The Caesar of Paris

by Susan Jaques

  Marie Louise had just returned home when rumors of Napoleon’s marriage proposal began circulating. “Napoleon is too afraid of being refused and too intent on hurting us further to make such a demand, and father is too good to insist on something of such importance,” she wrote naively. Around this time, Marie Louise told her father that she was in love with a relative, Archduke Franz of Modena-Este.

  Meanwhile, Russia’s Alexander I was stalling. His mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, strongly opposed the marriage of her daughter to Napoleon. “As a mother, I cannot wish nor desire this union,” she wrote Alexander on January 19. “However, as it should not be considered from a mother’s perspective, but as a matter of State of the highest importance, it should be discussed and judged as such. [. . .] All that the State can wish of me is the total abnegation of my maternal rights; in this (unique) case I must make this sacrifice to you and to [the State]: [the decision] on your sister’s fate belongs to no-one but you, my dear Alexander.”9

  By early February, Napoleon was expressing concerns about Anna Pavlovna’s age. “[It has been] observed that Princess Anne [is] not yet mature; occasionally it takes a couple of years for some girls to attain maturity having reached the marriageable age and the idea of waiting three years with no hope of conceiving a child goes against the intentions of the Emperor,” he wrote Champagny. There was also a religious complication. Sweden’s Gustav IV had jilted Alexander’s sister Marie after her grandmother Catherine the Great insisted that her granddaughter would not convert. Marriage to Marie’s young sister would require adding Russian Orthodox chapels to Napoleon’s many palaces.

  By the end of January, Napoleon began negotiating for Austria’s archduchess. Marie Louise seems to have come to terms with the political reality of her situation. “Since Napoleon’s divorce, I continue to open the Gazette de Francfort in the hope of finding an announcement of his new bride,” she confided to a friend. “I must admit that this delay has given me much cause for worry. [. . .] I am placing my fate in the hands of divine Providence. [. . .] If misfortune so wishes it, I am prepared to sacrifice my own happiness for the good of the State, convinced as I am that true happiness comes only from the accomplishment of one’s duties, even at the expense of one’s wishes.”10

  Francis couldn’t bring himself to tell his favorite child that she was about to be married off to his archenemy. Instead, he delegated the task to Metternich who broke the news to Marie Louise in mid-February. Marshal Berthier, who made the official request for Marie Louise’s hand in Vienna, wrote Napoleon that “without being a pretty woman,” Marie Louise had “everything needed to make Your Majesty happy.”

  On March 9, Metternich and Berthier signed the marriage contract, modeled after that of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Berthier accepted the five hundred thousand-franc dowry in rolls of gold ducats. Marie Louise formally renounced her claim to the Austrian crown, along with her two hundred thousand florin jewelry collection.11

  Three months after his divorce, Napoleon married Marie Louise by proxy. Archduke Charles, the bride’s uncle and staunch opponent of Napoleon, stood in for the groom. On March 11, the procession made its way through the Hofburg Palace past a double line of grenadiers to the Augustinian Church, the Habsburg’s traditional wedding venue. Since no one knew Napoleon’s ring size, the archbishop consecrated eleven rings of various sizes for the actual Paris ceremony.12

  A few days later, Marie Louise climbed into a carriage with her canary in a cage and her spaniel Zozo in her lap. As the teenager left Vienna, she tried not to think about her great aunt. Just fourteen when she set off from Vienna to marry the future Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette was despised by the French. Relatives were powerless to save the thirty-seven-year-old from the guillotine.

  Meanwhile Napoleon wrote his siblings, demanding they return to Paris for the wedding of the century. About the upcoming event, he remarked, “I am marrying a belly.”

  An Austrian entourage accompanied Marie Louise to the border with Bavaria near Braunau in St. Peter am Hart. A special pavilion was erected with a central hall flanked by matching rooms for the Austrian and French delegations. Wearing a gold brocade dress and a miniature of Napoleon framed by diamonds, Marie Louise took a seat on a canopied throne in the central hall.13

  Prince Trauttmansdorff, the Habsburg chief chamberlain, formally delivered Marie Louise to Berthier. After the marriage contract was signed and read aloud, the Austrian entourage kissed the archduchess’s hand one last time. “I assure you, dearest Papa, that I am truly unhappy and cannot console myself,” she wrote her father.14

  Marie Louise made a good first impression on her future sister-in-law Caroline Murat, who greeted her in the French pavilion. Though the archduchess wasn’t beautiful, Caroline found the tall young woman to have “charming blond hair, hands, and feet, a cultivated mind and dignified bearing; all in all she was very amiable and sweet.”15 But the choice of Caroline as official greeter was tactless on Napoleon’s part.

