In the late autumn of 1807, from the imperial palace in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte sat down to write a letter that revealed more than he likely intended. The addressee was a young Polish countess he had met only months before, a woman who had refused to answer his first two passionate notes. Now, having returned to his capital after nearly a year of campaigning in the east, he composed a message that mixed his own joy with a subtle plea. “My dear and gentle Marie,” he wrote, “you who love your country so much will understand the joy I feel at my return to France after an absence of almost a year.
This joy would have been complete if you were here too. But you are in my heart. ” The words were those of a man smitten, but the woman who received them was not what she seemed to be. Marie Walewska had a purpose that had nothing to do with love, and everything to do with the resurrection of a nation that had been erased from the map of Europe.
She had been born Marie Łączyńska on the seventh of December 1786, in the small village of Kiernozia in central Poland. Her arrival into the world came into a wealthy aristocratic family. Her father, Count Mateusz Łączyński, was a prominent landowner and nobleman, and her mother, Ewa, also came from a rich background. Hers was a comfortable childhood, spent in her parents’ country manor, receiving an elite education that included lessons in French from Nicolas Chopin, the father of the famous pianist Frédéric Chopin.
French was the language of polite society across eighteenth-century Europe, and for a young Polish noblewoman, it was an essential skill. Yet beneath this veneer of privilege lay a national catastrophe. By the time Marie was born, Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire had already carried out the First Partition of Poland in 1772, carving away a vast portion of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and dividing it among themselves. During Marie’s childhood, in the early 1790s, the same three powers executed two further partitions.
After the third, the Polish state simply ceased to exist. Much of what is now considered Poland was absorbed into Prussia. The Polish aristocracy faced the Third Partition in 1794 and 1795, and Marie’s father held a leadership role in that desperate struggle. In October 1794, he was killed at the Battle of Maciejowice.
Marie and her siblings grew up as fervent Polish nationalists, longing, like so many of their countrymen, for the day when a free Polish state would emerge from under German and Russian rule. But the decade that followed her father’s death and the collapse of the Commonwealth brought severe financial hardship to the Łączyński family. In 1804, in an attempt to improve the family’s fortunes, Marie’s mother arranged a marriage for her daughter, who was just eighteen years old. The groom was Athanasius Count Walewski, a man four times her age, precisely sixty-eight.
On her wedding day, Marie was described as a gloomy, emotionless little bride, while her husband was said to be an old man beaming with self-satisfaction. She became the Countess Walewska. The Count was a prominent political figure at the court of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the marriage introduced Marie to the Polish nationalist circles of the time. Across Europe, revolutionary sentiment was rising, and the peoples of regions like Poland looked to France as a potential ally against more immediate enemies such as Prussia and Russia.
For Marie, this would soon become crucial. In 1805, shortly after their marriage, Marie gave birth to her only child by the Count, a boy named Antoni Rudolf. Her life within her family and among her friends and political associates would go on to shape much of her story, leading to many happy moments but also, perhaps, to many things she did not wish to do. Then came Napoleon.
During 1805, 1806, and 1807, the Emperor found himself waging campaigns ever further east with his French armies. First, he fought the Austrians as part of the War of the Third Coalition. He had barely captured Vienna, defeated the Austrians, and made peace with them when Prussia declared war on France. Bonaparte therefore launched a campaign to the northeast, marching into Berlin, before pushing into what is now Poland to try to crush the Prussians there.
The King of Prussia had retreated to the eastern edge of his kingdom, seeking help from his Russian ally, Tsar Alexander I. It was during this eastward march that Napoleon first met Marie. Their first encounter was pure chance. At some point during his advance, Napoleon stopped at an inn along the road to change the horses pulling his carriage, and Marie happened to be there.
She apparently offered him flowers, and they likely spoke for some time, as Napoleon quickly made inquiries to learn the identity of this beautiful, unknown lady. Other accounts tell a different story. One version holds that Marie approached the commander of Napoleon’s guard and begged for a meeting with him, while still other accounts claim the encounter never happened at all. Whatever the truth, she left an impression on him.
When he saw her later at a gathering of Polish nobles in Warsaw, he ordered his staff that he wished to speak with her. He followed this by sending two admiring letters to the attractive Marie, but received no reply, which only increased his interest. Scholars also debate her reaction to his advances. Some believe she was interested in a relationship with a great leader; others insist she was embarrassed and frightened, and only humored the Emperor for the sake of the Polish cause.
In any case, she soon became his mistress in Poland. At first, the relationship remained secret, although many in the upper circles of Warsaw knew what was going on. As they spent more time together, the affair deepened, and both began showing genuine affection for the other. Napoleon spent several months in Poland, bringing the war with Prussia and Russia to an end in 1807, then concluding the Treaty of Tilsit to end the War of the Fourth Coalition.
