February 1807
Clouds hung heavy in the late-morning sky when Charlotte, a light bundle in her grasp, alighted from her carriage on Piwna Street. Zofia watched her from her bedchamber window. In a few minutes, a maid knocked and announced the Princess Sic’s arrival.
Charlotte was still standing when Zofia entered the reception room. “What a surprise, Char,” she said, approaching her friend and kissing her on either cheek. “I thought I wasn’t to see you until tonight.”
“I—well, I thought it best to speak to you in confidence first.”
“Why? I’m very busy at the moment getting ready. Napoléon has returned to Warsaw after seeing to his troops. I intend to look my best. Luckily Paweł has returned to duty.”
“Where’s Izabel? I haven’t seen her in a week.”
“She’s at convent school. The nuns are trying to undo the spoiling of her you’ve done. Really, that cameo you gave her was too much. I pray she doesn’t lose it.”
“Well, someone needs to pay the girl some attention.”
“And what does that mean? Why, she’s beginning to think of you like a grandmère.”
“Oh, does she?” Charlotte’s shoulders lifted in pride.
“Leave Izabel to me. Now we’ve gone off subject. What brings you around in the afternoon, dearest?” Zofia took closer notice of the item in Charlotte’s hand. “Ah, something for me?—A gift?”
“No, Zofia,” Charlotte said, giving over the parcel. “It’s not a gift.”
Zofia tore at the wrapping. “My shawl!” she cried, her dark eyes questioning. She unfolded the shawl and set it aside without inspection. “You retrieved it from that twit—what was her name?”
“Lady Maria Walewska.”
“Yes, that one. I knew it was mine. There is no other shawl like it.—Tell me, has she gone back to… to— ”
“Bronie.”
Zofia pulled a face. “The hinterlands!—it’s where she belongs.”
“Well, Bronie is in the provinces, but it’s hardly the hinterlands. Anyway, you have it back now.”
“Damn it, Charlotte!” Zofia cried, retrieving the shawl and dashing it to the floor.
“Ah, it wasn’t about the shawl then, was it?”
“Of course not! Not the shawl itself. But I would like to know how my shawl was transported from the King’s Bedchamber at the Royal Castle to cover that girl’s bony shoulders at Talleyrand’s! You haven’t solved that little mystery, have you?”
Charlotte nodded. “I have. Come, let’s sit down.”
“Will this take long? I still have a lot to do before tonight.”
“It depends how many questions you ask. Shall we sit?” They seated themselves in high-backed chairs, facing each other. “Well,” Charlotte began, “it seems the Lady Walewska stood among a group of well-wishers at Bronie when the emperor was making his way back to the city on New Year’s Eve. In fact, Napoléon gave her one of the bouquets that had been tossed into his carriage. Even though she could speak French quite well, he thought her a peasant girl.”
Zofia shrugged. “She looked the part, no doubt. Everything but a rainbow skirt!”
“She’s not a peasant. Anyway, he was struck by her innocence and looks, so that when he arrived in Warsaw he issued orders she be found.”
“I’m not going to enjoy this story, Charlotte, am I?”
“Turns out she’s eighteen and was married at sixteen.”
“Ah! She’s married!”
“To a count who’s seventy-seven.”
“Good lord! I do like what I hear!”
“And she’s given him a son.”
“Better and better! Not so virginal, after all.”
“But the emperor’s intrigue with her didn’t lessen. He let a number of our men know he wanted her to attend Talleyrand’s ball. In fact, he said he wouldn’t go unless they procured her for him. An entire delegation of the patriotic party descended on the Walewice, the Walewski manor house, and actually managed to win the husband over before Maria relented.”
“Polish fishmongers, the lot of them!—Relented?”
“It took some convincing. Her patriotism ultimately weakened her stance.”
“Oh, please! You mean to say she went to the ball out of some patriotic fervor? Please!”
“Yes. You see, her father died fighting for Kościuszko when Suvorov and his Russians came down on Praga.”
Zofia emitted a stage sigh. “Charlotte, I was there—I nearly died myself.”
“Well, Maria abhors the Russians and longs for the day when France will help re-establish Poland.”
Zofia waved her arm dismissively. “Little Maria and the rest of the city! Returning to the subject of my shawl, let me guess: Napoléon needed a unique gift on the spur of the moment, so he took to Talleyrand’s my shawl to present to the silly girl.”
