In 1809, Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria was fleeing across central Europe from castle to castle before the advancing army of the "Corsican devil", the man she would marry within less than a year. Meanwhile, in her family home, the Schonbrunn palace in French-occupied Vienna, Napoleon, whose marriage to Josephine was childless, was striving to prove his virility by making his Polish mistress pregnant. He succeeded, and so the Empress Josephine had to make way for a fecund successor.
Napoleon had no intention of marrying his already married mistress, Countess Maria Walewska, and cast around among the royal families of Europe for a likely bride. For political reasons (a peace settlement more favourable to Austria) Marie Louise, the healthy, 18-year-old, eldest child of Emperor Francis II, was offered, and chosen; "dutifully submissive", she agreed.
Tactfully, Napoleon wooed her with "a minor epistolary gem - masterful, disarming, optimistic, gently flattering". She was impressed. There followed his portrait, and the future empress found that he was quite good-looking and not at all like the devil.
It took two weeks for her cavalcade to reach Paris, but an impatient, ardent and excited Napoleon raced out 38 miles in the pouring rain to meet her, leaped into her carriage and embraced her. She was whisked into the palace at Compiegne and, after a brief supper, bedded. Later, in exile in St Helena, Napoleon told a companion: "She liked it so much that she asked me to do it again." From her letters it appears that Marie Louise was a sensuous woman and that they both fell in love. Within a year she had produced an heir.
During his various military campaigns in the four short years they were together, they wrote to each other almost daily. Marie Louise was an indefatigable letter-writer - to her husband, to her father, family and friends. One gets the impression of couriers galloping back and forth in relays across the continually changing map of Europe. But it is an image of Napoleon, rather than his wife, that emerges from the pages of this book.
He appears as a kind and loving husband, first to Josephine and later to Marie Louise, as a great administrator and military tactician, but with a lust for power that could only be called megalomania. He was, of course a control freak, making minutely detailed plans whether military, administrative or domestic; which probably explains his early success. He was easily bored, so constantly on the move.
Alan Parker is a historian and an expert on Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries. In this very readable book, he gives daily and sometimes hourly accounts of Napoleon's military adventures. The archives were obviously bulging with memoirs, journals, letters and state documents.
Napoleon's defeat brought a tragic end to the marriage, from which Marie Louise recovered surprisingly quickly. She went on to become Duchess of Parma, married twice afterwards, and survived her first husband by a quarter of a century.
Ethna Viney is a writer and critic