Maria Walewska fans - you are required please
I know that there are some Memoirs allegedly written by her, but many here (like @suburbanbeatnik ) are skeptical and say that they weren't probably written by her.
In any case, are those the source stating that Napoleon forced himself upon her on their first encounter?
I really, truly need to write a post debunking Marie Walewska's so-called "memoir." Here it is:
To put it bluntly, it's a memoir, not a novel. It's written from the POV of an anonymous Polish noblewoman who supposedly met Marie in Paris in 1809-- she didn't arrive in Paris until 1810. The unnamed narrator goes on at length about Marie's beauty and gentleness, and then we segue into Marie telling our narrator about her life and times. She has a romance, described at length, with the Russian prince Suvarov's cousin, and then she meets Napoleon later, who supposedly overwhelmed her with his manliness and persistence and overwrought monologues, and then later ravished her (with more flowery euphemisms).
I don't know how anyone can take any of this seriously. This reads like a Victorian melodrama, complete with detailed framing device a la Wuthering Heights. Christine Sutherland, Marie's biographer, thinks that this "memoir" is not very accurate, because Marie allegedly narrated this to her secretary when she was sick, for the benefit of her sons. But how is this even remotely probable? Who writes detailed framing devices into sickbed memoirs?
Anyway, read it for yourselves. It's all nonsense.
ADDENDUM: This is not only a Victorian era manuscript, but this was, IMO, written after 1868, because the author of manuscript mentions "survival of the fittest," a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in 1868, inspired by his reading of Darwin's Origin of Species. So this guy:
I think it is pretty safe to say that Marie Walewska did not invent the concept of "survival of the fittest" in 1809, the year Charles Darwin was born. Unless she was somehow a time traveler.
So I checked the French translation, and the term "survival of the fittest" is actually just a crap translation of the term "les droits du plus fort." This doesn't mean that this "memoir" is any less fake: it just means it might have been written before 1868.
I personally think that this was written sometime between the 1830s and the 1850s, by someone who either met Marie or who had an elderly relative who had once met her. There's no way this is real: it's still written like a novel, supposedly by an unnamed Polish noblewoman who met Marie at a party in Paris in 1809 (she did not arrive in Paris until 1810) and bangs on about her own life for seven pages before launching into Marie's alleged recollections.
To quote @frevandrest:
I am thinking of Charlotte Robespierre's memoirs where Lapponeraye def added his views and angle to the whole thing while my gal ranted about Duplays and jam. Which not to say that it was insignificant (I actually think there was a lot of politics going on) but the memoirs are def an amalgam of his 19c love for Robespierre, Charlotte's actual memories and Charlotte's apology video. This sounds like a fictional narrative based on some stuff Marie said but also with obvious political undertones (I closed my eyes and thought of Poland). Like it could be made up but I can also see her saying that because, well, she was technically cheating on her husband and it wouldn't be proper to say "yeah, I totally wanted to bang Naps". But I also feel all the scenes of actual interaction with Naps sound too Victorian melodrama to be actual memoirs. Like no way she'd write like that. imo So I can see her declaring she did it for Poland and then someone was inspired to fictionalize the actual encounter.
There could be some truth in it. The stuff about Marie's childhood or her romance with Suvarov Jr. might have something to it. But the problem with this document is that there's no clear provenance or author. And how can a memoir be remotely trusted if we don't even know who the author is-- AND many allegedly trustworthy biographers have been misleading (even if unintentionally) about the very nature of this document?
So yeah. Anything sourced from this "memoir" should be treated with care. It's all self-aggrandizing, melodramatic, bodice-ripping tosh.
Here's the French version for any of those who are interested:
