The baby Count of the Empire whom she left behind enjoyed a distinguished career. In appearance he certainly resembled his great father, but his talents never seem to have risen above a mediocre standard. Alexander-Florian-Joseph-Colonna-Walewski was mainly educated in France, but he was a Pole by birth, and he fought for Poland at the age of twenty during the rising of 1830-31. When Poland fell once more before the might of Russia, he returned to France, became a Frenchman, and served in the French army. The revolution of 1848 brought Napoleon III. to the front, and the new Emperor, with his power based on the frail fabric of a legend, saw fit to surround himself with names which recalled to men’s minds the old splendours of the First Empire. Walewski received honours in plenty; he was Ambassador to the most important Courts of Europe, a Senator, and a Minister of State. He wrote learnedly on various subjects. But all his glory was only a pale reflection of his father’s and cousin’s; he suffered eclipse after Sedan, and when he died, aged seventy-two, he had, after all, made very little mark in the world. He had not played the part of a Don John of Austria, or even of a Monmouth. De Morny quite outshone him.
With Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise and association with Madame Walewska, his casual amorous adventures came to a more or less abrupt end. It has been suggested that this was on account of increasing age, but Napoleon was only in the early forties, and this cannot be the true reason. However, the explanation is just as simple. Napoleon was devoted to his new wife, and he was frightfully busy. From the summer of 1812, two years after his second marriage, he was almost continuously in the field. His exertions and worries thenceforward were sufficient to occupy even him, without any other complications. One likes to think of him turning with relief from the agonizing strain of ruling Europe to snatch a few quiet minutes in the placid peace surrounding Marie Louise and her child. That is all. He had no other mistress. At Elba he lived with his sister and mother, with no woman to share his inner life. Perhaps this was policy, for Napoleon was trying hard to induce Marie Louise to join him, and he would naturally be chary of doing anything which might annoy her—ignorant as he was of her unfaithfulness. This may be the explanation of the briefness of Madame Walewska’s visit; she may have come intending to join him, and he may have sent her away again, but the fact that she was accompanied by her brother and other relations militates against this theory. Moreover, Marie was already close friends with d’Ornano. After the Hundred Days Napoleon was sent to St. Helena, and once again no woman accompanied him. The manifold rumours about Madame de Montholon and others at St. Helena seem to have no foundation whatever in fact. Thus practically all Napoleon’s illicit loves are confined to the decade 1800-10, while the last decade is entirely clear of them.
Thus far we have only treated of women who were Napoleon’s mistresses; but considerable interest also attaches to a large number of women who, although members of the Imperial circle, never attained this dubious honour. Perhaps of these the one who attained the greatest heights (and who, incidentally, did least to deserve it) was Désirée Clary. She was the sister of the lady whom Joseph Bonaparte made his wife, and whose dowry of six thousand pounds was so welcome to the struggling family. Désirée’s own dowry would have been of the same amount, and Joseph and various other Bonapartes tried to induce Napoleon to marry her. He seems to have dallied with the idea; indeed, it is frequently stated that a contract of betrothal was drawn up, but, however it was, Napoleon broke off the negotiations rather abruptly when he went to Paris in 1795. There is hardly any doubt that he had flirted with Désirée rather excessively, and that, after making a deep impression upon her, he had wounded her deeply by his precipitate abandonment. Subsequently he tried to make amends in much the same manner as he employed with his discarded mistresses—he tried to find her a husband to whom he could give substantial promotion. But Désirée was once more unlucky, for the man Napoleon sent to her, General Duphot, was murdered almost on her threshold while she was staying at Joseph Bonaparte’s Embassy in Rome.
Eventually she was approached by Bernadotte, during Napoleon’s absence in Egypt, and married him. Subsequently she declared that she had done this because Bernadotte was the only man who could injure Bonaparte, but she must have been far-sighted indeed if she could perceive the career which was awaiting Bernadotte. Moreau, and half a dozen other generals, such as Augereau, were more powerful than Bernadotte at the time. Désirée’s statement was probably made in the light of subsequent events.
It was Bernadotte who gained most by the marriage. He acquired at one stroke a venomous, if inert, ally in his wife, an enthusiastic supporter in Joseph, his brother-in-law, and a sure refuge in case of trouble in Napoleon’s dislike of a scandal in his family. From this time on, Désirée received distinction after distinction, and soon she was Son Altesse Serène la Maréchale Princesse de Ponte Corvo, sister of the Queen of Spain, and a leading figure in Imperial society. Then came the greatest distinction of all, and she found herself Princess Royal of Sweden. This last she found rather upsetting, for she discovered she was expected to leave her beloved Paris to live in the bleakness of the Stockholm palaces. She said, tearfully and truthfully, that she had thought at first that her new rank was merely a titular distinction, of the same class as her sovereignty of Ponte Corvo. She refused absolutely to leave France, and so Bernadotte went alone to Stockholm, thence to lead his Swedes against the Empire, while his wife stayed on in Paris. It certainly was an anomalous position, and some authors have said that Désirée acted as a spy on behalf of the Allies during the war of liberation. However, we can be quite sure that Napoleon, whatever tenderness he still felt towards her, would not have tolerated her sending news of any value to her husband; incidentally, it is obvious that a woman to whose mind Ponte Corvo, with its six thousand inhabitants, was in the same class as Sweden, with its millions, could not have been of much use as a spy.
