Not tonight Josephine

I was dusting some books and, as though mysteriously directed, pulled out an old Everyman edition of the Letters of Napoleon bought in a Swansea second hand bookshop some fifty odd years ago. 

I turned a random page and was hooked. Is it just me, or does is this small sample make for compulsive reading?

To the Empress (His wife, Josephine)

Warsaw23rd January 1807

I have received your letter of 15 January. I can’t possibly allow a woman to undertake the journey here. The roads are too bad —unsafe, and deep in mud. Go back to Paris; be happy and cheerful and perhaps I will come soon. Your remark that you married a husband to live with him makes me smile. I thought, in my ignorance, that the wife was made for the husband, and the husband for the country, the family, and glory. Forgive my ignorance. There is always something you can learn from the fine ladies of today. 

Good-by, my dear. Remember how much it costs me not to let you come. Say to yourself, it shows how much he cares for me.

N

There is so much to unpack in this letter, none of it entirely favourable in today's present climate. What do you get from it?

And  if you read this letter, written at the same time, you begin to understand Napoleon’s reasons for discouraging a marital  visit. 

To Madame Walewska

Warsaw Jan 1807

I saw no one but you, I admired no one but you. I want no one but you. Answer me at once, and assuage the impatient passion of

N

Didn’t you like me, Madame? I had reason to hope you might . . . Or perhaps I was wrong. Whilst my ardour is increasing, yours is slackening its pace. You are ruining my repose! Ah! Grant a few moments’ pleasure and happiness to a poor heart that is only waiting to adore you. Is it so difficult to let me have an answer? You owe me two. 

N

 

There are times — I am passing through one now—when hope is as heavy as despair. What can satisfy the needs of a smitten heart, which longs to throw itself at your feet, but is held back by the weight of serious considerations paralysing its keenest desires? Oh, if only you would!. . .  No one but you can remove the obstacles that keep us apart. My friend Duroc will make it quite easy for you.

Ah! Come! Come! You shall have all you ask. Your country will be dearer to me,  once you have had pity on my poor heart. 

N

 

Marie, my sweet Marie, my first thought is of you, my desire is to see you again. You will come again, wont you? You promised you would. If you don’t, the eagle will fly to you! I shall see you at dinner—Our friend tells me so. I want you to accept this bouquet; I want it to be a secret link, setting up a private understanding between us in the midst of the surrounding crowd. We shall be able to share our thoughts, though all the world is looking on. When my hand presses my heart, you will know that I am thinking of no one but you, and when you press your bouquet, I shall have you answer back! Love me, my pretty one, and hold your bouquet tight!

N

Maria Walewska

Maria Walewska was the young wife of an elderly Polish noble, and in some lights, she  might  be seen as a sexual pawn. After the death of her father, Maria’s seven debt-ridden brothers along with their mother faced poverty and ruin. At eighteen, she was persuaded into marriage with the 68-year-old Count Athanasius, Count Colonna-Walewski and all was well, prosperity was restored.

Napoleon 

She met Napoleon for the first time in 1806  – a brief encounter during a change of horses at a coaching inn. So impressed was he with her conversation, he engineered a reunion at a Warsaw ball.

History then repeated herself, perhaps more significantly. This time, instead of seven cash-strapped brothers to help out, it was the future of Poland—depending upon who you believe.  Certainly, a section of the Polish aristocracy, seeing Napoleon’s growing attraction for her, encouraged Maria to play along. Within weeks she was all but his mistress, was with him at Finckenstein in 1807, Paris in 1808 and 1810, at Vienna in 1809, and she even visited him in his first exile at Elba. The two were blessed with a son, Count Florian Walewski,  born May 11^th, 1810. 

After Napoleon’s exile to St Helena in late 1815, she married her lover Count Philippe Antoine d’Ornano in 1816 

and died in 1817 after kidney complications following the birth of their son. 

In her memoirs, she sought to put the record straight and thus restore her respectability. Writing about her relationship with Napoleon: ‘The sacrifice was complete. It was all about harvesting fruit now, achieving this one single equivalence (convincing Napoleon to support Polish independence) which could excuse my debased position. This was the thought that possessed me. Ruling over my will it did not allow me to fail under the weight of my bad conscience and sadness.’ 

