasions that he drew pathetically a comparison between her conduct and that which would have been Josephine's under similar circumstances. It is an astonishing characteristic in Napoleon that he always forgave those who had injured him most.