Читать книгу The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise - Imbert de Saint-Amand - Страница 6

Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria, Empress of the French, Queen of

Italy, afterwards Duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, was born

in Vienna, December 12, 1791, the daughter of Archduke Francis, Prince

Imperial, who a year later became Emperor of Germany under the name of

Francis II., and of Marie Thérèse, Princess of Naples, daughter of King

Ferdinand IV. and Queen Marie Caroline.

Marie Louise's father was born February 12, 1768, a year and a half earlier than the Emperor Napoleon. He was the grandson of the great Empress Marie Thérèse, and son of the Emperor Leopold II., who was the brother of the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, and whom he succeeded March 1, 1792; his mother was a Spanish princess, a daughter of Charles III. of Spain. He had four wives. He was an excellent husband, but his family affections were so strong that he could not remain a widower. In 1788 he married his first wife, Princess Elizabeth Wilhelmina Louisa of Wurtemberg, who died February 17, 1790, in giving birth to a daughter who lived but six months. The same year he married by proxy at Naples, August 15, and September 19 in person at Vienna, the young Neapolitan princess Marie Thérèse, daughter of Ferdinand IV. and of Marie Caroline, who ruled over the Two Sicilies.

The young princess, who was born June 6, 1772, was then eighteen years old. She was kind, virtuous, and well educated, and her influence at the court of Vienna was most excellent. Her mother, who during her reign of thirty-six years endured many trials and exhibited great qualities as well as great faults, was a remarkable woman.

Marie Caroline, the Queen of Naples, was energetic to excess, courageous to the point of heroism; she believed that severity and sometimes even cruelty was demanded of a sovereign; her religion amounted to superstition, her love of authority to despotism; she alternated between passionate devotion to pleasure and earnest zeal for her duty; she was ardent in her affections and implacable in resentment, intense in her joys and in her sorrows; she was often an unwise queen, but as a mother she was beyond reproach. Like the matrons of antiquity and her illustrious mother, the Empress Marie Thérèse, she was proud of her large family; she had no fewer than seventeen children, and political cares never prevented her actively and intelligently caring for their moral and physical welfare. If she had not the happiness of seeing them all grow up, those who survived were yet the constant object of her tender solicitude. She took a prominent part in the education of her two sons, the Duke of Calabria and the Prince of Salerno, and still more in that of her five daughters: Marie Thérèse, the wife of the Emperor Francis II.; Marie Louise, who married the Archduke Ferdinand, Grand Duke of Tuscany; Marie Christine, wife of Charles Felix, Duke of Genoa, later King of Sardinia; Marie Amélie, Duchess of Orleans, then Queen of France; Marie Antoinette, first wife of the Prince of Asturias, later Ferdinand VII., King of Spain.

Marie Caroline was very fond of her eldest daughter, Marie Thérèse; and when the princess had, in 1790, married the Archduke Francis, two years later Emperor of Germany, the mother and daughter kept up an active and affectionate correspondence in French. They were forever consulting each other about their babies, which were born at about the same time. When the daughter had given birth to her first child, the future French Empress, the Queen congratulated her most warmly: "I congratulate you on your courage. I am sure that when you look at your baby, which I hear is large, sturdy, and strong, that you forget all that you have been through." Scarcely was this child born than the Queen, who was most anxious to have a number of descendants, besought her daughter to give the Archduchess Marie Louise a little brother. April 17, 1793, there was born an Archduke Ferdinand, later Emperor of Germany; and his grandmother, Queen Marie Caroline, wrote: "I wept for joy! Thank Heaven for the birth of this boy!" Indeed, the wife of the Emperor Francis II. followed her mother's example with regard to her own children. Her eldest daughter, the Archduchess Marie Louise, she educated most carefully. The little princess, who had a most amiable disposition, was an eager student, and acquired a good knowledge of French, English, Italian, drawing, and music. She was brought up to respect religion and to detest revolutionary ideas.

Her grandmother, Queen Marie Caroline, who in 1800 came to visit the Austrian court and stayed there two years, had many conversations with Marie Louise, which certainly were unlikely to inspire her with any taste for the French Revolution or for General Bonaparte. It is easy to understand how extremely the high-spirited and haughty Queen of the Two Sicilies must have been distressed and revolted by the sufferings and death of her sister, Marie Antoinette. There was something very solemn in the way in which she told her children what took place in Paris October 16, 1793. She had them all summoned. They found her dressed in deep black, with tears in her eyes; and she led them without a word to the chapel in the royal palace of Naples, and there, before the altar, she told them that the people of regicides had just put their aunt to death upon the scaffold. Then she bade them all to pray together for the peace of the victim's soul, and probably there mingled with Marie Caroline's prayer thoughts of wrath and vengeance. From that time she waged against the principles and the spread of the Revolution a relentless, implacable war, of varying result, which filled her more and more with detestation of the new France. On the occasion of Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, she deemed the time ripe for a general uprising in Italy against the French. But Championnet had taken possession of Naples when the Parthenopean Republic had been proclaimed, and the Queen had been obliged, with her family, to take refuge at Palermo.

In the next year, 1799, the conditions of things changed; and while Milan was recovered by Austria, and the Russian army, led by Suwarow, completed the expulsion of the French from Northern and Southern Italy, the Parthenopean Republic expired, and the Bourbon flag waved once more over the walls of Naples.

