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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Famous Affinities of History V2, by Lyndon Orr
+#2 in our series by Lyndon Orr
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+Title: Famous Affinities of History V2
+       The Romance of Devotion
+ŒFú‰^øëeÄ^ø&€uN&Ä_&ƒ
+Author: Lyndon Orr
+
+Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4690]
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+
+FAMOUS AFFINITIES OF HISTORY
+
+THE ROMANCE OF DEVOTION
+
+BY LYNDON ORR
+
+VOLUME II of IV.
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE EMPRESS CATHARINE AND PRINCE POTEMKIN
+MARIE ANTOINETTE AND COUNT FERSEN
+THE STORY OF AARON BURR
+GEORGE IV. AND MRS. FITZHERBERT
+CHARLOTTE CORDAY AND ADAM LUX
+NAPOLEON AND MARIE WALEWSKA
+THE STORY OF PAULINE BONAPARTE
+THE STORY OF THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE AND COUNT NEIPPERG
+
+
+
+
+
+THE EMPRESS CATHARINE AND PRINCE POTEMKIN
+
+
+It has often been said that the greatest Frenchman who ever lived
+was in reality an Italian. It might with equal truth be asserted
+that the greatest Russian woman who ever lived was in reality a
+German. But the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Catharine II.
+resemble each other in something else. Napoleon, though Italian in
+blood and lineage, made himself so French in sympathy and
+understanding as to be able to play upon the imagination of all
+France as a great musician plays upon a splendid instrument, with
+absolute sureness of touch and an ability to extract from it every
+one of its varied harmonies. So the Empress Catharine of Russia--
+perhaps the greatest woman who ever ruled a nation--though born of
+German parents, became Russian to the core and made herself the
+embodiment of Russian feeling and Russian aspiration.
+
+At the middle of the eighteenth century Russia was governed by the
+Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great. In her own time,
+and for a long while afterward, her real capacity was obscured by
+her apparent indolence, her fondness for display, and her seeming
+vacillation; but now a very high place is accorded her in the
+history of Russian rulers. She softened the brutality that had
+reigned supreme in Russia. She patronized the arts. Her armies
+twice defeated Frederick the Great and raided his capital, Berlin.
+Had Elizabeth lived, she would probably have crushed him.
+
+In her early years this imperial woman had been betrothed to Louis
+XV. of France, but the match was broken off. Subsequently she
+entered into a morganatic marriage and bore a son who, of course,
+could not be her heir. In 1742, therefore, she looked about for a
+suitable successor, and chose her nephew, Prince Peter of
+Holstein-Gottorp.
+
+Peter, then a mere youth of seventeen, was delighted with so
+splendid a future, and came at once to St. Petersburg. The empress
+next sought for a girl who might marry the young prince and thus
+become the future Czarina. She thought first of Frederick the
+Great's sister; but Frederick shrank from this alliance, though it
+would have been of much advantage to him. He loved his sister--
+indeed, she was one of the few persons for whom he ever really
+cared. So he declined the offer and suggested instead the young
+Princess Sophia of the tiny duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst.
+
+The reason for Frederick's refusal was his knowledge of the semi-
+barbarous conditions that prevailed at the Russian court.
+
+The Russian capital, at that time, was a bizarre, half-civilized,
+half-oriental place, where, among the very highest-born, a thin
+veneer of French elegance covered every form of brutality and
+savagery and lust. It is not surprising, therefore, that Frederick
+the Great was unwilling to have his sister plunged into such a
+life.
+
+But when the Empress Elizabeth asked the Princess Sophia of
+Anhalt-Zerbst to marry the heir to the Russian throne the young
+girl willingly accepted, the more so as her mother practically
+commanded it. This mother of hers was a grim, harsh German woman
+who had reared her daughter in the strictest fashion, depriving
+her of all pleasure with a truly puritanical severity. In the case
+of a different sort of girl this training would have crushed her
+spirit; but the Princess Sophia, though gentle and refined in
+manner, had a power of endurance which was toughened and
+strengthened by the discipline she underwent.
+
+And so in 1744, when she was but sixteen years of age, she was
+taken by her mother to St. Petersburg. There she renounced the
+Lutheran faith and was received into the Greek Church, changing
+her name to Catharine. Soon after, with great magnificence, she
+was married to Prince Peter, and from that moment began a career
+which was to make her the most powerful woman in the world.
+
+At this time a lady of the Russian court wrote down a description
+of Catharine's appearance. She was fair-haired, with dark-blue
+eyes; and her face, though never beautiful, was made piquant and
+striking by the fact that her brows were very dark in contrast
+with her golden hair. Her complexion was not clear, yet her look
+was a very pleasing one. She had a certain diffidence of manner at
+first; but later she bore herself with such instinctive dignity as
+to make her seem majestic, though in fact she was beneath the
+middle size. At the time of her marriage her figure was slight and
+graceful; only in after years did she become stout. Altogether,
+she came to St. Petersburg an attractive, pure-minded German
+maiden, with a character well disciplined, and possessing reserves
+of power which had not yet been drawn upon.
+
+Frederick the Great's forebodings, which had led him to withhold
+his sister's hand, were almost immediately justified in the case
+of Catharine. Her Russian husband revealed to her a mode of life
+which must have tried her very soul. This youth was only
+seventeen--a mere boy in age, and yet a full-grown man in the rank
+luxuriance of his vices. Moreover, he had eccentricities which
+sometimes verged upon insanity. Too young to be admitted to the
+councils of his imperial aunt, he occupied his time in ways that
+were either ridiculous or vile.
+
+Next to the sleeping-room of his wife he kept a set of kennels,
+with a number of dogs, which he spent hours in drilling as if they
+had been soldiers. He had a troop of rats which he also drilled.
+It was his delight to summon a court martial of his dogs to try
+the rats for various military offenses, and then to have the
+culprits executed, leaving their bleeding carcasses upon the
+floor. At any hour of the day or night Catharine, hidden in her
+chamber, could hear the yapping of the curs, the squeak of rats,
+and the word of command given by her half-idiot husband.
+
+When wearied of this diversion Peter would summon a troop of
+favorites, both men and women, and with them he would drink deep
+of beer and vodka, since from his early childhood he had been both
+a drunkard and a debauchee. The whoops and howls and vile songs of
+his creatures could be heard by Catharine; and sometimes he would
+stagger into her rooms, accompanied by his drunken minions. With a
+sort of psychopathic perversity he would insist on giving
+Catharine the most minute and repulsive narratives of his amours,
+until she shrank from him with horror at his depravity and came to
+loathe the sight of his bloated face, with its little, twinkling,
+porcine eyes, his upturned nose and distended nostrils, and his
+loose-hung, lascivious mouth. She was scarcely less repelled when
+a wholly different mood would seize upon him and he would declare
+himself her slave, attending her at court functions in the garb of
+a servant and professing an unbounded devotion for his bride.
+
+Catharine's early training and her womanly nature led her for a
+long time to submit to the caprices of her husband. In his saner
+moments she would plead with him and strive to interest him in
+something better than his dogs and rats and venal mistresses; but
+Peter was incorrigible. Though he had moments of sense and even of
+good feeling, these never lasted, and after them he would plunge
+headlong into the most frantic excesses that his half-crazed
+imagination could devise.
+
+It is not strange that in course of time Catharine's strong good
+sense showed her that she could do nothing with this creature. She
+therefore gradually became estranged from him and set herself to
+the task of doing those things which Peter was incapable of
+carrying out.
+
+She saw that ever since the first awakening of Russia under Peter
+the Great none of its rulers had been genuinely Russian, but had
+tried to force upon the Russian people various forms of western
+civilization which were alien to the national spirit. Peter the
+Great had striven to make his people Dutch. Elizabeth had tried to
+make them French. Catharine, with a sure instinct, resolved that
+they should remain Russian, borrowing what they needed from other
+peoples, but stirred always by the Slavic spirit and swayed by a
+patriotism that was their own. To this end she set herself to
+become Russian. She acquired the Russian language patiently and
+accurately. She adopted the Russian costume, appearing, except on
+state occasions, in a simple gown of green, covering her fair
+hair, however, with a cap powdered with diamonds. Furthermore, she
+made friends of such native Russians as were gifted with talent,
+winning their favor, and, through them, the favor of the common
+people.
+
+It would have been strange, however, had Catharine, the woman,
+escaped the tainting influences that surrounded her on every side.
+The infidelities of Peter gradually made her feel that she owed
+him nothing as his wife. Among the nobles there were men whose
+force of character and of mind attracted her inevitably. Chastity
+was a thing of which the average Russian had no conception; and
+therefore it is not strange that Catharine, with her intense and
+sensitive nature, should have turned to some of these for the love
+which she had sought in vain from the half imbecile to whom she
+had been married.
+
+Much has been written of this side of her earlier and later life;
+yet, though it is impossible to deny that she had favorites, one
+should judge very gently the conduct of a girl so young and thrust
+into a life whence all the virtues seemed to be excluded. She bore
+several children before her thirtieth year, and it is very certain
+that a grave doubt exists as to their paternity. Among the nobles
+of the court were two whose courage and virility specially
+attracted her. The one with whom her name has been most often
+coupled was Gregory Orloff. He and his brother, Alexis Orloff,
+were Russians of the older type--powerful in frame, suave in
+manner except when roused, yet with a tigerish ferocity slumbering
+underneath. Their power fascinated Catharine, and it was currently
+declared that Gregory Orloff was her lover.
+
+When she was in her thirty-second year her husband was proclaimed
+Czar, after the death of the Empress Elizabeth. At first in some
+ways his elevation seemed to sober him; but this period of sanity,
+like those which had come to him before, lasted only a few weeks.
+Historians have given him much credit for two great reforms that
+are connected with his name; and yet the manner in which they were
+actually brought about is rather ludicrous. He had shut himself up
+with his favorite revelers, and had remained for several days
+drinking and carousing until he scarcely knew enough to speak. At
+this moment a young officer named Gudovitch, who was really loyal
+to the newly created Czar, burst into the banquet-hall, booted and
+spurred and his eyes aflame with indignation. Standing before
+Peter, his voice rang out with the tone of a battle trumpet, so
+that the sounds of revelry were hushed.
+
+"Peter Feodorovitch," he cried, "do you prefer these swine to
+those who really wish to serve you? Is it in this way that you
+imitate the glories of your ancestor, that illustrious Peter whom
+you have sworn to take as your model? It will not be long before
+your people's love will be changed to hatred. Rise up, my Czar!
+Shake off this lethargy and sloth. Prove that you are worthy of
+the faith which I and others have given you so loyally!"
+
+With these words Gudovitch thrust into Peter's trembling hand two
+proclamations, one abolishing the secret bureau of police, which
+had become an instrument of tyrannous oppression, and the other
+restoring to the nobility many rights of which they had been
+deprived.
+
+The earnestness and intensity of Gudovitch temporarily cleared the
+brain of the drunken Czar. He seized the papers, and, without
+reading them, hastened at once to his great council, where he
+declared that they expressed his wishes. Great was the rejoicing
+in St. Petersburg, and great was the praise bestowed on Peter;
+yet, in fact, he had acted only as any drunkard might act under
+the compulsion of a stronger will than his.
+
+As before, his brief period of good sense was succeeded by another
+of the wildest folly. It was not merely that he reversed the wise
+policy of his aunt, but that he reverted to his early fondness for
+everything that was German. His bodyguard was made up of German
+troops--thus exciting the jealousy of the Russian soldiers. He
+introduced German fashions. He boasted that his father had been an
+officer in the Prussian army. His crazy admiration for Frederick
+the Great reached the utmost verge of sycophancy.
+
+As to Catharine, he turned on her with something like ferocity. He
+declared in public that his eldest son, the Czarevitch Paul, was
+really fathered by Catharine's lovers. At a state banquet he
+turned to Catharine and hurled at her a name which no woman could
+possibly forgive--and least of all a woman such as Catharine,
+with her high spirit and imperial pride. He thrust his mistresses
+upon her; and at last he ordered her, with her own hand, to
+decorate the Countess Vorontzoff, who was known to be his
+maitresse en titre.
+
+It was not these gross insults, however, so much as a concern for
+her personal safety that led Catharine to take measures for her
+own defense. She was accustomed to Peter's ordinary
+eccentricities. On the ground of his unfaithfulness to her she now
+had hardly any right to make complaint. But she might reasonably
+fear lest he was becoming mad. If he questioned the paternity of
+their eldest son he might take measures to imprison Catharine or
+even to destroy her. Therefore she conferred with the Orloffs and
+other gentlemen, and their conference rapidly developed into a
+conspiracy.
+
+The soldiery, as a whole, was loyal to the empress. It hated
+Peter's Holstein guards. What she planned was probably the
+deposition of Peter. She would have liked to place him under guard
+in some distant palace. But while the matter was still under
+discussion she was awakened early one morning by Alexis Orloff. He
+grasped her arm with scant ceremony.
+
+"We must act at once," said he. "We have been betrayed!"
+
+Catharine was not a woman to waste time. She went immediately to
+the barracks in St. Petersburg, mounted upon a charger, and,
+calling out the Russian guards, appealed to them for their
+support. To a man they clashed their weapons and roared forth a
+thunderous cheer. Immediately afterward the priests anointed her
+as regent in the name of her son; but as she left the church she
+was saluted by the people, as well as by the soldiers, as empress
+in her own right.
+
+It was a bold stroke, and it succeeded down to the last detail.
+The wretched Peter, who was drilling his German guards at a
+distance from the capital, heard of the revolt, found that his
+sailors at Kronstadt would not acknowledge him, and then finally
+submitted. He was taken to Ropsha and confined within a single
+room. To him came the Orloffs, quite of their own accord. Gregory
+Orloff endeavored to force a corrosive poison into Peter's mouth.
+Peter, who was powerful of build and now quite desperate, hurled
+himself upon his enemies. Alexis Orloff seized him by the throat
+with a tremendous clutch and strangled him till the blood gushed
+from his ears. In a few moments the unfortunate man was dead.
+
+Catharine was shocked by the intelligence, but she had no choice
+save to accept the result of excessive zeal. She issued a note to
+the foreign ambassadors informing them that Peter had died of a
+violent colic. When his body was laid out for burial the
+extravasated blood is said to have oozed out even through his
+hands, staining the gloves that had been placed upon them. No one
+believed the story of the colic; and some six years later Alexis
+Orloff told the truth with the utmost composure. The whole
+incident was characteristically Russian.
+
+It is not within the limits of our space to describe the reign of
+Catharine the Great--the exploits of her armies, the acuteness of
+her statecraft, the vast additions which she made to the Russian
+Empire, and the impulse which she gave to science and art and
+literature. Yet these things ought to be remembered first of all
+when one thinks of the woman whom Voltaire once styled "the
+Semiramis of the North." Because she was so powerful, because no
+one could gainsay her, she led in private a life which has been
+almost more exploited than her great imperial achievements. And
+yet, though she had lovers whose names have been carefully
+recorded, even she fulfilled the law of womanhood--which is to
+love deeply and intensely only once,
+
+One should not place all her lovers in the same category. As a
+girl, and when repelled by the imbecility of Peter, she gave
+herself to Gregory Orloff. She admired his strength, his daring,
+and his unscrupulousness. But to a woman of her fine intelligence
+he came to seem almost more brute than man. She could not turn to
+him for any of those delicate attentions which a woman loves so
+much, nor for that larger sympathy which wins the heart as well as
+captivates the senses. A writer of the time has said that Orloff
+would hasten with equal readiness from the arms of Catharine to
+the embraces of any flat-nosed Finn or filthy Calmuck or to the
+lowest creature whom he might encounter in the streets.
+
+It happened that at the time of Catharine's appeal to the imperial
+guards there came to her notice another man who--as he proved in a
+trifling and yet most significant manner--had those traits which
+Orloff lacked. Catharine had mounted, man--fashion, a cavalry
+horse, and, with a helmet on her head, had reined up her steed
+before the barracks. At that moment One of the minor nobles, who
+was also favorable to her, observed that her helmet had no plume.
+In a moment his horse was at her side. Bowing low over his saddle,
+he took his own plume from his helmet and fastened it to hers.
+This man was Prince Gregory Potemkin, and this slight act gives a
+clue to the influence which he afterward exercised over his
+imperial mistress!
+
+When Catharine grew weary of the Orloffs, and when she had
+enriched them with lands and treasures, she turned to Potemkin;
+and from then until the day of his death he was more to her than
+any other man had ever been. With others she might flirt and might
+go even further than flirtation; but she allowed no other favorite
+to share her confidence, to give advice, or to direct her
+policies.
+
+To other men she made munificent gifts, either because they
+pleased her for the moment or because they served her on one
+occasion or another; but to Potemkin she opened wide the whole
+treasury of her vast realm. There was no limit to what she would
+do for him. When he first knew her he was a man of very moderate
+fortune. Within two years after their intimate acquaintance had
+begun she had given him nine million rubles, while afterward he
+accepted almost limitless estates in Poland and in every province
+of Greater Russia.
+
+He was a man of sumptuous tastes, and yet he cared but little for
+mere wealth. What he had, he used to please or gratify or surprise
+the woman whom he loved. He built himself a great palace in St.
+Petersburg, usually known as the Taurian Palace, and there he gave
+the most sumptuous entertainments, reversing the story of Antony
+and Cleopatra.
+
+In a superb library there stood one case containing volumes bound
+with unusual richness. When the empress, attracted by the
+bindings, drew forth a book she found to her surprise that its
+pages were English bank-notes. The pages of another proved to be
+Dutch bank-notes, and, of another, notes on the Bank of Venice. Of
+the remaining volumes some were of solid gold, while others had
+pages of fine leather in which were set emeralds and rubies and
+diamonds and other gems. The story reads like a bit of fiction
+from the Arabian Nights. Yet, after all, this was only a small
+affair compared with other undertakings with which Potemkin sought
+to please her.
+
+Thus, after Taurida and the Crimea had been added to the empire by
+Potemkin's agency, Catharine set out with him to view her new
+possessions. A great fleet of magnificently decorated galleys bore
+her down the river Dnieper. The country through which she passed
+had been a year before an unoccupied waste. Now, by Potemkin's
+extraordinary efforts, the empress found it dotted thick with
+towns and cities which had been erected for the occasion, filled
+with a busy population which swarmed along the riverside to greet
+the sovereign with applause. It was only a chain of fantom towns
+and cities, made of painted wood and canvas; but while Catharine
+was there they were very real, seeming to have solid buildings,
+magnificent arches, bustling industries, and beautiful stretches
+of fertile country. No human being ever wrought on so great a
+scale so marvelous a miracle of stage-management.
+
+Potemkin was, in fact, the one man who could appeal with unfailing
+success to so versatile and powerful a spirit as Catharine's. He
+was handsome of person, graceful of manner, and with an intellect
+which matched her own. He never tried to force her inclination,
+and, on the other hand, he never strove to thwart it. To him, as
+to no other man, she could turn at any moment and feel that, no
+matter what her mood, he could understand her fully. And this,
+according to Balzac, is the thing that woman yearns for most--a
+kindred spirit that can understand without the slightest need of
+explanation.
+
+Thus it was that Gregory Potemkin held a place in the soul of this
+great woman such as no one else attained. He might be absent,
+heading armies or ruling provinces, and on his return he would be
+greeted with even greater fondness than before. And it was this
+rather than his victories over Turk and other oriental enemies
+that made Catharine trust him absolutely.
+
+When he died, he died as the supreme master of her foreign policy
+and at a time when her word was powerful throughout all Europe.
+Death came upon him after he had fought against it with singular
+tenacity of purpose. Catharine had given him a magnificent
+triumph, and he had entertained her in his Taurian Palace with a
+splendor such as even Russia had never known before. Then he fell
+ill, though with high spirit he would not yield to illness. He ate
+rich meats and drank rich wines and bore himself as gallantly as
+ever. Yet all at once death came upon him while he was traveling
+in the south of Russia. His carriage was stopped, a rug was spread
+beneath a tree by the roadside, and there he died, in the country
+which he had added to the realms of Russia,
+
+The great empress who loved him mourned him deeply during the five
+years of life that still remained to her. The names of other men
+for whom she had imagined that she cared were nothing to her. But
+this one man lived in her heart in death as he had done in life.
+
+Many have written of Catharine as a great ruler, a wise diplomat,
+a creature of heroic mold. Others have depicted her as a royal
+wanton and have gathered together a mass of vicious tales, the
+gossip of the palace kitchens, of the clubs, and of the barrack-
+rooms. But perhaps one finds the chief interest of her story to
+lie in this--that besides being empress and diplomat and a lover
+of pleasure she was, beyond all else, at heart a woman.
