Confiscated British assets in the Baltic ports increased the total. Not
content with uplifting money, Napoleon imposed requisitions in kind,
especially for military materiel such as 6oo,ooo pairs of shoes. Coming on
top of the Berlin decrees, these measures scarcely made the Emperor a
popular man in Germany.
Napoleon did what he often did when confronted by titanic problems:
he made a show of indiffe rence and masked his anxieties by a riotous
display of conspicuous consumption. Savary recalled in his memoirs that
January r8o7 in Warsaw was a virtually non-stop festival of concerts,
balls, parties, fetes and other spectacles. To Josephine the Emperor wrote
offhandedly: 'I'm well. It's bad weather. I love you with all my heart.'
Josephine, still in Mainz, had been plaguing him to let her join him, but
Napoleon stressed that there was no point while his fu ture plans were so
uncertain. In a notably prophetic dream she saw Napoleon with a woman
with whom he was in love. In what we may now see as dramatic irony
Napoleon replied as fo llows: 'You say that your dream does not make you
jealous ... I think therefore that you are jealous and I am delighted. In
any case you are wrong. In these frozen Polish wastes one is not likely to
think of beautiful women ... There is only one woman fo r me. Do you
know her? I could paint her portrait for you but it would make you
conceited ... The winter nights are long, all alone.'
Only days after writing these words Napoleon met the woman who
would be the second great love of his life. He had left Warsaw for a week
on 23 December r8o6 and was returning to the city on New Year's Eve in
a six-horse carriage. At Bronie, the last post relay before Warsaw, as thick
snow fell, the Emperor's carriage was mobbed by enthusiastic Poles,
believing him to be the Messiah of Polish independence. What appeared
to be a beautiful, blonde-haired peasant girl came up to the carriage and
asked Duroc to present her to the Emperor. Napoleon was struck by her
looks, her modesty, her ability to speak French and the simple adoration
of a young woman overjoyed to see the man who had smitten Poland's
three great historical oppressors: Russia, Austria and Prussia. He gave her
one of the bouquets that had been thrown into his carriage when he
lowered the window and thought about her all the way to Warsaw. Once
there, he told Duroc to spare no measures to find the 'beautiful peasant'.
On 3 January Duroc told him the search had been successful. There
was a problem, though: the 'beautiful peasant' turned out to be Countess
Marie Walewska, the eighteen-year-old wife of an elderly Polish
nationalist; though her husband was seventy-seven, she was supposed to
have borne him a son. Further enquiries made the picture clearer. Marie
had been married at sixteen and had indeed borne a son to Walewski, the
marcin
(Marcin)
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