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bitterly resented the experience - and something of the atmosphere that prevailed can be obtained from the memoirs of the Marquise de la Tour du Pin, who, as the wife of the Prefect of the Department of Dyle, entertained the royal couple when they arrived in Brussels. At dinner the Marquise was seated at the left of the emperor: ‘He talked to me all the time regarding the manufactures, the laces, the daily wages, the life of the lace-makers; then of the monuments, the antiquities, the establishments of charity, the manners of the people, the béguines. Fortunately, I was well posted regarding all these subjects. ’10 Nor was this so much idle table-talk. At the time, as we shall see, the empire was experiencing severe economic depression. With lace very much the staple of the local textile industry, Marie-Louise in consequence soon found herself ‘visiting manufacturing facilities . . . and purchasing a considerable amount of lace, which the emperor had suggested in order to bring new business to those factories that were encountering bad times’.11

That said, however, there does seem to have been a change in the emperor’s demeanour and habits of work. Hunts, balls, dinners, soirées and receptions began to take up much more time than before and on a number of occasions the emperor arrived late for meetings of the Councils of State. Once Marie-Louise’s child arrived on 20 March 1811, he also took time out to play the devoted family man. These developments should not be exaggerated - what one sees is a small degree of relaxation at a time when there was no great military crisis to engage the attentions of the emperor - but what of the vexed question of the emperor’s health? The Napoleon who greeted Marie-Louise in 1809 was, if not the slight young man who had conquered Italy, at worst a little plump, and on the whole perfectly healthy and notorious for the simplicity of his tastes. To quote his secretary, Baron Fain:

To describe Napoleon’s person, I go back to the period of his second marriage . . . His height was five feet two inches. He was small but well-made; however, his neck was a little short and he had perhaps already too much belly. His tissue was soft and the lymph thick . . . I never saw him take to his bed with illness . . . The only indisposition I knew him to have was a bladder problem that sometimes made him uncomfortable . . . He was temperate, he lived frugally and ate quickly . . . Moreover, nature had gifted him with an unusual benefit, that of not being able to overeat, even when he would have liked to. ‘If I go even slightly beyond my capacity,’ he would say, ‘my stomach renders up the excess.’12

This soon changed. A fleshy young woman who loved her food - some observers complained that she talked of little else - the new empress encouraged a similar liking in her husband. For the first time, Napoleon began to spend time at the table, to indulge in rich dishes of a sort that he had hitherto been inclined to shun, and, inevitably, to run to fat. The French writer Charles-Paul de Kock, who saw him in 1811, wrote, for example, that he appeared ‘yellow, obese [and] bloated, with his head too far down on his shoulders’.13 By the time the French ruler went back to war in 1812 he was a changed man. ‘I follow the emperor when he goes out riding,’ wrote one of his aides. ‘We go the whole way at a walk. His Majesty rides much less quickly these days: he has put on a good deal of weight, and rides a horse with more difficulty than before. The Grand Equerry has to give him a hand in mounting. When the emperor travels, he does most of the journey by carriage.’14

And it was not just that Napoleon was fat. The day after Borodino, Philippe de Ségur had a disturbing conversation with Marshal Murat:

Murat . . . recalled having seen the emperor the day before . . . halt several times, dismount and, with his head resting upon a cannon, remain there some time in an attitude of suffering. He knew what a restless night he had passed and that a violent and incessant cough had shaken his weakened frame and at that current