+
+
+
+
+
+MARIE ANTOINETTE AND COUNT FERSEN
+
+
+The English-speaking world long ago accepted a conventional view
+of Marie Antoinette. The eloquence of Edmund Burke in one
+brilliant passage has fixed, probably for all time, an enduring
+picture of this unhappy queen.
+
+When we speak or think of her we speak and think first of all of a
+dazzling and beautiful woman surrounded by the chivalry of France
+and gleaming like a star in the most splendid court of Europe. And
+then there comes to us the reverse of the picture. We see her
+despised, insulted, and made the butt of brutal men and still more
+fiendish women; until at last the hideous tumbrel conveys her to
+the guillotine, where her head is severed from her body and her
+corpse is cast down into a bloody pool.
+
+In these two pictures our emotions are played upon in turn--
+admiration, reverence, devotion, and then pity, indignation, and
+the shudderings of horror.
+
+Probably in our own country and in England this will remain the
+historic Marie Antoinette. Whatever the impartial historian may
+write, he can never induce the people at large to understand that
+this queen was far from queenly, that the popular idea of her is
+almost wholly false, and that both in her domestic life and as the
+greatest lady in France she did much to bring on the terrors of
+that revolution which swept her to the guillotine.
+
+In the first place, it is mere fiction that represents Maria
+Antoinette as having been physically beautiful. The painters and
+engravers have so idealized her face as in most cases to have
+produced a purely imaginary portrait.
+
+She was born in Vienna, in 1755, the daughter of the Emperor
+Francis and of that warrior-queen, Maria Theresa. She was a very
+German-looking child. Lady Jackson describes her as having a
+long, thin face, small, pig-like eyes, a pinched-up mouth, with
+the heavy Hapsburg lip, and with a somewhat misshapen form, so
+that for years she had to be bandaged tightly to give her a more
+natural figure.
+
+At fourteen, when she was betrothed to the heir to the French
+throne, she was a dumpy, mean-looking little creature, with no
+distinction whatever, and with only her bright golden hair to make
+amends for her many blemishes. At fifteen she was married and
+joined the Dauphin in French territory.
+
+We must recall for a moment the conditions which prevailed in
+France. King Louis XV. was nearing his end. He was a man of the
+most shameless life; yet he had concealed or gilded his infamies
+by an external dignity and magnificence which, were very pleasing
+to his people. The French, liked to think that their king was the
+most splendid monarch and the greatest gentleman in Europe. The
+courtiers about him might be vile beneath the surface, yet they
+were compelled to deport themselves with the form and the
+etiquette that had become traditional in France. They might be
+panders, or stock-jobbers, or sellers of political offices; yet
+they must none the less have wit and grace and outward nobility of
+manner.
+
+There was also a tradition regarding the French queen. However
+loose in character the other women of the court might be, she
+alone, like Caesar's wife, must remain above suspicion. She must
+be purer than the pure. No breath, of scandal must reach her or be
+directed against her.
+
+In this way the French court, even under so dissolute a monarch as
+Louis XV., maintained its hold upon the loyalty of the people.
+Crowds came every morning to view the king in his bed before he
+arose; the same crowds watched him as he was dressed by the
+gentlemen of the bedchamber, and as he breakfasted and went
+through all the functions which are usually private. The King of
+France must be a great actor. He must appear to his people as in
+reality a king-stately, dignified, and beyond all other human
+beings in his remarkable presence.
+
+When the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette came to the French court
+King Louis XV. kept up in the case the same semblance of
+austerity. He forbade these children to have their sleeping-
+apartments together. He tried to teach them that if they were to
+govern as well as to reign they must conform to the rigid
+etiquette of Paris and Versailles.
+
+It proved a difficult task, however. The little German princess
+had no natural dignity, though she came from a court where the
+very strictest imperial discipline prevailed. Marie Antoinette
+found that she could have her own way in many things, and she
+chose to enjoy life without regard to ceremony. Her escapades at
+first would have been thought mild enough had she not been a
+"daughter of France"; but they served to shock the old French
+king, and likewise, perhaps even more, her own imperial mother,
+Maria Theresa.
+
+When a report of the young girl's conduct was brought to her the
+empress was at first mute with indignation. Then she cried out:
+
+"Can this girl be a child of mine? She surely must be a
+changeling!"
+
+The Austrian ambassador to France was instructed to warn the
+Dauphiness to be more discreet.
+
+"Tell her," said Maria Theresa, "that she will lose her throne,
+and even her life, unless she shows more prudence."
+
+But advice and remonstrance were of no avail. Perhaps they might
+have been had her husband possessed a stronger character; but the
+young Louis was little more fitted to be a king than was his wife
+to be a queen. Dull of perception and indifferent to affairs of
+state, he had only two interests that absorbed him. One was the
+love of hunting, and the other was his desire to shut himself up
+in a sort of blacksmith shop, where he could hammer away at the
+anvil, blow the bellows, and manufacture small trifles of
+mechanical inventions. From this smudgy den he would emerge, sooty
+and greasy, an object of distaste to his frivolous princess, with
+her foamy laces and perfumes and pervasive daintiness.
+
+It was hinted in many quarters, and it has been many times
+repeated, that Louis was lacking in virility. Certainly he had no
+interest in the society of women and was wholly continent. But
+this charge of physical incapacity seems to have had no real
+foundation. It had been made against some of his predecessors. It
+was afterward hurled at Napoleon the Great, and also Napoleon the
+Little. In France, unless a royal personage was openly licentious,
+he was almost sure to be jeered at by the people as a weakling.
+
+And so poor Louis XVI., as he came to be, was treated with a
+mixture of pity and contempt because he loved to hammer and mend
+locks in his smithy or shoot game when he might have been
+caressing ladies who would have been proud to have him choose them
+out.
+
+On the other hand, because of this opinion regarding Louis, people
+were the more suspicious of Marie Antoinette. Some of them, in
+coarse language, criticized her assumed infidelities; others, with
+a polite sneer, affected to defend her. But the result of it all
+was dangerous to both, especially as France was already verging
+toward the deluge which Louis XV. had cynically predicted would
+follow after him.
+
+In fact, the end came sooner than any one had guessed. Louis XV.,
+who had become hopelessly and helplessly infatuated with the low-
+born Jeanne du Barry, was stricken down with smallpox of the most
+virulent type. For many days he lay in his gorgeous bed. Courtiers
+crowded his sick-room and the adjacent hall, longing for the
+moment when the breath would leave his body. He had lived an evil
+life, and he was to die a loathsome death; yet he had borne
+himself before men as a stately monarch. Though his people had
+suffered in a thousand ways from his misgovernment, he was still
+Louis the Well Beloved, and they blamed his ministers of state for
+all the shocking wrongs that France had felt.
+
+The abler men, and some of the leaders of the people, however,
+looked forward to the accession of Louis XVI. He at least was
+frugal in his habits and almost plebeian in his tastes, and seemed
+to be one who would reduce the enormous taxes that had been levied
+upon France.
+
+The moment came when the Well Beloved died. His death-room was
+fetid with disease, and even the long corridors of the palace
+reeked with infection, while the motley mob of men and women, clad
+in silks and satins and glittering with jewels, hurried from the
+spot to pay their homage to the new Louis, who was spoken of as
+"the Desired." The body of the late monarch was hastily thrown
+into a mass of quick-lime, and was driven away in a humble wagon,
+without guards and with no salute, save from a single veteran, who
+remembered the glories of Fontenoy and discharged his musket as
+the royal corpse was carried through the palace gates.
+
+This was a critical moment in the history of France; but we have
+to consider it only as a critical moment in the history of Marie
+Antoinette. She was now queen. She had it in her power to restore
+to the French court its old-time grandeur, and, so far as the
+queen was concerned, its purity. Above all, being a foreigner, she
+should have kept herself free from reproach and above every shadow
+of suspicion.
+
+But here again the indifference of the king undoubtedly played a
+strange part in her life. Had he borne himself as her lord and
+master she might have respected him. Had he shown her the
+affection of a husband she might have loved him. But he was
+neither imposing, nor, on the other hand, was he alluring. She
+wrote very frankly about him in a letter to the Count Orsini:
+
+My tastes are not the same as those of the king, who cares only
+for hunting and blacksmith work. You will admit that I should not
+show to advantage in a forge. I could not appear there as Vulcan,
+and the part of Venus might displease him even more than my
+tastes.
+
+Thus on the one side is a woman in the first bloom of youth,
+ardent, eager--and neglected. On the other side is her husband,
+whose sluggishness may be judged by quoting from a diary which he
+kept during the month in which he was married. Here is a part of
+it:
+
+Sunday, 13--Left Versailles. Supper and slept at Compignee, at the
+house of M. de Saint-Florentin.
+
+Monday, 14--Interview with Mme. la Dauphine.
+
+Tuesday, 15--Supped at La Muette. Slept at Versailles.
+
+Wednesday, 16--My marriage. Apartment in the gallery. Royal
+banquet in the Salle d'Opera.
+
+Thursday, 17--Opera of "Perseus."
+
+Friday, 18--Stag-hunt. Met at La Belle Image. Took one.
+
+Saturday, 19--Dress-ball in the Salle d'Opera. Fireworks.
+
+Thursday, 31--I had an indigestion.
+
+What might have been expected from a young girl placed as this
+queen was placed? She was indeed an earlier Eugenie. The first was
+of royal blood, the second was almost a plebeian; but each was
+headstrong, pleasure-loving, and with no real domestic ties. As
+Mr. Kipling expresses it--
+
+    The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady
+    Are sisters under their skins;
+
+and so the Austrian woman of 1776 and the Spanish woman of 1856
+found amusement in very similar ways. They plunged into a sea of
+strange frivolity, such as one finds to-day at the centers of high
+fashion. Marie Antoinette bedecked herself with eccentric
+garments. On her head she wore a hat styled a "what-is-it,"
+towering many feet in height and flaunting parti-colored plumes.
+Worse than all this, she refused to wear corsets, and at some
+great functions she would appear in what looked exactly like a
+bedroom gown.
+
+She would even neglect the ordinary niceties of life. Her hands
+were not well cared for. It was very difficult for the ladies in
+attendance to persuade her to brush her teeth with regularity.
+Again, she would persist in wearing her frilled and lace-trimmed
+petticoats long after their dainty edges had been smirched and
+blackened.
+
+Yet these things might have been counteracted had she gone no
+further. Unfortunately, she did go further. She loved to dress at
+night like a shop-girl and venture out into the world of Paris,
+where she was frequently followed and recognized. Think of it--the
+Queen of France, elbowed in dense crowds and seeking to attract
+the attention of common soldiers!
+
+Of course, almost every one put the worst construction upon this,
+and after a time upon everything she did. When she took a fancy
+for constructing labyrinths and secret passages in the palace, all
+Paris vowed that she was planning means by which her various
+lovers might enter without observation. The hidden printing-
+presses of Paris swarmed with gross lampoons about this reckless
+girl; and, although there was little truth in what they said,
+there was enough to cloud her reputation. When she fell ill with
+the measles she was attended in her sick-chamber by four gentlemen
+of the court. The king was forbidden to enter lest he might catch
+the childish disorder.
+
+The apathy of the king, indeed, drove her into many a folly. After
+four years of marriage, as Mrs. Mayne records, he had only reached
+the point of giving her a chilly kiss. The fact that she had no
+children became a serious matter. Her brother, the Emperor Joseph
+of Austria, when he visited Paris, ventured to speak to the king
+upon the subject. Even the Austrian ambassador had thrown out
+hints that the house of Bourbon needed direct heirs. Louis grunted
+and said little, but he must have known how good was the advice.
+
+It was at about this time when there came to the French court a
+young Swede named Axel de Fersen, who bore the title of count, but
+who was received less for his rank than for his winning manner,
+his knightly bearing, and his handsome, sympathetic face. Romantic
+in spirit, he threw himself at once into a silent inner worship of
+Marie Antoinette, who had for him a singular attraction. Wherever
+he could meet her they met. To her growing cynicism this breath of
+pure yet ardent affection was very grateful. It came as something
+fresh and sweet into the feverish life she led.
+
+Other men had had the audacity to woo her--among them Duc de
+Lauzun, whose complicity in the famous affair of the diamond
+necklace afterward cast her, though innocent, into ruin; the Duc
+de Biron; and the Baron de Besenval, who had obtained much
+influence over her, which he used for the most evil purposes.
+Besenval tainted her mind by persuading her to read indecent
+books, in the hope that at last she would become his prey.
+
+But none of these men ever meant to Marie Antoinette what Fersen
+meant. Though less than twenty years of age, he maintained the
+reserve of a great gentleman, and never forced himself upon her
+notice. Yet their first acquaintance had occurred in such a way as
+to give to it a touch of intimacy. He had gone to a masked ball,
+and there had chosen for his partner a lady whose face was quite
+concealed. Something drew the two together. The gaiety of the
+woman and the chivalry of the man blended most harmoniously. It
+was only afterward that he discovered that his chance partner was
+the first lady in France. She kept his memory in her mind; for
+some time later, when he was at a royal drawing-room and she heard
+his voice, she exclaimed:
+
+"Ah, an old acquaintance!"
+
+From this time Fersen was among those who were most intimately
+favored by the queen. He had the privilege of attending her
+private receptions at the palace of the Trianon, and was a
+conspicuous figure at the feasts given in the queen's honor by the
+Princess de Lamballe, a beautiful girl whose head was destined
+afterward to be severed from her body and borne upon a bloody pike
+through the streets of Paris. But as yet the deluge had not
+arrived and the great and noble still danced upon the brink of a
+volcano.
+
+Fersen grew more and more infatuated, nor could he quite conceal
+his feelings. The queen, in her turn, was neither frightened nor
+indignant. His passion, so profound and yet so respectful, deeply
+moved her. Then came a time when the truth was made clear to both
+of them. Fersen was near her while she was singing to the
+harpsichord, and "she was betrayed by her own music into an avowal
+which song made easy." She forgot that she was Queen of France.
+She only felt that her womanhood had been starved and slighted,
+and that here was a noble-minded lover of whom she could be proud.
+
+Some time after this announcement was officially made of the
+approaching accouchement of the queen. It was impossible that
+malicious tongues should be silent. The king's brother, the Comte
+de Provence, who hated the queen, just as the Bonapartes afterward
+hated Josephine, did his best to besmirch her reputation. He had,
+indeed, the extraordinary insolence to do so at a time when one
+would suppose that the vilest of men would remain silent. The
+child proved to be a princess, and she afterward received the
+title of Duchesse d'Angouleme. The King of Spain asked to be her
+godfather at the christening, which was to be held in the
+cathedral of Notre Dame. The Spanish king was not present in
+person, but asked the Comte de Provence to act as his proxy.
+
+On the appointed day the royal party proceeded to the cathedral,
+and the Comte de Provence presented the little child at the
+baptismal font. The grand almoner, who presided, asked;
+
+"What name shall be given to this child?"
+
+The Comte de Provence answered in a sneering tone:
+
+"Oh, we don't begin with that. The first thing to find out is who
+the father and the mother are!"
+
+These words, spoken at such a place and such a time, and with a
+strongly sardonic ring, set all Paris gossiping. It was a thinly
+veiled innuendo that the father of the child was not the King of
+France. Those about the court immediately began to look at Fersen
+with significant smiles. The queen would gladly have kept him near
+her; but Fersen cared even more for her good name than for his
+love of her. It would have been so easy to remain in the full
+enjoyment of his conquest; but he was too chivalrous for that, or,
+rather, he knew that the various ambassadors in Paris had told
+their respective governments of the rising scandal. In fact, the
+following secret despatch was sent to the King of Sweden by his
+envoy:
+
+I must confide to your majesty that the young Count Fersen has
+been so well received by the queen that various persons have taken
+it amiss. I own that I am sure that she has a liking for him. I
+have seen proofs of it too certain to be doubted. During the last
+few days the queen has not taken her eyes off him, and as she
+gazed they were full of tears. I beg your majesty to keep their
+secret to yourself.
+
+The queen wept because Fersen had resolved to leave her lest she
+should be exposed to further gossip. If he left her without any
+apparent reason, the gossip would only be the more intense.
+Therefore he decided to join the French troops who were going to
+America to fight under Lafayette. A brilliant but dissolute
+duchess taunted him when the news became known.
+
+"How is this?" said she. "Do you forsake your conquest?"
+
+But, "lying like a gentleman," Fersen answered, quietly:
+
+"Had I made a conquest I should not forsake it. I go away free,
+and, unfortunately, without leaving any regret."
+
+Nothing could have been more chivalrous than the pains which
+Fersen took to shield the reputation of the queen. He even allowed
+it to be supposed that he was planning a marriage with a rich
+young Swedish woman who had been naturalized in England. As a
+matter of fact, he departed for America, and not very long
+afterward the young woman in question married an Englishman.
+
+Fersen served in America for a time, returning, however, at the
+end of three years. He was one of the original Cincinnati, being
+admitted to the order by Washington himself. When he returned to
+France he was received with high honors and was made colonel of
+the royal Swedish regiment.
+
+The dangers threatening Louis and his court, which were now
+gigantic and appalling, forbade him to forsake the queen. By her
+side he did what he could to check the revolution; and, failing
+this, he helped her to maintain an imperial dignity of manner
+which she might otherwise have lacked. He faced the bellowing mob
+which surrounded the Tuileries. Lafayette tried to make the
+National Guard obey his orders, but he was jeered at for his
+pains. Violent epithets were hurled at the king. The least
+insulting name which they could give him was "a fat pig." As for
+the queen, the most filthy phrases were showered upon her by the
+men, and even more so by the women, who swarmed out of the slums
+and sought her life.
+
+At last, in 1791, it was decided that the king and the queen and
+their children, of whom they now had three, should endeavor to
+escape from Paris. Fersen planned their flight, but it proved to
+be a failure. Every one remembers how they were discovered and
+halted at Varennes. The royal party was escorted back to Paris by
+the mob, which chanted with insolent additions:
+
+"We've brought back the baker, the baker's wife, and the baker's
+boy! Now we shall have bread!"
+
+Against the savage fury which soon animated the French a foreigner
+like Fersen could do very little; but he seems to have endeavored,
+night and day, to serve the woman whom he loved. His efforts have
+been described by Grandat; but they were of no avail. The king and
+queen were practically made prisoners. Their eldest son died. They
+went through horrors that were stimulated by the wretch Hebert, at
+the head of his so-called Madmen (Enrages). The king was executed
+in January, 1792. The queen dragged out a brief existence in a
+prison where she was for ever under the eyes of human brutes, who
+guarded her and watched her and jeered at her at times when even
+men would be sensitive. Then, at last, she mounted the scaffold,
+and her head, with its shining hair, fell into the bloody basket.
+
+Marie Antoinette shows many contradictions in her character. As a
+young girl she was petulant and silly and almost unseemly in her
+actions. As a queen, with waning power, she took on a dignity
+which recalled the dignity of her imperial mother. At first a
+flirt, she fell deeply in love when she met a man who was worthy
+of that love. She lived for most part like a mere cocotte. She
+died every inch a queen.
+
+One finds a curious resemblance between the fate of Marie
+Antoinette and that of her gallant lover, who outlived her for
+nearly twenty years. She died amid the shrieks and execrations of
+a maddened populace in Paris; he was practically torn in pieces by
+a mob in the streets of Stockholm. The day of his death was the
+anniversary of the flight to Varennes. To the last moment of his
+existence he remained faithful to the memory of the royal woman
+who had given herself so utterly to him.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF AARON BURR
+
+
+There will come a time when the name of Aaron Burr will be cleared
+from the prejudice which now surrounds it, when he will stand in
+the public estimation side by side with Alexander Hamilton, whom
+he shot in a duel in 1804, but whom in many respects he curiously
+resembled. When the white light of history shall have searched
+them both they will appear as two remarkable men, each having his
+own undoubted faults and at the same time his equally undoubted
+virtues.
+
+Burr and Hamilton were born within a year of each other--Burr
+being a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, and Alexander Hamilton being
+the illegitimate son of a Scottish merchant in the West Indies.
+Each of them was short in stature, keen of intellect, of great
+physical endurance, courage, and impressive personality. Each as a
+young man served on the staff of Washington during the
+Revolutionary War, and each of them quarreled with him, though in
+a different way.
+
+On one occasion Burr was quite unjustly suspected by Washington of
+looking over the latter's shoulder while he was writing.
+"Washington leaped to his feet with the exclamation:
+
+"How dare you, Colonel Burr?"
+
+Burr's eyes flashed fire at the question, and he retorted,
+haughtily:
+
+"Colonel Burr DARE do anything."
+
+This, however, was the end of their altercation The cause of
+Hamilton's difference with his chief is not known, but it was a
+much more serious quarrel; so that the young officer left his
+staff position in a fury and took no part in the war until the
+end, when he was present at the battle of Yorktown.
