The Emperor slept warmly during his brief Polish sojourn.

Countess Walewska moved into the Schloss Finckenstein (Bonaparte’s temporary headquarters) and nobody there could quite work the demure little countess out. She didn’t play cards, she didn’t drink or giggle or raise her voice, and she hid her voluptuous, pale Polish curves beneath unflattering clothes. Marie Walewska was not typical of Bonaparte’s lovers, and yet . . . and yet.

Her devotion and love for the Emperor grew fierce as his own fresh passion fired and burned during those winter weeks. But what would happen, what would eventuate . . . well, this was in hands other than her own.

True love relinquished all control.

The Empress Josephine, meanwhile, had been begging to join Bonaparte, sending numerous insisting letters. I am so miserable without you, she wrote, and always in tears. The balance of their love had shifted since the coronation and the change in Napoleon worried her deeply. She couldn’t give him a son. She would be abandoned, discarded, just like one of his many lovers. Her hand trembled over the pages, new letters begun as soon as the previous ones were sealed and sent.

I cannot breathe with you so far away. You must send for me.

From Warsaw, Bonaparte wrote: This is no time of year to travel. It is cold and the roads are bad and unsafe. So I cannot allow you to undertake so many trials and dangers.

Josephine was no fool but she suffered the rejection with less than her usual grace. One terrible night she even dreamed of the bouquet, of which she knew (as she knew of the young Countess Walewska and most everything else that involved her husband on campaign). In her dream she saw the bouquet on the carriage seat beside Napoleon who, as the horses began to pull away, tossed the flowers through the window and left them fallen on the snow, forgotten. In the dream, Josephine couldn’t tell what kind of flowers they were and was desperate to see, to know, as though this might dispel her distress, but the distance grew and the snow became silvered, then dark, and everything became strange and distorted, as so often happens in dreams. She woke and threw the covers off in a panic, felt she was suffocating beneath them. Later, after she left Mainz and returned to France, not even her magnificent gardens at Malmaison were able to ease her sense of dread.