Marie Louise in marrying Napoleon had felt that she was a kind of sacrificial offering, for she had naturally a deep horror of the man who had caused her country so much woe; but her dread was soon dispelled, and she became very fond of her husband. Outside of the court the two led an amusingly simple life, riding together informally early in the morning, in a gay Bohemian way; sitting together alone in the empress’s little salon, she at her needlework, he with a book. They even indulged now and then in quiet little larks of their own, as one day when Marie Louise attempted to make an omelet in her apartments. Just as she was completely engrossed in her work, the emperor came in. The empress tried to conceal her culinary operations, but Napoleon detected the odor.
“What is going on here? There is a singular smell, as if something was being fried. What, you are making an omelet! Bah! you don’t know how to do it. I will show you how it is done.”
And he set to work to instruct her. They got on very well until it came to tossing it, an operation Napoleon insisted on performing himself, with the result that he landed it on the floor.
On March 20, 1811, the long desired heir to the French throne was born. It had been arranged that the birth of the child should be announced to the people by cannon shot; twenty-one if it were a princess, one hundred and one if a prince. The people who thronged the quays and streets about the Tuileries waited with inexpressible anxiety as the cannon boomed forth; one—two—three. As twenty-one died away the city held its breath; then came twenty-two. The thundering peals which followed it were drowned in the wild enthusiasm of the people. For days afterward, enervated by joy and the endless fêtes given them, the French drank and sang to the King of Rome.
In all these rejoicings none were so touching as at Navarre, where Josephine, on hearing the cannon, called together her friends and said, “We, too, must have a fête. I shall give you a ball, and the whole city of Evreux must come and rejoice with us.”
Napoleon was the happiest of men, and he devoted himself to his son with pride. Reports of the boy’s condition appear frequently in his letters; he even allowed him to be taken without the empress’s knowledge to Josephine, who had begged to see him.
CHAPTER XVIII
TROUBLE WITH THE POPE—THE CONSCRIPTION—EVASIONS OF THE BLOCKADE—THE TILSIT AGREEMENT BROKEN
“This child in concert with our Eugène will constitute our happiness and that of France,” so Napoleon had written Josephine after the birth of the King of Rome, but it soon became evident that he was wrong. There were causes of uneasiness and discontent in France which had been operating for a long time, and which were only aggravated by the apparent solidity that an heir gave to the Napoleonic dynasty.
First among these was religious disaffection. Towards the end of 1808, being doubtful of the Pope’s loyalty, Napoleon had sent French troops to Rome; the spring following, without any plausible excuse, he had annexed four Papal States to the kingdom of Italy; and in 1809 the Pope had been made a prisoner at Savona. When the divorce was asked, it was not the Pope, but the clergy, of Paris, who had granted it. When the religious marriage of Marie Louise and Napoleon came to be celebrated, thirteen cardinals refused to appear; the “black cardinals” they were thereafter called, one of their punishments for non-appearance at the wedding being that they could no longer wear their red gowns. To the pious all this friction with the fathers of the Church was a deplorable irritation. It was impossible to show contempt for the authority of Pope and cardinals and not wound one of the deepest sentiments of France, and one which ten years before Napoleon had braved most to satisfy.