+
+Burr, on the other hand, helped Montgomery to storm the heights of
+Quebec, and nearly reached the upper citadel when his commander
+was shot dead and the Americans retreated. In all this confusion
+Burr showed himself a man of mettle. The slain Montgomery was six
+feet high, but Burr carried his body away with wonderful strength
+amid a shower of musket-balls and grape-shot.
+
+Hamilton had no belief in the American Constitution, which he
+called "a shattered, feeble thing." He could never obtain an
+elective office, and he would have preferred to see the United
+States transformed into a kingdom. Washington's magnanimity and
+clear-sightedness made Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury. Burr,
+on the other hand, continued his military service until the war
+was ended, routing the enemy at Hackensack, enduring the horrors
+of Valley Forge, commanding a brigade at the battle of Monmouth,
+and heading the defense of the city of New Haven. He was also
+attorney-general of New York, was elected to the United States
+Senate, was tied with Jefferson for the Presidency, and then
+became Vice-President.
+
+Both Hamilton and Burr were effective speakers; but, while
+Hamilton was wordy and diffuse, Burr spoke always to the point,
+with clear and cogent reasoning. Both were lavish spenders of
+money, and both were engaged in duels before the fatal one in
+which Hamilton fell. Both believed in dueling as the only way of
+settling an affair of honor. Neither of them was averse to love
+affairs, though it may be said that Hamilton sought women, while
+Burr was rather sought by women. When Secretary of the Treasury,
+Hamilton was obliged to confess an adulterous amour in order to
+save himself from the charge of corrupt practices in public
+office. So long as Burr's wife lived he was a devoted, faithful
+husband to her. Hamilton was obliged to confess his illicit acts
+while his wife, formerly Miss Elizabeth Schuyler, was living. She
+spent her later years in buying and destroying the compromising
+documents which her husband had published for his countrymen to
+read.
+
+The most extraordinary thing about Aaron Burr was the magnetic
+quality that was felt by every one who approached him. The roots
+of this penetrated down into a deep vitality. He was always young,
+always alert, polished in manner, courageous with that sort of
+courage which does not even recognize the presence of danger,
+charming in conversation, and able to adapt it to men or women of
+any age whatever. His hair was still dark in his eightieth year.
+His step was still elastic, his motions were still as spontaneous
+and energetic, as those of a youth.
+
+So it was that every one who knew him experienced his fascination.
+The rough troops whom he led through the Canadian swamps felt the
+iron hand of his discipline; yet they were devoted to him, since
+he shared all their toils, faced all their dangers, and ate with
+them the scraps of hide which they gnawed to keep the breath of
+life in their shrunken bodies.
+
+Burr's discipline was indeed very strict, so that at first raw
+recruits rebelled against it. On one occasion the men of an
+untrained company resented it so bitterly that they decided to
+shoot Colonel Burr as he paraded them for roll-call that evening.
+Burr somehow got word of it and contrived to have all the
+cartridges drawn from their muskets. When the time for the roll-
+call came one of the malcontents leaped from the front line and
+leveled his weapon at Burr.
+
+"Now is the time, boys!" he shouted.
+
+Like lightning Burr's sword flashed from its scabbard with such a
+vigorous stroke as to cut the man's arm completely off and partly
+to cleave the musket.
+
+"Take your place in the ranks," said Burr.
+
+The mutineer obeyed, dripping with blood. A month later every man
+in that company was devoted to his commander. They had learned
+that discipline was the surest source of safety.
+
+But with this high spirit and readiness to fight Burr had a most
+pleasing way of meeting every one who came to him. When he was
+arrested in the Western forests, charged with high treason, the
+sound of his voice won from jury after jury verdicts of acquittal.
+Often the sheriffs would not arrest him. One grand jury not merely
+exonerated him from all public misdemeanors, but brought in a
+strong presentment against the officers of the government for
+molesting him.
+
+It was the same everywhere. Burr made friends and devoted allies
+among all sorts of men. During his stay in France, England,
+Germany, and Sweden he interested such men as Charles Lamb, Jeremy
+Bentham, Sir Walter Scott, Goethe, and Heeren. They found his mind
+able to meet with theirs on equal terms. Burr, indeed, had
+graduated as a youth with honors from Princeton, and had continued
+his studies there after graduation, which was then a most unusual
+thing to do. But, of course, he learned most from his contact with
+men and women of the world.
+
+Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in The Minister's Wooing, has given
+what is probably an exact likeness of Aaron Burr, with his
+brilliant gifts and some of his defects. It is strong testimony to
+the character of Burr that Mrs. Stowe set out to paint him as a
+villain; but before she had written long she felt his fascination
+and made her readers, in their own despite, admirers of this
+remarkable man. There are many parallels, indeed, between him and
+Napoleon--in the quickness of his intellect, the ready use of his
+resources, and his power over men, while he was more than Napoleon
+in his delightful gift of conversation and the easy play of his
+cultured mind.
+
+Those who are full of charm are willing also to be charmed. All
+his life Burr was abstemious in food and drink. His tastes were
+most refined. It is difficult to believe that such a man could
+have been an unmitigated profligate.
+
+In his twentieth year there seems to have begun the first of the
+romances that run through the story of his long career. Perhaps
+one ought not to call it the first romance, for at eighteen, while
+he was studying law at Litchfield, a girl, whose name has been
+suppressed, made an open avowal of love for him. Almost at the
+same time an heiress with a large fortune would have married him
+had he been willing to accept her hand. But at this period he was
+only a boy and did not take such things seriously.
+
+Two years later, after Burr had seen hard service at Quebec and on
+Manhattan Island, his name was associated with that of a very
+beautiful girl named Margaret Moncrieffe. She was the daughter of
+a British major, but in some way she had been captured while
+within the American lines. Her captivity was regarded as little
+more than a joke; but while she was thus a prisoner she saw a
+great deal of Burr. For several months they were comrades, after
+which General Putnam sent her with his compliments to her father.
+
+Margaret Moncrieffe had a most emotional nature. There can be no
+doubt that she deeply loved the handsome young American officer,
+whom she never saw again. It is doubtful how far their intimacy
+was carried. Later she married a Mr. Coghlan. After reaching
+middle life she wrote of Burr in a way which shows that neither
+years nor the obligations of marriage could make her forget that
+young soldier, whom she speaks of as "the conqueror of her soul."
+In the rather florid style of those days the once youthful
+Margaret Moncrieffe expresses herself as follows:
+
+Oh, may these pages one day meet the eye of him who subdued my
+virgin heart, whom the immutable, unerring laws of nature had
+pointed out for my husband, but whose sacred decree the barbarous
+customs of society fatally violated!
+
+Commenting on this paragraph, Mr. H. C. Merwin justly remarks
+that, whatever may have been Burr's conduct toward Margaret
+Moncrieffe, the lady herself, who was the person chiefly
+concerned, had no complaint to make of it. It certainly was no
+very serious affair, since in the following year Burr met a lady
+who, while she lived, was the only woman for whom he ever really
+cared.
+
+This was Theodosia Prevost, the wife of a major in the British
+army. Burr met her first in 1777, while she was living with her
+sister in Westchester County. Burr's command was fifteen miles
+across the river, but distance and danger made no difference to
+him. He used to mount a swift horse, inspect his sentinels and
+outposts, and then gallop to the Hudson, where a barge rowed by
+six soldiers awaited him. The barge was well supplied with
+buffalo-skins, upon which the horse was thrown with his legs
+bound, and then half an hour's rowing brought them to the other
+side. There Burr resumed his horse, galloped to the house of Mrs.
+Prevost, and, after spending a few hours with her, returned in the
+same way.
+
+Mrs. Prevost was by no means beautiful, but she had an
+attractiveness of her own. She was well educated and possessed
+charming manners, with a disposition both gentle and affectionate.
+Her husband died soon after the beginning of the war, and then
+Burr married her. No more ideal family life could be conceived
+than his, and the letters which passed between the two are full of
+adoration. Thus she wrote to him:
+
+Tell me, why do I grow every day more tenacious of your regard? Is
+it because each revolving day proves you more deserving?
+
+And thus Burr answered her:
+
+Continue to multiply your letters to me. They are all my solace.
+The last six are constantly within my reach. I read them once a
+day at least. Write me all that I have asked, and a hundred things
+which I have not.
+
+When it is remembered that these letters were written after nine
+years of marriage it is hard to believe all the evil things that
+have been said of Burr.
+
+His wife died in 1794, and he then gave a double affection to his
+daughter Theodosia, whose beauty and accomplishments were known
+throughout the country. Burr took the greatest pains in her
+education, and believed that she should be trained, as he had
+been, to be brave, industrious, and patient. He himself, who has
+been described as a voluptuary, delighted in the endurance of cold
+and heat and of severe labor.
+
+After his death one of his younger admirers was asked what Burr
+had done for him. The reply was characteristic.
+
+"He made me iron," was the answer.
+
+No father ever gave more attention to his daughter's welfare. As
+to Theodosia's studies he was very strict, making her read Greek
+and Latin every day, with drawing and music and history, in
+addition to French. Not long before her marriage to Joseph
+Allston, of South Carolina, Burr wrote to her:
+
+I really think, my dear Theo, that you will be very soon beyond
+all verbal criticism, and that my whole attention will be
+presently directed to the improvement of your style.
+
+Theodosia Burr married into a family of good old English stock,
+where riches were abundant, and high character was regarded as the
+best of all possessions. Every one has heard of the mysterious
+tragedy which is associated with her history. In 1812, when her
+husband had been elected Governor of his state, her only child--a
+sturdy boy of eleven--died, and Theodosia's health was shattered
+by her sorrow. In the same year Burr returned from a sojourn in
+Europe, and his loving daughter embarked from Charleston on a
+schooner, the Patriot, to meet her father in New York. When Burr
+arrived he was met by a letter which told him that his grandson
+was dead and that Theodosia was coming to him.
+
+Weeks sped by, and no news was heard of the ill-fated Patriot. At
+last it became evident that she must have gone down or in some
+other way have been lost. Burr and Governor Allston wrote to each
+other letter after letter, of which each one seems to surpass the
+agony of the other. At last all hope was given up. Governor
+Allston died soon after of a broken heart; but Burr, as became a
+Stoic, acted otherwise.
+
+He concealed everything that reminded him of Theodosia. He never
+spoke of his lost daughter. His grief was too deep-seated and too
+terrible for speech. Only once did he ever allude to her, and this
+was in a letter written to an afflicted friend, which contained
+the words:
+
+Ever since the event which separated me from mankind I have been
+able neither to give nor to receive consolation.
+
+In time the crew of a pirate vessel was captured and sentenced to
+be hanged. One of the men, who seemed to be less brutal than the
+rest, told how, in 1812, they had captured a schooner, and, after
+their usual practice, had compelled the passengers to walk the
+plank. All hesitated and showed cowardice, except only one--a
+beautiful woman whose eyes were as bright and whose bearing was as
+unconcerned as if she were safe on shore. She quickly led the way,
+and, mounting the plank with a certain scorn of death, said to the
+others:
+
+"Come, I will show you how to die."
+
+It has always been supposed that this intrepid girl may have been
+Theodosia Allston. If so, she only acted as her father would have
+done and in strict accordance with his teachings.
+
+This resolute courage, this stern joy in danger, this perfect
+equanimity, made Burr especially attractive to women, who love
+courage, the more so when it is coupled with gentleness and
+generosity.
+
+Perhaps no man in our country has been so vehemently accused
+regarding his relations with the other sex. The most improbable
+stories were told about him, even by his friends. As to his
+enemies, they took boundless pains to paint him in the blackest
+colors. According to them, no woman was safe from his intrigues.
+He was a perfect devil in leading them astray and then casting
+them aside.
+
+Thus one Matthew L. Davis, in whom Burr had confided as a friend,
+wrote of him long afterward a most unjust account--unjust because
+we have proofs that it was false in the intensity of its abuse.
+Davis wrote:
+
+It is truly surprising how any individual could become so eminent
+as a soldier, as a statesman, and as a professional man who
+devoted so much time to the other sex as was devoted by Colonel
+Burr. For more than half a century of his life they seemed to
+absorb his whole thought. His intrigues were without number; the
+sacred bonds of friendship were unhesitatingly violated when they
+operated as barriers to the indulgence of his passions. In this
+particular Burr appears to have been unfeeling and heartless.
+
+It is impossible to believe that the Spartan Burr, whose life was
+one of incessant labor and whose kindliness toward every one was
+so well known, should have deserved a commentary like this. The
+charge of immorality is so easily made and so difficult of
+disproof that it has been flung promiscuously at all the great men
+of history, including, in our own country,
+
+Washington and Jefferson as well as Burr. In England, when
+Gladstone was more than seventy years of age, he once stopped to
+ask a question of a woman in the street. Within twenty-four hours
+the London clubs were humming with a sort of demoniac glee over
+the story that this aged and austere old gentleman was not above
+seeking common street amours.
+
+And so with Aaron Burr to a great extent. That he was a man of
+strict morality it would be absurd to maintain. That he was a
+reckless and licentious profligate would be almost equally untrue.
+Mr. H. O. Merwin has very truly said:
+
+Part of Burr's reputation for profligacy was due, no doubt, to
+that vanity respecting women of which Davis himself speaks. He
+never refused to accept the parentage of a child.
+
+"Why do you allow this woman to saddle you with her child when you
+KNOW you are not the father of it?" said a friend to him a few
+months before his death.
+
+"Sir," he replied, "when a lady does me the honor to name me the
+father of her child I trust I shall always be too gallant to show
+myself ungrateful for the favor."
+
+There are two curious legends relating to Aaron Burr. They serve
+to show that his reputation became such that he could not enjoy
+the society of a woman without having her regarded as his
+mistress.
+
+When he was United States Senator from New York he lived in
+Philadelphia at the lodging-house of a Mrs. Payne, whose daughter,
+Dorothy Todd, was the very youthful widow of an officer. This
+young woman was rather free in her manners, and Burr was very
+responsive in his. At the time, however, nothing was thought of
+it; hut presently Burr brought to the house the serious and
+somewhat pedantic James Madison and introduced him to the hoyden.
+
+Madison was then forty-seven years of age, a stranger to society,
+but gradually rising to a prominent position in politics--"the
+great little Madison," as Burr rather lightly called him. Before
+very long he had proposed marriage to the young widow. She
+hesitated, and some one referred the matter to President
+Washington. The Father of his Country answered in what was perhaps
+the only opinion that he ever gave on the subject of matrimony. It
+is worth preserving because it shows that he had a sense of
+humor:
+
+For my own part, I never did nor do I believe I ever shall give
+advice to a woman who is setting out on a matrimonial voyage ... A
+woman very rarely asks an opinion or seeks advice on such an
+occasion till her mind is wholly made up, and then it is with the
+hope and expectation of obtaining a sanction, and not that she
+means to be governed by your disapproval.
+
+Afterward when Dolly Madison with, her yellow turban and kittenish
+ways was making a sensation in Washington society some one
+recalled her old association with Burr. At once the story sprang
+to light that Burr had been her lover and that he had brought
+about the match with Madison as an easy way of getting rid of her.
+
+There is another curious story which makes Martin Van Buren,
+eighth President of the United States, to have been the
+illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. There is no earthly reason for
+believing this, except that Burr sometimes stopped overnight at
+the tavern in Kinderhook which was kept by Van Buren's putative
+father, and that Van Buren in later life showed an astuteness
+equal to that of Aaron Burr himself, so that he was called by his
+opponents "the fox of Kinderhook." But, as Van Buren was born in
+December of the same year (1782) in which Burr was married to
+Theodosia Prevost, the story is utterly improbable when we
+remember, as we must, the ardent affection which Burr showed his
+wife, not only before their marriage, but afterward until her
+death.
+
+Putting aside these purely spurious instances, as well as others
+cited by Mr. Parton, the fact remains that Aaron Burr, like Daniel
+Webster, found a great attraction in the society of women; that he
+could please them and fascinate them to an extraordinary degree;
+and that during his later life he must be held quite culpable in
+this respect. His love-making was ardent and rapid, as we shall
+afterward see in the case of his second marriage.
+
+Many other stories are told of him. For instance, it is said that
+he once took a stage-coach from Jersey City to Philadelphia. The
+only other occupant was a woman of high standing and one whose
+family deeply hated Aaron Burr. Nevertheless, so the story goes,
+before they had reached Newark she was absolutely swayed by his
+charm of manner; and when the coach made its last stop before
+Philadelphia she voluntarily became his mistress.
+
+It must also be said that, unlike those of Webster and Hamilton,
+his intrigues were never carried on with women of the lower sort.
+This may be held by some to deepen the charge against him; but
+more truly does it exonerate him, since it really means that in
+many cases these women of the world threw themselves at him and
+sought him as a lover, when otherwise he might never have thought
+of them.
+
+That he was not heartless and indifferent to those who had loved
+him may be shown by the great care which he took to protect their
+names and reputations. Thus, on the day before his duel with
+Hamilton, he made a will in which he constituted his son-in-law as
+his executor. At the same time he wrote a sealed letter to
+Governor Allston in which he said:
+
+If you can pardon and indulge a folly, I would suggest that Mme. ----,
+too well known under the name of Leonora, has claims on my
+recollection. She is now with her husband at Santiago, in Cuba.
+
+Another fact has been turned to his discredit. From many women, in
+the course of his long life, he had received a great quantity of
+letters written by aristocratic hands on scented paper, and these
+letters he had never burned. Here again, perhaps, was shown the
+vanity of the man who loved love for its own sake. He kept all
+these papers in a huge iron-clamped chest, and he instructed
+Theodosia in case he should die to burn every letter which might
+injure any one.
+
+After Theodosia's death Burr gave the same instructions to Matthew
+L. Davis, who did, indeed, burn them, though he made their
+existence a means of blackening the character of Burr. He should
+have destroyed them unopened, and should never have mentioned them
+in his memoirs of the man who trusted him as a friend.
+
+Such was Aaron Burr throughout a life which lasted for eighty
+years. His last romance, at the age of seventy-eight, is worth
+narrating because it has often been misunderstood.
+
+Mme. Jumel was a Rhode Island girl who at seventeen years of age
+eloped with an English officer, Colonel Peter Croix. Her first
+husband died while she was still quite young, and she then married
+a French wine-merchant, Stephen Jumel, some twenty years her
+senior, but a man of much vigor and intelligence. M. Jumel made a
+considerable fortune in New York, owning a small merchant fleet;
+and after Napoleon's downfall he and his wife went to Paris, where
+she made a great impression in the salons by her vivacity and wit
+and by her lavish expenditures.
+
+Losing, however, part of what she and her husband possessed, Mme.
+Jumel returned to New York, bringing with her a great amount of
+furniture and paintings, with which she decorated the historic
+house still standing in the upper part of Manhattan Island--a
+mansion held by her in her own right. She managed her estate with
+much ability; and in 1828 M. Jumel returned to live with her in
+what was in those days a splendid villa.
+
+Four years later, however, M. Jumel suffered an accident from
+which he died in a few days, leaving his wife still an attractive
+woman and not very much past her prime. Soon after she had
+occasion to seek for legal advice, and for this purpose visited
+the law-office of Aaron Burr. She had known him a good many years
+before; and, though he was now seventy-eight years of age, there
+was no perceptible change in him. He was still courtly in manner,
+tactful, and deferential, while physically he was straight,
+active, and vigorous.
+
+A little later she invited him to a formal banquet, where he
+displayed all his charms and shone to great advantage. When he was
+about to lead her in to dinner, he said:
+
+"I give my hand, madam; my heart has long been yours."
+
+These attentions he followed up with several other visits, and
+finally proposed that she should marry him. Much fluttered and no
+less flattered, she uttered a sort of "No" which was not likely to
+discourage a man like Aaron Burr.
+
+"I shall come to you before very long," he said, "accompanied by a
+clergyman; and then you will give me your hand because I want it."
+
+This rapid sort of wooing was pleasantly embarrassing. The lady
+rather liked it; and so, on an afternoon when the sun was shining
+and the leaves were rustling in the breeze, Burr drove up to Mme.
+Jumel's mansion accompanied by Dr. Bogart--the very clergyman who
+had married him to his first wife fifty years before.
+
+Mme. Jumel was now seriously disturbed, but her refusal was not a
+strong one. There were reasons why she should accept the offer.
+The great house was lonely. The management of her estate required
+a man's advice. Moreover, she was under the spell of Burr's
+fascination. Therefore she arrayed herself in one of her most
+magnificent Paris gowns; the members of her household and eight
+servants were called in and the ceremony was duly performed by Dr.
+Bogart. A banquet followed. A dozen cobwebbed bottles of wine were
+brought up from the cellar, and the marriage feast went on merrily
+until after midnight.