  Two years earlier, Napoleon named Caroline and her husband Joachim Murat queen and king of Naples, the throne belonging to Marie Louise’s grandparents. Driven from Naples, Maria Carolina and Ferdinand IV fled to Palermo, Sicily, in 1805. About Marie Louise’s engagement, the deposed queen and daughter of Maria Theresa wrote angrily: “The Emperor dares to give his daughter as an adulterous concubine to a man besmirched with all crimes and abominations!” She called herself the “Devil’s grandmother.”16

  Like her great aunt Marie-Antoinette, Marie Louise changed into French-style clothing the next morning. Before the three-dozen-coach fleet embarked for France, Caroline required her sister-in-law to give up her spaniel and canary.

  For his marriage to the Habsburg archduchess, Napoleon decided to recreate the nuptials of Maria Carolina’s ill-fated sister. In May 1770, Marie Antoinette was greeted at Château de Compiègne by Louis XV and her fiancé, the future Louis XVI. Four decades later, Napoleon met Marie Antoinette’s grandniece in the same place.

  Located some seventy miles northeast of Paris on the road to Flanders, surrounded by forest and the Oise and Aisne rivers, Compiègne had long charmed France’s kings. Louis XIV reportedly said, “At Versailles I am the King; at Fontainebleau a Prince, at Compiègne a country man.” Begun by Charles V in the fourteenth century, the château was altered by successive royals. In the mid-eighteenth century, Louis XV demolished the medieval-style residence and replaced it with a fashionable neoclassical limestone palace. Louis XVI continued to expand and decorate. Compiègne was finished just in time to be looted during the French Revolution.

  In 1807, Joséphine’s favorite architect Louis-Martin Berthault began a major makeover of the château. Berthault turned the apartments of Louis XVI’s family into spectacular apartments for Napoleon and Joséphine. Cabinetmakers Jacob-Desmalter and Pierre-Benoit Marcion supplied elegant Empire-style furniture, and Sèvres produced special porcelain. Berthault asked Vivant Denon for paintings and sculpture from the Musée Napoléon to decorate the apartments with a focus on themes of love and fertility. Canova’s sensual Cupid and Psyche was installed by the entrance to the imperial apartments. Large portraits of the Empire’s great figures by Prud’hon, Fabre, and Lefèvre lined the new Gallery of Minsters; paintings by Le Dominiquin, Patel, and Flinck hung in the empress’s Galerie des Tableaux.

  Napoleon took up residence in Louis XVI’s former gunpowder room and converted the garden-view bedchamber into a large reception room. His bedroom’s red and gold wall coverings, curtains, bed covers, and chairs were adorned with symbols of the Empire—oak leaves, stars, and bees. Napoleon personally chose a landscape by Jean-Joseph Bidault to hang between the windows. Dubois, Redouté, and Girodet produced the painted décor; the gilt wood furniture and cabinetry was by Jacob-Desmalter, who also produced a mechanical desk for the adjoining library, accessible only to Napoleon’s most senior court officials.

  Past the library were the empress’s apartments. Built in 1755, the north wing of
the terrace had been home to the Dauphin Louis and Dauphine Maria Josepha of Saxony, along with Marie Antoinette before she relocated to the newer south wing of the terrace. Jacob-Desmalter’s ethereal gilded bed featured symbols of fertility, cornucopias, along with two standing winged figures. “Compiègne speaks of Napoleon as Versailles does of Louis XIV,” observed the nineteenth-century French writer Auguste Luchet.17

  Joséphine never saw her finished apartments by Berthault. Ironically, her replacement Marie Louise got to enjoy the sumptuous remodel. On the eve of Marie Louise’s arrival at the château, Napoleon said goodbye to his mistress, Christine de Mathis, the Piedmontese lady-in-waiting of his sister Pauline. On March 27, Napoleon rode to meet Marie Louise and her retinue with his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, king of Naples.

