Love affairs of the Courts of Europe by Thornton Hall

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"It is in _Crocelle_," he writes a little later, "that you will make
people happy by your presence, and where you will recuperate your
health, regain your gaiety, and forget an Irishman; and a holy Bishop,
more worthy of your affection, on account of the deep attachment he has
for you, will take his place."

In June, 1796, this senile lover writes, "In an hour I depart for
Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say:
'This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and
mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath which I shall inhale,
the perfume of the breath of my dear Wilhelmine.'"

But these days of dallying with her legion of lovers, of regal fetes and
pleasure-chasing, were brought to an abrupt conclusion when news came to
her at Venice that her "husband," the King, was dying, with the Royal
family by his bedside awaiting the end. Such news, with all its import
of sorrow and tragedy, set the Countess racing across the Continent,
fast as horses could carry her, to the side of her beloved King, whom
she found, if not _in extremis_, "very dangerously ill and pitifully
changed" from the robust man she had left. Her return, however, did more
for him than all the skill of his doctors. It gave him a new lease of
life, in which her presence brought happiness into days which, none knew
better than himself, were numbered.

For more than a year the Countess was his tender nurse and constant
companion, ministering to his comfort and arranging plays and tableaux
for his entertainment. She watched over him as jealously as any mother
over her dying child; but all her devotion could not stay the steps of
death, which every day brought nearer. As the inevitable end approached,
her friends warned her to leave Charlottenburg while the opportunity was
still hers--to escape with her jewels and her money (a fortune of
L150,000)--but to all such urging she was deaf. She would stay by her
lover's side to the last, though she well knew the danger of delay.

One November day in 1797 Frederick William made his last public
appearance at a banquet, with the Countess at his right hand; and seldom
has festival had such a setting in tragedy. "None of the guests," we are
told, "uttered a word or ate a mouthful of anything; the plates were
cleared at the hasty ringing of a bell. A convulsive movement made by
the sick man showed that he was suffering agonies. Before half-past nine
every guest had left, greatly troubled. The majority of those who had
been present never saw the unfortunate monarch again. They all shared
the same presentiment of disaster, and wept."

From that night the King was dead, even to his own Court. The gates of
his palace were closed against the world, and none were allowed to
approach the chamber in which his life was ebbing away, save the
Countess, his nurse, and his doctors. Even his children were refused
admittance to his presence. As the Marquis de Saint Mexent said, "The
King of Prussia ends his days as though he were a rich benefactor. All
the relations are excluded by the housekeeper."

A few days before the end came the Countess was seen to leave the
palace, carrying a large red portfolio--a suspicious circumstance which
the Crown Prince's spies promptly reported to their master. There could
be only one inference--she had been caught in the act of stealing State
papers, a crime for which she would have to pay a heavy price as soon
as her protector was no more! As a matter of fact the portfolio
contained nothing more secret or valuable than the letters she had
written to the King during the twenty-seven years of their romance,
letters which, after reading, she consigned to the flames in her boudoir
within an hour of the suspected theft of State documents.

A few days later, on the night of the 16th of November (1797), the King
entered on his "death agony," one fit of suffocation succeeding another,
until the Countess, unable to bear any longer the sight of such
suffering, was carried away in violent convulsions. She saw him no more;
for by seven o'clock in the morning Frederick William had found release
from his agony in death, and his son had begun to reign in his stead.

At last the long-delayed hour of revenge had come to Frederick William
III., who had always regarded his father's favourite as an enemy; and
his vengeance was swift to strike. Before the late King's body was cold,
his successor's emissaries appeared at the palace door, Unter den
Linden, with orders to search her papers and to demand the keys of every
desk and cupboard. Even then she scorned to fly before the storm which
she knew was breaking. For three days and nights her carriage stood at
her gates ready to take her away to safety; but she refused to move a
step.

Then one morning, before she had left her bed, a major of the guards,
with a posse of soldiers, appeared at her bedroom door armed with a
warrant for her arrest; and for many weeks she was a closely guarded
prisoner in her own house, subject to daily insults and indignities from
men who, a few weeks earlier, had saluted her as a Queen.