+
+This marriage was a singular one from many points of view. It was
+strange that a man of seventy-eight should take by storm the
+affections of a woman so much younger than he--a woman of wealth
+and knowledge of the world. In the second place, it is odd that
+there was still another woman--a mere girl--who was so infatuated
+with Burr that when she was told of his marriage it nearly broke
+her heart. Finally, in the early part of that same year he had
+been accused of being the father of a new-born child, and in spite
+of his age every one believed the charge to be true. Here is a
+case that it would be hard to parallel.
+
+The happiness of the newly married pair did not, however, last
+very long. They made a wedding journey into Connecticut, of which
+state Burr's nephew was then Governor, and there Burr saw a
+monster bridge over the Connecticut River, in which his wife had
+shares, though they brought her little income. He suggested that
+she should transfer the investment, which, after all, was not a
+very large one, and place it in a venture in Texas which looked
+promising. The speculation turned out to be a loss, however, and
+this made Mrs. Burr extremely angry, the more so as she had reason
+to think that her ever-youthful husband had been engaged in
+flirting with the country girls near the Jumel mansion.
+
+She was a woman of high spirit and had at times a violent temper.
+One day the post-master at what was then the village of Harlem
+was surprised to see Mrs. Burr drive up before the post-office in
+an open carriage. He came out to ask what she desired, and was
+surprised to find her in a violent temper and with an enormous
+horse-pistol on each cushion at her side.
+
+"What do you wish, madam?" said he, rather mildly.
+
+"What do I wish?" she cried. "Let me get at that villain Aaron
+Burr!"
+
+Presently Burr seems to have succeeded in pacifying her; but in
+the end they separated, though she afterward always spoke most
+kindly of him. When he died, only about a year later, she is said
+to have burst into a flood of tears--another tribute to the
+fascination which Aaron Burr exercised through all his checkered
+life.
+
+It is difficult to come to any fixed opinion regarding the moral
+character of Aaron Burr. As a soldier he was brave to the point of
+recklessness. As a political leader he was almost the equal of
+Jefferson and quite superior to Hamilton. As a man of the world he
+was highly accomplished, polished in manner, charming in
+conversation. He made friends easily, and he forgave his enemies
+with a broadmindedness that is unusual.
+
+On the other hand, in his political career there was a touch of
+insincerity, and it can scarcely be denied that he used his charm
+too often to the injury of those women who could not resist his
+insinuating ways and the caressing notes of his rich voice. But as
+a husband, in his youth, he was devoted, affectionate, and loyal;
+while as a father he was little less than worshiped by the
+daughter whom he reared so carefully.
+
+One of his biographers very truly says that no such wretch as Burr
+has been declared to be could have won and held the love of such a
+wife and such a daughter as Burr had.
+
+When all the other witnesses have been heard, let the two
+Theodosias be summoned, and especially that daughter who showed
+toward him an affectionate veneration unsurpassed by any recorded
+in history or romance. Such an advocate as Theodosia the younger
+must avail in some degree, even though the culprit were brought
+before the bar of Heaven itself.
+
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE IV. AND MRS. FITZHERBERT
+
+
+In the last decade of the eighteenth century England was perhaps
+the most brilliant nation of the world. Other countries had been
+humbled by the splendid armies of France and were destined to be
+still further humbled by the emperor who came from Corsica. France
+had begun to seize the scepter of power; yet to this picture there
+was another side--fearful want and grievous poverty and the
+horrors of the Revolution. Russia was too far away, and was still
+considered too barbarous, for a brilliant court to flourish there.
+Prussia had the prestige that Frederick the Great won for her, but
+she was still a comparatively small state. Italy was in a
+condition of political chaos; the banks of the Rhine were running
+blood where the Austrian armies faced the gallant Frenchmen under
+the leadership of Moreau. But England, in spite of the loss of her
+American colonies, was rich and prosperous, and her invincible
+fleets were extending her empire over the seven seas.
+
+At no time in modern England has the court at London seen so much
+real splendor or such fine manners. The royalist emigres who fled
+from France brought with them names and pedigrees that were older
+than the Crusades, and many of them were received with the
+frankest, freest English hospitality. If here and there some
+marquis or baron of ancient blood was perforce content to teach
+music to the daughters of tradesmen in suburban schools,
+nevertheless they were better off than they had been in France,
+harried by the savage gaze-hounds of the guillotine. Afterward,
+in the days of the Restoration, when they came back to their
+estates, they had probably learned more than one lesson from the
+bouledogues of Merry England, who had little tact, perhaps, but
+who were at any rate kindly and willing to share their goods with
+pinched and poverty-stricken foreigners.
+
+The court, then, as has been said, was brilliant with notables
+from Continental countries, and with the historic wealth of the
+peerage of England. Only one cloud overspread it; and that was the
+mental condition of the king. We have become accustomed to think
+of George III as a dull creature, almost always hovering on the
+verge of that insanity which finally swept him into a dark
+obscurity; but Thackeray's picture of him is absurdly untrue to
+the actual facts. George III. was by no means a dullard, nor was
+he a sort of beefy country squire who roved about the palace
+gardens with his unattractive spouse.
+
+Obstinate enough he was, and ready for a combat with the rulers of
+the Continent or with his self-willed sons; but he was a man of
+brains and power, and Lord Rosebery has rightly described him as
+the most striking constitutional figure of his time. Had he
+retained his reason, and had his erratic and self-seeking son not
+succeeded him during his own lifetime, Great Britain might very
+possibly have entered upon other ways than those which opened to
+her after the downfall of Napoleon.
+
+The real center of fashionable England, however, was not George
+III., but rather his son, subsequently George IV., who was made
+Prince of Wales three days after his birth, and who became prince
+regent during the insanity of the king. He was the leader of the
+social world, the fit companion of Beau Brummel and of a choice
+circle of rakes and fox-hunters who drank pottle-deep. Some called
+him "the first gentleman of Europe." Others, who knew him better,
+described him as one who never kept his word to man or woman and
+who lacked the most elementary virtues.
+
+Yet it was his good luck during the first years of his regency to
+be popular as few English kings have ever been. To his people he
+typified old England against revolutionary France; and his youth
+and gaiety made many like him. He drank and gambled; he kept packs
+of hounds and strings of horses; he ran deeply into debt that he
+might patronize the sports of that uproarious day. He was a
+gallant "Corinthian," a haunter of dens where there were prize-
+fights and cock-fights, and there was hardly a doubtful resort in
+London where his face was not familiar.
+
+He was much given to gallantry--not so much, as it seemed, for
+wantonness, but from sheer love of mirth and chivalry. For a time,
+with his chosen friends, such as Fox and Sheridan, he ventured
+into reckless intrigues that recalled the amours of his
+predecessor, Charles II. He had by no means the wit and courage of
+Charles; and, indeed, the house of Hanover lacked the outward show
+of chivalry which made the Stuarts shine with external splendor.
+But he was good-looking and stalwart, and when he had half a dozen
+robust comrades by his side he could assume a very manly
+appearance. Such was George IV. in his regency and in his prime.
+He made that period famous for its card-playing, its deep
+drinking, and for the dissolute conduct of its courtiers and
+noblemen no less than for the gallantry of its soldiers and its
+momentous victories on sea and land. It came, however, to be seen
+that his true achievements were in reality only escapades, that
+his wit was only folly, and his so-called "sensibility" was but
+sham. He invented buckles, striped waistcoats, and flamboyant
+collars, but he knew nothing of the principles of kingship or the
+laws by which a state is governed.
+
+The fact that he had promiscuous affairs with women appealed at
+first to the popular sense of the romantic. It was not long,
+however, before these episodes were trampled down into the mire of
+vulgar scandal.
+
+One of the first of them began when he sent a letter, signed
+"Florizel," to a young actress, "Perdita" Robinson. Mrs. Robinson,
+whose maiden name was Mary Darby, and who was the original of
+famous portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, was a woman of
+beauty, talent, and temperament. George, wishing in every way to
+be "romantic," insisted upon clandestine meetings on the Thames at
+Kew, with all the stage trappings of the popular novels--cloaks,
+veils, faces hidden, and armed watchers to warn her of approaching
+danger. Poor Perdita took this nonsense so seriously that she gave
+up her natural vocation for the stage, and forsook her husband,
+believing that the prince would never weary of her.
+
+He did weary of her very soon, and, with the brutality of a man of
+such a type, turned her away with the promise of some money; after
+which he cut her in the Park and refused to speak to her again. As
+for the money, he may have meant to pay it, but Perdita had a long
+struggle before she succeeded in getting it. It may be assumed
+that the prince had to borrow it and that this obligation formed
+part of the debts which Parliament paid for him.
+
+It is not necessary to number the other women whose heads he
+turned. They are too many for remembrance here, and they have no
+special significance, save one who, as is generally believed,
+became his wife so far as the church could make her so. An act of
+1772 had made it illegal for any member of the English royal
+family to marry without the permission of the king. A marriage
+contracted without the king's consent might be lawful in the eyes
+of the church, but the children born of it could not inherit any
+claim to the throne.
+
+It may be remarked here that this withholding of permission was
+strictly enforced. Thus William IV., who succeeded George IV., was
+married, before his accession to the throne, to Mrs. Jordan
+(Dorothy Bland). Afterward he lawfully married a woman of royal
+birth who was known as Queen Adelaide.
+
+There is an interesting story which tells how Queen Victoria came
+to be born because her father, the Duke of Kent, was practically
+forced to give up a morganatic union which he greatly preferred to
+a marriage arranged for him by Parliament. Except the Duke of
+Cambridge, the Duke of Kent was the only royal duke who was likely
+to have children in the regular line. The only daughter of George
+IV. had died in childhood. The Duke of Cumberland was for various
+reasons ineligible; the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV.,
+was almost too old; and therefore, to insure the succession, the
+Duke of Kent was begged to marry a young and attractive woman, a
+princess of the house of Saxe-Coburg, who was ready for the honor.
+It was greatly to the Duke's credit that he showed deep and
+sincere feeling in this matter. As he said himself in effect:
+
+"This French lady has stood by me in hard times and in good times,
+too--why should I cast her off? She has been more than a wife to
+me. And what do I care for your plans in Parliament? Send over for
+one of the Stuarts--they are better men than the last lot of our
+fellows that you have had!"
+
+In the end, however, he was wearied out and was persuaded to
+marry, but he insisted that a generous sum should be settled on
+the lady who had been so long his true companion, and to whom, no
+doubt, he gave many a wistful thought in his new but unfamiliar
+quarters in Kensington Palace, which was assigned as his
+residence.
+
+Again, the second Duke of Cambridge, who died only a few years
+ago, greatly desired to marry a lady who was not of royal rank,
+though of fine breeding and of good birth. He besought his young
+cousin, as head of the family, to grant him this privilege of
+marriage; but Queen Victoria stubbornly refused. The duke was
+married according to the rites of the church, but he could not
+make his wife a duchess. The queen never quite forgave him for his
+partial defiance of her wishes, though the duke's wife--she was
+usually spoken of as Mrs. FitzGeorge--was received almost
+everywhere, and two of her sons hold high rank in the British army
+and navy, respectively.
+
+The one real love story in the life of George IV. is that which
+tells of his marriage with a lady who might well have been the
+wife of any king. This was Maria Anne Smythe, better known as Mrs.
+Fitzherbert, who was six years older than the young prince when
+she first met him in company with a body of gentlemen and ladies
+in 1784.
+
+Maria Fitzherbert's face was one which always displayed its best
+advantages. Her eyes were peculiarly languishing, and, as she had
+already been twice a widow, and was six years his senior, she had
+the advantage over a less experienced lover. Likewise, she was a
+Catholic, and so by another act of Parliament any marriage with
+her would be illegal. Yet just because of all these different
+objections the prince was doubly drawn to her, and was willing to
+sacrifice even the throne if he could but win her.
+
+His father, the king, called him into the royal presence and said:
+
+"George, it is time that you should settle down and insure the
+succession to the throne."
+
+"Sir," replied the prince, "I prefer to resign the succession and
+let my brother have it, and that I should live as a private
+English gentleman."
+
+Mrs. Fitzherbert was not the sort of woman to give herself up
+readily to a morganatic connection. Moreover, she soon came to
+love Prince George too well to entangle him in a doubtful alliance
+with one of another faith than his. Not long after he first met
+her the prince, who was always given to private theatricals, sent
+messengers riding in hot haste to her house to tell her that he
+had stabbed himself, that he begged to see her, and that unless
+she came he would repeat the act. The lady yielded, and hurried to
+Carlton House, the prince's residence; but she was prudent enough
+to take with her the Duchess of Devonshire, who was a reigning
+beauty of the court.
+
+The scene which followed was theatrical rather than impressive.--
+The prince was found in his sleeping-chamber, pale and with his
+ruffles blood-stained. He played the part of a youthful and love-
+stricken wooer, vowing that he would marry the woman of his heart
+or stab himself again. In the presence of his messengers, who,
+with the duchess, were witnesses, he formally took the lady as his
+wife, while Lady Devonshire's wedding-ring sealed the troth. The
+prince also acknowledged it in a document.
+
+Mrs. Fitzherbert was, in fact, a woman of sound sense. Shortly
+after this scene of melodramatic intensity her wits came back to
+her, and she recognized that she had merely gone through a
+meaningless farce. So she sent back the prince's document and the
+ring and hastened to the Continent, where he could not reach her,
+although his detectives followed her steps for a year.
+
+At the last she yielded, however, and came home to marry the
+prince in such fashion as she could--a marriage of love, and
+surely one of morality, though not of parliamentary law. The
+ceremony was performed "in her own drawing-room in her house in
+London, in the presence of the officiating Protestant clergyman
+and two of her own nearest relatives."
+
+Such is the serious statement of Lord Stourton, who was Mrs.
+Fitzherbert's cousin and confidant. The truth of it was never
+denied, and Mrs. Fitzherbert was always treated with respect, and
+even regarded as a person of great distinction. Nevertheless, on
+more than one occasion the prince had his friends in Parliament
+deny the marriage in order that his debts might be paid and new
+allowances issued to him by the Treasury.
+
+George certainly felt himself a husband. Like any other married
+prince, he set himself to build a palace for his country home.
+While in search of some suitable spot he chanced to visit the
+"pretty fishing-village" of Brighton to see his uncle, the Duke of
+Cumberland. Doubtless he found it an attractive place, yet this
+may have been not so much because of its view of the sea as for
+the reason that Mrs. Fitzherbert had previously lived there.
+
+However, in 1784 the prince sent down his chief cook to make
+arrangements for the next royal visit. The cook engaged a house on
+the spot where the Pavilion now stands, and from that time
+Brighton began to be an extremely fashionable place. The court
+doctors, giving advice that was agreeable, recommended their royal
+patient to take sea-bathing at Brighton. At once the place sprang
+into popularity.
+
+At first the gentry were crowded into lodging-houses and the
+accommodations were primitive to a degree. But soon handsome
+villas arose on every side; hotels appeared; places of amusement
+were opened. The prince himself began to build a tasteless but
+showy structure, partly Chinese and partly Indian in style, on the
+fashionable promenade of the Steyne.
+
+During his life with Mrs. Fitzherbert at Brighton the prince held
+what was practically a court. Hundreds of the aristocracy came
+down from London and made their temporary dwellings there; while
+thousands who were by no means of the court made the place what is
+now popularly called "London by the Sea." There were the Duc de
+Chartres, of France; statesmen and rakes, like Fox, Sheridan, and
+the Earl of Barrymore; a very beautiful woman, named Mrs. Couch, a
+favorite singer at the opera, to whom the prince gave at one time
+jewels worth ten thousand pounds; and a sister of the Earl of
+Barrymore, who was as notorious as her brother. She often took the
+president's chair at a club which George's friends had organized
+and which she had christened the Hell Fire Club.
+
+Such persons were not the only visitors at Brighton. Men of much
+more serious demeanor came down to visit the prince and brought
+with them quieter society. Nevertheless, for a considerable time
+the place was most noted for its wild scenes of revelry, into
+which George frequently entered, though his home life with Mrs.
+Fitzherbert at the Pavilion was a decorous one.
+
+No one felt any doubt as to the marriage of the two persons, who
+seemed so much like a prince and a princess. Some of the people of
+the place addressed Mrs. Fitzherbert as "Mrs. Prince." The old
+king and his wife, however, much deplored their son's relation
+with her. This was partly due to the fact that Mrs. Fitzherbert
+was a Catholic and that she had received a number of French nuns
+who had been driven out of France at the time of the Revolution.
+But no less displeasure was caused by the prince's racing and
+dicing, which swelled his debts to almost a million pounds, so
+that Parliament and, indeed, the sober part of England were set
+against him.
+
+Of course, his marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert had no legal status;
+nor is there any reason for believing that she ever became a
+mother. She had no children by her former two husbands, and Lord
+Stourton testified positively that she never had either son or
+daughter by Prince George. Nevertheless, more than one American
+claimant has risen to advance some utterly visionary claim to the
+English throne by reason of alleged descent from Prince George and
+Mrs. Fitzherbert.
+
+Neither William IV. nor Queen Victoria ever spent much time at
+Brighton. In King William's case it was explained that the
+dampness of the Pavilion did not suit him; and as to Queen
+Victoria, it was said that she disliked the fact that buildings
+had been erected so as to cut off the view of the sea. It is quite
+likely, however, that the queen objected to the associations of
+the place, and did not care to be reminded of the time when her
+uncle had lived there so long in a morganatic state of marriage.
+
+At length the time came when the king, Parliament, and the people
+at large insisted that the Prince of Wales should make a legal
+marriage, and a wife was selected for him in the person of
+Caroline, daughter of the Duke of Brunswick. This marriage took
+place exactly ten years after his wedding with the beautiful and
+gentle-mannered Mrs. Fitzherbert. With the latter he had known
+many days and hours of happiness. With Princess Caroline he had no
+happiness at all.
+
+Prince George met her at the pier to greet her. It is said that as
+he took her hand he kissed her, and then, suddenly recoiling, he
+whispered to one of his friends:
+
+"For God's sake, George, give me a glass of brandy!"
+
+Such an utterance was more brutal and barbaric than anything his
+bride could have conceived of, though it is probable, fortunately,
+that she did not understand him by reason of her ignorance of
+English.
+
+We need not go through the unhappy story of this unsympathetic,
+neglected, rebellious wife. Her life with the prince soon became
+one of open warfare; but instead of leaving England she remained
+to set the kingdom in an uproar. As soon as his father died and he
+became king, George sued her for divorce. Half the people sided
+with the queen, while the rest regarded her as a vulgar creature
+who made love to her attendants and brought dishonor on the
+English throne. It was a sorry, sordid contrast between the young
+Prince George who had posed as a sort of cavalier and this now
+furious gray old man wrangling with his furious German wife.
+
+Well might he look back to the time when he met Perdita in the
+moonlight on the Thames, or when he played the part of Florizel,
+or, better still, when he enjoyed the sincere and disinterested
+love of the gentle woman who was his wife in all but legal status.
+Caroline of Brunswick was thrust away from the king's coronation.
+She took a house within sight of Westminster Abbey, so that she
+might make hag-like screeches to the mob and to the king as he
+passed by. Presently, in August, 1821, only a month after the
+coronation, she died, and her body was taken back to Brunswick for
+burial.
+
+George himself reigned for nine years longer. When he died in 1830
+his executor was the Duke of Wellington. The duke, in examining
+the late king's private papers, found that he had kept with the
+greatest care every letter written to him by his morganatic wife.
+During his last illness she had sent him an affectionate missive
+which it is said George "read eagerly." Mrs. Fitzherbert wished
+the duke to give up her letters; but he would do so only in return
+for those which he had written to her.
+
+It was finally decided that it would be best to burn both his and
+hers. This work was carried out in Mrs. Fitzherbert's own house by
+the lady, the duke, and the Earl of Albemarle.
+
+Of George it may be said that he has left as memories behind him
+only three things that will be remembered. The first is the
+Pavilion at Brighton, with its absurdly oriental decorations, its
+minarets and flimsy towers. The second is the buckle which he
+invented and which Thackeray has immortalized with his biting
+satire. The last is the story of his marriage to Maria
+Fitzherbert, and of the influence exercised upon him by the
+affection of a good woman.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHARLOTTE CORDAY AND ADAM LUX
+
+
+Perhaps some readers will consider this story inconsistent with
+those that have preceded it. Yet, as it is little known to most
+readers and as it is perhaps unique in the history of romantic
+love, I cannot forbear relating it; for I believe that it is full
+of curious interest and pathetic power.
+
+All those who have written of the French Revolution have paused in
+their chronicle of blood and flame to tell the episode of the
+peasant Royalist, Charlotte Corday; but in telling it they have
+often omitted the one part of the story that is personal and not
+political. The tragic record of this French girl and her self-
+sacrifice has been told a thousand times by writers in many
+languages; yet almost all of them have neglected the brief romance
+which followed her daring deed and which was consummated after her
+death upon the guillotine. It is worth our while to speak first of
+Charlotte herself and of the man she slew, and then to tell that
+other tale which ought always to be entwined with her great deed
+of daring.
