England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [135]
Even though they had traveled more than three hundred miles in a week, Nelson and Emma gamely welcomed the cheering crowds. Snowed under by invitations to soirées, concerts, and dinners, they found that everybody tried to pay for their food and wine, and presents arrived at their hotel. Lord and Lady Minto, the British envoy and his wife, entertained their new guests, stunned at the frenzy for the hero. “The door of his house is always crowded with people, and even the street whenever his carriage is at the door,” Lady Minto wrote.3 People thronged the route when Nelson and Emma traveled out in their carriage, and the audience stood and cheered when they arrived in their box at the theater. Every artist offered to paint the hero and his mistress, musicians and composers waited for Emma's and Sir William's attention, and Mrs. Cadogan and Emma's maids were besieged by jewelers, dressmakers, and milliners hoping for favor. Tradesmen offered Nelson goods in order to claim him as a customer and named their shops, cafés, and hotels after him. They had no time for most of the offers, but Nelson did pay attention to the painters. He tried to distract Emma from her resentment at Maria Carolina's neglect by arranging for her to sit for the state painter, Heinrich Füger. In London, the Morning Post joked that Füger was “drawing Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson at full length together. An Irish correspondent hopes the artist will have the delicacy to put Sir William between them."4
On the Thursday after Nelson and Emma arrived, the empress invited them to tea with her children and Maria Carolina at the recently built Schonbrunn Palace. Soon after, they received good news. Stunned by the outpouring of support for the Nile hero, the emperor had decided he could no longer ignore his visitors, and he had invited Nelson and the Hamiltons to a grand court reception.
Emma's pregnancy was beginning to show. Although she was not sharing a room with her husband, he would have realized the reason for Emma's nausea and Nelson's protectiveness by the time the party reached Vienna. Under eighteenth-century law, custody of a child, even an infant, was always given to the mother's husband, and she had no rights of access if the pair separated. The baby inside Emma was legally Sir William's possession, but he and everybody else knew it was not his child. Sly comments appeared in the newspapers about Emma's size: reporters praised the wonderful face of "the most beautiful woman in Europe" but tittered that her figure had swelled.
At the end of August, the royal family moved to their summer residence at Baden. Nelson and the Hamiltons visited for court dinners and smaller lunches, but Nelson was growing increasingly frustrated by Emma's efforts to catch the queen's attention. It was quite obvious to him that Maria Carolina, preoccupied by the advance of Napoleon and marrying off her children, had no more use for Emma, the wife of an ex-envoy He steered his darling toward accepting an invitation from the young Prince Esterházy, a friend from Naples, to his splendid palace in Eisen-stadt, a day or two's drive away. At Esterházy's glittering receptions, upward of sixty dined every evening, and a hundred Hungarian bodyguards waited behind the banqueting table. After dinner, Emma performed her Attitudes, whipping guests into states of high emotion, according to the effusive reports in the newspapers. The prince put on fanfares and salutes and balls for his guests. Sir William hunted (to the amazement of the other guests, he shot 122 birds in a single session) and Emma won a great prize: the admiration of Josef Haydn, Esterházy's court musician and one of the most illustrious composers alive.
Sixty-eight-year-old Haydn was captivated by Emma's voice and her powers of expression, and practiced songs with her every day. She sang "Ariadne auf Naxos," one of his favorite pieces, and they tried out some of his new songs. Emma even managed