On January I, 1807, on his way back from Pultusk to Warsaw, Napoleon changed horses in a post-house at Blonie and there met the beautiful blonde, white-skinned twenty-year-old Polish Countess Marie Colonna-Walewska, who he soon discovered was married to an aristocratic landowner a full fifty-two years older than her. He arranged to meet her again at a ball, after which she quickly became the mistress to whom he became the most attached. One of the other ladies present at the ball, the gossipy diarist Countess Anna Potocka, ‘saw him squeeze her hand’ at the end of a dance, which she assumed equated to a rendezvous. She added that Marie had a ‘delicate figure but no brains’.
Napoleon quickly rescinded his invitation to Josephine [his wife] to join him in Warsaw. ‘It’s too great a stretch of country to cover between Mainz and Warsaw,’ he told her two days after meeting Marie. ‘I’ve many things to settle here. I think you should return to Paris, where you are needed… I’m well, the weather’s bad. I love you with all my heart.’
To her subsequent pleas to be allowed to join him, he replied: ‘I’m more vexed about this than you are; I would have loved to share these long winter nights with you, but one has to yield to circumstances.’
Source:
Roberts, Andrew. "Blockades." Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2014. 435. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Sutherland, Marie Walewska p. 61.
ed. Stryjenski, Mémoires p. 125.
CG7 no. 13938 p. 27, January 3, 1807.
CG& no. 13988 p. 52, January 8, 1807.
Further Reading:
Napoleone di Buonaparte / Napoléon Bonaparte / Napoleon I
Maria Countess Walewska (née Łączyńska)
Joséphine of Leuchtenberg or Joséphine de Beauharnais (Joséphine Maximilienne Eugénie Napoléone)
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