  Climbing into her carriage, Napoleon kissed his bride on both cheeks, saying “Madam, I feel great pleasure to see you.”

  “Sire, you are much better than on your portraits,” she replied.

  Canceling the welcome ceremony, Napoleon went straight to Compiègne. Taking his arm, Marie Louise climbed the palace’s grand staircase. To her delight, Zozo and her pet parrot were waiting in her apartments, along with a tapestry she left behind at the Hofburg palace. That evening, Caroline Murat joined the couple for dinner in the empress’s antiquity-inspired dining room. Above them, the ceiling painting featured two winged lovers holding a bunch of grapes and sharing a cup. Rather than wait for the civil or religious ceremonies, Napoleon spent the night with Marie Louise.

  On Sunday, April 1, arch-chancellor Cambacérès presided over the couple’s civil wedding at the Château de Saint-Cloud. The turnout was so large that guests spilled over from the Apollo Gallery into the Salon du Mars. Marie Louise entered the gallery alongside Napoleon in full court dress and a diamond crown. At the end of the gallery, the couple sat at a dais below a canopy.

  After the exchange of vows, Cambacérès declared: “In the name of the Emperor and the Law, I declare that his Imperial and Royal Majesty Napoleon, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, and her Imperial and Royal Highness the Archduchess Marie Louise are united in marriage.” Salvos of artillery at Saint-Cloud and the Invalides in Paris announced the marriage.

  The next morning, Parisians began gathering along the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne to the Tuileries Palace. Their main objective was to catch a glimpse of the new teenage empress. The newlyweds meanwhile were en route to the capital in a gilded coronation coach drawn by eight horses. The retinue was led by the cavalry of the Imperial Guard, followed by other horsemen, heralds of arms, and numerous carriages. The impressive procession numbered fifty carriages and 240 horsemen.

  Entering Paris from the west, the newlyweds paused for speeches at the Arc de Triomphe. With the arch still under construction, they passed through a full-size model in wood and painted cloth. Napoleon declared the arch to be the capital’s official gateway. From there, the procession proceeded past cheering crowds along the Champs-Élysées to the Tuileries Palace.

  The gate at the Tuileries Garden sported a special veneered decoration courtesy of Percier and Fontaine—a triumphal arch adorned with bas-reliefs in the middle of a colonnade. As an expression of the dynastic union, the top of the arch featured two kneeling female figures holding out their arms to a crown resting on a cushion, supporting a sculpted altar with the arms of the French and Austrian Empires.

  A few weeks before the wedding, Napoleon informed Denon that he had decided to transform the Louvre’s Salon Carré into a chapel. To make room for two levels of seating, all of the paintings had to be moved out, including Veronese’s monumental Wedding at Cana. To get to the Salon Carré, the large wedding party would have to pass through the Grand Gallery, representing a risk to the masterpieces lining the walls. Denon expressed his concern for the precious canvases.

  “Well, there is nothing to do but burn them!” Napoleon replied.

  Denon rolled up and stored the canvases. Percier and Fontaine covered the empty walls of the Salon with Gobelins tapestries and gold embroidered textiles.

  The wedding cortege made its way from the Tuileries to the Grand Gallery, with the imperial couple following behind the great dignitaries of the Empire. After five years and numerous delays, Percier and Fontaine’s renovations to the gallery were finally finished.

  Skylights bathed the long corridor with natural light. Large arches supported on double columns divided the gallery into bays, providing wall space for hundreds of stolen masterpieces. The first bay displayed French paintings by Poussin, Le Sueur, and Vouet; Dutch, Flemish, and German pictures made up the next four bays, with Rubens’s Descent from the Cross from Antwerp enjoying a central location. The last four bays were dedicated to the Italian schools and starred Leonardo, Tintoretto, Veronese, Titian, and Raphael.18

  Marie Louise entered the gallery wearing a new gown designed by Joséphine’s favorite dressmaker, Leroy. The 12,000-franc, form-fitting dress in silver tulle netting, embroidered with pearls and lamé, featured a high waist and long, flowing skirt. A diadem held an Alençon lace veil in place over her blond hair. But no one had bothered to find out the bride’s shoe size and her white satin slippers with silver embroidery were painfully small.

