Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  Napoleon’s admonishment was ignored. In Turin, according to historian Flora Fraser, Pauline may have embarked on yet another extramarital affair—this time a fling with the violinist Niccolò Paganini.

  She returned to France when Napoleon began to seriously contemplate a divorce from Josephine, wholeheartedly in favor of her brother’s scheme. There she played the role of court hostess to the hilt, determined to excel in her duties. But this docility did not come without a price; the responsibility was exchanged for an annuity: six hundred thousand francs to be paid to her annually by Napoleon and regarded as “separate property” from her marital funds, meaning that Camillo could never touch it.

  Pauline was back in her element. According to the Austrian statesman Count Metternich, “She was in love with herself alone, and her sole occupation was pleasure,” an account that was not only confirmed but enhanced by the princess’s neighbor at Montgobert, Stanislas de Girardin. “Pauline Borghese was then in the full brilliance of her beauty. Men pressed about her to admire her, to pay court. And she enjoyed this homage as her due. In the glances she exchanged with some of them, indeed, there was a recognition of past favors granted or hints of romance to come. Few women have savored more the pleasure of being beautiful.”

  And few women have had a better knack for combining the dramatic and the exotic. Pauline would recline on a sofa while her black page boy brought her a basin of milk, which she would sip languidly, playing up her pale fragility as high society mingled about her. And when she decided to get up to waltz, “all the other dancers stop, so as not to hurt this delicate and gentle imperial highness. She is very pretty and says very amusing things,” an unnamed Austrian observer noted.

  Who knows what she was thinking as she sipped her milk. The Austrian diplomat Prince Clary noticed that Pauline “had a habit of falling into a reverie when contemplating an affair.”

  One of her conquests around this time was Conrad Friedrich, an impressionably young German-born lieutenant on a temporary mission to Paris to request reinforcements for Napoleon’s occupying army in Italy. He visited Pauline in Neuilly in the hopes that she might influence her brother to secure the necessary troops. On their first meeting, Pauline and Friedrich enjoyed an idyllic walk in her gardens, and while she insisted to Friedrich that she had no special power over the emperor, she invited him to return the following day—for an assignation.

  Her twenty-seven-year-old body thinly veiled and leaving little to the imagination, Pauline greeted the young lieutenant in a grand salon dominated by an enormous bathtub that Friedrich described in his memoirs as being “out of a novel, or even a fairy tale.” He could hardly miss “the opulent and perfectly molded curves of her body. . . . She gave me her hand to kiss, wished me welcome and had me sit next to her on a yielding daybed. I was certainly not the seducer, but the one seduced, for in the cavernous twilight Pauline employed all her charms to bring my blood to boiling point and my senses to a point of frenzy. Soon the nameless emissions which marked our mutual passions were imprinted on the velvet cushions. In which Pauline revealed herself still more experienced a lover than I, having greater staying power.” Later, “clothed in fine linen wrappers” they climbed into the bathtub. “We stayed nearly an hour in the azure waters, after which we ate in a neighboring room an exquisite meal, and there we stayed till dusk.”

  But their affair was a brief one, due to Friedrich’s discomfort with not being special. “I had to promise to come back soon, and I spent more than one afternoon like that. All the same, I never felt very proud of my conquest, for Pauline had granted the last favors to more than one before me, and was later to grant them to many more. Moreover, she was almost too routine in seeking her own pleasure, and before long, it was more aversion than anticipation that I felt in going there, despite her beauty.”

  Ouch.

  Friedrich was indeed one of numerous lovers Pauline took between 1808 and 1812. Many were foreign generals, and several of them were considerably older than she was.

  Napoleon divorced Josephine in January 1810 and married Marie-Louise of Austria three months later. When Camillo, who had become a popular governor in Turin, came to Paris for the wedding, Pauline refused to see him or to speak with him further, after reading him a letter written by Napoleon setting up their “separate property.” She declined to feed her husband’s entourage, suggesting that they all dine at a restaurant instead. Because she had cut off all personal contact with him, Camillo tried to reach her by letter, but she would not open any of his correspondence.