+
+Charlotte Corday--Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d'Armand--was a
+native of Normandy, and was descended, as her name implies, from
+noble ancestors. Her forefathers, indeed, had been statesmen,
+civil rulers, and soldiers, and among them was numbered the famous
+poet Corneille, whom the French rank with Shakespeare. But a
+century or more of vicissitudes had reduced her branch of the
+family almost to the position of peasants--a fact which partly
+justifies the name that some give her when they call her "the
+Jeanne d'Arc of the Revolution."
+
+She did not, however, spend her girlish years amid the fields and
+woods tending her sheep, as did the other Jeanne d'Arc; but she
+was placed in charge of the sisters in a convent, and from them
+she received such education as she had. She was a lonely child,
+and her thoughts turned inward, brooding over many things.
+
+After she had left the convent she was sent to live with an aunt.
+Here she devoted herself to reading over and over the few books
+which the house contained. These consisted largely of the deistic
+writers, especially Voltaire, and to some extent they destroyed
+her convent faith, though it is not likely that she understood
+them very fully.
+
+More to her taste was a copy of Plutarch's Lives. These famous
+stories fascinated her. They told her of battle and siege, of
+intrigue and heroism, and of that romantic love of country which
+led men to throw away their lives for the sake of a whole people.
+Brutus and Regulus were her heroes. To die for the many seemed to
+her the most glorious end that any one could seek. When she
+thought of it she thrilled with a sort of ecstasy, and longed with
+all the passion of her nature that such a glorious fate might be
+her own.
+
+Charlotte had nearly come to womanhood at the time when the French
+Revolution first broke out. Royalist though she had been in her
+sympathies, she felt the justice of the people's cause. She had
+seen the suffering of the peasantry, the brutality of the tax-
+gatherers, and all the oppression of the old regime. But what she
+hoped for was a democracy of order and equality and peace. Could
+the king reign as a constitutional monarch rather than as a
+despot, this was all for which she cared.
+
+In Normandy, where she lived, were many of those moderate
+republicans known as Girondists, who felt as she did and who hoped
+for the same peaceful end to the great outbreak. On the other
+hand, in Paris, the party of the Mountain, as it was called, ruled
+with a savage violence that soon was to culminate in the Reign of
+Terror. Already the guillotine ran red with noble blood. Already
+the king had bowed his head to the fatal knife. Already the threat
+had gone forth that a mere breath of suspicion or a pointed finger
+might be enough to lead men and women to a gory death.
+
+In her quiet home near Caen Charlotte Corday heard as from afar
+the story of this dreadful saturnalia of assassination which was
+making Paris a city of bloody mist. Men and women of the Girondist
+party came to tell her of the hideous deeds that were perpetrated
+there. All these horrors gradually wove themselves in the young
+girl's imagination around the sinister and repulsive figure of
+Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and
+Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that she saw the monster who
+sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who reveled like some
+arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death.
+
+In his earlier years Marat had been a very different figure--an
+accomplished physician, the friend of nobles, a man of science and
+original thought, so that he was nearly elected to the Academy of
+Sciences. His studies in electricity gained for him the admiration
+of Benjamin Franklin and the praise of Goethe. But when he turned
+to politics he left all this career behind him. He plunged into
+the very mire of red republicanism, and even there he was for a
+time so much hated that he sought refuge in London to save his
+life.
+
+On his return he was hunted by his enemies, so that his only place
+of refuge was in the sewers and drains of Paris. A woman, one
+Simonne Evrard, helped him to escape his pursuers. In the sewers,
+however, he contracted a dreadful skin-disease from which he never
+afterward recovered, and which was extremely painful as well as
+shocking to behold.
+
+It is small wonder that the stories about Marat circulated through
+the provinces made him seem more a devil than a man. His
+vindictiveness against the Girondists brought all of this straight
+home to Charlotte Corday and led her to dream of acting the part
+of Brutus, so that she might free her country from this hideous
+tyrant.
+
+In January, 1793, King Louis XVI. met his death upon the scaffold;
+and the queen was thrust into a foul prison. This was a signal for
+activity among the Girondists in Normandy, and especially at Caen,
+where Charlotte was present at their meetings and heard their
+fervid oratory. There was a plot to march on Paris, yet in some
+instinctive way she felt that such a scheme must fail. It was then
+that she definitely formed the plan of going herself, alone, to
+the French capital to seek out the hideous Marat and to kill him
+with her own hands.
+
+To this end she made application for a passport allowing her to
+visit Paris. This passport still exists, and it gives us an
+official description of the girl. It reads:
+
+Allow citizen Marie Corday to pass. She is twenty-four years of
+age, five feet and one inch in height, hair and eyebrows chestnut
+color, eyes gray, forehead high, mouth medium size, chin dimpled,
+and an oval face.
+
+Apart from this verbal description we have two portraits painted
+while she was in prison. Both of them make the description of the
+passport seem faint and pale. The real Charlotte had a wealth of
+chestnut hair which fell about her face and neck in glorious
+abundance. Her great gray eyes spoke eloquently of truth and
+courage. Her mouth was firm yet winsome, and her form combined
+both strength and grace. Such is the girl who, on reaching Paris,
+wrote to Marat in these words:
+
+Citizen, I have just arrived from Caen. Your love for your native
+place doubtless makes you wish to learn the events which have
+occurred in that part of the republic. I shall call at your
+residence in about an hour. Be so good as to receive me and give
+me a brief interview. I will put you in such condition as to
+render great service to France.
+
+This letter failed to gain her admission, and so did another which
+she wrote soon after. The fact is that Marat was grievously ill.
+His disease had reached a point where the pain could be assuaged
+only by hot water; and he spent the greater part of his time
+wrapped in a blanket and lying in a large tub.
+
+A third time, however, the persistent girl called at his house and
+insisted that she must see him, saying that she was herself in
+danger from the enemies of the Republic. Through an open door
+Marat heard her mellow voice and gave orders that she should be
+admitted.
+
+As she entered she gazed for a moment upon the lank figure rolling
+in the tub, the rat-like face, and the shifting eyes. Then she
+approached him, concealing in the bosom of her dress a long
+carving-knife which she had purchased for two francs. In answer to
+Marat's questioning look she told him that there was much
+excitement at Caen and that the Girondists were plotting there.
+
+To this Marat answered, in his harsh voice:
+
+"All these men you mention shall be guillotined in the next few
+days!"
+
+As he spoke Charlotte flashed out the terrible knife and with all
+her strength she plunged it into his left side, where it pierced a
+lung and a portion of his heart.
+
+Marat, with the blood gushing from his mouth, cried out:
+
+"Help, darling!"
+
+His cry was meant for one of the two women in the house. Both
+heard it, for they were in the next room; and both of them rushed
+in and succeeded in pinioning Charlotte Corday, who, indeed, made
+only a slight effort to escape. Troops were summoned, she was
+taken to the Prison de l'Abbaye, and soon after she was arraigned
+before the revolutionary tribunal.
+
+Placed in the dock, she glanced about her with an air of pride, as
+of one who gloried in the act which she had just performed. A
+written charge was read. She was asked what she had to say.
+Lifting her head with a look of infinite satisfaction, she
+answered in a ringing voice:
+
+"Nothing--except that I succeeded!"
+
+A lawyer was assigned for her defense. He pleaded for her
+earnestly, declaring that she must he regarded as insane; but
+those clear, calm eyes and that gentle face made her sanity a
+matter of little doubt. She showed her quick wit in the answers
+which she gave to the rough prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, who
+tried to make her confess that she had accomplices.
+
+"Who prompted you to do this deed?" roared Tinville.
+
+"I needed no prompting. My own heart was sufficient."
+
+"In what, then, had Marat wronged you?"
+
+"He was a savage beast who was going to destroy the remains of
+France in the fires of civil war."
+
+"But whom did you expect to benefit?" insinuated the prosecutor.
+
+"I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand."
+
+"What? Did you imagine that you had murdered all the Marats?"
+
+"No, but, this one being dead, the rest will perhaps take
+warning."
+
+Thus her directness baffled all the efforts of the prosecution to
+trap her into betraying any of her friends. The court, however,
+sentenced her to death. She was then immured in the Conciergerie.
+
+This dramatic court scene was the beginning of that strange, brief
+romance to which one can scarcely find a parallel. At the time
+there lived in Paris a young German named Adam Lux. The continual
+talk about Charlotte Corday had filled him with curiosity
+regarding this young girl who had been so daring and so patriotic.
+She was denounced on every hand as a murderess with the face of a
+Medusa and the muscles of a Vulcan. Street songs about her were
+dinned into the ears of Adam Lux.
+
+As a student of human nature he was anxious to see this terrible
+creature. He forced his way to the front of the crowded benches in
+the court-room and took his stand behind a young artist who was
+finishing a beautiful sketch. From that moment until the end of
+the trial the eyes of Adam Lux were fastened on the prisoner. What
+a contrast to the picture he had imagined!
+
+A mass of regal chestnut hair crowned with the white cap of a
+Norman peasant girl; gray eyes, very sad and serious, but looking
+serenely forth from under long, dark lashes; lips slightly curved
+with an expression of quiet humor; a face the color of the sun and
+wind, a bust indicative of perfect health, the chin of a Caesar,
+and the whole expression one of almost divine self-sacrifice. Such
+were the features that the painter was swiftly putting upon his
+canvas; but behind them Adam Lux discerned the soul for which he
+gladly sacrificed both his liberty and his life.
+
+He forgot his surroundings and seemed to see only that beautiful,
+pure face and to hear only the exquisite cadences of the wonderful
+voice. When Charlotte was led forth by a file of soldiers Adam
+staggered from the scene and made his way as best he might to his
+lodgings. There he lay prostrate, his whole soul filled with the
+love of her who had in an instant won the adoration of his heart.
+
+Once, and only once again, when the last scene opened on the
+tragedy, did he behold the heroine of his dreams.
+
+On the 17th of July Charlotte Corday was taken from her prison to
+the gloomy guillotine. It was toward evening, and nature had given
+a setting fit for such an end. Blue-black thunder-clouds rolled in
+huge masses across the sky until their base appeared to rest on
+the very summit of the guillotine. Distant thunder rolled and
+grumbled beyond the river. Great drops of rain fell upon the
+soldiers' drums. Young, beautiful, unconscious of any wrong,
+Charlotte Corday stood beneath the shadow of the knife.
+
+At the supreme moment a sudden ray from the setting sun broke
+through the cloud-wrack and fell upon her slender figure until she
+glowed in the eyes of the startled spectators like a statue cut in
+burnished bronze. Thus illumined, as it were, by a light from
+heaven itself, she bowed herself beneath the knife and paid the
+penalty of a noble, if misdirected, impulse. As the blade fell her
+lips quivered with her last and only plea:
+
+"My duty is enough--the rest is nothing!"
+
+Adam Lux rushed from the scene a man transformed. He bore graven
+upon his heart neither the mob of tossing red caps nor the glare
+of the sunset nor the blood-stained guillotine, but that last look
+from those brilliant eyes. The sight almost deprived him of his
+reason. The self-sacrifice of the only woman he had ever loved,
+even though she had never so much as seen him, impelled him with a
+sort of fury to his own destruction.
+
+He wrote a bitter denunciation of the judges, of the officers, and
+of all who had been followers of Marat. This document he printed,
+and scattered copies of it through every quarter in Paris. The
+last sentences are as follows:
+
+The guillotine is no longer a disgrace. It has become a sacred
+altar, from which every taint has been removed by the innocent
+blood shed there on the 17th of July. Forgive me, my divine
+Charlotte, if I find it impossible at the last moment to show the
+courage and the gentleness that were yours! I glory because you
+are superior to me, for it is right that she who is adored should
+be higher and more glorious than her adorer!
+
+This pamphlet, spread broadcast among the people, was soon
+reported to the leaders of the rabble. Adam Lux was arrested for
+treason against the Republic; but even these men had no desire to
+make a martyr of this hot-headed youth. They would stop his mouth
+without taking his life. Therefore he was tried and speedily found
+guilty, but an offer was made him that he might have passports
+that would allow him to return to Germany if only he would sign a
+retraction of his printed words.
+
+Little did the judges understand the fiery heart of the man they
+had to deal with. To die on the same scaffold as the woman whom he
+had idealized was to him the crowning triumph of his romantic
+love. He gave a prompt and insolent refusal to their offer. He
+swore that if released he would denounce his darling's murderers
+with a still greater passion.
+
+In anger the tribunal sentenced him to death. Only then he smiled
+and thanked his judges courteously, and soon after went blithely
+to the guillotine like a bridegroom to his marriage feast.
+
+Adam Lux! Spirit courtship had been carried on silently all
+through that terrible cross-examination of Charlotte Corday. His
+heart was betrothed to hers in that single gleam of the setting
+sun when she bowed beneath the knife. One may believe that these
+two souls were finally united when the same knife fell sullenly
+upon his neck and when his life-blood sprinkled the altar that was
+still stained with hers.
+
+
+
+
+
+NAPOLEON AND MARIE WALEWSKA
+
+
+There are four women who may be said to have deeply influenced the
+life of Napoleon. These four are the only ones who need to be
+taken into account by the student of his imperial career. The
+great emperor was susceptible to feminine charms at all times; but
+just as it used to be said of him that "his smile never rose above
+his eyes," so it might as truly be said that in most instances the
+throbbing of his heart did not affect his actions.
+
+Women to him were the creatures of the moment, although he might
+seem to care for them and to show his affection in extravagant
+ways, as in his affair with Mlle. Georges, the beautiful but
+rather tiresome actress. As for Mme. de Stael, she bored him to
+distraction by her assumption of wisdom. That was not the kind of
+woman that Napoleon cared for. He preferred that a woman should be
+womanly, and not a sort of owl to sit and talk with him about the
+theory of government.
+
+When it came to married women they interested him only because of
+the children they might bear to grow up as recruits for his
+insatiate armies. At the public balls given at the Tuileries he
+would walk about the gorgeous drawing-rooms, and when a lady was
+presented to him he would snap out, sharply:
+
+"How many children have you?"
+
+If she were able to answer that she had several the emperor would
+look pleased and would pay her some compliment; but if she said
+that she had none he would turn upon her sharply and say:
+
+"Then go home and have some!"
+
+Of the four women who influenced his life, first must come
+Josephine, because she secured him his earliest chance of
+advancement. She met him through Barras, with whom she was said to
+be rather intimate. The young soldier was fascinated by her--the
+more because she was older than he and possessed all the practised
+arts of the creole and the woman of the world. When she married
+him she brought him as her dowry the command of the army of Italy,
+where in a few months he made the tri-color, borne by ragged
+troops, triumphant over the splendidly equipped hosts of Austria.
+
+She was his first love, and his knowledge of her perfidy gave him
+the greatest shock and horror of his whole life; yet she might
+have held him to the end if she had borne an heir to the imperial
+throne. It was her failure to do so that led Napoleon to divorce
+Josephine and marry the thick-lipped Marie Louise of Austria.
+There were times later when he showed signs of regret and said:
+
+"I have had no luck since I gave up Josephine!"
+
+Marie Louise was of importance for a time--the short time when
+she entertained her husband and delighted him by giving birth to
+the little King of Rome. Yet in the end she was but an episode;
+fleeing from her husband in his misfortune, becoming the mistress
+of Count Neipperg, and letting her son--l'Aiglon--die in a land
+that was far from France.
+
+Napoleon's sister, Pauline Bonaparte, was the third woman who
+comes to mind when we contemplate the great Corsican's career.
+She, too, is an episode. During the period of his ascendancy she
+plagued him with her wanton ways, her sauciness and trickery. It
+was amusing to throw him into one of his violent rages; but
+Pauline was true at heart, and when her great brother was sent to
+Elba she followed him devotedly and gave him all her store of
+jewels, including the famous Borghese diamonds, perhaps the most
+superb of all gems known to the western world. She would gladly
+have followed him, also, to St. Helena had she been permitted.
+Remaining behind, she did everything possible in conspiring to
+secure his freedom.
+
+But, after all, Pauline and Marie Louise count for comparatively
+little. Josephine's fate was interwoven with Napoleon's; and, with
+his Corsican superstition, he often said so. The fourth woman, of
+whom I am writing here, may be said to have almost equaled
+Josephine in her influence on the emperor as well as in the pathos
+of her life-story.
+
+On New-Year's Day of 1807 Napoleon, who was then almost Emperor of
+Europe, passed through the little town of Bronia, in Poland.
+Riding with his cavalry to Warsaw, the ancient capital of the
+Polish kingdom, he seemed a very demigod of battle.
+
+True, he had had to abandon his long-cherished design of invading
+and overrunning England, and Nelson had shattered his fleets and
+practically driven his flag from the sea; but the naval disaster
+of Trafalgar had speedily been followed by the triumph of
+Austerlitz, the greatest and most brilliant of all Napoleon's
+victories, which left Austria and Russia humbled to the very
+ground before him.
+
+Then Prussia had dared to defy the over-bearing conqueror and had
+put into the field against him her armies trained by Frederick the
+Great; but these he had shattered almost at a stroke, winning in
+one day the decisive battles of Jena and Auerstadt. He had stabled
+his horses in the royal palace of the Hohenzollerns and had
+pursued the remnant of the Prussian forces to the Russian border.
+
+As he marched into the Polish provinces the people swarmed by
+thousands to meet him and hail him as their country's savior. They
+believed down to the very last that Bonaparte would make the Poles
+once more a free and independent nation and rescue them from the
+tyranny of Russia.
+
+Napoleon played upon this feeling in every manner known to his
+artful mind. He used it to alarm the Czar. He used it to
+intimidate the Emperor of Austria; but more especially did he use
+it among the Poles themselves to win for his armies thousands upon
+thousands of gallant soldiers, who believed that in fighting for
+Napoleon they were fighting for the final independence of their
+native land.
+
+Therefore, with the intensity of patriotism which is a passion
+among the Poles, every man and every woman gazed at Napoleon with
+something like adoration; for was not he the mighty warrior who
+had in his gift what all desired? Soldiers of every rank swarmed
+to his standards. Princes and nobles flocked about him. Those who
+stayed at home repeated wonderful stories of his victories and
+prayed for him and fed the flame which spread through all the
+country. It was felt that no sacrifice was too great to win his
+favor; that to him, as to a deity, everything that he desired
+should be yielded up, since he was to restore the liberty of
+Poland.
+
+And hence, when the carriage of the emperor dashed into Bronia,
+surrounded by Polish lancers and French cuirassiers, the enormous
+crowd surged forward and blocked the way so that their hero could
+not pass because of their cheers and cries and supplications.
+
+In the midst of it all there came a voice of peculiar sweetness
+from the thickest portion of the crowd.
+
+"Please let me pass!" said the voice. "Let me see him, if only for
+a moment!"
+
+The populace rolled backward, and through the lane which they made
+a beautiful girl with dark blue eyes that flamed and streaming
+hair that had become loosened about her radiant face was
+confronting the emperor. Carried away by her enthusiasm, she
+cried:
+
+"Thrice welcome to Poland! We can do or say nothing to express our
+joy in the country which you will surely deliver from its tyrant."
+
+The emperor bowed and, with a smile, handed a great bouquet of
+roses to the girl, for her beauty and her enthusiasm had made a
+deep impression on him.
+
+"Take it," said he, "as a proof of my admiration. I trust that I
+may have the pleasure of meeting you at Warsaw and of hearing your
+thanks from those beautiful lips."
+
+In a moment more the trumpets rang out shrilly, the horsemen
+closed up beside the imperial carriage, and it rolled away amid
+the tumultuous shouting of the populace.
+
+The girl who had so attracted Napoleon's attention was Marie
+Walewska, descended from an ancient though impoverished family in
+Poland. When she was only fifteen she was courted by one of the
+wealthiest men in Poland, the Count Walewska. He was three or four
+times her age, yet her dark blue eyes, her massive golden hair,
+and the exquisite grace of her figure led him to plead that she
+might become his wife. She had accepted him, but the marriage was
+that of a mere child, and her interest still centered upon her
+country and took the form of patriotism rather than that of
+wifehood and maternity.
+
+It was for this reason that the young Countess had visited Bronia.
+She was now eighteen years of age and still had the sort of
+romantic feeling which led her to think that she would keep in
+some secret hiding-place the bouquet which the greatest man alive
+had given her.
