were still rows about her extravagance with money, but most of them
were formulaic, for in his secret heart Napoleon thought that to be
hopeless with money was to be truly feminine. At any rate he took no
effective steps to curb his wife's spendthrift tendencies, so she simply
carried on as before. The one area where he was a stickler concerned her
clothes. He had pronounced views and often made her change her outfit
several times. Once he took a dislike to a pink and silver lame gown and
threw a bottle of ink over it to make sure it could never be worn again. He
particularly liked her in decollete dresses and, if too much bosom was
concealed by a shawl, he would tear it off and throw it into the fire. His
attitude to clothes was in general bizarre, fo r if a jacket was too tight or a
collar chafed at his neck his immediate instinct was to rip the offending
apparel from his body and hurl it in fury on the floor.
Nothing was more evident than the total reversal of the balance of
power between the couple as compared with the period of the late 1790s
when Josephine had the whip hand. By now even her small acts of
rebellion were stifled. While Napoleon was in Italy in November
December 1807 she allowed herself a brief liaison with the thirty-year-old
Duke Frederick Louis of Mecklenburg, who had come to Paris for
Jerome's wedding, but Fouche alerted the Emperor. Hearing that she had
been with the prince incognito to a 'low theatre', Napoleon warned that
her behaviour was becoming as infamous as that of Marie Antoinette; he
also took immediate steps to banish Frederick Louis from France. But
not even this act of infidelity could turn him against Josephine. As he
wrote to Talleyrand, in many ways she was still the perfect wife and
divorce was not to be undertaken lightly: 'I would be giving up all the
charm she has brought to my private life ... She adjusts her habits to
mine and understands me perfectly ... I would be showing ingratitude
fo r all she has done fo r me.'
Nevertheless, the Empress's sexual charms no longer had the potency
of yore and, immediately on return from Italy, Napoleon summoned
Marie Walewska to Paris. A separation was arranged between her and
Count Walewski and she arrived from Warsaw at the end of January 1808
to take up her quarters at the Q!.tai Voltaire. The idyll of Schloss
Finkenstein was resumed. One of Napoleon's favourite pastimes was to
imitate Henry V and take nightly strolls incognito, engaging shopkeepers
in animated conversations about the Emperor or 'that devil Bonaparte'.
As a variation on this practice, he and Marie liked to check in at some
country inn in disguise and spend the night making love. Josephine was
much alarmed at the resumption of this liaison and threw yet another
attractive lady-in-waiting, Mile Guillebeau, at him to try to break it up.
marcin
(Marcin)
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