Afterward, he returned to Paris in the autumn of 1807. From the French capital, he sent her his portrait, along with some books and the letter that spoke of his joy at returning home. The relationship was politically significant. In the summer of 1807, as part of the Treaty of Tilsit, Napoleon stripped Prussia of a large portion of its territory, one of the harshest peace treaties he ever imposed on a defeated nation.
A large part of his reasoning was the desire to create a new Polish state. Just a few weeks later, the Duchy of Warsaw was born, with a new constitution issued. Part of Napoleon’s logic was that the Polish rebels had supported him in the war against the Prussians, and he also wanted a useful client state in Eastern Europe that would be a strong ally for France. Yet there is no doubt that the Countess Walewska exerted a powerful influence over him in this regard, and that her fervent Polish nationalism contributed to the re-emergence of a Polish nation, however fleeting it proved to be.
While Napoleon seems to have fallen in love with Marie, her memoirs suggest she did not feel the same way. She wrote: “The sacrifice was total. It was all about reaping the fruits now, achieving this single equivalent, convincing Napoleon to support the Polish independence movement, which might justify my degrading position. This was the only idea that seized me and dominated my will.
It did not allow me to collapse under the weight of my bad conscience and my sorrow. ” Yet, as it turned out, this was not entirely true. Unlike most of his other mistresses, who came and went very quickly, Napoleon resumed his relationship with Walewska in 1809. The occasion was the War of the Fifth Coalition, which brought Napoleon east from France once again to invade Vienna, his second war with Austria in less than half a decade.
While he settled in the Austrian capital and became involved in peace negotiations, Marie came from the southwest, from the Duchy of Warsaw, to join him in Vienna. During this meeting, their child was conceived. Returning to Poland in early May 1810, she gave birth to a boy she named Alexander Florian Joseph. Marie’s husband acknowledged the child as his own, and many studies have argued that the paternity is debatable.
But there is no doubt when one looks at portraits of Alexander in his mid-fifties that he was Napoleon’s son. The resemblance is striking, and it was confirmed by DNA testing in 2013. In 1810, Napoleon returned to Paris and made it clear that he wanted Marie near him. She settled into a luxurious residence with their son, provided for her by Napoleon.
But their relationship ended shortly afterward. After divorcing Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon married Marie Louise, the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, hoping to produce a legitimate heir. It is unknown whether Napoleon met Marie and their son at that time, but he took care to provide for them and ensure their financial security. In 1812, Marie divorced her husband, who was then in his mid-seventies, while she was still in her mid-twenties.
As part of the settlement, she and her elder son received half of the Count’s property, a fortune that was large despite debts. She likely met Napoleon again at that time, when he arrived in Poland to prepare his armies for the invasion of Russia, a campaign that turned into a catastrophe that cost him his empire in the years that followed. When he first abdicated in the spring of 1814 and was exiled for the first time, as Emperor of the island of Elba off the coast of Italy, Marie traveled there and joined him on the island. Her reasons for doing so are another source of controversy.
Some speculate that Napoleon’s financial arrangements had not been carried out, so Marie went to ask for money, while others say she simply wanted to be with her former lover and the father of her second son. After he escaped back to France and tried to resume his position as Emperor, that was the end of their contact. Napoleon was defeated for the last time at Waterloo, abdicated shortly afterward, and was exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1815, Marie’s first husband died.
Around that time, she fell in love with Count Philippe Antoine d’Ornano, a man she had known for several years and with whom she had been close. He was a French soldier, one of the marshals of Napoleon’s army, and a prominent general. Ironically, he was also Napoleon’s cousin. They married in 1817 and settled in Liège, in what is now Belgium, then the Austrian Netherlands.
There, she quickly gave birth to her third child, another boy, named Rodolphe Auguste. However, she died only six months later, on the eleventh of December 1817, of a kidney disease she had suffered from for nearly her entire life. Marie was only thirty-one years old when she died. She was buried in Paris, although her remains were later returned to Poland.
The Duchy of Warsaw did not survive the collapse of Napoleon’s empire, but two of her sons played important roles in European politics during the mid-nineteenth century. Rodolphe was an important political figure during the Second Empire in the 1850s and 1860s, when Napoleon’s nephew was Emperor of France under the name Napoleon III. Likewise, Alexander, the son of Napoleon and Marie, served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of France under Napoleon III, to whom he was closely related. He played a pivotal role in negotiating the terms of peace at the end of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s.
Marie completed her memoirs before her death, and they remain an important source for the history of the Napoleonic era in Europe. A film was made about her life in 1937, starring Greta Garbo in the title role.