+
+But Napoleon was not the sort of man to forget anything that had
+given him either pleasure or the reverse. He who, at the height of
+his cares, could recall instantly how many cannon were in each
+seaport of France and could make out an accurate list of all his
+military stores; he who could call by name every soldier in his
+guard, with a full remembrance of the battles each man had fought
+in and the honors that he had won--he was not likely to forget so
+lovely a face as the one which had gleamed with peculiar radiance
+through the crowd at Bronia.
+
+On reaching Warsaw he asked one or two well-informed persons about
+this beautiful stranger. Only a few hours had passed before Prince
+Poniatowski, accompanied by other nobles, called upon her at her
+home.
+
+"I am directed, madam," said he, "by order of the Emperor of
+France, to bid you to be present at a ball that is to be given in
+his honor to-morrow evening."
+
+Mme. Walewska was startled, and her face grew hot with blushes.
+Did the emperor remember her escapade at Bronia? If so, how had he
+discovered her? Why should he seek her out and do her such an
+honor?
+
+"That, madam, is his imperial majesty's affair," Poniatowski told
+her. "I merely obey his instructions and ask your presence at the
+ball. Perhaps Heaven has marked you out to be the means of saving
+our unhappy country."
+
+In this way, by playing on her patriotism, Poniatowski almost
+persuaded her, and yet something held her back. She trembled,
+though she was greatly fascinated; and finally she refused to go.
+
+Scarcely had the envoy left her, however, when a great company of
+nobles entered in groups and begged her to humor the emperor.
+Finally her own husband joined in their entreaties and actually
+commanded her to go; so at last she was compelled to yield.
+
+It was by no means the frank and radiant girl who was now
+preparing again to meet the emperor. She knew not why, and yet her
+heart was full of trepidation and nervous fright, the cause of
+which she could not guess, yet which made her task a severe
+ordeal. She dressed herself in white satin, with no adornment save
+a wreath of foliage in her hair.
+
+As she entered the ballroom she was welcomed by hundreds whom she
+had never seen before, but who were of the highest nobility of
+Poland. Murmurs of admiration followed her, and finally
+Poniatowski came to her and complimented her, besides bringing her
+a message that the emperor desired her to dance with him.
+
+"I am very sorry," she said, with a quiver of the lips, "but I
+really cannot dance. Be kind enough to ask the emperor to excuse
+me."
+
+But at that very moment she felt some strange magnetic influence;
+and without looking up she could feel that Napoleon himself was
+standing by her as she sat with blanched face and downcast eyes,
+not daring to look up at him.
+
+"White upon white is a mistake, madam," said the emperor, in his
+gentlest tones. Then, stooping low, he whispered, "I had expected
+a far different reception."
+
+She neither smiled nor met his eyes. He stood there for a moment
+and then passed on, leaving her to return to her home with a heavy
+heart. The young countess felt that she had acted wrongly, and yet
+there was an instinct--an instinct that she could not conquer.
+
+In the gray of the morning, while she was still tossing
+feverishly, her maid knocked at the door and brought her a hastily
+scribbled note. It ran as follows:
+
+I saw none but you, I admired none but you; I desire only you.
+Answer at once, and calm the impatient ardor of--N.
+
+These passionate words burned from her eyes the veil that had
+hidden the truth from her. What before had been mere blind
+instinct became an actual verity. Why had she at first rushed
+forth into the very streets to hail the possible deliverer of her
+country, and then why had she shrunk from him when he sought to
+honor her! It was all clear enough now. This bedside missive meant
+that he had intended her dishonor and that he had looked upon her
+simply as a possible mistress.
+
+At once she crushed the note angrily in her hand.
+
+"There is no answer at all," said she, bursting into bitter tears
+at the very thought that he should dare to treat her in this way.
+
+But on the following morning when she awoke her maid was standing
+beside her with a second letter from Napoleon. She refused to open
+it and placed it in a packet with the first letter, and ordered
+that both of them should be returned to the emperor.
+
+She shrank from speaking to her husband of what had happened, and
+there was no one else in whom she dared confide. All through that
+day there came hundreds of visitors, either of princely rank or
+men who had won fame by their gallantry and courage. They all
+begged to see her, but to them all she sent one answer--that she
+was ill and could see no one.
+
+After a time her husband burst into her room, and insisted that
+she should see them.
+
+"Why," exclaimed he, "you are insulting the greatest men and the
+noblest women of Poland! More than that, there are some of the
+most distinguished Frenchmen sitting at your doorstep, as it were.
+There is Duroc, grand marshal of France, and in refusing to see
+him you are insulting the great emperor on whom depends everything
+that our country longs for. Napoleon has invited you to a state
+dinner and you have given him no answer whatever. I order you to
+rise at once and receive these ladies and gentlemen who have done
+you so much honor!"
+
+She could not refuse. Presently she appeared in her drawing-room,
+where she was at once surrounded by an immense throng of her own
+countrymen and countrywomen, who made no pretense of
+misunderstanding the situation. To them, what was one woman's
+honor when compared with the freedom and independence of their
+nation? She was overwhelmed by arguments and entreaties. She was
+even accused of being disloyal to the cause of Poland if she
+refused her consent.
+
+One of the strangest documents of that period was a letter sent to
+her and signed by the noblest men in Poland. It contained a
+powerful appeal to her patriotism. One remarkable passage even
+quotes the Bible to point out her line of duty. A portion of this
+letter ran as follows:
+
+Did Esther, think you, give herself to Ahasuerus out of the
+fulness of her love for him? So great was the terror with which he
+inspired her that she fainted at the sight of him. We may
+therefore conclude that affection had but little to do with her
+resolve. She sacrificed her own inclinations to the salvation of
+her country, and that salvation it was her glory to achieve. May
+we be enabled to say the same of you, to your glory and our own
+happiness!
+
+After this letter came others from Napoleon himself, full of the
+most humble pleading. It was not wholly distasteful thus to have
+the conqueror of the world seek her out and offer her his
+adoration any more than it was distasteful to think that the
+revival of her own nation depended on her single will. M. Frederic
+Masson, whose minute studies regarding everything relating to
+Napoleon have won him a seat in the French Academy, writes of
+Marie Walewska at this time: Every force was now brought into play
+against her. Her country, her friends, her religion, the Old and
+the New Testaments, all urged her to yield; they all combined for
+the ruin of a simple and inexperienced girl of eighteen who had no
+parents, whose husband even thrust her into temptation, and whose
+friends thought that her downfall would be her glory.
+
+Amid all these powerful influences she consented to attend the
+dinner. To her gratification Napoleon treated her with distant
+courtesy, and, in fact, with a certain coldness.
+
+"I heard that Mme. Walewska was indisposed. I trust that she has
+recovered," was all the greeting that he gave her when they met.
+
+Every one else with whom she spoke overwhelmed her with flattery
+and with continued urging; but the emperor himself for a time
+acted as if she had displeased him. This was consummate art; for
+as soon as she was relieved of her fears she began to regret that
+she had thrown her power away.
+
+During the dinner she let her eyes wander to those of the emperor
+almost in supplication. He, the subtlest of men, knew that he had
+won. His marvelous eyes met hers and drew her attention to him as
+by an electric current; and when the ladies left the great dining-
+room Napoleon sought her out and whispered in her ear a few words
+of ardent love.
+
+It was too little to alarm her seriously now. It was enough to
+make her feel that magnetism which Napoleon knew so well how to
+evoke and exercise. Again every one crowded about her with
+congratulations. Some said:
+
+"He never even saw any of US. His eyes were all for YOU! They
+flashed fire as he looked at you."
+
+"You have conquered his heart," others said, "and you can do what
+you like with him. The salvation of Poland is in your hands."
+
+The company broke up at an early hour, but Mme. Walewska was asked
+to remain. When she was alone General Duroc--one of the emperor's
+favorite officers and most trusted lieutenants--entered and placed
+a letter from Napoleon in her lap. He tried to tell her as
+tactfully as possible how much harm she was doing by refusing the
+imperial request. She was deeply affected, and presently, when
+Duroc left her, she opened the letter which he had given her and
+read it. It was worded thus:
+
+There are times when all splendors become oppressive, as I feel
+but too deeply at the present moment. How can I satisfy the
+desires of a heart that yearns to cast itself at your feet, when
+its impulses are checked at every point by considerations of the
+highest moment? Oh, if you would, you alone might overcome the
+obstacles that keep us apart. MY FRIEND DUROC WILL MAKE ALL EASY
+FOR YOU. Oh, come, come! Your every wish shall be gratified! Your
+country will be dearer to me when you take pity on my poor heart.
+N.
+
+Every chance of escape seemed to be closed. She had Napoleon's own
+word that he would free Poland in return for her self-sacrifice.
+Moreover, her powers of resistance had been so weakened that, like
+many women, she temporized. She decided that she would meet the
+emperor alone. She would tell him that she did not love him, and
+yet would plead with him to save her beloved country.
+
+As she sat there every tick of the clock stirred her to a new
+excitement. At last there came a knock upon the door, a cloak was
+thrown about her from behind, a heavy veil was drooped about her
+golden hair, and she was led, by whom she knew not, to the street,
+where a finely appointed carriage was waiting for her.
+
+No sooner had she entered it than she was driven rapidly through
+the darkness to the beautifully carved entrance of a palace. Half
+led, half carried, she was taken up the steps to a door which was
+eagerly opened by some one within. There were warmth and light and
+color and the scent of flowers as she was placed in a comfortable
+arm-chair. Her wrappings were taken from her, the door was closed
+behind her; and then, as she looked up, she found herself in the
+presence of Napoleon, who was kneeling at her feet and uttering
+soothing words.
+
+Wisely, the emperor used no violence. He merely argued with her;
+he told her over and over his love for her; and finally he
+declared that for her sake he would make Poland once again a
+strong and splendid kingdom.
+
+Several hours passed. In the early morning, before daylight, there
+came a knock at the door.
+
+"Already?" said Napoleon. "Well, my plaintive dove, go home and
+rest. You must not fear the eagle. In time you will come to love
+him, and in all things you shall command him."
+
+Then he led her to the door, but said that he would not open it
+unless she promised to see him the next day--a promise which she
+gave the more readily because he had treated her with such
+respect.
+
+On the following morning her faithful maid came to her bedside
+with a cluster of beautiful violets, a letter, and several
+daintily made morocco cases. When these were opened there leaped
+out strings and necklaces of exquisite diamonds, blazing in the
+morning sunlight. Mme. Walewska seized the jewels and flung them
+across the room with an order that they should be taken back at
+once to the imperial giver; but the letter, which was in the same
+romantic strain as the others, she retained.
+
+On that same evening there was another dinner, given to the
+emperor by the nobles, and Marie Walewska attended it, but of
+course without the diamonds, which she had returned. Nor did she
+wear the flowers which had accompanied the diamonds.
+
+When Napoleon met her he frowned upon her and made her tremble
+with the cold glances that shot from his eyes of steel. He
+scarcely spoke to her throughout the meal, but those who sat
+beside her were earnest in their pleading.
+
+Again she waited until the guests had gone away, and with a
+lighter heart, since she felt that she had nothing to fear. But
+when she met Napoleon in his private cabinet, alone, his mood was
+very different from that which he had shown before. Instead of
+gentleness and consideration he was the Napoleon of camps, and not
+of courts. He greeted her bruskly.
+
+"I scarcely expected to see you again," said he. "Why did you
+refuse my diamonds and my flowers? Why did you avoid my eyes at
+dinner? Your coldness is an insult which I shall not brook." Then
+he raised his voice to that rasping, almost blood-curdling tone
+which even his hardiest soldiers dreaded: "I will have you know
+that I mean to conquer you. You SHALL--yes, I repeat it, you
+SHALL love me! I have restored the name of your country. It owes
+its very existence to me."
+
+Then he resorted to a trick which he had played years before in
+dealing with the Austrians at Campo Formio.
+
+"See this watch which I am holding in my hand. Just as I dash it
+to fragments before you, so will I shatter Poland if you drive me
+to desperation by rejecting my heart and refusing me your own."
+
+As he spoke he hurled the watch against the opposite wall with
+terrific force, dashing it to pieces. In terror, Mme. Walewska
+fainted. When she resumed consciousness there was Napoleon wiping
+away her tears with the tenderness of a woman and with words of
+self-reproach.
+
+The long siege was over. Napoleon had conquered, and this girl of
+eighteen gave herself up to his caresses and endearments, thinking
+that, after all, her love of country was more than her own honor.
+
+Her husband, as a matter of form, put her away from him, though at
+heart he approved what she had done, while the Polish people
+regarded her as nothing less than a national heroine. To them she
+was no minister to the vices of an emperor, but rather one who
+would make him love Poland for her sake and restore its greatness.
+
+So far as concerned his love for her, it was, indeed, almost
+idolatry. He honored her in every way and spent all the time at
+his disposal in her company. But his promise to restore Poland he
+never kept, and gradually she found that he had never meant to
+keep it.
+
+"I love your country," he would say, "and I am willing to aid in
+the attempt to uphold its rights, but my first duty is to France.
+I cannot shed French blood in a foreign cause."
+
+By this time, however, Marie Walewska had learned to love Napoleon
+for his own sake. She could not resist his ardor, which matched
+the ardor of the Poles themselves. Moreover, it flattered her to
+see the greatest soldier in the world a suppliant for her smiles.
+
+For some years she was Napoleon's close companion, spending long
+hours with him and finally accompanying him to Paris. She was the
+mother of Napoleon's only son who lived to manhood. This son, who
+bore the name of Alexandre Florian de Walewski, was born in Poland
+in 1810, and later was created a count and duke of the second
+French Empire. It may be said parenthetically that he was a man of
+great ability. Living down to 1868, he was made much of by
+Napoleon III., who placed him in high offices of state, which he
+filled with distinction. In contrast with the Duc de Morny, who
+was Napoleon's illegitimate half-brother, Alexandre de Walewski
+stood out in brilliant contrast. He would have nothing to do with
+stock-jobbing and unseemly speculation.
+
+"I may be poor," he said--though he was not poor--"but at least I
+remember the glory of my father and what is due to his great
+name."
+
+As for Mme. Walewska, she was loyal to the emperor, and lacked the
+greed of many women whom he had made his favorites. Even at Elba,
+when he was in exile and disgrace, she visited him that she might
+endeavor to console him. She was his counselor and friend as well
+as his earnestly loved mate. When she died in Paris in 1817, while
+the dethroned emperor was a prisoner at St. Helena, the word
+"Napoleon" was the last upon her lips.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF PAULINE BONAPARTE
+
+
+It was said of Napoleon long ago that he could govern emperors and
+kings, but that not even he could rule his relatives. He himself
+once declared:
+
+"My family have done me far more harm than I have been able to do
+them good."
+
+It would be an interesting historical study to determine just how
+far the great soldier's family aided in his downfall by their
+selfishness, their jealousy, their meanness, and their
+ingratitude.
+
+There is something piquant in thinking of Napoleon as a domestic
+sort of person. Indeed, it is rather difficult to do so. When we
+speak his name we think of the stern warrior hurling his armies up
+bloody slopes and on to bloody victory. He is the man whose steely
+eyes made his haughtiest marshals tremble, or else the wise, far-
+seeing statesman and lawgiver; but decidedly he is not a household
+model. We read of his sharp speech to women, of his outrageous
+manners at the dinner-table, and of the thousand and one details
+which Mme. de Remusat has chronicled--and perhaps in part
+invented, for there has always existed the suspicion that her
+animus was that of a woman who had herself sought the imperial
+favor and had failed to win it.
+
+But, in fact, all these stories relate to the Napoleon of courts
+and palaces, and not to the Napoleon of home. In his private life
+this great man was not merely affectionate and indulgent, but he
+even showed a certain weakness where his relatives were concerned,
+so that he let them prey upon him almost without end.
+
+He had a great deal of the Italian largeness and lavishness of
+character with his family. When a petty officer he nearly starved
+himself in order to give his younger brother, Louis, a military
+education. He was devotedly fond of children, and they were fond
+of him, as many anecdotes attest. His passionate love for
+Josephine before he learned of her infidelity is almost painful to
+read of; and even afterward, when he had been disillusioned, and
+when she was paying Fouche a thousand francs a day to spy upon
+Napoleon's every action, he still treated her with friendliness
+and allowed her extravagance to embarrass him.
+
+He made his eldest brother, Joseph, King of Spain, and Spain
+proved almost as deadly to him as did Russia. He made his youngest
+brother, Jerome, King of Westphalia, and Jerome turned the palace
+into a pigsty and brought discredit on the very name of Bonaparte.
+His brother Louis, for whom he had starved himself, he placed upon
+the throne of Holland, and Louis promptly devoted himself to his
+own interests, conniving at many things which were inimical to
+France. He was planning high advancement for his brother Lucien,
+and Lucien suddenly married a disreputable actress and fled with
+her to England, where he was received with pleasure by the most
+persistent of all Napoleon's enemies.
+
+So much for his brothers--incompetent, ungrateful, or openly his
+foes. But his three sisters were no less remarkable in the
+relations which they bore to him. They have been styled "the three
+crowned courtesans," and they have been condemned together as
+being utterly void of principle and monsters of ingratitude.
+
+Much of this censure was well deserved by all of them--by Caroline
+and Elise and Pauline. But when we look at the facts impartially
+we shall find something which makes Pauline stand out alone as
+infinitely superior to her sisters. Of all the Bonapartes she was
+the only one who showed fidelity and gratitude to the great
+emperor, her brother. Even Mme. Mere, Napoleon's mother, who
+beyond all question transmitted to him his great mental and
+physical power, did nothing for him. At the height of his splendor
+she hoarded sous and francs and grumblingly remarked:
+
+"All this is for a time. It isn't going to last!"
+
+Pauline, however, was in one respect different from all her
+kindred. Napoleon made Elise a princess in her own right and gave
+her the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. He married Caroline to Marshal
+Murat, and they became respectively King and Queen of Naples. For
+Pauline he did very little--less, in fact, than for any other
+member of his family--and yet she alone stood by him to the end.
+
+This feather-headed, languishing, beautiful, distracting morsel of
+frivolity, who had the manners of a kitten and the morals of a
+cat, nevertheless was not wholly unworthy to be Napoleon's sister.
+One has to tell many hard things of her; and yet one almost
+pardons her because of her underlying devotion to the man who made
+the name of Bonaparte illustrious for ever. Caroline, Queen of
+Naples, urged her husband to turn against his former chief. Elise,
+sour and greedy, threw in her fortunes with the Murats. Pauline,
+as we shall see, had the one redeeming trait of gratitude.
+
+To those who knew her she was from girlhood an incarnation of what
+used to be called "femininity." We have to-day another and a
+higher definition of womanhood, but to her contemporaries, and to
+many modern writers, she has seemed to be first of all woman--
+"woman to the tips of her rosy finger-nails," says Levy. Those who
+saw her were distracted by her loveliness. They say that no one
+can form any idea of her beauty from her pictures. "A veritable
+masterpiece of creation," she had been called. Frederic Masson
+declares:
+
+ She was so much more the typical woman that with her the defects
+common to women reached their highest development, while her
+beauty attained a perfection which may justly be called unique.
+
+ No one speaks of Pauline Bonaparte's character or of her
+intellect, but wholly of her loveliness and charm, and, it must be
+added, of her utter lack of anything like a moral sense.
+
+Even as a child of thirteen, when the Bonapartes left Corsica and
+took up their abode in Marseilles, she attracted universal
+attention by her wonderful eyes, her grace, and also by the utter
+lack of decorum which she showed. The Bonaparte girls at this time
+lived almost on charity. The future emperor was then a captain of
+artillery and could give them but little out of his scanty pay.
+
+Pauline--or, as they called her in those days, Paulette--wore
+unbecoming hats and shabby gowns, and shoes that were full of
+holes. None the less, she was sought out by several men of note,
+among them Freron, a commissioner of the Convention. He visited
+Pauline so often as to cause unfavorable comment; but he was in
+love with her, and she fell in love with him to the extent of her
+capacity. She used to write him love letters in Italian, which
+were certainly not lacking in ardor. Here is the end of one of
+them:
+
+I love you always and most passionately. I love you for ever, my
+beautiful idol, my heart, my appealing lover. I love you, love
+you, love you, the most loved of lovers, and I swear never to love
+any one else!
+
+This was interesting in view of the fact that soon afterward she
+fell in love with Junot, who became a famous marshal. But her love
+affairs never gave her any serious trouble; and the three sisters,
+who now began to feel the influence of Napoleon's rise to power,
+enjoyed themselves as they had never done before. At Antibes they
+had a beautiful villa, and later a mansion at Milan.
+
+By this time Napoleon had routed the Austrians in Italy, and all
+France was ringing with his name. What was Pauline like in her
+maidenhood? Arnault says:
+
+She was an extraordinary combination of perfect physical beauty
+and the strangest moral laxity. She was as pretty as you please,
+but utterly unreasonable. She had no more manners than a school-
+girl--talking incoherently, giggling at everything and nothing,
+and mimicking the most serious persons of rank.
