The last was a cunning ruse, for it spoke to patriotic Maria in a language she heard. Poland. She could use her influence with the Great Man to save Poland. What Maria did not know was Napoleon’s opinion of women meddling in politics. “States are lost as soon as women interfere in public affairs,” he said. “…If a woman were to advocate some political move, that would seem to me sufficient reason for taking the opposite course.”9 In a message to his army he wrote, “How unhappy are those princes who, in political matters, allow themselves to be guided by women.”10
Soon everyone in Warsaw knew of Napoleon’s infatuation with Maria. Many guests dropped by her house to offer advice. Society ladies offered unwanted congratulations on Maria’s conquest, even congratulated her husband. Her oldest brother, Benedict, who had already served ten years with the French army, regarded it as her patriotic duty to have sex with the emperor. The count felt honored that Napoleon wanted to make love to his wife and prodded her to visit him as he requested.
Indeed, it seemed everyone wanted Maria to sleep with Napoleon except Maria. They chided her: What would happen if the emperor, spurned by Maria, turned against Poland as well? It would be Maria’s fault! And so trembling Maria, pushed into the carriage by her insistent husband, visited Napoleon in his suite at Warsaw Castle. The first night he talked with her for four hours and nothing more. The second night she became “the unwilling victim of his passion,” she wrote a decade later in her memoirs, which sounds alarmingly like rape.11 But tenderness must have come afterward, for he awakened a sexuality in Maria that she had never known with a sick and aging husband.
The old count had set in motion a love affair that he could not halt. Maria fell in love with Napoleon, and her gratitude to her husband dried up when he forced her into another man’s arms. They separated and eventually divorced. Maria fell deeply in love with Napoleon and for the three years of their torrid love affair followed him around Europe on campaign. But when she became pregnant with his child, Napoleon—who had always believed he was sterile—realized he could sire a prince and heir. He divorced the barren Josephine, dumped the heartbroken Maria, and married an eighteen-year-old Austrian princess.
Maria’s sacrifice on behalf of her beloved nation was as doomed as her love affair with the emperor had been. Even as Napoleon was promising her he would restore Poland, he had instructed his ambassador to Russia to tell the czar, “His Majesty was prepared to see the words Poland and Polish people disappear from all current political transactions,” and “would agree that the kingdom of Poland would never be restored.”12
Doubly betrayed by Napoleon, Maria did not hesitate to visit him in his disgrace and exile on the island of Elba. Bringing their five-year-old son and all her jewels to help him with his financial difficulties, she arrived prepared to stay as his companion. But Napoleon, fearing that scandal would prevent his wife, Empress Maria Louisa, and their son from joining him, sent Maria packing after only three days. Maria and all of Europe knew that the empress was having an affair with a handsome equerry in Vienna and would never trade in her lavish lifestyle for exile on a rock. Not wishing to disillusion Napoleon, Maria kept her peace and boarded the ship, never to see him again.
Long-Suffering Acceptance
Not every husband jumped for joy when the king ogled his wife. In 1716, the new mistress of Philippe d’Orléans, regent of France, bore an inconvenient accessory—a loving and jealous husband. While Marie-Madeleine de Parabère reveled in the expensive jewels the regent gave her and ached to wear them, she needed to come up with an explanation for her husband as to how she had obtained them.
Madame de Parabère told her husband that some friends in financial embarrassment wanted to sell the items at a ridiculously low price. Her generous spouse immediately gave her the money to buy them. When she displayed her glittering gems proudly in public and courtiers asked her where she had obtained them, she replied that her kind husband had bought them for her. No one was fooled except her husband. Basking in his wife’s seeming fidelity, Monsieur de Parabère replied that a husband should be generous to a wife who loved no one but himself. The room erupted into guffaws of laughter. Monsieur de Parabère considerately died afterward, sparing his wife traumatic scenes when he would inevitably discover the truth. Relieved of this burden, Madame de Parabère could flaunt the regent’s gifts more freely.
But most married royal mistresses did not have husbands who thoughtfully provided them with the freedoms of an early widowhood. In the 1740s Madame de Pompadour was forced to unharness herself from an adoring husband when she became the mistress of Louis XV. Born Jeanne Poisson, she had married—rather above her station—a wealthy and handsome bourgeois named Le Normant d’Etioles. Monsieur d’Etioles was the nephew of Le Normant de Tournehem, Jeanne’s mother’s lover, who was also presumed to be Jeanne’s father. Monsieur d’Etioles idolized his bride and gave her a large allowance to beautify herself and their homes, and to secure her social position, which had been dimmed by her mother’s shady past.
Since childhood, Madame d’Etioles’s sole ambition had been to become the king’s mistress. It is likely that her marriage to Monsieur d’Etioles fulfilled a dual purpose—to enjoy the fruits of improved social status, and to use that status as a springboard to meet the king. While the pretty young wife had many admirers, she took no lovers, a rare phenomenon in eighteenth-century Paris. She was known to remark at lively dinner parties that the king alone could make her unfaithful to her husband. The room would always ring with laughter at this remark, her husband laughing loudest of all. Little did he know the cold truth that lurked behind the witticism and the pain it would cause him.
The d’Etioles had been married four years when Jeanne achieved her desire of meeting—and winning—the king. Monsieur de Tournehem occupied the position of farmer-general—a wealthy tax collector—and, showing more loyalty to his presumed daughter Jeanne than to his nephew, quickly packed her husband off on a long tour of the provinces. When Monsieur d’Etioles returned some two months later, his uncle broke the unwelcome news that his pretty wife had become the king’s mistress. Monsieur d’Etioles fainted from the shock.
When he came to, he reacted so violently that his uncle feared he would try to kill himself and had all guns removed from the house. Monsieur d’Etioles threatened to go to Versailles to reclaim his wife. His uncle pointed out the folly of such a venture.
Meanwhile, Madame d’Etioles was using her husband’s violent reaction to urge the king to commit, to make her the official maîtresse-en-titre. Fed up with being smuggled into side doors and up secret stairs at night, she wanted her position recognized; she wanted to taste the power, to enjoy the luxuries of Versailles in all their daylight splendor. Madame d’Etioles told the king that she was in danger of an insanely jealous husband and only he could protect her. She wept copious shimmering tears into a silken handkerchief. Louis, shaken, was won over by her tears and assented to all her demands. As a sign of accepting her as maîtresse-en-titre, he created her the marquise de Pompadour.
Monsieur d’Etioles was sent on a business trip to Provence in the hopes that a change of scene would dispel his grief. In 1747 the king rewarded Monsieur d’Etioles for his grudging acquiescence by giving him his uncle’s newly vacated post of farmer-general, a position that brought him the enormous income of four hundred thousand livres a year. He took as mistress a singer from the opera, Mademoiselle Raime, and lived with her in a marriage-type relationship for many years, bringing several children into the world. When offered the post of French ambassador to Constantinople, he turned it down because he would not be allowed to bring his mistress and their children and, as long as Madame de Pompadour was alive, could not remarry.