to flee his kingdom in a hurry. Meanwhile he continued his profligate
opera bouffi career. After one of his carouses he was so drunk that he was
arrested in the street by his own police, who did not recognize him.
Napoleon could afford to treat his brothers with contempt, but the
Murats were a more dangerous proposition. After Louis's downfall,
Murat suspected that he was next on the Emperor's hitlist so opted for
offence as the best form of defence. His minister Maghella advised that
the card to play was to pose as the champion of Italian unity and to form
a party which would back him if the French tried to dispossess him.
While making secret contacts with anti-Bonaparte Italian nationalists,
Murat tried to make his French officials put their loyalty to him and
Naples above their oaths to France and the Emperor, and floated a
scheme to make them all take out Neapolitan naturalization papers. The
ingenious Napoleon stymied that by decreeing that every French citizen
was also a citizen of Naples by virtue of that city's being part of the
French Empire.
The noses of the scheming, unscrupulous Bonaparte clan were put out
of joint by the news, in autumn 1810 , that Marie-Louise was pregnant; an
heir to Napoleon would end all their vague hopes of inheriting the wealth
and power of Empire. But the birth of Napoleon's son, on 20 March
1811, was a close-run thing. As was usual in those days, a royal birth was
a public event, with extended family, courtiers and ambassadors all
present in the bedroom. Marie-Louise experienced a difficult and
protracted labour, and her cries of pain caused Napoleon deep distress.
The obstetrician told him that it would be a difficult breech birth and
that both mother and child were in danger: it might be that he could save
the mother only by killing the baby or vice versa; since the birth of an
heir was the very point of the marriage with Marie-Louise, which was it
to be? Without hesitation Napoleon replied: 'Save the mother.'
Marie-Louise's final agony lasted twenty minutes before a successful
forceps delivery. The man who could look on scenes of battlefield
slaughter unblinkingly could not take the blood and pain of childbirth
and retreated to the bathroom near the end. When the child was born, it
appeared to be stillborn and lay fo r seven minutes without signs of life.
Napoleon looked at his son - for such it was - and was convinced he was
dead. Suddenly the infant let out a lusty cry. Once the doctor assured
him that the boy would live, Napoleon took him in his arms. Soon the
cannon roared with the prearranged signal fo r the birth - twenty-one
rounds for a girl, one hundred for a boy. At the twenty-second booming,
the Parisian crowd went wild. Napoleon watched scenes of spectacular
public drunkenness with tears running down his cheeks.
marcin
(Marcin)
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