My Fair Duke. What is Marina Tsvetaeva’a brooch’s connection to the Napoléons

Some items in museum collections have histories as exciting as novels. You can’t fit them on exposition labels. Staff of Moscow museums talk to mos.ru about some such items.

The porcelain brooch from Marina Tsvetaeva House-Museum stars today in our History of Things section. You can see the brooch at the From Gagarinsky to Trekhprudny exhibition in the guest room of Marina Tsvetaeva’s memorial apartment. Natalya Fedorenko, Head of the Museum’s Exposition and Exhibition Department, talked to us about why Tsvetaeva loved the brooch so much and what was the meaning of the child’s portrait on it.

Symbolism of jewelry

Marina Tsvetaeva’a sense of style was singular: she always chose her looks based on her own concepts of beauty, ignoring the fashion trends. She had her discerning fashion taste from childhood and her parents: her father, a famous but modest university professor, and her mother, a descendant of a noble bloodline. Mrs. Tsvetaeva instilled her own aesthetic concepts in her daughters: the girls used to dress as behooved their lineage and age. Modesty and practicality were praised highly; glitzy dresses, garish or overly expensive jewelry were out of limits. All her life Tsvetaeva considered gold low taste, preferring silver.

A piece of jewelry had to mean something for her. For example, she loved her amber necklace, entranced by their renewed glow, when she put them on after a long break.

 

Tsvetaeva had special love for rings. She often wore silver rings with massive ornaments; she was buying a lot of them to later give them away to her friends or loved ones. A precious few rings stayed with her for her entire life; the major one was the pink carnelian ring given to her by Sergei Efron, her future husband.

Marina Tsvetaeva wore brooches less often. One of the exceptions was the porcelain brooch with a miniature decal portrait. Tsvetaeva definitely loved that one. The brooch found its way to the Museum collection thanks to Lev Mnukhin, a literary scholar and researcher of Tsvetaeva’s life. It’s generally accepted that the portrait on the brooch is just a generalized child image, but Tsvetaeva believed that it was a portrait of a real person: the Duke of Reichstadt, son of Napoléon I.

“Those are eternal images you can find all through her poems and letters. Napoléon Bonaparte and his son were more than just historical or literary figures for Tsvetaeva. They were the role models of her youth. Of course, young Marina couldn’t dream of being a military commander or an emperor, but she was, from childhood, yearning for a memorable, unique lot, not just a life of wife and mother. Marina’s love for Napoléon can be traced back to the memory of her mother,” Natalya Fedorenko says.

The poet’s mother, Maria Tsvetaeva (née Mein) was a child of a noble Polish family, with excellent home education. A gifted pianist who spoke several foreign languages, well-versed in history and literature, she and not her husband, linguist and art historian Ivan Tsvetaev, became the guide to European culture for Marina. Mrs. Tsvetaeva was closer to her daughter than her husband, and more involved in Marina’s upbringing. She was more emotional about art, and immersed her children in that passionate approach.

What’s a Napoléon?

In her essay My Pushkin, reminiscing on her childhood, Tsvetaeva wrote that, although she started connecting with the image of Napoléon I on her own, the beginning was her talk with her mother. “What’s a Napoléon, Mama?” “Excuse me? You don’t know what a Napoléon is? <…> But it’s all around us!”

Indeed, the talk of the French Emperor was all around at that time: the memories of the Patriotic War of 1812 were still fresh. Little Marina Tsvetaeva dived into the French history. Bonaparte’s rule was her favorite subject. She loved reading, so she started learning the world through literature. She learned about Napoléon from books, gradually forming a mythos around him. To the Sea was her favorite poem by Pushkin.

One single rock, one tomb of glory…

That’s where by death sleep overcome

Lie memories, a noble story —

That’s where Napoléon succumbed.