At the trial which followed some very grave indictments were preferred
against her. She was charged with having betrayed State secrets; with
having robbed the Royal Exchequer; stolen the King's portfolio; and
removed the priceless solitaire diamond from his crown, and the very
rings from his fingers as he lay dying. To these and other equally grave
charges the Countess gave a dignified denial, which the evidence she was
able to produce supported. The diamond and the rings were, in fact,
discovered in places indicated by her where they had been put, by the
King's orders, for safe custody.

The trial had a happier ending than, from the malignity of her enemies,
especially of the King, might have been expected. After three months of
durance she was removed to a Silesian fortress. Her houses and lands
were taken from her; but her furniture and jewels were left untouched,
and with them she was allowed to enjoy a pension of four thousand
thalers a year. Such was the judgment of a Court which proved more
merciful than she had perhaps a right to expect. And two months later,
the influence and pleading of her friends set her free from her
fortress-prison to spend her life where and as she would.

The sun of her splendour had indeed set, but many years of peaceful and
not unhappy life remained for our ex-Queen, who was still in the prime
of her womanhood and beauty and with the magnetism that, to her last
day, brought men to her feet. At fifty she was able to inspire such
passion in the breast of a young artist, Francis Holbein, that he asked
and won her hand in marriage. But this romance was short-lived, for
within a year he left her, to spend the remainder of her days in Paris,
Vienna, and her native Prussia. Here her adventurous career closed in
such obscurity, at the age of sixty-eight, that even those who
ministered to her last moments were unaware that the dying woman was the
Countess who had played so dazzling a part a generation earlier, as
favourite of the King of Prussia and Queen of her loveliest women.

CHAPTER XII

THE CORSICAN AND THE CREOLE

Of the many women who succeeded one another with such bewildering
rapidity in the favour of the first Napoleon, from Desiree Clary,
daughter of the Marseilles silk-merchant, the "little wife" of his days
of obscurity, to Madame Walewska, the beautiful Pole, who so fruitlessly
bartered her charms for her country's salvation, only one really
captured his fickle heart--Josephine de Beauharnais, the woman whom he
raised to the splendour of an Imperial crown, only to fling her aside
when she no longer served the purposes of his ambition.

It was one October day in the year 1795 that Josephine, Vicomtesse de
Beauharnais, first cast the spell of her beauty on the "ugly little
Corsican," who had then got his foot well planted on the ladder, at the
summit of which was his crown of empire. At twenty-six, the man who, but
a little earlier, was an out-of-work captain, eating his heart out in a
Marseilles slum, was General-in-Chief of the armies of France, with the
disarmed rebels of Paris grovelling at his feet.

One day a handsome boy came to him, craving permission to retain the
sword his father had won, a favour which the General, pleased by the
boy's frankness and manliness, granted. The next day the young rebel's
mother presented herself to thank him with gracious words for his
kindness to her son--a creature of another world than his, with a
beauty, grace and refinement which were a new revelation to his
bourgeois eyes.

The fair vision haunted him; the music of her voice lingered in his
ears. He must see her again. And, before another day had passed, we find
the pale-faced, grim Corsican, with the burning eyes, sitting awkwardly
on a horse-hair chair of Madame's dining-room in her small house in the
Rue Chantereine, nervously awaiting the entry of the Vicomtesse who had
already played such havoc with his peace of mind. And when at last she
made her appearance, few would have recognised in the man, who made his
shy, awkward bow, the famous General with whose name the whole of France
was ringing.

It was little wonder, perhaps, that the little Corsican's heart went
pit-a-pat, or that his knees trembled under him, for the lady whose
smile and the touch of whose hand sent a thrill through him, was indeed,
to quote his own words, "beautiful as a dream." From the chestnut hair
which rippled over her small, proudly poised head to the arch of her
tiny, dainty feet, "made for homage and for kisses," she was, "all
glorious without." There was witchery in every part of her--in the rich
colour that mantled in her cheeks; the sweet brown eyes that looked out
between long-fringed eyelids; the small, delicate nose; "the nostrils
quivering at the least emotion"; the exquisite lines of the tall, supple
figure, instinct with grace in every moment; and, above all, in the
seductive music of a voice, every note of which was a caress.

