an whom history condemns while at the same time
it partly hides the facts which might mitigate the harshness of the
judgment that is passed upon her. This woman is Marie Louise, Empress
of France, consort of the great Napoleon, and archduchess of imperial
Austria. When the most brilliant figure in all history, after his
overthrow in 1814, was in tawdry exile on the petty island of Elba,
the empress was already about to become a mother; and the father of her
unborn child was not Napoleon, but another man. This is almost all that
is usually remembered of her--that she was unfaithful to Napoleon, that
she abandoned him in the hour of his defeat, and that she gave herself
with readiness to one inferior in rank, yet with whom she lived for
years, and to whom she bore what a French writer styled "a brood of
bastards."

Naturally enough, the Austrian and German historians do not have much
to say of Marie Louise, because in her own disgrace she also brought
disgrace upon the proudest reigning family in Europe. Naturally, also,
French writers, even those who are hostile to Napoleon, do not care
to dwell upon the story; since France itself was humiliated when its
greatest genius and most splendid soldier was deceived by his Austrian
wife. Therefore there are still many who know little beyond the bare
fact that the Empress Marie Louise threw away her pride as a princess,
her reputation as a wife, and her honor as a woman. Her figure seems to
crouch in a sort of murky byway, and those who pass over the highroad of
history ignore it with averted eyes.

In reality the story of Napoleon and Marie Louise and of the Count von
Neipperg is one which, when you search it to the very core, leads you
straight to a sex problem of a very curious nature. Nowhere else does
it occur in the relations of the great personages of history; but in
literature Balzac, that master of psychology, has touched upon the theme
in the early chapters of his famous novel called "A Woman of Thirty."

As to the Napoleonic story, let us first recall the facts of the
case, giving them in such order that their full significance may be
understood.

In 1809 Napoleon, then at the plenitude of his power, shook himself free
from the clinging clasp of Josephine and procured the annulment of his
marriage to her. He really owed her nothing. Before he knew her she had
been the mistress of another. In the first years of their life together
she had been notoriously unfaithful