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Marie, Countess Walewski (or Walewska) born Laczinska (1789 - 1817) wife of Count Athenasius Walewski, mistress of Napoleon I Bonaparte and mother of Alexandre Joseph Colonna, Count Walewski. Her parents were Count Mathieu Laczynski and Eva Zaborowska. In 1807 in Warsaw Napoleon fell in love with a Polish aristocrat, the Countess Walewska. She gave him a son, Alexandre, and remained faithful and devoted to him until he was exiled.
At the age of eighteen, Marie Laczinska married Count Athenasius Walewski, her senior by several years, by whom she had a son in 1805. Two years later, in January of 1807, she became acquainted with the emperor of the French. She related the meeting in her diary: "Napoleon raised his hat, bent toward me, I don't know what he said to me then because I was too eager to express what I was feeling. Be welcome, a thousand times welcome to our country. Nothing that we could do would express strongly enough either our admiration for you personally or the pleasure we have in seeing you set foot on the land which expects you to reestablish it.... Napoleon looked at me closely and took a bouquet which happened to be in the carriage, and as he gave it to me he said, 'Keep it as a pledge of my good intentions; I hope that we shall see each other in Warsaw and that I shall receive a thank-you from your beautiful mouth.'".
The emperor noticed her again at one of those sumptuous affairs given by the Polish nobility. He did not stop seeing her. Twenty two years old, Marie Walewska, blue-eyed and blond, aroused passions. Patriotic friends of the countess tried to push her into becoming his mistress, which at first she refused to do, but she finally yielded in the hope of inducing the emperor to treat Poland equitably. "Her character enchanted the emperor and made him cherish her more every day", relates Constant Wairy. Their affair was passionate. During this time Josphine kicked up her heels in Mainz. The idyll was interrupted when Napoleon took command of his army for the Campaign of Eylau. In May of 1810 Marie gave Napoleon a son, Alexandre Walewski.
After the Battle of Nations and the first abdication, Marie and Alexandre made a discrete trip to Elba to comfort the disgraced emperor. A rumor had it that the visit was by Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria and the king of Rome!
In September of 1816 she married a distant cousin, Count Philippe Antoine d'Ornano. She died in labor, in 1817. Her heart was placed in the crypt of the d'Ornano family in Pre Lachaise in Paris and her body returned to Poland.
External links
- http://www.histofig.com/history/empire/personnes/pologne_walewska_en.html
- http://www.napoleonicsociety.com/english/CountessWalewska.htm
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