“I expect that was the scenario.”
“And since then? Has she returned to her husband?”
“She has. But that has not slowed the would-be Emperor of Europe. He has showered her with impassioned letters and jewels.”
“And the old goat of a husband?”
Charlotte gave a little shrug. “It’s an old story. An affair with a monarch advances the family. He’s positively preening at the attention. Not a goat but proud as a peacock.”
“Stupid as a cuckold, you mean.… And she… has she… delivered the goods?”
Charlotte nodded.
“The little fool!” Zofia hissed.
“He wants to bring her to Paris.”
Zofia felt her temples throbbing. “Ah, the Caesar-Cleopatra scenario. I wonder how Josephine will take to that.”
“I’m sorry, Zofia. I really am.”
“For what?” Zofia gave a little wave. “I won’t have you or anyone pity me. A cholera on them both!”
“It’s hard, I know. When I met you, I still had remnants of my beauty. But no more, no more. Only my diamonds sparkle as they did in those wonderful days in Paris before the rising of the scum.”
Zofia tilted her head at her friend. “So you think I have only remnants of my looks left?”
“No, no, child! You are still very beautiful. But you’ll be thirty-four this year, yes?”
“Yes, thank you for reminding me.”
“And Maria is eighteen.”
“And a twit.”
“A patriotic twit. She’s to be Napoléon’s ‘Polish conquest’.”
“It makes me ill, Charlotte. I was to be his conquest.”
Charlotte reached across, placing her hand on Zofia’s. “No, Napoléon Bonaparte was your conquest, Zofia.—And that’s what made all the difference.”
Zofia thought for a long moment, then gazed at her long-time friend as if for the first time. She was right: her own aggressiveness had done her in. Her own hunger. It seemed she had been short-changing Charlotte’s intelligence for years.
“You still have the love of Paweł,” Charlotte said. “Why, I haven’t a notion.”
“I do have that. And do you know what? I can’t figure it, either.”
“Will you still go tonight?”
Zofia shrugged. “And see the twit?” She thought for a long moment. Did she really want to stay home? Her back straightened. “Dog’s Blood!—Why shouldn’t I go? There will be other men there besides the illustrious Caesar and his nubile whore.” She laughed then. “Taller men and men who take more than five minutes to make love to a woman!”
Napoléon Bonaparte, so they said, somehow deluded himself into thinking his affair with the married Lady Maria Walewska went unnoticed in the nation formerly known as the Commonwealth, but by early February and far removed from Warsaw, Paweł caught wind of the French emperor’s Polish conquest.
Napoléon had had to tear himself away from his newest passion to join his forces assembling near Eylau. The Russians, it seemed, were impervious to winter’s wrath.
No Polish forces were included in the French formations; nonetheless, because of his knowledge of the terrain, Paweł—and a dozen of his squadron—had been attached in a special assignment to Prince Murat’s forces. And it was at Eylau that Paweł would learn that Napoléon Bonaparte was not wholly invincible.
The Russian General Bennigsen had initiated the winter action in the Polish lakeland region that drew Napoléon from the warmth of the bedchamber to the theater of war. Napoléon’s initial decisions, solid as they seemed, were thwarted by mishaps, intercepted orders, and the hostile eastern Prussian lands rife with snow, frigid cold, and quicksand. A game of cat and mouse with Bennigsen ensued for four long days, nightfall alone bringing down the curtain on the fighting.
Then, on 7 February, a skirmish evolved into battle at 2 p.m. and continued for eight hours, the flash of artillery holding back the dark. The night temperatures dropped to thirty degrees below zero, so few of the combined four thousand French casualties survived the field. The battle raged the next morning despite constant snowstorms. One French corps ran against the pelting snow straight into a Russian seventy-gun battery and was cut to ribbons. When an opening occurred in the French line, Bennigsen took full advantage and six thousand Russians overran Eylau. For one precarious moment, disaster was a mere heartbeat away because Napoléon had been issuing orders from the town’s bell tower when the town was taken—and were it not for his heroic personal guards, he would have been taken, as well.
Riding with Prince Murat, Paweł witnessed the most telling event of the day. At a little before noon, the Murat cavalry crashed into the Russian center, commandeering the Russian guns, and at last turning back the enemy. And yet fighting continued until ten at night. The snowy landscape, lighted by the moon, was laden with corpses as far as one could see. Tens of thousands. It was a sight Paweł would never forget.
