On the 15th October 1809 peace was restored between France and Austria by the Treaty of Schönbrünn, sometimes called the Peace of Vienna, by which the former chiefly benefited. More than once the negotiations trembled in the balance, but ultimately the Austrian war party was obliged to give way. Archduke Charles had grown tired of fighting, the wily Metternich could see nothing but disaster by its continuance. Just as business people sometimes ask a higher price than they expect to receive for an article of commerce and are content to be “beaten down,” so Napoleon made extravagant demands at first and was satisfied with smaller concessions. The apparent readiness to give way, for which he did not forget to claim credit, enabled him to pose as a political philanthropist. Nevertheless, three and a half million people were lost to Austria by the districts which she ceded to France, Bavaria, Russia, Saxony, Italy, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Pursuing the same policy of army retrenchment he had followed with Prussia, Napoleon insisted that Austria should support not more than 150,000 troops. A big war indemnity was also exacted.
The Emperor afterwards maintained that this “pound of flesh” was insufficient. “I committed a great fault after the battle of Wagram,” he remarked, “in not reducing the power of Austria still more. She remained too strong for our safety, and to her we must attribute our ruin. The day after the battle, I should have made known, by proclamation, that I would treat with Austria only on condition of the preliminary separation of the three crowns of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia.” As a matter of fact the abdication of the Emperor Francis had been one of his extortionate demands in the early stages of the negotiations.
If proof were necessary of the truth of the proverb that “truth is stranger than fiction” the marriage of Napoleon to the Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, but a few months after he had threatened to dispossess her father of his throne, would surely justify it. Poor childless, light-hearted Josephine was put away for this daughter of the Cæsars. The Emperor had first asked for a Russian Princess, then as suddenly turned in the direction of the House of Hapsburg because his former suit was not immediately accepted. From that time Napoleon’s friendship with Alexander began to wane perceptibly. The Czar was under no delusion when he prophetically remarked, on hearing of the Emperor’s change of front in wooing an Austrian princess, “Then the next thing will be to drive us back into our forests.”
Small wonder that in after years Napoleon referred to his second marriage as “That abyss covered with flowers which was my ruin.”
To compare Napoleon’s two consorts is extremely difficult, because their temperaments were essentially different. Josephine was vivacious, witty, fond of dress and of admiration, and brought up in a very different school of thought to that of Marie Louise. The former had witnessed, and to some extent felt, the terrors of the Revolution at their worst; she had mixed with all sorts and conditions of men and women, some good, many bad; the latter had been nurtured with scrupulous care, so shielded and safeguarded that she scarcely knew of the follies and sins which mar the everyday world. She once wrote to a friend that she believed Napoleon “is none other than Anti-Christ.” When she heard that the man she felt to be “our oppressor” was to become her husband, she lifted her pale blue eyes to the skies and remarked that the birds were happier because they could choose their own mates! And yet, although she was so horrified, she had a certain nobility of character which enabled her to understand that in making the surrender she would be performing a double duty to her father and to her country: “This marriage gives pleasure to my father, and though separation from my family always will make me miserable, I will have the consolation of having obeyed his wishes. And Providence, it is my firm belief, directs the lot of us princesses in a special manner; and in obeying my father I feel I am obeying Providence.”
But what were the reasons for Napoleon’s dissolution of his first marriage when his love for Josephine is beyond question? Pasquier thus sums up the matter for us:
“For some time past,” he says, “the greater number of those about him, and especially the members of his family, had been urging him to repudiate a union which could not give him an heir, and which precluded the idea of his dreaming of certain most advantageous alliances. As early as the time of his consecration as Emperor, the greatest pressure had been put upon him to prevent him from strengthening the bonds uniting him to Josephine, by having her crowned by his side; but all these endeavours had been neutralized by the natural and potent ascendancy of a woman full of charm and grace, who had given herself to him at a time when nothing gave any indication of his high destinies, whose conciliatory spirit had often removed from his path difficulties of a somewhat serious nature, and brought back to him many embittered or hostile minds, who seemed to have been constantly a kind of good genius, entrusted with the care of watching over his destiny and of dispelling the clouds which came to darken its horizon....
“I can never forget the evening,” adds Pasquier, “on which the discarded Empress did the honours of her Court for the last time. It was the day before the official dissolution. A great throng was present, and supper was served, according to custom, in the gallery of Diana, on a number of little tables. Josephine sat at the centre one, and the men went round her, waiting for that particularly graceful nod which she was in the habit of bestowing on those with whom she was acquainted. I stood at a short distance from her for a few minutes, and I could not help being struck with the perfection of her attitude in the presence of all these people who still did her homage, while knowing full well that it was for the last time; that, in an hour, she would descend from the throne, and leave the palace never to re-enter it. Only women can rise superior to the difficulties of such a situation, but I have my doubts as to whether a second one could have been found to do it with such perfect grace and composure. Napoleon did not show as bold a front as did his victim.”
The Archduchess was in her eighteenth year, Napoleon in his forty-first. She was not without personal charms, although Pasquier, who keenly sympathised with Josephine, scarcely does her justice. “Her face,” he says, “was her weakest point; but her figure was fine, although somewhat stiff. Her personality was attractive, and she had very pretty feet and hands.” The marriage was celebrated by proxy at Vienna on the 11th March 1810.
That Marie Louise grew to love the man of whom she once wrote that “the very sight of this creature would be the worst of all my sufferings” is very improbable, and in the end she played him false. She certainly showed no wish to join him at Elba, and shortly after his death married the dissolute Adam Albert, Graf von Neipperg, her third husband being the Comte de Bombelles. The Emperor believed in her faithfulness to the last. “I desire,” he said to his physician, Antommarchi, “that you preserve my heart in spirits of wine, and that you carry it to Parma to my dear Marie Louise. Please tell her that I loved her tenderly, and that I have not ceased to love her.”