  Over her gown, Marie Louise donned Joséphine’s eighty-pound crimson velvet and gold embroidered coronation mantle. Four of her sisters-in-law—Caroline Murat, Joseph’s wife Julie Clary, Hortense de Beauharnais, and Catharine of Württemberg—reluctantly carried the weighty ermine-lined train. In another awkward move, Napoleon named Hortense Mistress of the Robes for her mother’s successor.

  Napoleon’s wedding attire was equally elaborate. Trading his signature bicorn for a plumed hat, Napoleon wore a dress coat of embroidered purple velvet—similar to those designed by Isabey for his coronations in Paris and Milan. Embellished in point couché embroidery with sequins and gold and silver thread by Augustin François-Andre Picot, the coat’s decoration was highly symbolic. “For the heir to Augustus and Charlemagne,” writes Yves Carlier, “the ceremonial garment conveyed a powerful message through its ornaments: the stars of glory, the oak and olive trees of Jupiter, the laurels and radiant glory of Apollo, the grapes and wheat of abundance, the emblematic bee and the imperial flower.”19 A diamond-studded sword completed the ensemble.

  The choice of purple was also symbolic. Purple, antiquity’s most enduring status symbol, took hold in Rome, the ancient world’s “most status symbol-conscious culture,” writes Meyer Reinhold.20 During antiquity, the red-violet hue was reserved for authority figures. Senators and members of the equestrian order wore tunics with a vertical purple stripe; priests and magistrates donned togas with a purple border. During the early Roman Empire, empresses went to a “purple palace” chamber or Porphyra to give birth.21

  The highly prized purple dye was made from a secretion of mollusks from the Mediterranean; one gram required eight thousand mollusks.22 With Constantinople’s fall to the Turks in 1453, manufacture of sea purple ended, creating something of a wardrobe emergency for the Church. In 1464, Pope Paul II decreed that vivid scarlet dye derived from the New World cochineal insect would be used to produce clerical robes and hats.23 The female cochineal was dried and crushed to extract a red acid; additives produced a range of shades from light pink to a deep purple. Cochineal became second to silver as Spain’s most profitable export. The introduction of synthetic dyes in the nineteenth century led to the decline of cochineal.24

  Four hundred wedding guests had been waiting hours for the bride and groom. Finally at one o’clock in the afternoon, the imperial couple ascended the grand stairway and entered the white and gold Salon Carré. Surrounded by family members and dignitaries, Napoleon and Marie Louise stood facing the silver gilt altar crowned with a large cross with a tabernacle cabinet at its base and six chased vermeil candlesticks.

  Napoleon originally intended to give Henri Auguste’s cross and candlesticks to Pius VII, but redirected the gift to the Basilica of St. Denis when their re
lationship soured. The financially strapped Auguste was forced to hand over his completed pieces to goldsmith Martin-Guillaume Biennais who completed the commission.25 Auguste combined antique motifs like acanthus leaves, leaf-and-dart moldings, gadroons, tortoiseshell, quatrefoil, and lion’s paw feet with symbols of the Eucharist, including sheaves of wheat, vine branches, and reeds.

  Cardinal Fesch officiated the wedding, pronouncing the nuptial blessing, blessing of the rings, and the exchange of gold coins. Placing the ring on Marie Louise’s finger, Napoleon repeated: “I give you this ring in token of our marriage.” Jean-Roch Coignet, a member of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, described the ceremony:

  “The whole assembly remained standing, and the most solemn silence prevailed. The procession moved slowly. As soon as it had passed by General Dorsenne called us together, marched us into the chapel, and formed us into a circle. We saw the Emperor on the right, kneeling upon a cushion decorated with bees, and his wife kneeling beside him to receive the benediction. After having placed the crown on his own head and on that of his wife, he rose, and sat down with her on a settee. Then the celebration of mass was begun . . .”26

  Napoleon and Marie Louise proceeded back through the Grand Gallery to the Tuileries with their courtiers and the imperial family to the cheers of thousands of spectators. Napoleon insisted on the formal banquet of the ancien régime, known as the grand couvert. In the theater of the Tuileries, courtiers stood in the galleries watching Napoleon and his family eat at a horseshoe-shaped table. Guests were arranged according to rank on either side of the couple.