Napoleon was in ecstasies. He was a boy again, amorous, rapturous, seeing everything with the eyes of a lover. Soissons had prepared a magnificent reception and banquet, but Napoleon could not think of tarrying. He must hasten on to Compiègne with the blushing Maria that very night. “He made love like a hussar!” some have sneered. So he did, and most men who are not invalids or frigid decadents make love like hussars. Furthermore, most women who are young, healthy, and sane, have a stealthy preference for the hussar style of love-making.
Etiquette had prepared a bed for Maria at the Chancellor’s, and one for Napoleon at the palace. Etiquette insisted that this separation was decorous, was most essential, was demanded by precedent and custom. “Not so,” maintained Napoleon; “Henry IV. breached the custom, and so will I.”
Had not the marriage already taken place in Vienna? If that ceremony, solemnized by the Archbishop of Vienna was valid, were not Napoleon and Maria man and wife? Why, then, separate apartments? He decided that a husband’s rights were already his, and Maria made no strenuous objection,—so well had she been tutored in Vienna. Read what the imperial valet-de-chambre, Constant, writes:—
“The next morning at his toilet the Emperor asked me if any one had noticed his change of the programme.” Constant lied, like a good servant, and “I told him, no.” At that moment entered one of the Emperor’s intimates who was unmarried. Pinching his ears, his Majesty said to him: “Marry a German, my dear fellow. They are the best women in the world: gentle, good, artless and as fresh as roses.” And Constant states that Napoleon “was charmingly gay all the remainder of the day.”
With imperial pomp the civil and religious marriage was solemnized at St. Cloud and Paris, April 1 and 2, 1810. The illuminations, the processions, the festivities, were gorgeous beyond description. After these were ended, there was a grand tour of the provinces by the imperial couple. Returning to Paris, the Austrian ambassador, Prince Schwarzenberg, tendered them the magnificent fête during which the tapestries in the vast temporary ballroom caught on fire, the building burned to the ground, and some of the revellers met fiery death.
MARIA LOUISA
From the portrait by Gérard in the Louvre
As to Maria Louisa it may be said, once for all, that she was a commonplace woman, with no talent, no character, no graces of manner, and no beauty. She was strong, healthy, physically fresh and buxom, therefore admirably suited to Napoleon’s immediate purpose. She was never a companion to him, never had any influence over him, never had any love for him, never understood or appreciated him. Dull, indolent, sensual, capable of no warm attachment, she simply yielded to her father’s policy, married where she was told to marry, obeyed Napoleon as she was told to obey him, accepted his caresses, ate four or five times per day, bore him a child, pleaded her health against the bearing of more, gave herself little concern about his reverses, left him when her father called for her to leave him, took up with another man whom her father selected, lived with him in much contentment, and bore him several children.
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