presents. Her effect on him was certainly beneficial. During the sojourn
at the castle of Finkenstein he displayed miraculous energy, giving
detailed attention to all aspects of his Empire. It can hardly be a
coincidence that the new surge of vigour and confidence was evident at
the height of his liaison with Marie.
Among the detail Napoleon attended to was Josephine's daily life in
Paris. To sustain the morale of Paris, which had been bowed down with
horror stories about fields of mud into which entire divisions sank
without trace and quicksands that swallowed an artillery park, Josephine
held numerous state receptions for the Senate, the Legislature, the
diplomatic corps and even the Church, while hosting lavish official
dinners and gala nights. From Prussia the Emperor supervised her
timetable to the smallest item, even specifying the days on which she was
to be at St-Cloud, and those when she was permitted to relax at
Malmaison. She expressed herself depressed at her husband's long
absence and the virtual exile of her two children, Eugene as viceroy of
Italy and Hortense as wife to Louis, the new King of Holland.
Gradually rumours about Marie Walewska reached her. She might
already have suspected something from the mere fact that Napoleon had
ended his ritual dirges about 'long, lonely winter nights'. She was
particularly curious about what Napoleon was getting up to at the Schloss
Finkenstein, which Napoleon did not leave from 1 April to 6 June, and
expressed her misgivings in a letter. The Emperor's reply is vintage
Bonaparte humbug: 'I don't know what you mean by ladies I am
supposed to be involved with. I love only my little Josephine, good, sulky
and capricious, who knows how to pick a quarrel with grace, as she does
everything, because she is ever lovable, apart however from the times
when she is jealous, when she becomes a demon.. .. But let us return to
these ladies. If I needed to busy myself with one of them, I assure you I
would wish her to have pretty pink nipples. Is this the case with those of
whom you speak to me?'
Despite provocation, Josephine did not let him down and played the
role of distant imperial benefactress superbly. She did not succumb to the
temptation of returning to the fleshpots of the Directory or taking up
with her raffish Thermidorian friends of yore. Napoleon, though,
underrated her and gave many explicit warnings about that old hedonistic
crew. There was a particularly splenetic outburst on the subject of
Theresia Tallien, now Princesse de Chimay, who had already notched up
ten children by four fathers (including four to Chimay) which seemed to
Napoleon to reduce her to the level of a beast in the field. He wrote to
Josephine: 'You are not to see her. Some wretch has married her with her
marcin
(Marcin)
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