The advance was a very slow and cautious one. Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, was fighting fiercely in Venetia against the Austrians. Tempting offers were made to him by the Allies, but he refused them; his dignified replies are worthy of Bayard or Francis I. But Murat and his Neapolitans were moving steadily northward; even now he had made no public declaration as to which side he was on, and in private he and Caroline were assuring Eugène, Napoleon and the Austrians at one and the same time of their unfailing support. Nor was this all. They were further intriguing with the infant United Italy party in an endeavour to increase their dominion in that way; while in addition they had made some sort of agreement with Elise Bonaparte in Tuscany. It would be hard to discover anywhere in history an equally loathsome example of double-dealing.
Murat occupied the Papal States, Tuscany, and portions of the Kingdom of Italy, but he still refrained from making any open attack on either French or Austrians. Not until March 6th, 1814, when he received from Caroline definite news of the certainty of the fall of the Empire, did he attack Eugène’s forces. He achieved little, and after two fierce little skirmishes he subsided once more into inaction. At last official intimation of Napoleon’s fall came to hand, and, abandoning Elise to her fate, Murat returned to Naples. Further diplomacy confirmed him in his possession of Naples; the only person concerned who kept to his pledged word in all the intricacies of the negotiations was Francis of Austria.
Thus 1815 found Napoleon’s three sisters in very different situations. Caroline was still a Queen; Elise, turned out of Tuscany by the Austrians, was a pensioner on her bounty; while Pauline, who alone had remained faithful to her brother, was living with Napoleon at Elba. Suddenly there came another dramatic change, for Napoleon escaped from Elba, and within a few days was once more Emperor of the French. Italy was again plunged into a ferment. Murat and Caroline were naturally anxious, for they could not expect that Napoleon would forgive their black treachery of the year before, while it was only too obvious that not a single country in Europe retained any interest in their possession of the throne of Naples. In these circumstances Murat took the first heroic decision of his life, and decided to cut the Gordian knot by force of arms. He declared war against Austria, proclaimed a United Italy, and with fifty thousand men he marched northward to establish himself as King of Italy. It was a vain effort. The Neapolitan army was a wretched force, and Murat himself was worse than useless in independent command. The Austrian army hurriedly concentrated, defeated Murat in one or two minor actions, and finally utterly routed him at Tolentino. The Neapolitans deserted in thousands, and Murat re-entered his dominions with only five thousand men left. The Austrians followed him up remorselessly; the Sicilians were preparing an expedition against him; and all that was left for Murat to do was to abdicate and fly for his life.
Caroline was successful in obtaining the protection of Francis of Austria, and she soon went off to settle down in Austria with a pension and a residence. Murat had reached France, and for some weeks he was in hiding in Marseilles. After Waterloo he left by sea to join his wife, but on his way he changed his mind and took his second heroic decision. Napoleon had regained France simply by appearing in person before his army; why should not Murat regain Naples in the same way? Murat landed with a score of companions at Pizzo in Calabria, and marched into the market place with his escort shouting “Long live King Joachim!” For a moment there was an astonished silence, and then the townspeople fell on the little party. Not for nothing had Murat decorated every mile of every road in Calabria with a gallows from which hung captured bandits; every soul in Pizzo must have had a blood feud with their late King. Battered with sticks and stones, Murat was seized and flung into prison, and five days later he was tried and shot.
Murat’s attempt was the last spurt of the Napoleonic feeling for a long period. Not until, with the passage of years, the Legend had been built up, do we hear of any surprising action or heroic deed. Europe sank into a slough of inaction, crushed down by the weight of the Holy Alliance and the burden of accumulated debts. The most typical action of a dull generation was the establishment on the throne of France of fat, pathetic, bourgeois Louis Philippe as King of the French. It was a safe thing to do, and Louis Philippe and his Amelia did their best to make it remain safe. No risks were taken until the movement of 1848. Happiness has no history, and there is precious little history about the period 1815-48. Had the Holy Alliance had its way, there would be even less. Somehow one cannot help feeling that the dullness of the period is the dullness of unhappiness. It was the time when “order reigned in Warsaw,” when little children died in droves in English factories, when in Naples the negation of God was erected into a system of government. Historians may sneer at the ineffectiveness of the Napoleonides; they may point to a pillaged, blood-drenched Europe writhing under the heel of a Corsican Emperor; they can draw horrible pictures of the sacks of Lübeck or Badajoz, but they are unconvincing when they attempt to prove that there was more unhappiness under the Empire than under the Holy Alliance. Peace has its defeats as well as war.
