Another exile--General Moreau, Napoleon's oft-time rival in both war
and love--now sought to win where his enemy had lost. And he failed.
He was the same General Moreau who a few years earlier had paid court
to Betty Jumel and had given her as a love gift a huge gilt-and-prism
chandelier which later hung in the Jumel mansion in New York. But he
found Jeanne as cold as Betty had been kind, and in time he, too,
departed, hopeless.
The next victim was no less a personage than the King of Naples. He
was Murat, ex-tavern waiter, peerless cavalry leader, and husband of
Napoleon's shrew sister, Caroline Bonaparte. The emperor, after
conquering the separate Italian states, had placed his ex-waiter
brother-in-law on the Neapolitan throne.
When Jeanne reached Naples, Queen Caroline received her with open arms
and invited her to be a guest at the palace. Murat's admiration for
the lovely visitor was undisguisable. And--though it has been denied
by one biographer that Jeanne was responsible for his treason--almost
at once after her arrival, he began to intrigue with Napoleon's
enemies. Form your own conclusions, as did folk of the time.
Soon afterward, weakened by the idiotic Russian campaign, Napoleon was
set upon by a host of foes. Men who had licked his boots fell over one
another to join the alliance against him.
The lion was wounded, and the dog pack was at his throat.
As soon as Napoleon had been hustled off into exile, the Recamiers
returned to Paris, as did practically all the army of people he had
banished. The banker's fortune was looking up, and they could live in
something of their old style there.
Paris, in those first weeks of the "Restoration," was as full of
kings, emperors, princes, and dukes as a subway rush-hour train of
newspaper readers. One could hardly walk a block without stumbling
over a monarch or a commander-in-chief or a princeling.
The heads of the allied armies were still there, strutting gallantly
about--they would have run up a tree, two years earlier--and bragging
of Napoleon's fall.
There was Alexander, Czar of Russia, gigantic and bearlike, who had
once cringed to Napoleon, then frozen and starved him in the Moscow
campaign, and now was one of the chiefs of the alliance. There, too,
was Blucher, who had tumbled off his horse at Waterloo, but who, none
the less, had done more than is placed to his credit to win the
victory that forever crushed Napoleon. It was he and his Prussians,
not Wellington and the English, who really won Waterloo for the
Allies.
Other sovereigns, other generals, there were, too. And, foremost among
them, a long, lean Irishman, with a bony face and a great hooked beak
of a nose. He was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, titular Victor
of Waterloo and Man of the Hour.
The Duke of Wellington was not happily married. I think no retroactive
libel law can attack me for saying this, for he himself made no secret
of it. And he was far from being an exponent to stern British
morality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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