Napoleon: A Biography

followed, which Napoleon was unable to assuage with a promise that he
would always protect her.
Disturbed by the emotional hyperbole of the scene, he made sure he
was not left alone with her next morning when she and her retinue
departed fo r Malmaison. For all the apparent coldness, he visited her at
Malmaison next day and walked hand in hand with her in the garden in
pouring rain. For a week he came for similar meetings, taking care never
to embrace her or enter the palace. The two continued to correspond, fo r
Napoleon seems genuinely to have been concerned that his ex-wife
should adjust as painlessly as possible to her new sphere. Back at
Versailles he snapped angrily at the triumphalist Bonaparte sisters and
was gratuitously rude to the new Italian mistress Pauline had procured
for him.
But soon his thoughts turned to Josephine's successor. His hopes of a
marriage to the Russian Grand Duchess Anne were dashed by a less than
tactful rebuff from the Czar, using the excuse that, not yet sixteen, his
sister was too young for marriage; as yet, though, there was no formal
repudiation of Napoleon's suit. Baulked of the Russian marriage he
desired, Napoleon was fo rced back on his second choice, an Austrian
match. Having made his decision, he acted in a quite extraordinary way.
He sent Eugene de Beauharnais to the Austrian embassy to ask for the
hand of Emperor Francis's nineteen-year-old daughter Marie-Louise,
specifying that the proposal had to be accepted at once and the contract
signed next day; there was to be no time for opinion in Vienna to be
consulted. After trying vainly to prevaricate, the ambassador was forced
to accept the proposal. Napoleon's tactless bullying was matched only by
his equal insensitivity in using Josephine's son as the envoy to find a
bride to replace his mother.
Once his suit was accepted, Napoleon sent two dispatches to the Czar:
in the first he formally withdrew his petition for Alexander's sister's
hand; in the other he announced his engagement to Marie-Louise. Much
face-saving was involved on both sides, so that a legend later grew up that
Napoleon's dispatches 'crossed' in the mails with a f ormal refusal of the
suit from Alexander. The Czar's snub was actuated by many fa ctors:
the intense hatred of his court and the Empress Dowager fo r Napoleon;
the realization that the logic of the Continental System would soon put
the two nations on a collision course; and even the rumour, said to have
been fomented by Josephine, that Napoleon was impotent. But the failed
suit has a counterfactual attraction all of its own: would the r8rz
campaign still have happened if the Emperor had married a Russian