Being a romantic, I’m persuaded it was more than that. She wasn't just lying back and thinking of Poland.

Even so, it adds weight to Napoleon’s observation …. ‘Battles against women are the only ones that are won by running away.’

 Josephine coming up next week.

The Prisoner

The Old Woman and the Mystical Whale did me precious little good in Saguenay. It was there I came down with Covid. I tried to brush it off, I’ve had worse – a small, dry cough and an over-moist nose: irritating but that’s all. Yes, okay, tired too. But the brains of the outfit insisted something was wrong when she noticed I had lost my appetite, too. I bent to her instincts and more to prove her wrong than anything else, contacted the medical centre.

Within moments I was diagnosed and the ship went into security over-drive (with one obvious weak link.) Our cabin door was sprayed from the outside, mercifully no cross daubed with dripping red paint. The Prisoner in Cabin X. If there had been an iron mask somewhere, I'd have been in it. 

There was a thin silver lining: free wi-fi and a vague promise that I might be allowed out for a spot of fresh air if masked and properly supervised. Little did I know what that entailed.

The day following, I had something worse than Covid: cabin fever. I was drowning in prison movie cliches, pacing my cell to maintain optimal fitness, doing press-ups, shaving my head, investing in tattoos, practising hard stares and the occasional dead-pan snarl. Gradually a more chilling vision dominated. This is what a care home would be like, an elderly Keyton responding with Pavlovian eagerness to room service bringing in food. My worst fears came true when I found myself watching a Spice Girls documentary on TV without knowing why.

I tried the stiff upper lip thing— “Worse things happen at sea, as my dad used to say.” —only for my wife to point out that we were at sea. I’m still trying to think of a rejoinder. 

A day later, my wife who up until then had been allowed her freedom (the weak link mentioned earlier) also came down with Covid. 

More forceful than me, she demanded access to fresh air. Hours later there was a furtive knock at the door. Two masked men stood outside, one with a disinfectant spray and a large cloth. We were ushered out into the corridor, one leading the way the other conducting a bizarre balletic dance behind us with spray and cloth. It put me in mind of ‘Curling’ — the back to front version. 

They led us to an empty luxury cabin with its own balcony where we were allowed to breath in buckets of North Atlantic air, as we headed for Belfast and ultimately home two or three pounds heavier.

Myth and Religion

The St Lawrence was beautiful. Squint and you might glimpse red coats and blue coats still fighting it out.

But we were about to enter Saguenay Fjord, and the weather mysteriously changed. 

As we sailed along Saguenay fjord, which is just off the St Lawerence,  I was struck by its emptiness, even monotony. How many photos can you take of forested cliffs with no differentiating features? I tried and was each time disappointed. None would pass muster in an identity parade. 

Below, I tried to convince myself that the water in someway mirrored the rock

Port or starboard, the same overwhelming emptiness.

And yet.

Nature abhors a vacuum, as  does the human spirit. The Saguenay fjord  teems with fish, its shores densely forested and rich in game, but the overwhelming impression is of a vast and virgin wilderness – one filled with native myth, overlaid later by French colonisation and an imported religion.

An early native legend is that of the White Whale, one that housed a powerful and benevolent spirit. Those who reported seeing  it talked of a majestic and otherworldly creature, serene and pure white. For them, it was the spirit guardian of the river and surrounding forests. It’s been seen many times over the years, each sighting supposedly marking a significant event.

Here was  a likely spot for a whale, even an old woman in a canoe

A related spirit is that of the ‘Old Woman of the Fjord,' depicted as a wise and elderly woman who, like the whale, guards and preserves the purity of both wildlife and wilderness. Both myths reflect the native reverence for a natural world that sustained them.

Some years after the French arrived the tradition was continued, though in religious form and epitomised by the Statue of Our Lady of Saguenay. 

The statue is over thirty feet tall and shows Mary embracing the valley with her arms outstretched. It’s both religiously important as well as a tourist attraction, and has the added advantage of being more accessible than the Old Woman or the Whale. I saw it at least, but not, alas, the Old woman or the Whale.

