Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe

by Leslie Carroll

  Marie wrote to him that day. The following reply survives:

  Marie—I have received your letter of the fifteenth and I am deeply touched by your sentiments. They are worthy of your lovely soul and the goodness of your heart. When you have settled your affairs in Paris and decide to take the waters at Lucca or Pisa, it would give me the greatest pleasure to see you and your son again [on Elba]. My feelings for you both remain unchanged. Keep well; don’t worry. Think affectionately of me and never doubt me.

  Marie did travel to Italy that summer, and received a letter from Napoleon dated August 9 while she was in Florence.

  I will see you here with the same pleasure as always—either now or on your return from Naples. I will be very glad to see the little boy, of whom I hear many nice things, and look forward to giving him a good kiss. Adieu Marie.

  He signed it, “Your affectionate Napoleon.”

  Meanwhile, her former lover was also encouraging his wife, Empress Marie-Louise, to visit him on Elba and to bring their son with her.

  Traveling with her sister Antonia and brother Theodore as chaperones, Marie and Alexander embarked for Elba from the port of Livorno on August 31, planning to remain on the island for as long as Napoleon would have her. Whatever intentions of fidelity the ex-emperor might have had toward his wife may have melted away when he beheld Countess Walewska again, because others detected the chemistry between them. They were fairly certain that if the couple hadn’t already resumed their love affair, they were about to do so as soon as they had the opportunity. Alexander called Napoleon Papa l’Empereur and the pair of them romped and roughhoused on the lawns like a typical boy and his dad. Napoleon’s chef, Louis-Etienne Saint-Denis, observed, “The young boy looked a bit pale and his features were very like the Emperor’s; he was rather serious for his age.”

  That night Napoleon visited Marie’s room. The following day he received word that the whole island was talking about the arrival of a heavily veiled blond woman and an equally towheaded little boy. Napoleon’s local doctor, Fourreau de Beauregard, donned his Sunday best to pay a special call on the imperial family and found Napoleon sitting with a little blond child on his knee, who the doctor assumed was his son by Marie-Louise. Beauregard paid his compliments to the little boy and asked Napoleon to please convey his respects to the empress. Napoleon, who had given the impression to the islanders of Elba that he was a fine, upstanding family man, had to do some swift damage control before the rumors continued to fly and the gossip spread over the waters and reached the real Marie-Louise. Obviously, Countess Walewska and Alexander had to depart immediately. Brokenhearted, Marie packed her things. She offered Napoleon her jewelry in case he should need money, but he refused it. The weather provided a dramatic backdrop for a truly Napoleonic farewell; the lovers said adieu before Marie and Alexander boarded their boat as the wind whipped about them in a gathering storm.

  Marie-Louise would never arrive. Her father had forbidden her all further contact with her husband. By this time she had embarked on an extramarital affair of her own with the man her papa had sent to prevent her from reuniting with Napoleon, the one-eyed Adam Adalbert, Graf von Neipperg.

  Marie Walewska remained in Naples for the rest of 1814. In January 1815, she learned of Count Walewski’s death. By April she was back in Paris. She saw Napoleon on June 11, one week before the Battle of Waterloo, when he summoned her to the Elysée Palace to give her some financial advice. The next time she entered the palace, a few days after the fateful battle, it was to help with the pack-out. On June 22, Napoleon abdicated for the second time.

  At Malmaison on June 28, he and Marie said their final farewells. “[T]he atmosphere was very sad. I can still see the Emperor…. He took me in his arms and I remember a tear ran down his face,” Marie later recalled. She spent an hour with Napoleon, and when it was time for her to depart she collapsed into his arms and remained there for several moments.

  His refusal of Marie’s offer to join him in his second exile on St. Helena devastated her. The man who had been the center of her world for more than eight years was now exiting it forever.

  Marie continued to live quietly in Paris. Napoleon’s dashing cousin General d’Ornano wanted to marry her, but she needed time for her emotional wounds to heal before moving on. They were finally wed on September 7, 1816, in Brussels. On June 9, 1817, she bore d’Ornano a son, Rodolphe Auguste. The infant was strong and healthy, but Marie remained frail. Although she didn’t know it, she had already been suffering from advanced kidney problems for a few years.