Early in 1800 the French cause seemed forever lost in Italy; General Masséna alone held out at Genoa. Queen Marie Caroline had triumphed; and she conceived the plan of going to Austria to visit her daughter, the Empress, and to make the acquaintance of her grandchildren, whom she had never seen, and at the same time to demand an enlargement of her territory in return for the sacrifices of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in behalf of the common cause of the crowned heads and the Pope. She set sail from Palermo, June 9, 1800, with her second son, the Prince of Salerno, and her three unmarried daughters, Marie Christine, Marie Amélie, and Marie Antoinette.

The ideas, the feelings, the principles, the prejudices, the hates, the hopes, the interests, of Queen Marie Caroline were the same as those of her son-in-law, the Emperor, of her daughter, the Empress, and of her other daughter, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. At Vienna she found the same political feelings as at Naples. On her way thither she had a great joy—the news of the surrender of the French at Genoa, which caused her to utter cries of delight; and a great sorrow—the tidings of the Austrian defeat at Marengo, which was such a blow that she fell unconscious and narrowly escaped dying of apoplexy. We may readily understand the influence which a woman of this character must have had on the mind of her daughter, the Empress of Germany, and of her granddaughter, the future Empress of the French. Doubtless the young Marie Louise would have been much astonished if any one had prophesied to her that she would marry this Bonaparte who was represented to her as a monster. Marie Caroline did not leave Schoenbrunn to return to her own kingdom until July 29, 1802. For two years she had worked persistently and not without success, to augment, if that was possible, the detestation which the court, the aristocracy, and the whole Austrian people felt for France and French ideas. When Marie Louise was a child, and with her little brothers and sisters used to play with toy-soldiers, the ugliest, blackest, and most repulsive of them was always picked out and called Bonaparte, and this one they used to prick with pins and denounce in every way.

The war of 1805, which brought Austria to the brink of ruin, added to the Archduchess's instinctive repulsion for Napoleon. At Vienna the panic was extreme; the Imperial family was obliged to flee in different directions. Marie Louise was only fourteen years old, and she was already learning bitter lessons at the school of experience. Seeking shelter in Hungary, and afterwards in Galicia, she prayed most warmly for the success of the Austrians. She wrote: "Papa must be finally successful, and the time must come when the usurper will lose heart. Perhaps God has let him go so far to make his ruin more complete when He shall have abandoned him." November 21, 1805, a few days before the battle of Austerlitz, she wrote a letter to her governess's husband, Count Colloredo, in which she said: "God must be very wroth with us, since He punishes us so sorely. Perhaps at this very moment there is living in one of our rooms at Schoenbrunn one of those generals who are as treacherous as cats. Our family is all scattered: my dear parents are at Olmütz; we are at Kaschan; there is a third colony at Ofen."

Every sort of misfortune combined to smite this suffering family. While the Emperor Francis was losing the battle of Austerlitz, his wife, who was in Silesia, with only one of her children, the little Archduchess Leopoldine, who was born in 1797 and was not yet eight years old, fell seriously ill with the measles, and dreaded giving the disease to her little girl. "The only thing which would make death terrible," she wrote to her husband, "would be to die without seeing you again. … Do not take a step that will injure you or the country. Only don't let me be taken to France." Nothing disturbed her so much as the dread of falling into the hands of the enemy. The details which her husband wrote to her about his interview with Napoleon did not allay her uneasiness. "I have been as happy," he wrote, "as I could hope to be with a conqueror who holds possession of a large part of my kingdom. With regard to his treatment of me and mine, he has been very kind. It is easy to see that he is not a Frenchman." Thus the Emperor Francis ascribed to Napoleon's Italian birth the politeness with which the hero of Austerlitz treated him. Does not this simple statement suffice to show in what esteem the German sovereign held France and the French character?

The Imperial family was at last reunited in Vienna, after many vicissitudes, early in 1806. But a new misfortune awaited them the following year. The Empress, whose health was already delicate, had a miscarriage April 9, 1807, and a pleurisy which seized her carried her off in four days, in due odor of sanctity, after she had given her blessing to Marie Louise and the rest of her children. She was only thirty-five. The untimely death of the amiable and virtuous princess, whose gayety and kindness had been the life and delight of the court, plunged her whole family into deep grief.

The Emperor Francis was an excellent husband, but he was not an inconsolable widower. April 13, 1807, he lost his second wife; but less than nine months afterwards, January 6, 1808, he married his young cousin, Marie Louise Beatrice of Este, daughter of the late Archduke Ferdinand of Modena. This princess, who was born December 14, 1787, was very short, but attractive in appearance and of an excellent character. Her disposition was pleasant and her intelligence acute, but she was not the woman to give Marie Louise any taste for France or the French; for if in all Europe there was a princess who utterly detested the French Revolution and all its works, it was the third wife of Francis II.

The new Empress was but four years older than her step-daughter, Marie Louise, and at the age of twenty-one, she looked much more like the sister than the step-mother of the young Archduchess, who was then in her seventeenth year. Nevertheless, the Empress took hold of the princess's education with a high hand, and displayed as much solicitude as if she had been her real mother.