  When Pauline determined that she wasn’t receiving enough attention, especially from her powerful brother, she would behave wildly and flaunt her latest extramarital fling. After Napoleon’s only child, his son and heir Napoleon François Charles Joseph, was born on March 20, 1811, and the emperor began to lavish his affection on the infant (as well as on his nubile young wife), in retaliation Pauline took another paramour—one who would assuredly provoke her brother’s attention.

  “Le beau Montrond,” as he was nicknamed, was a suave and rakish diplomat, a confidant of Napoleon’s former foreign secretary Talleyrand. But the emperor had a dim view of Pauline’s latest conquest, allegedly asserting, “There will never be morals in France as long as Montrond lives there.” Even worse than Montrond’s scruples was his politics. He had managed to get himself exiled from Paris for criticizing Napoleon’s foreign policy strategy.

  In 1812 the thirty-one-year-old Pauline embarked on an affair with the celebrated actor François-Joseph Talma, who was eighteen years her senior. Talma spent innumerable nights giving the equivalent of command performances for his audience of one as Pauline demanded that he read scene after scene of Molière every evening with her as his costar.

  It no doubt delighted her to have an affinity with one of France’s greatest talents, and perhaps the affair with Talma was somehow connected to Pauline’s determination to be immortalized by the most celebrated artists of the day. Not only did Canova sculpt her as Venus Victrix, but he also did a cast of her hand. A commemorative medal was struck by Denon, featuring her noble profile on one side, and an image of the Three Graces on the reverse, with the inscription, Beauty be our queen. Jean François Bosio sculpted her bust; and her breast was used as the model for the one-of-a-kind golden goblet fashioned by the Paris goldsmith John-Baptiste Odiot.

  On the outside Pauline’s beauty may have appeared flawless, but her physical condition beneath the surface was entirely the opposite. In 1812, her chronic gynecological ailments were so painful that the doctors advised the application of leeches to her genitals, in addition to the usual purgatives, douches, and bleedings. At the time, leeches were commonly used to treat the effects of gonorrhea—and it’s no surprise that Pauline might have contracted the disease, given her own Grande Armée of lovers. Naturally, she ignored all advice to practice abstinence in order to fully recuperate.

  As Napoleon’s star began to plummet, Pauline grew anxious. Following the 1812 defeat of his army in Russia, she downsized, converting some of her wealth into more portable assets. Defeat in Spain soon followed, and Pauline sold some of her important pieces of jewelry, offering the cash to Napoleon to help defray his astronomical military expenses. Her health continued to deteriorate as her brother’s empire crumbled, bit by bit. Members of her entourage sought to keep her from hearing bad news.

  On April 11, 1814, according to the terms of the treaty of Fontainebleau, Napoleon was forced to abdicate and instead accept the kingdom of Elba, a tiny island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, ironically not far from his native Corsica. Pauline insisted on joining him there, averring, “I have not always loved the Emperor as I should, but as my brother he has a claim on my allegiance . . . I must offer him my condolences, and if he wishes it, follow him to Elba.”

  Pauline packed her trunks and, in the company of a small entourage, set out for Elba, with a detour in southern Italy to avail herself of a spa cure. With characteristic entitlement, even after Napoleon’s ignomin
ious fate, she ordered some of the latest fashions sent to her in care of the Neapolitan minister at Paris.

  Meanwhile, both Pauline and her estranged husband, Camillo, were in the pope’s bad graces. During the Napoleonic wars His Holiness had been a prisoner at Savona, which was located within Camillo’s governor-generalship. Because of Camillo’s immoral lifestyle (he had been having an affair with one of his cousins, the Duchessa Lante della Rovere), the pope refused to allow him to move back to Rome.

  Pauline was keen to deprive Camillo as well. When her Paris residence, the Hôtel Charost, was sold in 1814, she demanded that the finest paintings from the Borghese collection be removed from their frames and hidden so that the prince would not find them. Her intention was to use the treasures as bargaining chips, if necessary, presumably to protect her own interests, or Napoleon’s. The Hôtel Charost was bought by the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, who would in due time defeat her brother at Waterloo.