This digression may be unpardonable, but it was nevertheless inevitable. Let us minimize our error, even if we cannot repair it, by turning back to the consideration of three fair and frail women whom we left thrust back unwillingly into a private station of life. One of them did not long survive the calamities of 1814. This was Elise. The Allies refused her request to join Napoleon at St. Helena, and she lived quietly in Italy until her death in 1820. She was only forty-two when she died. Pauline had the advantage over her sisters of having a husband whose position was independent of the Empire. Prince Borghese was a very considerable person in Rome, and Pauline for some time was a leading figure in Italian society. It did not last long, however. She quarrelled with her husband; her beauty left her; Austrian, French and Papal surveillance worried her, and she died in 1825.
Caroline, the most capable and cold-hearted of all the Bonapartes, after Napoleon, bore her troubles with more dignity and for a much longer time. As the Countess of Lipona (an anagram of Napoli) she lived for some time in Austria; she travelled restlessly about; she seemed in fact to have completely recovered from the shock of the loss of her husband and her throne, when at last a whole series of deaths broke down her reserve and shortened her life. Pauline and Elise, as has been said, were already dead; in 1832 the Prince Imperial (Napoleon II.) died at Vienna; Prince Borghese died in the same year. Another brother-in-law, Baciocchi, died in 1834; Catherine of Westphalia, her best beloved sister-in-law, died in 1835, and then in 1836 Madame Mère, her stern but adored mother, also died. Caroline endured her loneliness for a little while longer, but she died in 1839. Even she, almost the last of her generation, was only fifty-six at her death.
None of the Bonaparte family was as long-lived as Napoleon’s mother. Maria Letizia Ramolino was certainly one of the greatest women of the period. Elise Bonaparte might be called the Semiramis of Italy; Caroline might intrigue for Empires; Pauline might be the most beautiful woman of France; but their mother combined all their good qualities with very few of their bad ones. To bring up a family of eight children thoroughly well on an income of less than one hundred pounds a year in a revolution-torn country like Corsica is in itself a remarkable feat, though hardly likely in unfavourable circumstances to gain mention in history, but to do it when handicapped by a husband like Carlo Bonaparte is more remarkable still. The strain of those dreadful years in Ajaccio would have broken down anyone of stuff less stern than Maria Letizia’s; pitched battles were fought in the streets outside the Bonapartes’ house; three-quarters of Corsica were at feud with the Bonapartes and the party they represented; death threatened them all at different times, while all the time a most bitter, grinding poverty harried them unmercifully.
Maria Letizia came through the ordeal unbroken in body or spirit. Even Napoleon’s fierce pride humbled itself before her, and her other children were her slaves. But she had a woman’s weaknesses as well as a man’s strength. She was bitterly jealous of her daughter-in-law Josephine; she was bigoted in church matters; and she fought like a tigress in the cause of whichever of her children was experiencing misfortune. When Lucien left France in disgrace in consequence of his marriage to Madame Jouberthon, his mother strove desperately hard to re-establish him. She went to Italy to be near him, and endeavoured, by absenting herself at the time of the coronation, to force Napoleon to recall Lucien and herself together. However, her great son outwitted her on this occasion, for he dispensed with her presence, and yet arranged with David the artist for her portrait to appear along with the other French dignitaries in the celebrated picture of the coronation.
Letizia had a very good opinion of her own position. When Napoleon became Emperor, and made his brothers and sisters Imperial Highnesses, she demanded some greater title for herself. Napoleon was in a quandary, for on consulting precedents he found that no French king’s mother had ever been given any such honour if she had never been queen. Letizia insisted, and, almost at his wits’ end, Napoleon at last gave her a singular dignity. He awarded her the same position and precedence as used to be given under the Bourbons to the wife of the king’s second son. The king’s second son was Monsieur, and his wife was Madame. Letizia was named Madame, and as a subsidiary title she was called Mère de S.M. l’Empéreur et Roi. Almost at once the titles were merged together in common speech, and Letizia was called Madame Mère everywhere except at strict official gatherings.