The days-long battle ended in a standstill with the French leaving the fields of Eylau to the Russians. It would take more than an emperor’s word to burnish the engagement as victory of any kind. Prince Murat released Paweł with commendations for the extraordinary work of his squadron of lancers. Paweł made his way back to accept further orders from General Dąbrowski. He had lost four good men.
The true winner, it seemed, was General Winter.
A few days later Paweł learned the emperor had moved his headquarters to East Prussia. Much later, critics—and there were many—would say that as a result of the battle at Eylau, Napoléon’s military prowess suffered a lasting loss of surety. In any case, Maria Walewska—my petite Marie, Napoléon called her—joined him at Schloss Finkenstein to console him, and their tryst continued in style.
Jan Stelnicki joked with Lucjan as the servant packed the portmanteau. Lucjan was true and loyal but no replacement for the camaraderie he had shared with his friend Paweł.
The cavalry were preparing to move out. A few days earlier, General Dąbrowski had apprised the officers of the orders. A siege of the Prussian-held city Gdańsk was the ultimate objective. The infantry had already moved out of Poznań with orders to neutralize any and all villages and towns along the Gdańsk Road. The mud-laden roads hampered travel so that the days passed slowly. Agonizingly so. Rumor had it that Napoléon Bonaparte—still snug at Schloss Finkenstein with his Polish conquest—claimed to have discovered in Poland a new obstacle to his brilliant war strategies: mud.
The cavalry followed in the infantry’s wake through Gasawa, Bydgoszcz, Świecie, catching up to the infantry at Gniew and then moving past Cieplo. They expected significant opposition at Tczew and so halted not far away, the officers gathering around Dąbrowski as he laid out his plan of attack on the Prussian-held town. It would be executed in the early morning.
The men settled in for the night. The homes in the suburbs of the town were owned by Poles who saw to it that the forces were well fed. Planks were brought out so that men could avoid sleeping in the mud. In the morning, Jan’s squadron preceded an infantry battalion, moving past the suburban houses toward the houses nearest the Vistula Gate. Dawn brought into focus mounted Prussian hussars on the heights. Marksmanship on horseback was a dicey thing, and few shots of either side found their marks. Jan halted his horse, took careful aim with his carbine, and felled one of the Prussian hussars who were now disappearing behind the suburban houses to wait their chance.
Jan’s men moved into position on either side of the gates, drawing fire while the infantry and grenadiers made for the gate. The houses nearest the wall were occupied by Prussian foot soldiers, and a volley spat out now from what seemed every door and window. Its effect on the Poles was deadly, wounding a number of the infantry, killing an officer, and sending the unit into disarray, with many fleeing. House-to-house fighting was the worst kind of warfare.
Jan saw a young friend of his, Lieutenant Dezydery Chlapowski, stand up next to the body of his fallen comrade and rally his men. “Stay for the cannon!” he called. “Don’t fall back now! For Poland!” The young man had a true Polish heart! His effort was well rewarded, for within minutes, a French squadron could be seen rolling their cannon up the street that led to the gate.
The rallying troops, the lumbering cannon, and the approach of an additional battalion had its effect: a second Prussian volley did not materialize. Instead, the Prussian infantry, covered by their few hussars, retreated, running pell-mell into the walled town and slamming shut the gate.
Fire was exchanged while the cannon were being set up and a number of French and Polish allies fell. It took three shots from the cannon for the gate to collapse. Buoyed by this success, the infantry, accompanied by Jan’s lancers, burst into Tcew. A second battalion had been sent to the Mill Gate and additional cavalry to the Gdańsk Gate, which was, Dąbrowski had said, a likely escape route. The enemy fell into a full rout, and within an hour the Prussian commander, General Roth, surrendered in a church where he had found sanctuary. With him were eight hundred men. A number of Prussians had attempted to escape across the delicate ice of the River Vistula, but few escaped drowning.
Jan came through it all physically unscathed, but the price had been high. One hundred fifty Poles had been lost, a half dozen from his own squadron. And it was only after the battle that he learned that General Dąbrowski himself had been wounded.
So when they moved out of Tcew, it was with General Kosinski in command.