Sixteen years earlier, Josephine had come from Martinique to Paris as
bride of the Vicomte de Beauharnais, with whom she had led a more or
less unhappy life, until the guillotine of the Revolution left her a
widow, with two children and an empty purse. But even this crowning
calamity was powerless to crush the sunny-hearted Creole, who merely
laughed at the load of debts which piled themselves up around her. A
little of the wreckage of her husband's fortune had been rescued for her
by influential friends; but this had disappeared long before Napoleon
crossed her path. And at last the light-hearted widow realised that if
she had a card left to play, she must play it quickly.

Here then was her opportunity. The little General was obviously a slave
at her feet; he was already a great man, destined to be still greater;
and if he was bourgeois to his coarse finger-tips, he could at least
serve as a stepping-stone to raise her from poverty and obscurity.

As for Napoleon, he was a vanquished man--and he knew it--before ever he
set foot in Madame's modest dining-room. When he left, he "trod on air,"
for the Vicomtesse had been more than gracious to him. The next day he
was drawn as by a magnet to the Rue Chantereine, and the next and the
next, each interview with his divinity forging fresh links for the
chain that bound him; and at each visit he met under Madame's roof some
of the great ones of that other world in which Josephine moved, the old
_noblesse_ of France--who paid her the homage due to a Queen.

Thus vanity and ambition fed the flames of the passion which was
consuming him; and within a fortnight he had laid his heart and his
fortune, which at the time consisted of "his personal wardrobe and his
military accoutrements" at the feet of the Creole widow; and one March
day in 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte, General, and Josephine de Beauharnais,
were made one by a registrar who obligingly described the bride as
twenty-nine (thus robbing her of three years), and added two to the
bridegroom's twenty-six years.

After two days of rapturous honeymooning Napoleon was on his way to join
his army in Italy, as reluctant a bridegroom as ever left Cupid at the
bidding of Mars. At every change of horses during the long journey he
dispatched letters to the wife he had left behind--letters full of
passion and yearning. In one of them he wrote, "When I am tempted to
curse my fate, I place my hand on my heart and find your portrait there.
As I gaze at it I am filled with a joy unutterable. Life seems to hold
no pain, save that of severance from my beloved."

At Nice, amid all the labours and anxieties of organising his rabble
army for a campaign, his thoughts are always taking wings to her; her
portrait is ever in his hand. He says his prayers before it; and, when
once he accidentally broke the glass, he was in an agony of despair and
superstitious foreboding. His one cry was, "Come to me! Come to my heart
and to my arms. Oh, that you had wings!"

Even when flushed with the surrender of Piedmont after a fortnight's
brilliant fighting, in which he had won half a dozen battles and reaped
twenty-one standards, he would have bartered all his laurels for a sight
of the woman he loved so passionately. But while he was thus yearning
for her in distant Italy, Madame was much too happy in her beloved Paris
to lend an ear to his pleadings. As wife of the great Napoleon she was a
veritable Queen, fawned on and flattered by all the great ones in the
capital. Hers was the place of honour at every fete and banquet; the
banners her husband had captured were presented to her amid a tumult of
acclamation; when she entered a theatre the entire house rose to greet
her with cheers. She was thus in no mood to leave her Queendom for the
arms of her husband, whose unattractive person and clumsy ardour only
repelled her.

When his letters calling her to him became more and more imperative, she
could no longer ignore them. But she could, at least, invent an
excellent excuse for her tarrying. She wrote to tell him that she was
expecting to become a mother. This at least would put a stop to his
importunity. And it did. Napoleon was full of delight--and self-reproach
at the joyful news. "Forgive me, my beloved," he wrote. "How can I ever
atone? You were ill and I accused you of lingering in Paris. My love
robs me of my reason, and I shall never regain it.... A child, sweet as
its mother, is soon to lie in your arms. Oh! that I could be with you,
even if only for one day!"

To his brother Joseph he writes in a similar strain: "The thought of her
illness drives me mad. I long to see her, to hold her in my arms. I love
her so madly, I cannot live without her. If she were to die, I should
have absolutely nothing left to live for."