Just lots of trees

Life and Death

When I was a child I remember going to Blackpool on a number of occasions. To our left, as we walked along the front, was sky and sea, invariably drizzly and grey. To our right were long terraces of old-fashioned Boarding Houses, all with big windows. One in particular I remember. It revealed a cosy breakfast room and tables clothed in white linen and silver. The lighting was subdued, pink; and it appeared truly magical, like nothing I’d ever seen before. And it was this lure, I’m sure, that attracted ‘regulars’ to Blackpool, year in and year out. It was perhaps a northern thing, dating from a time when factories closed for holiday weeks; there were special trains, and holidays were almost a communal activity. 

I was reminded of this on the ship with the realisation we had become part of a cult. The ‘cruise cult.’ There are cults within cults, in this case that of Fred Olsen or ‘Fred’—referred to in reverent whispers. 

People spoke in quiet pride of the number of cruises they’d been on, some happy to stay on the ship having been to these places before. Like the northerners that once flocked to Blackpool, they liked what they already had. Why change a good thing. We’re talking about people on their fifteenth or eighteenth cruise—far better than any care home alternative—speaking of which, they should just give the care home franchise to Fred. He’d make a far better job of it. Assign their pensions to Fred and be done.

It's foolish to generalise or cast judgement. Every person has their own story. One lady in her eighties ruefully described her knee and hip replacements and upcoming shoulder surgery, the amount of metal in her, and how airport security alarms bleeped from a mile away. She’d booked five cruises for the upcoming year. In her case the impetus to cruise was not just making the best of things, before she became totally immobile. It also reflected a lifetime of  adventuring. As a child she’d experienced the Liverpool blitz and grown up amidst bombsites. In 1957 she bought a Vespa and with a friend drove all the way to a Paris largely untouched by the war. The beauty of a foreign city had proved an eye opener and prompted a life-long wanderlust. Age shouldn’t, and in her case hasn’t ended an adventurous spirit, even if cruising is now the only way it can be released.

Another lady, from Kenya, had travelled all the way from Africa to Liverpool for this particular cruise because she had always wanted to cross the Atlantic to Canada. This lady came from what you would call ‘good stock.’ She had a thousand-yard stare, the kind that examined your soul as you talked. It’s one the of secrets of the Royal Family and the aristocracy in general, an ability to rivet you with a gaze as though what you were saying was the most important thing in the world at that moment. It’s a neat trick, even if at that particular moment we were talking about chocolate eclairs. 

I’ve mentioned the feuding ukulele players, but I mustn’t forget the Irish travellers. They constituted of a patriarch who spent most of his time in the bar getting drunk, and glammed up young ladies, one of whom had a baby in tow. They never got farther than Newfoundland. One account has it that at St Johns they went on the rob, stuffing their loot into the baby’s pushchair. The police were waiting for them at the port and the ship sailed off without them.

And then there was Fred Olsen himself—the actual Fred—a thin ninety-two-year-old man walking with the aid of sticks. He was on board, but I failed to spot him amidst the multitude of elderly gentlemen leaning on sticks. Even so, it was interesting that the owner or other members of the family regularly sail on their own ships and so sample customer experience first-hand.

Our final passenger was ‘Death.’ The first indication manifested itself in two nurses rushing a bent-up figure in a wheelchair down a long corridor enroute to the Medical Centre. We were enroute to the restaurant and our evening meal. A moment or two before dessert—pavlova, my wife had the apple tart—a tannoy switched into life, along with a sombre request for ‘a stretcher party’ to attend the Medical Centre. Speculation was rife, but we had seen the first manifestation, and there was of course only one destination after the Medical Centre when a stretcher is called for.

Being a simple soul, I assumed they’d commandeer a fridge and imagined how over the next few days they keep pushing the ice-cream and sorbets to make space. Later I discovered cruise ships necessarily have their own morgue capable of carrying up to three bodies, more on the very large ships. A cheery thought. 

Though usually close to the medical centre, some can be situated near food fridges as the photo below shows. 

There was of course life outside the ship—and also an absence of it. Whether it was Baie-Comeau, Trois Rivieres,  or Saguenay, we were struck by the absence of traffic. Normally you have to wait some time before you can take a photo without the ubiquitous white van. Here you can almost walk on the road with your eyes shut, assuming there's room in the ship's morgue.