Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [112]
When the archduchess stepped out of her carriage at Compiègne, Napoleon took her straight to her apartments. To the surprise, and indeed the disbelief of many dignitaries who had come to greet the future empress, they did not emerge until the following day. Having been assured that the marriage by proxy in Vienna was valid in the eyes of the Church, Napoleon wasted no time in putting his feisty young wife to the task.
The following week, their civil marriage was celebrated at Saint Cloud, and the next day they were married in a religious ceremony at the Tuileries, where the salon carré of the Louvre was transformed for the occasion in a dazzling imperial chapel. At Napoleon’s request, the ritual was the same that had been followed forty years earlier for the wedding of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
The emperor and the empress returned to Compiègne for their honeymoon in a state of complete enthralment—Marie Louise even took to making coffee for her husband every morning and within days she was calling him silly nicknames like “Nana” and “Popo.”29 Napoleon gave every indication that he intended to linger in the arms of his wife at their countryside castle while important state papers piled up in his study. Prince Eugène and Princess Augusta, summoned to Compiègne with the rest of the court, brought their own vast retinue. Lucia felt her cloistered days were back:
I have been living like a monk since the day I arrived. Our residence has the appearance of a dormitory. The rooms open out on to this long corridor where lonely ladies-in-waiting pace up and down waiting for instructions. We pay each other visits, going from cell to cell. Our schedule is intense and rigid: we cannot leave the house even when we are not on duty all day long. [In the morning] we have breakfast together in the refectory. Then we walk over to the Empress’s quarters, and there we wait for their majesties to walk before us on their way to chapel. We follow the Empress. But only Princess Augusta, her maids of honour and those of us who are on duty are allowed to follow the Empress all the way inside.30
Like all Habsburgs, Marie Louise was a fervent Catholic. Napoleon, anxious to please his wife, showed an unusual devoutness during the numerous religious ceremonies that began to take place at court. A rather startled Lucia, who well remembered young Bonaparte’s early crusade against the Pope when he first conquered Italy, reported that the emperor “seems completely absorbed by his prayers.” At Marie Louise’s request, all meat was forbidden at court during the week preceding Easter, and Napoleon extended the injunction to all the restaurants in the area of Compiègne, to make sure that wily dignitaries did not circumvent the court’s order.
The stay at Compiègne turned into the most tedious sojourn for everyone except the imperial couple. Occasionally, it was enlivened by a hunt in the surrounding woods. The event was never much fun for Lucia but at least it was an opportunity to leave the palace and get some fresh air:
Today we rushed through the woods in an open buggy, though we never actually saw the hunters, among whom was the Emperor. The Empress followed the hunt in her carriage, and we followed her. After six hours we stopped for a picnic lunch. I had a plate of asparagus and drank a glass of champagne.31
During her stay at Compiègne, Lucia managed to take two days off to visit the former empress, Joséphine, in the duchy of Navarre, sixty miles east of Paris. The small chateau of Navarre, to which Napoleon had in effect exiled his former wife for the duration of the wedding celebrations, was very run-down. The walls needed painting and the rooms seemed to lack proper furniture. There was, all about the house, a melancholy atmosphere of impermanence. But it quickly dissolved once Lucia stepped out into the gardens, which were nicely kept and very beautiful; she wondered if a caring gardener had made a point of