  Her acute toxemia grew worse during the autumn of 1817. On December 11, at the age of thirty-one, she died with all three of her sons at her side. When Napoleon learned of her passing he was still wearing the ring she had given him bearing the inscription, “When you cease to love me, I will love you still.”

  Napoleon died in 1821. His will stipulated that Alexander Walewski join the French army. Alexander did both of his parents proud; he became the French ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and served as foreign minister under his half cousin Napoleon III.

  Marie’s romance with Napoleon was born out of her Polish patriotism. He had promised her that he would do much for her homeland, but despite his florid pledges made in the urgent heat of desire, Poland got very little out of the liaison. And Napoleon’s policies were not at all influenced by her.

  However, their royal romance may have changed the course of history. Marie’s pregnancy proved Napoleon capable of siring a son. It precipitated his divorce from Josephine and led to his marriage with Marie-Louise of Austria. Countess Walewska undoubtedly meant much to the emperor during their love affair, but politics always came first.

  “[T]he hero, in order to be interesting, must be neither completely guilty nor completely innocent.” This was Napoleon’s view of the protagonist in a classic drama, and he applied the formula to himself as well. Marie also qualifies. She knew she was violating Church doctrine by committing adultery, and yet she was then, and is still, viewed as a Polish patriot. Her face even graced a postage stamp in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

  Marie Walewska had worshiped Napoleon Bonaparte since girlhood and carried her genuine passion for him to her grave. Throughout her life, her destiny, it seems, was to be a sacrifice: as a teenage bride to save her family’s estate; as a young wife and mother to save Poland; and finally, as the test womb that proved her lover’s virility, sacrificed on the altar of his dynastic and political ambitions.

  LUDWIG I OF BAVARIA

  1786–1868

  RULED: 1825–1848

  Though a monarch of the progressive nineteenth century, Ludwig seemed to be a man of another place and time, looking backward for inspiration. Perhaps it’s because his godparents were Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, for whom he had been named. Born into a minor branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty, which ruled Bavaria for a thousand years, Ludwig was the oldest son of the count palatine Maximilian at the Zweibrücken court in Strasbourg and the princess Wilhelmine Auguste of Hesse-Darmstadt. He eventually became king of Munich upon the death of his father in 1825. Having traveled extensively throughout Greece and Rome, Ludwig was enamored of classicism, art, and antiquities, and it was his ambition to transform Munich into the Athens of Bavaria.

  Ludwig had soft features, wide-set blue eyes, and a proud mouth, but his face bore several marks as a result of his having survived smallpox at the age of eleven. He was also profoundly deaf and spoke with a stammer, which may have been related to his loss of hearing. Despite his aural deficiency he fought with distinction and courage, though not with passion, for Napoleon—whom he intensely disliked. Ludwig was delighted when the tide eventually turned against the emperor in 1814 and Napoleon lost Germany, even though Ludwig’s sister, Princess Augusta of Bavaria, had married the emperor’s stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais. Ludwig’s joy in Napoleon’s defeat was dampened only by the fact that because of their family connection to the emperor, his father had prohibited him f
rom actively taking up the sword for the enemy allied forces.

  The Roman Catholic Ludwig’s October 12, 1810, wedding to the Protestant princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen had marked the occasion of the first Oktoberfest. It was a political alliance, although Therese, a tall, fresh-faced, serious-minded brunette, was said at the time to be the prettiest catch in Europe. She bore Ludwig nine children, one of whom died in infancy. Determined to preserve the lifestyle he had enjoyed as a bachelor, Ludwig, then crown prince, maintained a separate bedroom, sleeping apart from Therese unless he made conjugal visits to her boudoir. He continued to take his daily constitutionals alone, frustrated that he could no longer enjoy a conversation with every pretty woman he chanced to meet during his strolls.