  On November 1, 1814, Pauline arrived in Elba and honored her promise to be Napoleon’s “good angel . . . the treasure of the palace.” She had recently celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday, although she still dressed like an ingenue of eighteen. On Elba she cultivated the image of the invalid, giving the stink eye to anyone who dared to remark upon her good health, even as she danced like a maniac at balls and soirees.

  Napoleon made his daring escape from the island on February 26, 1815, sailing for the south of France aboard the Inconstant. Before his departure, in case he might be in need of funds, Pauline allegedly gave her brother the famous Borghese diamond necklace. It was purportedly hidden in a secret compartment in Napoleon’s coach, which he abandoned on the battlefield at Waterloo. In any event, the diamond parure was never seen again.

  A few days after her brother left for France, on March 4, 1815, Pauline departed as well, seeking sanctuary in Italy at their sister Elisa’s residence at Compignano, near Lucca. Elisa, however, wasn’t there; after the fall of Napoleon she had been placed under house arrest in Brünn (now Brno, in the Czech Republic). Once Pauline reached Elisa’s villa, she was subject to the same form of internment, as Lucca was now under the control of an Austrian governor, Colonel Wercklein.

  On March 20, 1815, Napoleon was carried like a hero into the Tuileries; but times had changed and he was faced with presenting himself to the French as a constitutional monarch rather than as an autocrat. Just three months later, on June 18, his army was routed at Waterloo, ending his hundred days of power. He was exiled by the allies to the remote island of St. Helena.

  That October, Pauline went back to Rome, where the pope agreed to grant her refuge. Her movements, along with those of her other siblings, were carefully watched by Britain and Austria; but Pauline had never censored herself and was not about to begin to do so now.

  She continued to wrangle with Camillo over her rights to apartments in the Palazzo Borghese. He now resided there with his mistress and wished to divorce Pauline so he could wed his paramour. Pauline wanted nothing more to do with him, but she did wish to retain the Borghese title and trappings and was holding on for dear life to her status as a bona fide Roman princess. A compromise was eventually reached. The couple received a judicial separation and Pauline was permitted to keep her apartments in the palazzo, along with two fine carriages and a cash settlement. She had reset the Borghese jewels so many times during the course of her marriage that she defied Camillo to identify which pieces had originally been among his family’s treasures; consequently, she was able to keep the priceless jewelry.

  Pauline still retained much of her beauty, and took a young lover. But when she began to appear somewhat haggard, primarily from fretting over Napoleon’s health on St. Helena, she tried to prevent Camillo from exhibiting Canova’s Venus Victrix to anyone, lest they make an unfavorable comparison between her former physical perfection and her present frailness. She declared the sculpture indecent and obscene, and even offered (unsuccessfully) to purchase it from Camillo, or to employ Canova to create another, more decorous likeness of her.

  On May 5, 1821, the man who was perhaps her greatest love died in his bed. But Napoleon’s demise engendered no dramatic keening and hair chopping worthy of a Sophoclean heroine. Nevertheless, Pauline walked on emotional eggshells. “Anything that recalls my brother upsets me,” she maintained. She grew obsessed with her own mortality, drawing up several wills, and frequently changing her mind regarding the beneficiaries. As she had no heirs, there was rampant speculation about how she might dispose of her property. Napoleon had once said, “My sister is the queen of trinkets.” To whom would she leave them now?

  In 1824 Pauline finally reached a rapprochement with Camillo after a papal tribunal upheld the 1816 decree regarding the distribution of their marital property, which meant that she could no longer get anything more out of him financially. She had been ill for several months, possibly suffering from liver cancer. The new pope, Leo X, urged the Borgheses to resume cohabitation, appealing to Camillo as a good Catholic and a Roman prince to take back his wayward wife. Camillo caved, relocating his mistress. But the prince and principessa were no longer one of Europe’s most glamorous couples. Camillo was jowly and stout, and Pauline was very frail, her once milky complexion sallow. She was now suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis.

