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Updated: May 17, 2025
It is true, I am burying my dead, and, as there are unfortunately a great many of them, it takes me a long time to do it. But over the tomb of the dead of Essling I am going to erect a monument which will be radiant with the splendor of victory, and on its frontispiece shall be read the word 'Vengeance! The Emperor of Austria is lost.
"Come here, you idiot," continued the Emperor; "and the next time this happens, be sure you will pay for it." Saying this, he seized him by the ears and laughed heartily. On the 22d of May, ten days after the triumphant entry of the Emperor into the Austrian capital, the battle of Essling took place, a bloody combat lasting from four in the morning till six in the evening.
Even of 1809, the year of Eckmühl, Essling, and Wagram, and the darkest hour of German freedom, Goethe can write: "This year, considering the beautiful returns it brought me, shall ever remain dear and precious to memory," and when the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought quietude in oriental poetry Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami.
When communication was again affected, the fighting was everywhere carried on with fresh fury. Another attack was made on the villages of Aspern and Essling, which had already been reduced to ruins. One after another, Massena recovered the positions which Molitor was forced on the previous evening to abandon; he also carried the church occupied by the Austrian general, Vacquant.
Then the lion of Essling retreats out of sight to wipe his eyes. Sometimes he comes into the salon when she and I are talking, and if she says: "Don't disturb us, he is reading to me," he leaves us without a word.
To forestall another such accident as had occurred before, this structure was not only protected by piles, but guarded by rowboats which were armed with field-pieces and manned by artillerymen. The enemy had withdrawn behind the Russbach in a line from Deutsch-Wagram to Markgrafneusiedl, leaving only a corps to fortify the old line from Aspern to Essling.
The most important of these victories was that of Eckmühl, and he regarded the manoeuvre by which it was won as the finest in his military career. On May 13 the French entered Vienna, but the Archduke Charles with an army of nearly 200,000 men was facing him on the left bank of the Danube. Napoleon's army crossed and encountered the Austrians on the great plain between Aspern and Essling.
In his public proclamations he made an effort to disguise the check he had received at Essling; but in practice, in his military operations he comprehended all the gravity of it, without allowing himself to be troubled an instant by bad fortune; he even derived original and powerful combinations from the embarrassments of his situation.
On the right Essling, after being captured and recaptured several times by each side, was taken and long held by the enemy's left; it was then retaken at about three in the afternoon, by a portion of the French reserve, Napoleon's "young guard." Thereupon, from the sheer exhaustion of both sides, the conflict ceased, nothing being heard but desultory discharges of artillery.
And the good people of Vienna, enchanted at the sight, both wondered and rejoiced to see their Emperor's daughter so warmly greeted by the French soldiers of Essling and Wagram. Before proceeding to the account of the wedding, celebrated by proxy in Vienna, at the Church of the Augustins, March 11, 1810, it may be well to enumerate the members, at that time, of the Imperial family.
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