Young Tsvetaeva started building a collections of items that connected her to Bonaparte and his son. Her sister Anastasia wrote: “She ordered from Paris, through Gotier’s store on Kuznetsky [bridge], everything that could be found on Napoléon’s life: volumes upon volumes upon volumes. The walls of her room were lines with his portraits and portraits of his son. King of Rome, Duke of Reichstadt. <…> Which one of the two did she love more: the commanding father conquering so many countries, or the dreamer son, prisoner of Austria, who died so young? Marina’s love for them was a bleeding wound. She hated days with their hustle, people and obligations. She lived only through portraits and books”.

Young Marina Tsvetaeva was in love with a romantic image of Napoléon I’s son who lived all his short life in exile and perished at 21. She carried that love with her throughout her life. When grown-up Tsvetaeva sent a portrait of her son Georgy to Anna Teskova, she wrote that the boy was looking more like Napoleon’s son than Napoleon’s son himself.

Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte, or Franz, Duke of Reichstadt, Napoléon I’s only legitimate son, was born in 1811. When the crown prince turned 3, Bonaparte abdicated in his favor for the first time; he did the same again a year later. Napoléon II had never been crowned: both of Napoléon I’s attempts were deemed illegitimate, so finally Louis XVIII became King of France.

The boy’s mother, Empress Marie Louise of Austria, took the boy back home. He died in Austria at 21: many had said his death at such a young age was an assassination: Bonapartists who considered him to be Napoleon II, wanted the young man to take the throne in Belgium, and that was very inconvenient to the rulers of Austria. In truth, the Duke of Reichstadt had been of poor health from childhood, and succumbed to tuberculosis.

The boy on the brooch does really look like the golden-haired Duke as he was depicted on numerous engravings and portraits. Who knows, maybe Tsvetaeva was right when she insisted it was him.

Wounded eaglet, farewell!

Some engravings similar to those that used to decorate her room on her parents’ house in Trekhprudny Pereulok, can now be found in Marina Tsvetaeva House-Museum in Borisoglebsly Pereulok. One of them is an original 19 th century engraving brought in by Marina Razumovskaya, a researcher of Tsvetaeva’a poetry. It has a dedicatory inscription from 1992. The image on it is of Napoléon I in profile, astride a horse. There’s also a portrait of his son, a copy of watercolor painting by Moritz Michael Daffinger. Thanks to Live about Living, Tsvetaeva’s memoir book, we can now imagine what her room looked like:

“The room was as small as a steamboat compartment; the wallpapers were gold stars over red (I wanted Napoleon’s bees, but couldn’t find them in Moscow and had to do with stars). Fortunately, they were mostly covered by portraits of the Father and the Son: by Gerard, by Davide, by Gros, by Lawrence, by Meissonier and by Vereshchagin, right up to the icon stand where the Holy Virgin was obscured by Napoleon looking at Moscow in flames. A narrow couch and a writing desk right next to it. That’s all”.

Many of Tsvetaeva’s earlier poems were dedicated to Napoléon and his son. Her first poetry collection, Evening Scrapbook, has a set of four poems preceded by an excerpt from Edmond Rostand’s play L’Aiglon (Eaglet). That was the nickname given to the Duke of Reichstadt by the Bonapartists. It originated from Victor Hugo, who first called Napoléon’s son that in one of his poems.

Tsvetaeva’s infatuation with the Napoléons was the effort she put in translating L’Aiglon into Russian. Aged 16, she spent every free hours writing. “Here Marina, forgetting everything, day after day and even deep at night, battled the differences between the two languages, the challenges of rhythm and rhyme,” wrote Anastasia Tsvetaeva in her Memoir.

Her translation of L’Aiglon was highly praised in Tsvetaeva’s circles, but unfortunately, didn’t survive. Learning that Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik had already translated the play into Russian, Tsvetaeva gave up.

In 1912, aged 19, she published Magic Lantern, a poetry collection. Two poems, dedicated to the Duke and the Bonapartists can be read as symbolic goodbyes to the poet’s youth. From Farewell:

My spirit’s almost tranquil now,

Don’t stir it with reproach…

Farewell, warrior felled with grief,

Wounded eaglet, farewell!

You were my unsophisticated obsession,

A dream that won’t repeat…

Farewell, my fair Duke,

My great love!