Éléonore Denuelle

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Éléonore Denuelle, oil painting by François Gérard (1770–1837)

Louise Catherine Éléonore Denuelle , later Louise Catherine Éléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne, from 1814 Comtesse de Luxbourg (Countess of Luxburg) (born September 3, 1787 in Paris ; † January 30, 1868 ibid) was Napoleon Bonaparte's lover and the mother of his first Son, Charles Léon Denuelle .

Life

Denuelle was the daughter of the businessman Dominique Denuelle (1748-1821) and his wife Françoise-Charlotte Couprie (1767-1850). Although the family was not very wealthy Denuelle, Éléonore came into the girls' by Jeanne Louise Henriette Campan , presumably in the hope of being able to marry off their daughter later "good" or to allow her a lucrative job.

Neither of these things came true immediately and the joy was all the greater when Capitain Jean François Revel-Honoré, a - as it later turned out - self-appointed officer asked for her daughter's hand. The seemingly good match soon turned out to be unemployed and impoverished. After two months of marriage, her husband was sentenced to two years in prison, leaving Éléonore penniless. Despite the shame, Mme Jeanne Campan helped her get a job as a reader in the house of Caroline Bonaparte , married Murat. Caroline apparently pursued the goal from the beginning to make Eleanor the lover of her brother Napoleon, probably to harm her hated sister-in-law Joséphine . For her part, Éléonore quickly recognized the advantages of such a liaison and endured the annoying encounter with the emperor by putting the clock forward and thus shortening his presence in her bedchamber. In April 1806 she was divorced from her husband, reverted to her maiden name and was pregnant.

Napoléon doubted his paternity, but elevated his supposed son to the rank of count and secured him financially. He broke off all contact with Eleanor.

On February 4, 1808, Éléonore married in Paris Pierre Philippe Augier de la Sauzaye, an officer who was killed in the Battle of the Beresina (November 26-28, 1812). She settled in Mannheim , where she made the acquaintance of Charles Auguste Émile Louis de Luxbourg and married him on May 23, 1814. Her third husband was a major in the Bavarian invasion troops , who later even rose to become the envoy of the Baden ruling house and from 1821 director of the Mannheim National Theater was.

The last years of her life, Éléonore von Luxburg (de Luxbourg) lived alternately in Mannheim and Paris, where she died on January 30, 1868. She found her final resting place in the Père Lachaise cemetery (41st Division).

literature

  • Gertrude Aretz : Women around Napoleon . Severus-Verlag, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-86347-286-3 (unchanged reprint of the Munich 1912 edition)
  • Stefan Glasses: Women around Napoleon. Piper, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-492-23811-4 (EA Munich 2001)
  • Bourg, Edme Theodore (Saint-Edme): Liaisons and gallantries of the kings of France, vol. 2, Schneeberg 1830, p. 348 ff