Napoleon Bonaparte was a little rough on women

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In fact, Napoleon did not like women very much. He was candid in his opinions: "We treat women too well and by doing so have spoilt everything. We have been very wrong indeed to raise them to our own level. The Orientals are much more intelligent and sensible making women slaves."

Men, he thought, should have several wives.

"What do most ladies have to complain of? Don't we acknowledge they have souls... They demand equality! Pure madness! Woman is our property.. just as the fruit tree belongs to the gardener."

Napoleon was also convinced of the "weakness of the female intellect". His brother Joseph, he complained, was "forever shut away with some woman reading Torquato Tasso and Aretino".

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A delegation begged Count Walewski to force Marie to "surrender herself for Poland. He did so and she went unwillingly to Napoleon's private apartments in Warsaw. There, he flung his watch on the floor and crushed it under his heel, saying that he would grind her people
into the dust if she did not succumb. Then he "swooped" on her like "an eagle on a dove". She fainted. So he raped the unconscious woman, merely noting that "she did not struggle overmuch".

Despite this inauspicious beginning, the affair lasted for three years and contemporaries maintained that the charming and devoted Marie was the only woman he ever really loved.

During his stay in Poland they lived together in Schloss Finckenstein and Napoleon called her his "Polish wife". The only problem was that, despite the fact that she had had one child by her seventy-year-old husband, Napoleon did not seem to be able to make her pregnant. But eventually, after he had returned to France, she sent word that she had had a son.

While there had always been some doubt over the paternity of Eleonore Denuelle's child, Napoleon believed that Marie's child was his. Marie's husband gave the child his name and as Count Alexandre Walewski, he rose to prominence under Napoleon III. However, Countess Walewska's "sacrifice" was seen to be in vain. Later, Napoleon made a treaty with the Czar, agreeing that the very words "Poland" and "Polish" be "obliterated not only from any transaction, but from history itself.

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Marie Louise was over twenty years Napoleon's junior. On the evening they first met, she
consented to go to bed with him. His behaviour was described at the time as "more rape than wooing", but Marie Louise did not seem to mind. In fact, afterwards "she asked me to do it again," Napoleon said in a celebrated quote.

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