  A poet long before he was a king, Ludwig had the acquisitive collector’s eye for beauty, which encompassed everything from art and architecture to gorgeous women. His wife was a popular queen who endeavored to turn a blind eye to Ludwig’s numerous extramarital infidelities, although she displayed her displeasure in discreet ways, once leaving town during one of his affairs. Therese would, however, draw the line at his infatuation with Lola Montez.

  As a sovereign, Ludwig was an eccentric workaholic. He would often rise by five a.m., and his was always the first lamp to be lit in the palace as he tackled the pile of official documents awaiting his perusal, comfortably attired in the green banyan, or dressing gown, that he had worn for the past forty years. Ludwig went out among his subjects, which was unusual for a ruler of his day, shopping and strolling, visiting museums and enjoying concerts, dressed like a rumpled professor and always carrying an umbrella.

  Despite his sartorial oddities, he was an able administrator, rescuing Bavaria from the financial disarray in which his father had left it. Not only did he turn the kingdom around, but he transformed it into one of the most fiscally sound monarchies in Europe by micromanaging its cash flow—which often involved a good deal of penny-pinching.

  He was a good steward, using that money to make Munich a showpiece of culture, art, and design. Although Ludwig’s aesthetics were rooted in the classical antiquities of the past, his pragmatic eye was firmly on the future. He built Bavaria’s first railway, launched her first steamship, and constructed a canal that linked the beautiful blue Danube with the Main River, which allowed for access to both the North and the Black seas, extensively broadening Bavaria’s trade possibilities.

  But a pair of flashing blue eyes proved to be Ludwig’s undoing when his penchant for pretty women allowed other parts of his anatomy to cloud his judgment. His affair with the Spanish dancer Lola Montez, a self-made Irish-born adventuress who passed herself off as an exotic Iberian of noble birth and a victim of the Carlist civil war, brought down his monarchy, forcing his humiliating abdication in favor of his son, the crown prince Maximilian.

  At the age of eighty in 1866, Ludwig acted as an adviser for his grandson, who by then had assumed the throne as Ludwig II. The second Ludwig was the “Mad King” who built Neuschwanstein Castle and whose crush on the composer Richard Wagner earned the latter the nickname “Lolus,” a direct reference to Ludwig I’s royal favorite, Lola Montez.

  On February 29, 1868, Ludwig I died at the age of eighty-one after a leg infection became gangrenous. His will stipulated the wish to be buried beside Queen Therese, who had passed away thirteen and a half years earlier.

  LUDWIG I OF BAVARIA AND

  LOLA MONTEZ (1821–1861)

  The maxim “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets” did not originate with the Broadway musical Damn Yankees. It was the angry protest of a group of nineteenth-century Munich university students against the malignant influence of a seductive foreigner upon their sovereign.

  Lola Montez—her greed, her immorality, and her anti-Jesuitical ideas—were, in their view, the ruination of the nation, and they wanted her gone.

  But King Ludwig I, who was old enough to be Lola’s grandfather, was smitten, so blinded by his infatuation that he refused to believe his “Lolitta,” with her sultry looks, fiery temper, and passion for politics, was perhaps the finest grifter of the age. “Lola Montez” was her greatest role—one that she lived so well and so fully that she began to believe her own lies.

  By the time the woman born as Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert met the sixty-year-old king of Bavaria in October 1846, she had already lived a wildly colorful life. She was born in 1821 in County Sligo, Ireland, to an infantryman and his sixteen-year-old wife, who were almost immediately posted to India. Gilbert died soon after their arrival, and his widow wed one of his fellow officers, an upright Scot named Craigie. As soon as she learned to walk, little Eliza ran about India nearly unsupervised, an ungovernable hoyden even then, soaking up the exotic sights, sounds, and scents.

  In 1826, she was packed off to Montrose, Scotland, to live with her stepfather’s family. Five years later she was sent south, first to Durham, to the home of Captain Craigie’s former commanding officer, Major General Sir Jasper Nicolls. The gruff major general had eight school-age daughters of his own, and from the other side of the world Eliza’s stepfather relied on his judgment to superintend her education, placing the girl in an appropriate school after she left the Nicolls household. In 1832, Nicolls enrolled Eliza in a boarding school in Bath.

