Despite this inauspicious beginning, the affair lasted for three years and contemporaries maintained that the charming and devoted Marie was the only woman he ever really loved.
During his stay in Poland they lived together in Schloss Finckenstein and Napoleon called her his “Polish wife”. The only problem was that, despite the fact that she had had one child by her seventy-year-old husband, Napoleon did not seem to be able to make her pregnant. But eventually, after he had returned to France, she sent word that she had had a son.
While there had always been some doubt over the paternity of Eleonore Denuelle’s child, Napoleon believed that Marie’s child was his. Marie’s husband gave the child his name and, as Count Alexandre Walewski, he rose to prominence under Napoleon III. However, Countess Walewska’s “sacrifice” was seen to be in vain. Later, Napoleon made a treaty with the Czar, agreeing that the very words “Poland” and “Polish” be “obliterated not only from any transaction, but from history itself”.
Convinced, at last, that he was not sterile, Napoleon decided to divorce Josephine and marry someone who could give him a legitimate heir. Tired of war, he decided that dynastic alliance was a better policy. He fancied marrying a Russian Grand Duchess. The Dowager Empress was against it, claiming that Napoleon was “not as other men”. If the Grand Duchess did marry him, she warned, in order to have children she would have to entertain another man in her bed.
Prince Frederick Louis of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was despatched to Paris to investigate. Josephine, terrified of divorce as ever, lost Napoleon his Romanov bride by telling the Prince that Napoleon was impotent — “Bonaparte est bon a faire rien [Bonaparte is good for nothing],” she said.
Later, after her divorce, the twenty-nine-year-old Prince Frederick proposed marriage to the forty-seven-year-old Josephine. She refused.
Josephine also said publicly that Napoleon’s semen was “no use at all; it’s just like so much water”. He may look like other men, she said, but then so did the famous castrato tenors of the time. Napoleon’s bouts of impotence were also discussed openly in the family and news of it spread across Europe.
As Josephine had still failed to produce a son and heir, in 1809 Napoleon had their marriage annulled. Out of political necessity, Napoleon picked Marie Louise of Austria — Marie Antoinette’s niece — to be his second wife. Nevertheless, he concluded that the eighteen-year-old virgin was “the kind of womb I want to marry”.
He told his brother Lucien: “Naturally I would prefer to have my mistress [meaning Walewska] crowned, but I must be allied with sovereigns.”
The alliance with Austria was a political mistake. It soon led to war with Russia.
Although she had lost the battle over the divorce, Josephine continued to fight. She backed his marriage to Marie Louise in the hope that the young princess might look to her for advice. The three of them could set up a menage a trois, she thought. As the older of the two Empresses, she would naturally take precedence. However, two weeks after his marriage by proxy in March 1810, Napoleon banished Josephine from Paris. They met occasionally at Malmaison when both shed tears of joy.
Marie Louise was over twenty years Napoleon’s junior. On the evening they first met, she consented to go to bed with him. His behaviour was described at the time as “more rape than wooing”, but Marie Louise did not seem to mind. In fact, afterwards “she asked me to do it again,” Napoleon said in a celebrated quote.
Napoleon was very much in love with her and in 1811, she produced a son and heir, though there were rumours that artificial insemination was used. Napoleon was ecstatic. Even Josephine was pleased. Despite Marie Louise’s expressed orders, she managed to see the baby secretly. She also received Countess Walewska when she visited France with her son Alexei.
When Napoleon fell from power, Josephine wanted to accompany him to Elba, but was prevented “by his wife”. Marie Louise did not go with him either though. She became Grand Duchess of Parma. Her father sent Count von Neipperg as her aide. He seduced her and she remained his mistress until the day she died. By the time Napoleon returned from Elba, Josephine was dead. Then, after Waterloo, he was exiled to St Helena and took with him four friends, all men.
There has been a great deal of speculation that Napoleon was gay. He tolerated homosexuality in the army and refused to outlaw homosexual practices in his Napoleonic Code. Many men wrote of his “seductive charm”. General de Segur put it most succinctly: “In moments of sublime power, he no longer commands like a man but seduces like a woman.”
Napoleon himself admitted that his friendships with men usually began with physical attraction. General Caulaincourt said: “He told me that for him the heart was not, the organ of sentiment; that he felt emotions only where men experience feelings of another kind: nothing in the heart, everything in the loins and in another place, which I leave nameless.”
Napoleon was obsessed with the golden-haired young Czar Alexander I. This obsession eventually brought about Napoleon’s downfall after the disastrous Russian expedition in 1812. When they first met on a raft on the River Tilsit, Napoleon exclaimed: “It is Apollo!”
Afterwards, he wrote to Josephine, saying: “If he were a woman I would make him my mistress.”
Josephine’s maid talked about Napoleon’s “predilection for handsome men”. His aides were often young and effeminate, and he would caress them. His secretary Meneval said Napoleon would “come and sit on the corner of my desk, or on the arm of my armchair, sometimes on my knees. He would put his arm around my neck and amuse himself by gently pulling my ear.”
His aide Louis Marchand was referred to as “Mademoiselle Marchand” and Chevalier de Sainte-Croix — “a slightly built, dapper little fellow, with a pretty, smooth face more like a girl’s than that of a brave soldier” — was called “Mademoiselle Sainte-Croix”, while Baron Gaspard Gourgard, Napoleon’s orderly for six years, referred to the Emperor as “Her Majesty”.
After his disastrous campaign against Russia, Napoleon became impotent at the age of forty-two, probably due to the failure of his endocrine glands. He was also afflicted by “burning urine”, caused by deposits of calcium in his urethra.
While Napoleon may have been a little uncertain of his sexuality, his sister Pauline was one of the loveliest women of the age and, by all accounts, sexually insatiable.
“She was an extraordinary combination of perfect beauty and the strangest moral laxity,” said a contemporary. “She was the loveliest creature I had ever seen; she was also the most frivolous.”
The Countess Anna Potocka agreed:
“She combined the finest and most regular features imaginable with a most shapely figure, admired — alas! too often.”
In an age when most people rarely washed, Pauline’s bath-time was practically a public event. Every morning a bath tub would be filled with twenty litres of fresh milk. She would strip naked, then Paul, her black slave, would carry her to the tub. When people were shocked, she said brazenly: “Why not? Are you scandalized because he is not married?”
So Pauline married Paul off to one of her maids, but he continued to carry her, naked, to her bath.
At fifteen, Pauline fell in love with forty-year-old Louis Freron, who was known as the king of the dandies. The family thought that the match was unsuitable, so Napoleon had Freron removed. To get her own back, Pauline began flirting with his officers.
To reassert control, Napoleon found Pauline a husband — Victor Leclerc, the blond, clean-cut son of a miller. As a wedding present, Napoleon promoted him to Brigadier General. Although it was no great love match, Pauline was happy enough and bore him a son, Dremide, in 1798.