Her vanity was flattered in many ways, and most of all by her appointment as regent of the empire during Napoleon’s absence in the disastrous Russian campaign which began in 1812.  It was in June of that year that the French emperor held court at Dresden, where he played, as was said, to “a parterre of kings.”  This was the climax of his magnificence, for there were gathered all the sovereigns and princes who were his allies and who furnished the levies that swelled his Grand Army to six hundred thousand men.  Here Marie Louise, like her husband, felt to the full the intoxication of supreme power.  By a sinister coincidence it was here that she first met the other man, then unnoticed and little heeded, who was to cast upon her a fascination which in the end proved irresistible.

This man was Adam Albrecht, Count von Neipperg.  There is something mysterious about his early years, and something baleful about his silent warfare with Napoleon.  As a very young soldier he had been an Austrian officer in 1793.  His command served in Belgium; and there, in a skirmish, he was overpowered by the French in superior numbers, but resisted desperately.  In the melee a saber slashed him across the right side of his face, and he was made prisoner.  The wound deprived him of his right eye, so that for the rest of his life he was compelled to wear a black bandage to conceal the mutilation.

From that moment he conceived an undying hatred of the French, serving against them in the Tyrol and in Italy.  He always claimed that had the Archduke Charles followed his advice, the Austrians would have forced Napoleon’s army to capitulate at Marengo, thus bringing early eclipse to the rising star of Bonaparte.  However this may be, Napoleon’s success enraged Neipperg and made his hatred almost the hatred of a fiend.

Hitherto he had detested the French as a nation.  Afterward he concentrated his malignity upon the person of Napoleon.  In every way he tried to cross the path of that great soldier, and, though Neipperg was comparatively an unknown man, his indomitable purpose and his continued intrigues at last attracted the notice of the emperor; for in 1808 Napoleon wrote this significant sentence: 

The Count von Neipperg is openly known to have been the enemy of the French.

Little did the great conqueror dream how deadly was the blow which this Austrian count was destined finally to deal him!

Neipperg, though his title was not a high one, belonged to the old nobility of Austria.  He had proved his bravery in war and as a duelist, and he was a diplomat as well as a soldier.  Despite his mutilation, he was a handsome and accomplished courtier, a man of wide experience, and one who bore himself in a manner which suggested the spirit of romance.  According to Masson, he was an Austrian Don Juan, and had won the hearts of many women.  At thirty he had formed a connection with an Italian woman named Teresa Pola, whom he had carried away from her husband.  She had borne him five children; and in 1813 he had married her in order that these children might be made legitimate.