  Her mother came to collect her in 1837, because she had arranged a good marriage for Eliza with Craigie’s current commanding officer in India, a man in his mid-sixties. Mrs. Craigie was accompanied by thirty-year-old Lieutenant Thomas James, whom she had met on the voyage from India; it seemed clear from their body language that the pair had enjoyed a shipboard romance.

  By then, Eliza was a stunning sixteen-year-old with raven hair and gentian blue eyes. Lieutenant James fell for his paramour’s daughter and the couple eloped to Ireland, wedding on July 23, 1837. They eventually went to India, but the marriage was a complete fiasco. The couple called it a day in 1840, but was never legally divorced. With the equivalent of ten thousand dollars from her stepfather, Lola sailed for England. While at sea she had an affair with the nephew of the Duke of Richmond. When Thomas James learned about it, he sued his wife for divorce. The decree was granted on December 15, 1842, but prohibited either of them from remarrying during the other’s lifetime.

  With limited options available to her socially, Eliza Gilbert James decided to reinvent herself as an actress. She enrolled at Fanny Kelly’s renowned drama school in London, but was told that her talents would be better employed in other artistic pursuits—perhaps as a dancer. She was far too old to begin ballet lessons, but Spanish dancing had become the rage of the age. Mrs. Kelly suggested that Eliza might have better luck learning the popular ethnic dances.

  She spent four months in Spain taking lessons in their language and dance. The woman who left the country was not Mrs. Eliza Gilbert James, but Doña Maria Dolores de Porris y Montez, complete with a biographical backstory that she told to people so often, she grew convinced of it herself, even though she adjusted the details (of birth dates, parents’ professions, marital status, and persecuted relatives) to fit her audience. Playing upon their sympathies, she would even win letters of introduction to highly influential people. In truth, she had pirated the moniker of a famous matador, Francisco “Paquito” Montez, whose own surname wasn’t even Montez.

  Lola embarked upon her European career, speaking with a thick accent that was assessed as a hybrid of Irish and Spanish. As she’d had only four months of lessons in her “native” tongue, it’s remarkable that she was able to fool so many people with her broken Spanglish and Sprench, depending on the country she was performing in.

  As a dancer, Lola received mixed reviews, mostly along the lines of: Looks 10, Dance 3. Her blue-black hair, huge blue eyes, and the “splendor of her breasts…made madmen everywhere,” according to her German biographer Edward Fuchs. But as a performer, she appeared to have more passion than talent, and she had a lot of competition, as this was the age of Carlotta Grisi, Marie Taglioni, and other exceptional balleri
nas. Although her act was unique, audiences still expected strong technique.

  But Lola was in dangerous territory in more ways than one. In London, the press “outed” her as Mrs. Thomas James, and she fought back, in character, stepping down to the footlights to defend herself in her thick-as-salsa accent. And every time Lola opened her mouth, she usually compounded her troubles. Her biggest detractor, the Englishman Albert Vandam, observed, “Her gait and carriage were those of a duchess for she was naturally graceful but the moment she opened her lips the illusion vanished—at least to me…her wit was that of a pot-house, which would not have been tolerated in the smoking room of a club in the small hours.”

  Audiences became increasingly hostile with each performance. After only a few shows in London, Lola’s contract was not renewed; it was time to move on. Her career and personal life were crowded with incident everywhere she went. She took lovers with impunity, but had a few ground rules: They had to be gorgeous and, if possible, royal. One of them was the emotionally tormented composer Franz Liszt. Unable to countenance any ridicule of her dancing or challenges to her Spanish identity, she traveled with a full complement of knives, whips, and pistols, and employed them if necessary. It was part and parcel of Lola’s volatile personality, but often got her into trouble. After only one or two performances Lola was kicked out of city after city as a result of violent incidents.

  A member of her Australian touring troupe many years later described her as “frivolous, naughty as a little child; can charm with a wink; woe to him who falls into her disfavor. She has a very excitable nature and for the slightest reason her whole body will tremble and her eyes flash lightning. For this reason one has to treat her very carefully because she is the most courageous and foolhardy woman who ever walked this earth.”