+
+General de Ricard, who knew her then, tells in his monograph of
+the private theatricals in which Pauline took part, and of the
+sport which they had behind the scenes. He says:
+
+The Bonaparte girls used literally to dress us. They pulled our
+ears and slapped us, but they always kissed and made up later. We
+used to stay in the girls' room all the time when they were
+dressing.
+
+Napoleon was anxious to see his sisters in some way settled. He
+proposed to General Marmont to marry Pauline. The girl was then
+only seventeen, and one might have had some faith in her
+character. But Marmont was shrewd and knew her far too well. The
+words in which he declined the honor are interesting:
+
+"I know that she is charming and exquisitely beautiful; yet I have
+dreams of domestic happiness, of fidelity, and of virtue. Such
+dreams are seldom realized, I know. Still, in the hope of winning
+them--"
+
+And then he paused, coughed, and completed what he had to say in a
+sort of mumble, but his meaning was wholly clear. He would not
+accept the offer of Pauline in marriage, even though she was the
+sister of his mighty chief.
+
+Then Napoleon turned to General Leclerc, with whom Pauline had for
+some time flirted, as she had flirted with almost all the officers
+of Napoleon's staff. Leclerc was only twenty-six. He was rich and
+of good manners, but rather serious and in poor health. This was
+not precisely the sort of husband for Pauline, if we look at it in
+the conventional way; but it served Napoleon's purpose and did not
+in the least interfere with his sister's intrigues.
+
+Poor Leclerc, who really loved Pauline, grew thin, and graver
+still in manner. He was sent to Spain and Portugal, and finally
+was made commander-in-chief of the French expedition to Haiti,
+where the famous black rebel, Toussaint l'Ouverture, was heading
+an uprising of the negroes.
+
+Napoleon ordered Pauline to accompany her husband. Pauline flatly
+refused, although she made this an occasion for ordering
+"mountains of pretty clothes and pyramids of hats." But still she
+refused to go on board the flag-ship. Leclerc expostulated and
+pleaded, but the lovely witch laughed in his face and still
+persisted that she would never go.
+
+Word was brought to Napoleon. He made short work of her
+resistance.
+
+"Bring a litter," he said, with one of his steely glances. "Order
+six grenadiers to thrust her into it, and see that she goes on
+board forthwith."
+
+And so, screeching like an angry cat, she was carried on board,
+and set sail with her husband and one of her former lovers. She
+found Haiti and Santo Domingo more agreeable than she had
+supposed. She was there a sort of queen who could do as she
+pleased and have her orders implicitly obeyed. Her dissipation was
+something frightful. Her folly and her vanity were beyond belief.
+
+But at the end of two years both she and her husband fell ill. He
+was stricken down by the yellow fever, which was decimating the
+French army. Pauline was suffering from the results of her life in
+a tropical climate. Leclerc died, the expedition was abandoned,
+and Pauline brought the general's body back to France. When he was
+buried she, still recovering from her fever, had him interred in a
+costly coffin and paid him the tribute of cutting off her
+beautiful hair and burying it with him.
+
+"What a touching tribute to her dead husband!" said some one to
+Napoleon.
+
+The emperor smiled cynically as he remarked:
+
+"H'm! Of course she knows that her hair is bound to fall out after
+her fever, and that it will come in longer and thicker for being
+cropped."
+
+Napoleon, in fact, though he loved Pauline better than his other
+sisters--or perhaps because he loved her better--was very strict
+with her. He obliged her to wear mourning, and to observe some of
+the proprieties; but it was hard to keep her within bounds.
+
+Presently it became noised about that Prince Camillo Borghese was
+exceedingly intimate with her. The prince was an excellent
+specimen of the fashionable Italian. He was immensely rich. His
+palace at Rome was crammed with pictures, statues, and every sort
+of artistic treasure. He was the owner, moreover, of the famous
+Borghese jewels, the finest collection of diamonds in the world.
+
+Napoleon rather sternly insisted upon her marrying Borghese.
+Fortunately, the prince was very willing to be connected with
+Napoleon; while Pauline was delighted at the idea of having
+diamonds that would eclipse all the gems which Josephine
+possessed; for, like all of the Bonapartes, she detested her
+brother's wife. So she would be married and show her diamonds to
+Josephine. It was a bit of feminine malice which she could not
+resist.
+
+The marriage took place very quietly at Joseph Bonaparte's house,
+because of the absence of Napoleon; but the newly made princess
+was invited to visit Josephine at the palace of Saint-Cloud. Here
+was to be the triumph of her life. She spent many days in planning
+a toilet that should be absolutely crushing to Josephine. Whatever
+she wore must be a background for the famous diamonds. Finally she
+decided on green velvet.
+
+When the day came Pauline stood before a mirror and gazed at
+herself with diamonds glistening in her hair, shimmering around
+her neck, and fastened so thickly on her green velvet gown as to
+remind one of a moving jewel-casket. She actually shed tears for
+joy. Then she entered her carriage and drove out to Saint-Cloud.
+
+But the Creole Josephine, though no longer young, was a woman of
+great subtlety as well as charm. Stories had been told to her of
+the green velvet, and therefore she had her drawing-room
+redecorated in the most uncompromising blue. It killed the green
+velvet completely. As for the diamonds, she met that maneuver by
+wearing not a single gem of any kind. Her dress was an Indian
+muslin with a broad hem of gold.
+
+Her exquisite simplicity, coupled with her dignity of bearing,
+made the Princess Pauline, with her shower of diamonds, and her
+green velvet displayed against the blue, seem absolutely vulgar.
+Josephine was most generous in her admiration of the Borghese
+gems, and she kissed Pauline on parting. The victory was hers.
+
+There is another story of a defeat which Pauline met from another
+lady, one Mme. de Coutades. This was at a magnificent ball given
+to the most fashionable world of Paris. Pauline decided upon
+going, and intended, in her own phrase, to blot out every woman
+there. She kept the secret of her toilet absolutely, and she
+entered the ballroom at the psychological moment, when all the
+guests had just assembled.
+
+She appeared; and at sight of her the music stopped, silence fell
+upon the assemblage, and a sort of quiver went through every one.
+Her costume was of the finest muslin bordered with golden palm-
+leaves. Four bands, spotted like a leopard's skin, were wound
+about her head, while these in turn were supported by little
+clusters of golden grapes. She had copied the head-dress of a
+Bacchante in the Louvre. All over her person were cameos, and just
+beneath her breasts she wore a golden band held in place by an
+engraved gem. Her beautiful wrists, arms, and hands were bare. She
+had, in fact, blotted out her rivals.
+
+Nevertheless, Mme. de Coutades took her revenge. She went up to
+Pauline, who was lying on a divan to set off her loveliness, and
+began gazing at the princess through a double eye-glass. Pauline
+felt flattered for a moment, and then became uneasy. The lady who
+was looking at her said to a companion, in a tone of compassion:
+
+"What a pity! She really would be lovely if it weren't for THAT!"
+
+"For what?" returned her escort.
+
+"Why, are you blind? It's so remarkable that you SURELY must see
+it."
+
+Pauline was beginning to lose her self-composure. She flushed and
+looked wildly about, wondering what was meant. Then she heard Mme.
+Coutades say:
+
+"Why, her ears. If I had such ears as those I would cut them off!"
+
+Pauline gave one great gasp and fainted dead away. As a matter of
+fact, her ears were not so bad. They were simply very flat and
+colorless, forming a contrast with the rosy tints of her face. But
+from that moment no one could see anything but these ears; and
+thereafter the princess wore her hair low enough to cover them.
+
+This may be seen in the statue of her by Canova. It was considered
+a very daring thing for her to pose for him in the nude, for only
+a bit of drapery is thrown over her lower limbs. Yet it is true
+that this statue is absolutely classical in its conception and
+execution, and its interest is heightened by the fact that its
+model was what she afterward styled herself, with true Napoleonic
+pride--"a sister of Bonaparte."
+
+Pauline detested Josephine and was pleased when Napoleon divorced
+her; but she also disliked the Austrian archduchess, Marie Louise,
+who was Josephine's successor. On one occasion, at a great court
+function, she got behind the empress and ran out her tongue at
+her, in full view of all the nobles and distinguished persons
+present. Napoleon's eagle eye flashed upon Pauline and blazed like
+fire upon ice. She actually took to her heels, rushed out of the
+ball, and never visited the court again.
+
+It would require much time to tell of her other eccentricities, of
+her intrigues, which were innumerable, of her quarrel with her
+husband, and of the minor breaches of decorum with which she
+startled Paris. One of these was her choice of a huge negro to
+bathe her every morning. When some one ventured to protest, she
+answered, naively:
+
+"What! Do you call that thing a MAN?"
+
+And she compromised by compelling her black servitor to go out and
+marry some one at once, so that he might continue his
+ministrations with propriety!
+
+To her Napoleon showed himself far more severe than with either
+Caroline or Elise. He gave her a marriage dowry of half a million
+francs when she became the Princess Borghese, but after that he
+was continually checking her extravagances. Yet in 1814, when the
+downfall came and Napoleon was sent into exile at Elba, Pauline
+was the only one of all his relatives to visit him and spend her
+time with him. His wife fell away and went back to her Austrian
+relatives. Of all the Bonapartes only Pauline and Mme. Mere
+remained faithful to the emperor.
+
+Even then Napoleon refused to pay a bill of hers for sixty-two
+francs, while he allowed her only two hundred and forty francs for
+the maintenance of her horses. But she, with a generosity of which
+one would have thought her quite incapable, gave to her brother a
+great part of her fortune. When he escaped from Elba and began the
+campaign of 1815 she presented him with all the Borghese diamonds.
+In fact, he had them with him in his carriage at Waterloo, where
+they were captured by the English. Contrast this with the meanness
+and ingratitude of her sisters and her brothers, and one may well
+believe that she was sincerely proud of what it meant to be la
+soeur de Bonaparte.
+
+When he was sent to St. Helena she was ill in bed and could not
+accompany him. Nevertheless, she tried to sell all her trinkets,
+of which she was so proud, in order that she might give him help.
+When he died she received the news with bitter tears "on hearing
+all the particulars of that long agony."
+
+As for herself, she did not long survive. At the age of forty-four
+her last moments came. Knowing that she was to die, she sent for
+Prince Borghese and sought a reconciliation. But, after all, she
+died as she had lived--"the queen of trinkets" (la reine des
+colifichets). She asked the servant to bring a mirror. She gazed
+into it with her dying eyes; and then, as she sank back, it was
+with a smile of deep content.
+
+"I am not afraid to die," she said. "I am still beautiful!"
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE AND COUNT NEIPPERG
+
+
+There is one famous woman whom history condems while at the same
+time it partly hides the facts which might mitigate the harshness
+of the judgment that is passed upon her. This woman is Marie
+Louise, Empress of France, consort of the great Napoleon, and
+archduchess of imperial Austria. When the most brilliant figure in
+all history, after his overthrow in 1814, was in tawdry exile on
+the petty island of Elba, the empress was already about to become
+a mother; and the father of her unborn child was not Napoleon, but
+another man. This is almost all that is usually remembered of her
+--that she was unfaithful to Napoleon, that she abandoned him in
+the hour of his defeat, and that she gave herself with readiness
+to one inferior in rank, yet with whom she lived for years, and to
+whom she bore what a French writer styled "a brood of bastards."
+
+Naturally enough, the Austrian and German historians do not have
+much to say of Marie Louise, because in her own disgrace she also
+brought disgrace upon the proudest reigning family in Europe.
+Naturally, also, French writers, even those who are hostile to
+Napoleon, do not care to dwell upon the story; since France itself
+was humiliated when its greatest genius and most splendid soldier
+was deceived by his Austrian wife. Therefore there are still many
+who know little beyond the bare fact that the Empress Marie Louise
+threw away her pride as a princess, her reputation as a wife, and
+her honor as a woman. Her figure seems to crouch in a sort of
+murky byway, and those who pass over the highroad of history
+ignore it with averted eyes.
+
+In reality the story of Napoleon and Marie Louise and of the Count
+von Neipperg is one which, when you search it to the very core,
+leads you straight to a sex problem of a very curious nature.
+Nowhere else does it occur in the relations of the great
+personages of history; but in literature Balzac, that master of
+psychology, has touched upon the theme in the early chapters of
+his famous novel called "A Woman of Thirty."
+
+As to the Napoleonic story, let us first recall the facts of the
+case, giving them in such order that their full significance may
+be understood.
+
+In 1809 Napoleon, then at the plenitude of his power, shook
+himself free from the clinging clasp of Josephine and procured the
+annulment of his marriage to her. He really owed her nothing.
+Before he knew her she had been the mistress of another. In the
+first years of their life together she had been notoriously
+unfaithful to him. He had held to her from habit which was in part
+a superstition; but the remembrance of the wrong which she had
+done him made her faded charms at times almost repulsive. And then
+Josephine had never borne him any children; and without a son to
+perpetuate his dynasty, the gigantic achievements which he had
+wrought seemed futile in his eyes, and likely to crumble into
+nothingness when he should die.
+
+No sooner had the marriage been annulled than his titanic ambition
+leaped, as it always did, to a tremendous pinnacle. He would wed.
+He would have children. But he would wed no petty princess. This
+man who in his early youth had felt honored by a marriage with the
+almost declassee widow of a creole planter now stretched out his
+hand that he might take to himself a woman not merely royal but
+imperial.
+
+At first he sought the sister of the Czar of Russia; but Alexander
+entertained a profound distrust of the French emperor, and managed
+to evade the tentative demand. There was, however, a reigning
+family far more ancient than the Romanoffs--a family which had
+held the imperial dignity for nearly six centuries--the oldest and
+the noblest blood in Europe. This was the Austrian house of
+Hapsburg. Its head, the Emperor Francis, had thirteen children, of
+whom the eldest, the Archduchess Marie Louise, was then in her
+nineteenth year.
+
+Napoleon had resented the rebuff which the Czar had given him. He
+turned, therefore, the more eagerly to the other project. Yet
+there were many reasons why an Austrian marriage might be
+dangerous, or, at any rate, ill-omened. Only sixteen years before,
+an Austrian arch-duchess, Marie Antionette, married to the ruler
+of France, had met her death upon the scaffold, hated and cursed
+by the French people, who had always blamed "the Austrian" for the
+evil days which had ended in the flames of revolution. Again, the
+father of the girl to whom Napoleon's fancy turned had been the
+bitter enemy of the new regime in France. His troops had been
+beaten by the French in five wars and had been crushed at
+Austerlitz and at Wagram. Bonaparte had twice entered Vienna at
+the head of a conquering army, and thrice he had slept in the
+imperial palace at Schonbrunn, while Francis was fleeing through
+the dark, a beaten fugitive pursued by the swift squadrons of
+French cavalry.
+
+The feeling of Francis of Austria was not merely that of the
+vanquished toward the victor. It was a deep hatred almost
+religious in its fervor. He was the head and front of the old-time
+feudalism of birth and blood; Napoleon was the incarnation of the
+modern spirit which demolished thrones and set an iron heel upon
+crowned heads, giving the sacred titles of king and prince to
+soldiers who, even in palaces, still showed the swaggering
+brutality of the camp and the stable whence they sprang. Yet, just
+because an alliance with the Austrian house seemed in so many ways
+impossible, the thought of it inflamed the ardor of Napoleon all
+the more.
+
+"Impossible?" he had once said, contemptuously. "The word
+'impossible' is not French."
+
+The Austrian alliance, unnatural though it seemed, was certainly
+quite possible. In the year 1809 Napoleon had finished his fifth
+war with Austria by the terrific battle of Wagram, which brought
+the empire of the Hapsburgs to the very dust. The conqueror's rude
+hand had stripped from Francis province after province. He had
+even let fall hints that the Hapsburgs might be dethroned and that
+Austria might disappear from the map of Europe, to be divided
+between himself and the Russian Czar, who was still his ally. It
+was at this psychological moment that the Czar wounded Napoleon's
+pride by refusing to give the hand of his sister Anne.
+
+The subtle diplomats of Vienna immediately saw their chance.
+Prince Metternich, with the caution of one who enters the cage of
+a man-eating-tiger, suggested that the Austrian archduchess would
+be a fitting bride for the French conqueror. The notion soothed
+the wounded vanity of Napoleon. From that moment events moved
+swiftly; and before long it was understood that there was to be a
+new empress in France, and that she was to be none other than the
+daughter of the man who had been Napoleon's most persistent foe
+upon the Continent. The girl was to be given--sacrificed, if you
+like--to appease an imperial adventurer. After such a marriage,
+Austria would be safe from spoliation. The reigning dynasty would
+remain firmly seated upon its historic throne.
+
+But how about the girl herself? She had always heard Napoleon
+spoken of as a sort of ogre--a man of low ancestry, a brutal and
+faithless enemy of her people. She knew that this bold, rough-
+spoken soldier less than a year before had added insult to the
+injury which he had inflicted on her father. In public
+proclamations he had called the Emperor Francis a coward and a
+liar. Up to the latter part of the year Napoleon was to her
+imagination a blood-stained, sordid, and yet all-powerful monster,
+outside the pale of human liking and respect. What must have been
+her thoughts when her father first told her with averted face that
+she was to become the bride of such a being?
+
+Marie Louise had been brought up, as all German girls of rank were
+then brought up, in quiet simplicity and utter innocence. In
+person she was a tall blonde, with a wealth of light brown hair
+tumbling about a face which might be called attractive because it
+was so youthful and so gentle, but in which only poets and
+courtiers could see beauty. Her complexion was rosy, with that
+peculiar tinge which means that in the course of time it will
+become red and mottled. Her blue eyes were clear and childish. Her
+figure was good, though already too full for a girl who was
+younger than her years.
+
+She had a large and generous mouth with full lips, the lower one
+being the true "Hapsburg lip," slightly pendulous--a feature which
+has remained for generation after generation as a sure sign of
+Hapsburg blood. One sees it in the present emperor of Austria, in
+the late Queen Regent of Spain, and in the present King of Spain,
+Alfonso. All the artists who made miniatures or paintings of Marie
+Louise softened down this racial mark so that no likeness of her
+shows it as it really was. But take her all in all, she was a
+simple, childlike, German madchen who knew nothing of the outside
+world except what she had heard from her discreet and watchful
+governess, and what had been told her of Napoleon by her uncles,
+the archdukes whom he had beaten down in battle.
+
+When she learned that she was to be given to the French emperor
+her girlish soul experienced a shudder; but her father told her
+how vital was this union to her country and to him. With a sort of
+piteous dread she questioned the archdukes who had called Napoleon
+an ogre.
+
+"Oh, that was when Napoleon was an enemy," they replied. "Now he
+is our friend."
+
+Marie Louise listened to all this, and, like the obedient German
+girl she was, yielded her own will.
+
+Events moved with a rush, for Napoleon was not the man to dally.
+Josephine had retired to her residence at Malmaison, and Paris was
+already astir with preparations for the new empress who was to
+assure the continuation of the Napoleonic glory by giving children
+to her husband. Napoleon had said to his ambassador with his usual
+bluntness:
+
+"This is the first and most important thing--she must have
+children."
+
+To the girl whom he was to marry he sent the following letter--an
+odd letter, combining the formality of a negotiator with the
+veiled ardor of a lover:
+
+MY COUSIN: The brilliant qualities which adorn your person have
+inspired in me a desire to serve you and to pay you homage. In
+making my request to the emperor, your father, and praying him to
+intrust to me the happiness of your imperial highness, may I hope
+that you will understand the sentiments which lead me to this act?
+May I flatter myself that it will not be decided solely by the
+duty of parental obedience? However slightly the feelings of your
+imperial highness may incline to me, I wish to cultivate them with
+so great care, and to endeavor so constantly to please you in
+everything, that I flatter myself that some day I shall prove
+attractive to you. This is the end at which I desire to arrive,
+and for which I pray your highness to be favorable to me.
+
+Immediately everything was done to dazzle the imagination of the
+girl. She had dressed always in the simplicity of the school-room.
+Her only ornaments had been a few colored stones which she
+sometimes wore as a necklace or a bracelet. Now the resources of
+all France were drawn upon. Precious laces foamed about her.
+Cascades of diamonds flashed before her eyes. The costliest and
+most exquisite creations of the Parisian shops were spread around
+her to make up a trousseau fit for the princess who was soon to
+become the bride of the man who had mastered continental Europe.