When, however, he learns that Madame's illness is not sufficient to
interfere with her Paris gaieties, a different mood seizes him. Jealousy
and anger take the place of anxious sympathy. He insists that she shall
join him--threatens to resign his command if she refuses. Josephine no
longer dares to keep up her deception. She must obey. And thus, in a
flood of angry tears, we see her starting on her long journey to Italy,
in company with her dog, her maid, and a brilliant escort of officers.
Arrived at Milan, she was welcomed by Napoleon with open arms; but
"after two days of rapture and caresses," he was face to face with the
great crisis of Castiglione. His army was in imminent danger of
annihilation; his own fate and fortune trembled in the balance. Nothing
short of a miracle could save him; and on the third day of his new
honeymoon he was back again in the field at grips with fate.

But even at this supreme crisis he found time to write daily letters to
the dear one who was awaiting the issue in Milan, begging her to share
his life. "Your tears," he writes, "drive me to distraction; they set my
blood on fire. Come to me here, that at least we may be able to say
before we die we had so many days of happiness." Thus he pleads in
letter after letter until Josephine, for very shame, is forced to yield,
and to return to her husband, who, as Masson tells us, "was all day at
her feet as before some divinity."

Such days of bliss were, however, few and far between for the man who
was now in the throes of a Titanic struggle, on the issue of which his
fortunes and those of France hung. But when duty took him into danger
where his lady could not follow, she found ample solace. Monsieur
Charles, Leclerc's adjutant, was all the cavalier she needed--an Adonis
for beauty, a Hercules for strength, the handsomest soldier in
Napoleon's army, a past-master in all the arts of love-making. There was
no dull moment for Josephine with such a squire at her elbow to pour
flatteries into her ears and to entertain her with his clever tongue.

But Monsieur Charles had short shrift when Napoleon's jealousy was
aroused. He was quickly sent packing to Paris; and Josephine was left to
write to her aunt, "I am bored to extinction." She was weary of her
husband's love-rhapsodies, disgusted with the crudities of his passion.
She had, however, a solace in the homage paid to her everywhere. At
Genoa she was received as a Queen; at Florence the Grand Duke called her
"cousin"; the entire army, from General to private, was under the spell
of her beauty and the graciousness that captivated all hearts. She was,
too, reaping a rich harvest of costly presents and bribes, from all who
sought to win Napoleon's favour through her.

The Italian campaign at last over, Madame found herself back again in
her dear Paris, raised to a higher pinnacle of Queendom than ever,
basking in the splendours of the husband whose glories she so gladly
shared, though she held his love in such light esteem. But for him, at
least, there was no time for dallying. Within a few months he was waving
farewell to her again, from the bridge of the _Ocean_ which was carrying
him off to the conquest of Egypt, buoyed by her promise that she would
join him when his work was done. And long before he had reached Malta
she was back again in the vortex of Paris gaiety, setting the tongue of
scandal wagging by her open flirtation with one lover after another.

It was not long before the news of Madame's "goings-on" reached as far
as Alexandria. The dormant jealousy in Napoleon, lulled to rest since
Monsieur Charles had vanished from the scene, was fanned into flame. He
was furious; disillusion seized him, and thoughts of divorce began to
enter his brain. Two could play at this game of falseness; and there
were many beautiful women in Egypt only too eager to console the great
Napoleon.

When news came to Josephine that her husband had landed at Frejus, and
would shortly be with her, she was in a state bordering on panic. She
shrank from facing his anger; from the revelation of debts and unwifely
conduct which was inevitable. Her all was at stake and the game was more
than half lost. In her desperation she took her courage in both hands
and set forth, as fast as horses could take her, to meet Napoleon, that
she might at least have the first word with him; but as ill-luck would
have it, he travelled by a different route and she missed him.

On her return to Paris she found the door of Napoleon's room barred
against her. "After repeated knocking in vain," says M. Masson, "she
sank on her knees sobbing aloud. Still the door remained closed. For a
whole day the scene was prolonged, without any sign from within. Worn
out at last, Josephine was about to retire in despair, when her maid
fetched her children. Eugene and Hortense, kneeling beside their mother,
mingled their supplications with hers. At last the door was opened;
speechless, tears streaming down his cheeks, his face convulsed with the
struggle that had rent his heart, Bonaparte appeared, holding out his
arms to his wife."

Such was the meeting of the unfaithful Josephine and the husband who had
vowed that he would no longer call her wife. The reconciliation was
complete; for Napoleon was no man of half-measures. He frankly forgave
the weeping woman all her sins against him; and with generous hand
removed the mountain of debt her extravagance had heaped up--debts
amounting to more than two million francs, one million two hundred
thousand of which she owed to tradespeople alone.

