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Yet Franz, advised by his gifted but vain, neurotic, pleasure-loving minister Klemens von Metternich, was moving inexorably against his son-in-law. Blond, blue-eyed and cosmopolitan, Metternich was friendly with Napoleon, had slept with his sister Caroline Murat and had negotiated Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise, but he was a believer in strategic balance, and he realized Napoleon would never accept compromise.

‘Metternich strikes me as an intriguer directing Papa François very badly,’ Napoleon told Marie, but he faced the dilemma of self-made warlords: ‘I owe everything to my glory. If I sacrifice it, I cease to be.’ In August 1813, the Habsburgs switched sides. ‘Deceived by Metternich, your father’s joined my enemies,’ he told his loyal wife. At Dresden he defeated Austrians, Prussians and Russians, informing Marie that ‘Papa François had the good sense not to come,’ while ‘Papa François’s troops have never been so bad.’ But at Leipzig in October, Napoleon’s 200,000 men were defeated by 300,000 Russians, Austrians and Swedes – the biggest European battle until the First World War. France was invaded by the coalition, led by Alexander from the east and Wellington from the south-west. Even the king and queen of Naples – Murat and his sister Caroline – betrayed Napoleon, while Talleyrand negotiated the restoration of the Bourbons in the obese shape of the guillotined king’s brother, Louis XVIII. ‘Treason,’ Talleyrand said, ‘is a matter of dates.’ As his house of cards collapsed, Napoleon admitted (like Louis XIV), ‘I’ve waged war too much.’ He reassured his anxious Marie, ‘I’m sorry to hear you are worrying. Cheer up and be gay. My health is perfect, my affairs, none too easy, aren’t in bad shape …’ But Marie was perhaps focused more on herself than on Napoleon’s crisis, writing in her diary as if she wondered what was keeping her husband so busy, ‘I have no news from the emperor. He is so casual in his ways. I can see he’s forgetting me.’

As a mark of the disintegration of the empire, in March 1813 Napoleon’s brother tried to seduce Empress Marie. ‘King Joseph’, she complained to Napoleon, ‘says very tiresome things to me.’

‘Don’t be too familiar with the King,’ Napoleon warned her. ‘Be cold to him … No intimacy … Talk to him only in the presence of the duchess and by a window.’ Later he confided, ‘All this depresses me rather; I need to be comforted by members of my family.’ He warned Joseph pathetically, ‘If you want the throne, take it … but leave me the heart and love of the empress,’ before instructing him, ‘Don’t allow the empress and the king of Rome to fall into enemy hands.’ Referring to the boy, he added grimly, ‘I’d sooner see him drowned in the Seine.’

As the allied armies surrounded Paris, Empress Marie fled, spoiling any chance of her baby king succeeding to the throne. Talleyrand assumed power. The Russians occupied Paris eighteen months after Parisians had occupied Moscow; Alexander had fought from Moscow to Paris, thus overseeing Russia’s emergence as a great power.^* The tsar stayed at Talleyrand’s mansion, joined by Wellington, newly minted duke. Alexander was charmed by the Empress Josephine; Wellington enjoyed the favours of the actresses who had once favoured Napoleon.

Lafayette arranged Napoleon’s exile to America. Instead, at Fontainebleau, Napoleon abdicated in favour of his son, who technically became Napoleon II, and accepted instead the title emperor of the small island of Elba, and for Empress Marie, the Italian duchy of Parma. ‘You’re to have … a beautiful country,’ he wrote. He hoped that ‘When you tire of Elba and I begin to bore you, as I can but do when I’m older … you’ll be content with my ill-fortune if you … can still be happy sharing it.’ That night he attempted suicide with his poison kit, carried since Moscow.

WATERLOO: THE BRITISH CENTURY; NAPOLEON II AND THE RISE OF THE ROTHSCHILDS

After a night of vomiting, Napoleon survived. The Royal Navy delivered him to Elba, where he was soon joined by his mother and sister Pauline. Card games bored him.

‘You’re cheating, son,’ Madame Mère said.

‘You’re rich, mother,’ he replied. In Paris, Josephine died of pneumonia aged fifty, while his second empress, Marie, was scooped up by Austrian cavalry and reunited with her father. She still hoped to follow Napoleon to Elba. ‘I am in a very unhappy and critical position; I must be very prudent,’ she wrote. ‘There are moments when I think the best thing I could do is to die.’ Franz sent her and the infant ex-Napoleon II to Vienna, where she was assigned Count Adam von Neipperg, a one-eyed bravo, as chamberlain to prevent her joining Napoleon. ‘Within six months I’ll be her lover,’ Neipperg boasted, ‘and soon her husband.’ Marie fell in love with him – then fell pregnant.