+
+The archives of Vienna were ransacked for musty documents which
+would show exactly what had been done for other Austrian
+princesses who had married rulers of France. Everything was
+duplicated down to the last detail. Ladies-in-waiting thronged
+about the young archduchess; and presently there came to her Queen
+Caroline of Naples, Napoleon's sister, of whom Napoleon himself
+once said: "She is the only man among my sisters, as Joseph is the
+only woman among my brothers." Caroline, by virtue of her rank as
+queen, could have free access to her husband's future bride. Also,
+there came presently Napoleon's famous marshal, Berthier, Prince
+of Neuchatel, the chief of the Old Guard, who had just been
+created Prince of Wagram--a title which, very naturally, he did
+not use in Austria. He was to act as proxy for Napoleon in the
+preliminary marriage service at Vienna.
+
+All was excitement. Vienna had never been so gay. Money was
+lavished under the direction of Caroline and Berthier. There were
+illuminations and balls. The young girl found herself the center
+of the world's interest; and the excitement made her dizzy. She
+could not but be flattered, and yet there were many hours when her
+heart misgave her. More than once she was found in tears. Her
+father, an affectionate though narrow soul, spent an entire day
+with her consoling and reassuring her. One thought she always kept
+in mind--what she had said to Metternich at the very first: "I
+want only what my duty bids me want." At last came the official
+marriage, by proxy, in the presence of a splendid gathering. The
+various documents were signed, the dowry was arranged for. Gifts
+were scattered right and left. At the opera there were gala
+performances. Then Marie Louise bade her father a sad farewell.
+Almost suffocated by sobs and with her eyes streaming with tears,
+she was led between two hedges of bayonets to her carriage, while
+cannon thundered and all the church-bells of Vienna rang a joyful
+peal.
+
+She set out for France accompanied by a long train of carriages
+filled with noblemen and noblewomen, with ladies-in-waiting and
+scores of attendant menials. The young bride--the wife of a man
+whom she had never seen--was almost dead with excitement and
+fatigue. At a station in the outskirts of Vienna she scribbled a
+few lines to her father, which are a commentary upon her state of
+mind:
+
+I think of you always, and I always shall. God has given me power
+to endure this final shock, and in Him alone I have put all my
+trust. He will help me and give me courage, and I shall find
+support in doing my duty toward you, since it is all for you that
+I have sacrificed myself.
+
+There is something piteous in this little note of a frightened
+girl going to encounter she knew not what, and clinging almost
+frantically to the one thought--that whatever might befall her,
+she was doing as her father wished.
+
+One need not recount the long and tedious journey of many days
+over wretched roads, in carriages that jolted and lurched and
+swayed. She was surrounded by unfamiliar faces and was compelled
+to meet at every town the chief men of the place, all of whom paid
+her honor, but stared at her with irrepressible curiosity. Day
+after day she went on and on. Each morning a courier on a foaming
+horse presented her with a great cluster of fresh flowers and a
+few lines scrawled by the unknown husband who was to meet her at
+her journey's end.
+
+There lay the point upon which her wandering thoughts were
+focused--the journey's end! The man whose strange, mysterious
+power had forced her from her school-room, had driven her through
+a nightmare of strange happenings, and who was waiting for her
+somewhere to take her to himself, to master her as he had mastered
+generals and armies!
+
+What was marriage? What did it mean? What experience still lay
+before her! These were the questions which she must have asked
+herself throughout that long, exhausting journey. When she thought
+of the past she was homesick. When she thought of the immediate
+future she was fearful with a shuddering fear.
+
+At last she reached the frontier of France, and her carriage
+passed into a sort of triple structure, the first pavilion of
+which was Austrian, while the middle pavilion was neutral, and the
+farther one was French. Here she was received by those who were
+afterward to surround her--the representatives of the Napoleonic
+court. They were not all plebeians and children of the Revolution,
+ex-stable boys, ex-laundresses. By this time Napoleon had gathered
+around himself some of the noblest families of France, who had
+rallied to the empire. The assemblage was a brilliant one. There
+were Montmorencys and Beaumonts and Audenardes in abundance. But
+to Marie Louise, as to her Austrian attendants, they were all
+alike. They were French, they were strangers, and she shrank from
+them.
+
+Yet here her Austrians must leave her. All who had accompanied her
+thus far were now turned back. Napoleon had been insistent on this
+point. Even her governess, who had been with her since her
+childhood, was not allowed to cross the French frontier. So fixed
+was Napoleon's purpose to have nothing Austrian about her, that
+even her pet dog, to which she clung as a girl would cling, was
+taken from her. Thereafter she was surrounded only by French
+faces, by French guards, and was greeted only by salvos of French
+artillery.
+
+In the mean time what was Napoleon doing at Paris. Since the
+annulment of his marriage with Josephine he had gone into a sort
+of retirement. Matters of state, war, internal reforms, no longer
+interested him; but that restless brain could not sink into
+repose. Inflamed with the ardor of a new passion, that passion was
+all the greater because he had never yet set eyes upon its object.
+Marriage with an imperial princess flattered his ambition. The
+youth and innocence of the bride stirred his whole being with a
+thrill of novelty. The painted charms of Josephine, the mercenary
+favors of actresses, the calculated ecstasies of the women of the
+court who gave themselves to him from vanity, had long since
+palled upon him. Therefore the impatience with which he awaited
+the coming of Marie Louise became every day more tense.
+
+For a time he amused himself with planning down to the very last
+details the demonstrations that were to be given in her honor. He
+organized them as minutely as he had ever organized a conquering
+army. He showed himself as wonderful in these petty things as he
+had in those great strategic combinations which had baffled the
+ablest generals of Europe. But after all had been arranged--even
+to the illuminations, the cheering, the salutes, and the etiquette
+of the court--he fell into a fever of impatience which gave him
+sleepless nights and frantic days. He paced up and down the
+Tuileries, almost beside himself. He hurried off courier after
+courier with orders that the postilions should lash their horses
+to bring the hour of meeting nearer still. He scribbled love
+letters. He gazed continually on the diamond-studded portrait of
+the woman who was hurrying toward him.
+
+At last as the time approached he entered a swift traveling-
+carriage and hastened to Compiegne, about fifty miles from Paris,
+where it had been arranged that he should meet his consort and
+whence he was to escort her to the capital, so that they might be
+married in the great gallery of the Louvre. At Compiegne the
+chancellerie had been set apart for Napoleon's convenience, while
+the chateau had been assigned to Marie Louise and her attendants.
+When Napoleon's carriage dashed into the place, drawn by horses
+that had traveled at a gallop, the emperor could not restrain
+himself. It was raining torrents and night was coming on, yet,
+none the less, he shouted for fresh horses and pushed on to
+Soissons, where the new empress was to stop and dine. When he
+reached there and she had not arrived, new relays of horses were
+demanded, and he hurried off once more into the dark.
+
+At the little village of Courcelles he met the courier who was
+riding in advance of the empress's cortege.
+
+"She will be here in a few moments!" cried Napoleon; and he leaped
+from his carriage into the highway.
+
+The rain descended harder than ever, and he took refuge in the
+arched doorway of the village church, his boots already bemired,
+his great coat reeking with the downpour. As he crouched before
+the church he heard the sound of carriages; and before long there
+came toiling through the mud the one in which was seated the girl
+for whom he had so long been waiting. It was stopped at an order
+given by an officer. Within it, half-fainting with fatigue and
+fear, Marie Louise sat in the dark, alone.
+
+Here, if ever, was the chance for Napoleon to win his bride. Could
+he have restrained himself, could he have shown the delicate
+consideration which was demanded of him, could he have remembered
+at least that he was an emperor and that the girl--timid and
+shuddering--was a princess, her future story might have been far
+different. But long ago he had ceased to think of anything except
+his own desires.
+
+He approached the carriage. An obsequious chamberlain drew aside
+the leathern covering and opened the door, exclaiming as he did
+so, "The emperor!" And then there leaped in the rain-soaked, mud-
+bespattered being whose excesses had always been as unbridled as
+his genius. The door was closed, the leathern curtain again drawn,
+and the horses set out at a gallop for Soissons. Within, the
+shrinking bride was at the mercy of pure animal passion, feeling
+upon her hot face a torrent of rough kisses, and yielding herself
+in terror to the caresses of wanton hands.
+
+At Soissons Napoleon allowed no halt, but the carriage plunged on,
+still in the rain, to Compiegne. There all the arrangements made
+with so much care were thrust aside. Though the actual marriage
+had not yet taken place, Napoleon claimed all the rights which
+afterward were given in the ceremonial at Paris. He took the girl
+to the chancellerie, and not to the chateau. In an anteroom dinner
+was served with haste to the imperial pair and Queen Caroline.
+Then the latter was dismissed with little ceremony, the lights
+were extinguished, and this daughter of a line of emperors was
+left to the tender mercies of one who always had about him
+something of the common soldier--the man who lives for loot and
+lust. ... At eleven the next morning she was unable to rise and
+was served in bed by the ladies of her household.
+
+These facts, repellent as they are, must be remembered when we
+call to mind what happened in the next five years. The horror of
+that night could not be obliterated by splendid ceremonies, by
+studious attention, or by all the pomp and gaiety of the court.
+Napoleon was then forty-one--practically the same age as his new
+wife's father, the Austrian emperor; Marie Louise was barely
+nineteen and younger than her years. Her master must have seemed
+to be the brutal ogre whom her uncles had described.
+
+Installed in the Tuileries, she taught herself compliance. On
+their marriage night Napoleon had asked her briefly: "What did
+your parents tell you?" And she had answered, meekly: "To be yours
+altogether and to obey you in everything." But, though she gave
+compliance, and though her freshness seemed enchanting to
+Napoleon, there was something concealed within her thoughts to
+which he could not penetrate. He gaily said to a member of the
+court:
+
+"Marry a German, my dear fellow. They are the best women in the
+world--gentle, good, artless, and as fresh as roses."
+
+Yet, at the same time, Napoleon felt a deep anxiety lest in her
+very heart of hearts this German girl might either fear or hate
+him secretly. Somewhat later Prince Metternich came from the
+Austrian court to Paris.
+
+"I give you leave," said Napoleon, "to have a private interview
+with the empress. Let her tell you what she likes, and I shall ask
+no questions. Even should I do so, I now forbid your answering
+me."
+
+Metternich was closeted with the empress for a long while. When he
+returned to the ante-room he found Napoleon fidgeting about, his
+eyes a pair of interrogation-points.
+
+"I am sure," he said, "that the empress told you that I was kind
+to her?"
+
+Metternich bowed and made no answer.
+
+"Well," said Napoleon, somewhat impatiently, "at least I am sure
+that she is happy. Tell me, did she not say so?"
+
+The Austrian diplomat remained unsmiling.
+
+"Your majesty himself has forbidden me to answer," he returned
+with another bow.
+
+We may fairly draw the inference that Marie Louise, though she
+adapted herself to her surroundings, was never really happy.
+Napoleon became infatuated with her. He surrounded her with every
+possible mark of honor. He abandoned public business to walk or
+drive with her. But the memory of his own brutality must have
+vaguely haunted him throughout it all. He was jealous of her as he
+had never been jealous of the fickle Josephine. Constant has
+recorded that the greatest precautions were taken to prevent any
+person whatsoever, and especially any man, from approaching the
+empress save in the presence of witnesses.
+
+Napoleon himself underwent a complete change of habits and
+demeanor. Where he had been rough and coarse he became attentive
+and refined. His shabby uniforms were all discarded, and he spent
+hours in trying on new costumes. He even attempted to learn to
+waltz, but this he gave up in despair. Whereas before he ate
+hastily and at irregular intervals, he now sat at dinner with
+unusual patience, and the court took on a character which it had
+never had. Never before had he sacrificed either his public duty
+or his private pleasure for any woman. Even in the first ardor of
+his marriage with Josephine, when he used to pour out his heart to
+her in letters from Italian battle-fields, he did so only after he
+had made the disposition of his troops and had planned his
+movements for the following day. Now, however, he was not merely
+devoted, but uxorious; and in 1811, after the birth of the little
+King of Rome, he ceased to be the earlier Napoleon altogether. He
+had founded a dynasty. He was the head of a reigning house. He
+forgot the principles of the Revolution, and he ruled, as he
+thought, like other monarchs, by the grace of God.
+
+As for Marie Louise, she played her part extremely well. Somewhat
+haughty and unapproachable to others, she nevertheless studied
+Napoleon's every wish. She seemed even to be loving; but one can
+scarcely doubt that her obedience sprang ultimately from fear and
+that her devotion was the devotion of a dog which has been beaten
+into subjection.
+
+Her vanity was flattered in many ways, and most of all by her
+appointment as regent of the empire during Napoleon's absence in
+the disastrous Russian campaign which began in 1812. It was in
+June of that year that the French emperor held court at Dresden,
+where he played, as was said, to "a parterre of kings." This was
+the climax of his magnificence, for there were gathered all the
+sovereigns and princes who were his allies and who furnished the
+levies that swelled his Grand Army to six hundred thousand men.
+Here Marie Louise, like her husband, felt to the full the
+intoxication of supreme power. By a sinister coincidence it was
+here that she first met the other man, then unnoticed and little
+heeded, who was to cast upon her a fascination which in the end
+proved irresistible.
+
+This man was Adam Albrecht, Count von Neipperg. There is something
+mysterious about his early years, and something baleful about his
+silent warfare with Napoleon. As a very young soldier he had been
+an Austrian officer in 1793. His command served in Belgium; and
+there, in a skirmish, he was overpowered by the French in superior
+numbers, but resisted desperately. In the melee a saber slashed
+him across the right side of his face, and he was made prisoner.
+The wound deprived him of his right eye, so that for the rest of
+his life he was compelled to wear a black bandage to conceal the
+mutilation.
+
+From that moment he conceived an undying hatred of the French,
+serving against them in the Tyrol and in Italy. He always claimed
+that had the Archduke Charles followed his advice, the Austrians
+would have forced Napoleon's army to capitulate at Marengo, thus
+bringing early eclipse to the rising star of Bonaparte. However
+this may be, Napoleon's success enraged Neipperg and made his
+hatred almost the hatred of a fiend.
+
+Hitherto he had detested the French as a nation. Afterward he
+concentrated his malignity upon the person of Napoleon. In every
+way he tried to cross the path of that great soldier, and, though
+Neipperg was comparatively an unknown man, his indomitable purpose
+and his continued intrigues at last attracted the notice of the
+emperor; for in 1808 Napoleon wrote this significant sentence:
+
+The Count von Neipperg is openly known to have been the enemy of
+the French.
+
+Little did the great conqueror dream how deadly was the blow which
+this Austrian count was destined finally to deal him!
+
+Neipperg, though his title was not a high one, belonged to the old
+nobility of Austria. He had proved his bravery in war and as a
+duelist, and he was a diplomat as well as a soldier. Despite his
+mutilation, he was a handsome and accomplished courtier, a man of
+wide experience, and one who bore himself in a manner which
+suggested the spirit of romance. According to Masson, he was an
+Austrian Don Juan, and had won the hearts of many women. At thirty
+he had formed a connection with an Italian woman named Teresa
+Pola, whom he had carried away from her husband. She had borne him
+five children; and in 1813 he had married her in order that these
+children might be made legitimate.
+
+In his own sphere the activity of Neipperg was almost as
+remarkable as Napoleon's in a greater one. Apart from his exploits
+on the field of battle he had been attached to the Austrian
+embassy in Paris, and, strangely enough, had been decorated by
+Napoleon himself with, the golden eagle of the Legion of Honor.
+Four months later we find him minister of Austria at the court of
+Sweden, where he helped to lay the train of intrigue which was to
+detach Bernadotte from Napoleon's cause. In 1812, as has just been
+said, he was with Marie Louise for a short time at Dresden,
+hovering about her, already forming schemes. Two years after this
+he overthrew Murat at Naples; and then hurried on post-haste to
+urge Prince Eugene to abandon Bonaparte.
+
+When the great struggle of 1814 neared its close, and Napoleon,
+fighting with his back to the wall, was about to succumb to the
+united armies of Europe, it was evident that the Austrian emperor
+would soon be able to separate his daughter from her husband. In
+fact, when Napoleon was sent to Elba, Marie Louise returned to
+Vienna. The cynical Austrian diplomats resolved that she should
+never again meet her imperial husband. She was made Duchess of
+Parma in Italy, and set out for her new possessions; and the man
+with the black band across his sightless eye was chosen to be her
+escort and companion.
+
+When Neipperg received this commission he was with Teresa Pola at
+Milan. A strange smile flitted across his face; and presently he
+remarked, with cynical frankness:
+
+"Before six months I shall be her lover, and, later on, her
+husband."
+
+He took up his post as chief escort of Marie Louise, and they
+journeyed slowly to Munich and Baden and Geneva, loitering on the
+way. Amid the great events which were shaking Europe this couple
+attracted slight attention. Napoleon, in Elba, longed for his wife
+and for his little son, the King of Rome. He sent countless
+messages and many couriers; but every message was intercepted, and
+no courier reached his destination. Meanwhile Marie Louise was
+lingering agreeably in Switzerland. She was happy to have escaped
+from the whirlpool of politics and war. Amid the romantic scenery
+through which she passed Neipperg was always by her side,
+attentive, devoted, trying in everything to please her. With him
+she passed delightful evenings. He sang to her in his rich
+barytone songs of love. He seemed romantic with a touch of
+mystery, a gallant soldier whose soul was also touched by
+sentiment.
+
+One would have said that Marie Louise, the daughter of an imperial
+line, would have been proof against the fascinations of a person
+so far inferior to herself in rank, and who, beside the great
+emperor, was less than nothing. Even granting that she had never
+really loved Napoleon, she might still have preferred to maintain
+her dignity, to share his fate, and to go down in history as the
+empress of the greatest man whom modern times have known.
+
+But Marie Louise was, after all, a woman, and she followed the
+guidance of her heart. To her Napoleon was still the man who had
+met her amid the rain-storm at Courcelles, and had from the first
+moment when he touched her violated all the instincts of a virgin.
+Later he had in his way tried to make amends; but the horror of
+that first night had never wholly left her memory. Napoleon had
+unrolled before her the drama of sensuality, but her heart had not
+been given to him. She had been his empress. In a sense it might
+be more true to say that she had been his mistress. But she had
+never been duly wooed and won and made his wife--an experience
+which is the right of every woman. And so this Neipperg, with his
+deferential manners, his soothing voice, his magnetic touch, his
+ardor, and his devotion, appeased that craving which the master of
+a hundred legions could not satisfy.
+
+In less than the six months of which Neipperg had spoken the
+psychological moment had arrived. In the dim twilight she listened
+to his words of love; and then, drawn by that irresistible power
+which masters pride and woman's will, she sank into her lover's
+arms, yielding to his caresses, and knowing that she would be
+parted from him no more except by death.
+
+From that moment he was bound to her by the closest ties and lived
+with her at the petty court of Parma. His prediction came true to
+the very letter. Teresa Pola died, and then Napoleon died, and
+after this Marie Louise and Neipperg were united in a morganatic
+marriage. Three children were born to them before his death in
+1829.
+
+It is interesting to note how much of an impression was made upon
+her by the final exile of her imperial husband to St. Helena. When
+the news was brought her she observed, casually:
+
+"Thanks. By the way, I should like to ride this morning to
+Markenstein. Do you think the weather is good enough to risk it?"
+
+Napoleon, on his side, passed through agonies of doubt and longing
+when no letters came to him from Marie Louise. She was constantly
+in his thoughts during his exile at St. Helena. "When his faithful
+friend and constant companion at St. Helena, the Count Las Casas,
+was ordered by Sir Hudson Lowe to depart from St. Helena, Napoleon
+wrote to him:
+
+"Should you see, some day, my wife and son, embrace them. For two
+years I have, neither directly nor indirectly, heard from them.
+There has been on this island for six months a German botanist,
+who has seen them in the garden of Schoenbrunn a few months before
+his departure. The barbarians (meaning the English authorities at
+St. Helena) have carefully prevented him from coming to give me
+any news respecting them."
+
+At last the truth was told him, and he received it with that high
+magnanimity, or it may be fatalism, which at times he was capable
+of showing. Never in all his days of exile did he say one word
+against her. Possibly in searching his own soul he found excuses
+such as we may find. In his will he spoke of her with great
+affection, and shortly before his death he said to his physician,
+Antommarchi:
+
+"After my death, I desire that you will take my heart, put it in
+the spirits of wine, and that you carry it to Parma to my dear
+Marie Louise. You will please tell her that I tenderly loved her--
+that I never ceased to love her. You will relate to her all that
+you have seen, and every particular respecting my situation and
+death."
+
+The story of Marie Louise is pathetic, almost tragic. There is the
+taint of grossness about it; and yet, after all, there is a lesson
+in it--the lesson that true love cannot be forced or summoned at
+command, that it is destroyed before its birth by outrage, and
+that it goes out only when evoked by sympathy, by tenderness, and
+by devotion.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Famous Affinities of History V2, by Lyndon Orr
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+End of Project Gutenberg's Famous Affinities of History V2, by Lyndon Orr
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