But Napoleon's passion for his wife, of whose beauty few traces now
remained, was dead. His loyalty only remained; and this, in turn, was to
be swept away by the tide of his ambition. A few years later Josephine
was crowned Empress by her husband, and consecrated by the Pope, after
a priest had given the sanction of the Church to her incomplete
nuptials.

She had now reached the dazzling zenith of her career. At the Tuileries,
at St Cloud, and at Malmaison, she held her splendid Courts as Empress.
She had the most magnificent crown jewels in the world; and at Malmaison
she spent her happiest hours in spreading her gems out on the table
before her, and feasting her eyes on their many-hued fires. Her
wardrobes were full of the daintiest and costliest gowns of which, we
are told, more than two hundred were summer-dresses of percale and of
muslin, costing from one thousand to two thousand francs each.

Less than six years of such splendour and luxury, and the inevitable end
of it all came. Napoleon's eyes were dazzled by the offer of an alliance
with the eldest daughter of the Austrian Emperor. His whole ambition now
was focused on providing a successor to his crown (Josephine had failed
him in this important matter); and in Marie Louise of Austria he not
only saw the prospective mother of his heir, but an alliance with one of
the great reigning houses of Europe, which would lend a much-needed
glamour to his bourgeois crown.

His mind was at last inevitably made up. Josephine must be divorced. Her
pleadings and tears and faintings were powerless to melt him. And one
December day, in the year 1809, Napoleon was free to wed his Austrian
Princess; and Josephine was left to console herself as best she might,
with the knowledge that at least she had rescued from her downfall a
life-income of three million francs a year, on which she could still
play the role of Empress at the Elysee, Malmaison, and Navarre, the
sumptuous homes with which Napoleon's generosity had dowered the wife
who failed.

CHAPTER XIII

THE ENSLAVER OF A KING

More than fifty years have gone since the penitent soul of Lola Montez
took flight to its Creator; but there must be some still living whose
pulses quicken at the very mention of a name which recalls so much
mystery and romance and bewildering fascination of the days when, for
them, as for her, "all the world was young."

Who was she, this woman whose beauty dazzled the eyes and whose witchery
turned the heads of men in the forties and fifties of last century? A
dozen countries, from Spain to India, were credited with her birth. Some
said she was the daughter of a noble house, kidnapped by gipsies in her
infancy; others were equally confident that she had for father the
coroneted rake, Lord Byron, and for mother a charwoman.

Her early years were wrapped in a mystery which she mischievously helped
to intensify by declaring that her father was a famous Spanish toreador.
Her origin, however, was prosaic enough. She was the daughter of an
obscure army captain, Gilbert, who hailed from Limerick; her mother was
an Oliver, from whom she received her strain of Spanish blood; and the
names given to her at a Limerick font, one day in 1818, two months after
her parents had made their runaway match, were Marie Dolores Eliza
Rosanna.

When Captain Gilbert returned, after his furlough-romance, to India, he
took his wife and child with him. Seven years later cholera removed him;
his widow found speedy solace in the arms of a second husband, one
Captain Craigie; and Dolores was packed off to Scotland to the care of
her stepfather's people until her schooldays were ended.

In the next few years she alternated between the Scottish household,
with its chilly atmosphere of Calvinism, and schools in Paris and
London, until, her education completed, she escaped the husband, a
mummified Indian judge, whom her mother had chosen for her, by eloping
with a young army officer, a Captain James, and with him made the return
voyage to India.

A few months later her romance came to a tragic end, when her Lothario
husband fell under the spell of a brother-officer's wife and ran away
with her to the seclusion of the Neilgherry Hills, leaving his wife
stranded and desolate. And thus it was that Dolores Gilbert wiped the
dust of India finally off her feet, and with a cheque for a thousand
pounds, which her good-hearted stepfather slipped into her hand, started
once more for England, to commence that career of adventure which has
scarcely a parallel even in fiction. She had had more than enough of
wedded life, of Scottish Calvinism, and of a mother's selfish
indifference. She would be henceforth the mistress of her own fate. She
had beauty such as few women could boast--she had talents and a stout
heart; and these should be her fortune.

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