After 1815, fate overtook her, and she was borne away to spend the rest of her life in the spartan splendour of the palace in the Staden. From that time forth she and her husband were a disappointed couple, distrusted and despised by all Europe, he with his eyes turned lingeringly towards the France whose crown he believed he had so nearly attained, she thinking longingly of the gaiety and careless freedom of the Paris she had left behind, which now hated her with true Parisian virulence.
Napoleon’s sisters married before the plenitude of his power, and the matches they made were not as splendid as they might have been later; it was for his younger but much more distant connections that Napoleon was able to find husbands of royal rank. It is curious to notice the extraordinary marriages which were arranged while the Empire was at its height. A niece of Murat’s, who had been brought up as the ragged and bare-footed daughter of a small farmer, married Prince Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, and among her grandchildren and great-grandchildren at the present day are the King of Rumania, the King of the Belgians and the Queen of Portugal. Several of the petty princelings of Germany, with thirty generations of royal descent behind them, married obscure little Beauharnais and Taschers de la Pagerie. Eugène de Beauharnais and Berthier married princesses of Bavaria, and Jerome received as bride a daughter of the King of Würtemberg.
Eugène’s marriage had caused a difficult situation, for Augusta of Bavaria was already affianced to the Hereditary Prince of Baden, heir apparent to the reigning Grand Duke. Napoleon had caused the marriage contract to be broken, but he was in no way disconcerted; he straightway found a new bride for the Hereditary Prince. He selected Stéphanie de Beauharnais, a “thirty-second cousin” of Josephine’s. Stéphanie was the merest child, who had had the most extraordinary upbringing. Her parents were of a shiftless character, like various other Beauharnais, and after the Revolution Stéphanie had been dependent on an English peeress, Lady de Bathe, who had arranged with two nuns from the suppressed houses to look after her. As soon as Napoleon heard of her existence, he summoned her to Court, and in accordance with his pronounced ideas on family loyalty, made himself responsible for her support. Next he announced to her that he had secured her a royal husband. Stéphanie immediately became a person of consequence, because as yet royal marriages were by no means common in the Bonaparte family. Their Imperial Highnesses, Napoleon’s sisters, naturally turned like tigresses upon the interloper, and reduced the fifteen-year-old child to tears more than once in the presence of the Court. This was more than Napoleon could stand, and by a single decree he gave the girl precedence over the whole Imperial family save himself and Josephine. He wished to keep the House of Baden as satisfied as possible. With the same idea he gave Stéphanie a marvellous trousseau, a dowry of sixty thousand pounds, and jewels costing the same amount. Her wretched father, who had returned from exile, received an income of three thousand pounds a year and a lump sum of two hundred thousand francs. He had done nothing to earn it; he was merely the father of the girl who was marrying an ally of the Emperor’s.
The period was one of general rejoicing, for Austerlitz had just been won, and French domination over Europe seemed assured. The fêtes of the marriage were of unexampled splendour; there were illuminations; there were fireworks; and there were balls without number, at one of which over two thousand persons appeared. But behind all the rejoicings there was a curious tragi-comedy being played, for poor Stéphanie, married at sixteen to a man she had never met, displayed a disconcerting reluctance to complete all the accompanying formalities. Night after night she insisted on a girl friend sharing her room with her. The Hereditary Prince grew restive; the whole Court knew of the deadlock, and were proportionately amused. But international politics cannot wait on a girl’s whim; war clouds were appearing again across the Rhine; Prussia seemed bent on war, and it was important for Napoleon to be sure of Baden’s friendship. Napoleon admonished Stéphanie with all the severity of which he was capable; he terrified the wretched girl into passivity, and when at last the newly-married couple set off for Carlsruhe Baden’s support of France was assured.
But the unhappiness which awaited all Napoleon’s favourites dogged poor Stéphanie to her grave. The House of Zaehringen hated her as an intruder; her male children all died in infancy, and when in 1818 her husband died she found herself without any established position in a hostile land. Hints have not been lacking that Charles of Baden died through poison administered by the Hochberg family (of morganatic descent from an earlier Elector), which ultimately obtained the throne. But the strangest story is that concerning Kaspar Hauser. In 1828 a young man was found wandering in the streets of Nuremberg, who had never seen the sunlight, and whose whole appearance seemed to indicate that he had been shut up in a cellar all his life. He did not long survive his freedom. Stéphanie jumped to the conclusion that he was her second son, born in 1811, who was supposed to have died as an infant while she was seriously ill. Many people have agreed with her, and have supposed that he had been kidnapped by the Hochbergs to prevent his inheritance of the throne. Some people go further, and boldly declare that after his escape he was poisoned. The whole matter has an aura of peculiarity, and it has attracted the attention of many writers of authority, among them Mr. Baring Gould. The most obvious counter to the theory that Kaspar Hauser was a son of Stéphanie is that the people who would be bold enough to kidnap him would have had the sense to kill him outright, and not to keep him as living evidence of their guilt. If they murdered him in 1828, they would certainly not have flinched from murdering him in 1811.