The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise | Page 2

who endured every danger, and
all sorts of persecutions, to share her husband's exile and poverty, has
set in an even clearer light the faults of Marie Louise. She has been
blamed for not having joined Napoleon at Elba, for not having even
tried to temper his sufferings at Saint Helena, for not consoling him in
any way, for not even writing to him. The former Empress of the
French has been also more severely condemned for her two morganatic
marriages,--one with Count Neipperg, an Austrian general and a bitter
enemy of Napoleon, the other with Count de Bombelles, a Frenchman
who left France to enter the Austrian service. Certainly Marie Louise
was neither a model wife nor a model widow, and there is nothing
surprising in the severity with which her contemporaries judged her, a
severity which doubtless history will not modify. But if this princess
was guilty, more than one attenuating circumstance may be urged in
her defence, and we should, in justice, remember that it was not
without a struggle, without tears, distress, and many conscientious
scruples, that she decided to obey her father's rigid orders and become
again what she had been before her marriage,--simply an Austrian
princess.
It must not be forgotten that the Empress Marie Louise, who was in two
ways the grandniece of Queen Marie Antoinette, through her mother
Maria Theresa of Naples, daughter of Queen Marie Caroline, and
through her father the Emperor Francis, son of the Emperor Leopold II.,
the brother of the martyred queen, had been brought up to abhor the
French Revolution and the Empire which succeeded it. She had been
taught from the moment she left the cradle, that France was the
hereditary enemy, the savage and implacable foe, of her country. When
she was a child, Napoleon appeared to her against a background of
blood, like a fatal being, an evil genius, a satanic Corsican, a sort of
Antichrist. The few Frenchmen whom she saw at the Austrian court
were émigrés, who saw in Napoleon nothing but the selfish

revolutionist, the friend of the young Robespierre, the creature of
Barras, the defender of the members of the Convention, the man of the
13th of Vendémiaire, the murderer of the Duke of Enghien, the enemy
of all the thrones of Europe, the author of the treachery of Bayonne, the
persecutor of the Pope, the excommunicated sovereign. Twice he had
driven Austria to the brink of ruin, and it had even been said that he
wished to destroy it altogether, like a second Poland. The young
archduchess had never heard the hero of Austerlitz and Wagram spoken
of, except in terms inspired by resentment, fear, and hatred. Could she,
then, in a single day learn to love the man who always had been held up
before her as a second Attila, as the scourge of God? Hence, when she
came to contemplate the possibility of her marriage with him, she was
overwhelmed with surprise, terror, and repulsion, and her first idea was
to regard herself as a victim to be sacrificed to a vague Minotaur. We
find this word "sacrifice" on the lips of the Austrian statesmen who
most warmly favored the French alliance, even of those who had
counselled and arranged the match. The Austrian ambassador in Paris,
the Prince of Swartzenberg, wrote to Metternich, February 8, 1810, "I
pity the princess; but let her remember that it is a fine thing to bring
peace to such good people!" And Metternich wrote back, February 15,
to the Prince of Swartzenberg, "The Archduchess Marie Louise sees in
the suggestion made to her by her August father, that Napoleon may
include her in his plans, only a means of proving to her beloved father
the most absolute devotion. She feels the full force of the sacrifice, but
her filial love will outweigh all other considerations." Having been
brought up in the habit of severe discipline and passive obedience, she
belonged to a family in which the Austrian princesses are regarded as
the docile instruments of the greatness of the Hapsburgs. Consequently,
she resigned herself to following her father's wishes without a murmur,
but not without sadness. What Marie Louise thought at the time of her
marriage she still thought in the last years of her life. General de
Trobriand, the Frenchman who won distinction on the northern side in
the American civil war, told me recently how painfully surprised he
was when once at Venice he had heard Napoleon's widow, then the
wife of Count de Bombelles, say, in speaking of her marriage to the
great Emperor, "I was sacrificed."
Austria was covered with ruins, its hospitals were crowded with

wounded French and Austrians, and in the ears of Viennese still echoed
the cannon of Wagram, when salvos of artillery announced not