  Her health further deteriorated the following May. On June 9, 1825, the forty-four-year-old Pauline agreed to receive last rites, then dictated her will. She bequeathed her house at Lucca to Camillo because “of the sincere care he has shown me in my last illness . . . and because he always behaved towards the Emperor, my brother, with the greatest loyalty.” With her affairs punctiliously in order, she died at 1:00 p.m. that day from a tumor on the stomach, the same illness that had felled her father. Pauline was buried in the Borghese family vault in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Camillo outlived her by seven years, dying in Florence on May 9, 1832.

  Although Pauline routinely disobeyed her famous brother, when push came to shove, she was the most loyal of his siblings, and the only one of them to voluntarily share his exile on Elba. During Napoleon’s sojourn on St. Helena, he committed his reminiscences of Pauline to paper, and they make a fitting eulogy, warts and all.

  Pauline was probably the most beautiful woman of her time and . . . the best creature in the world. . . . But she was too prodigal, too wild. She could have been immensely rich considering the sums I gave her, but she gave it all away, though her mother often lectured her. She warned Pauline that she would die in the workhouse.

  Letizia had once told their brother Joseph that Pauline “amuses herself with drawing up budgets but she never keeps to them for more than a month.”

  Yet Pauline proved her mother wrong. She departed this world with wealth, but moreover, left it with a lasting legacy of her beauty in the many surviving portraits and other artistic incarnations of her image. Regardless of her morals, in Canova’s incomparably alluring masterpiece, the Venus Victrix , Pauline Bonaparte emerges permanently triumphant.

  ARCHDUKE RUDOLF

  Crown Prince of Austria,

  Hungary, and Bohemia

  1858-1889

  HE DOSED HIMSELF WITH LIQUOR AND MORPHINE AND ran around with a fast crowd. And he was at the epicenter of one of the nineteenth century’s biggest royal scandals, in which sex and violence combustibly collided. How did the Hapsburgs’ last crown prince become such a bad seed? Was it boredom, inbreeding, or both?

  Royal marriages were made for nearly every reason but love—and most notably for political alliances and territorial gain. For centuries it was not unusual for first cousins from Europe’s ruling houses to marry each other because they were appropriate social equals, a gene pool that became increasingly shallower as time wore on. Rarely was there an objection to such a union, other than the exceptionally close affinity or “consanguinity” as defined by the Catholic Church. But backs were mutually scratched, bargains made, favors returned, perhaps treasures exchanged hands; and somehow the
petitioners always were forgiven by His Holiness. And in Protestant countries, papal approval of such kissing cousins was a nonissue.

  Archduke Rudolf, the crown prince of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia—great hope of the Hapsburg dynasty and heir to the vast Austro-Hungarian empire—was the progeny of two first cousins whose marriage was a rare royal love match. Sort of. Rudolf’s drop-dead-gorgeous mother, who had been only fifteen on the day of her engagement, had allowed her girlish imagination to guide her to the altar. And his dashing father had taken one look at her and become the slave of his libido. Yet their marriage quickly became as miserable as any purely dynastic one.

  However, the union between Emperor Franz Joseph II and his wife, the Empress Elisabeth, known as Sisi, a former duchess in Bavaria, was not disastrous merely because they were first cousins. Sisi’s side of the family were Wittelsbachs, the dynasty that ruled Bavaria; and it was a Wittelsbach, Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was the nineteenth century’s poster child for inbred, hereditary insanity. Nicknamed “Mad King Ludwig,” he built Neuschwanstein (the “fairy-tale” castle that was Walt Disney’s inspiration for Sleeping Beauty’s abode). Ludwig was found drowned in Lake Starnberg on June 13, 1886, within hours of being officially declared insane and incarcerated at Berg Castle, ostensibly for his own good.

  Despite the young emperor’s infatuation with Sisi, she and Franz Joseph proved to be as ill suited as his mother, the formidable Dowager Empress Sophia (a Wittelsbach herself), had predicted. Sophia’s biggest concern regarding her son’s marital selection was not the threat of insanity, but the issue of compatibility. She had initially urged her son to wed Sisi’s older sister Hélène, a girl who was closer to the young autocrat’s age, and whose compliant personality better suited his rigid temperament.