This one
just fell on me from deep space—Deep Space
Nine, really. I was watching a rerun of that TV
program the other day, and as the credits ran I was
reminded of something that had occurred to me on other
occasions. I wondered how many mangled pronunciations of
his beautiful name the actor René Auberjonois has
had to endure in his life, especially in his home town
of New York City. (Yeah...uh... Mistuh
...uh... Uh-BIRD-yer-nose, ya wanna step oudda da cah,
please?) Out of curiosity,
I researched him a bit. He is an
esteemed and accomplished stage and film actor. My first
memory of him in a film was in the role of Lt. Father
John Mulcahy in the 1970 Robert Altman film, M*A*S*H; TV
fans know him also as Odo, the
shape-shifter or “changeling” on Deep Space
Nine (which ran from 1993-99) and as attorney Paul
Lewiston in the popular TV series, Boston
Legal. AND (!) for our purposes, it is interesting
that his full name is René Murat Auberjonois; he is
named for —and is a direct descendant, on his mother’s
side, of—
Joachim (in Italian, Gioacchino) Murat
(the king of Naples in the very early 1800s) and the
“other” Queen Caroline, Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s
sister.
In Neapolitan history, when you say
“Queen Caroline,” you generally mean Maria Carolina of Austria,
the daughter of empress Maria Theresa; that Caroline
married onto the throne of the Kingdom of Naples by
marrying King Ferdinand, the
oafish King Nasone, (a word that was a
term of endearment as well as an augmentative of “nose”;
thus, he was known as “King Shnozz”).
No, this time we mean Napoleon’s sister: Maria
Annunziata Carolina Murat (née Bonaparte)
(1782-1839). She was simply “Queen
Caroline” of Naples during her short reign and was quite
well-liked, as a matter of fact, as was her husband.
Like the
rest of her siblings, she was born on the island of
Corsica. In 1793, during the French Revolution, the family
moved to France, where their fate became inextricably
woven into that of their ambitious brother, the future
emperor. In Paris, Caroline fell in love with Joachim
Murat, one of her brother's generals; they were married in
1800. In 1808 when Murat was promoted to King of Naples
(yes, he worked his way up from son of an inn-keeper!) by
his brother-in-law, Caroline became queen consort.
Gioacchino & Caroline
Interestingly,
with the Napoleonic wars raging in northern Europe, Naples
wasn’t a bad place at all to live in the years 1805-15.
None of the horrors that had occurred in connection with
the earlier Neapolitan Republic
took place. This time, Napoleon just sent in the French
army, at which point King Ferdinand IV with his own
Caroline and the entire Bourbon court, army, and
silverware moved to Sicily, no resistance and no questions
asked. The new king in 1806 was Napoleon’s brother,
Joseph, replaced by Murat two years later. That period of
French rule in Naples is still benignly called “The
Decade” by Neapolitan historians. The Napoleonic Code was
instituted —a vast improvement over the earlier Divine
Right of Shnozz; the arts and sciences were cultivated;
and, at least in the south, it was a time of peace. Murat,
himself, although a silly peacock when it came to
designing his own uniforms,was as dashing a king as he had
been a cavalry officer. And his wife was beautiful. They
had four children together—two boys and two girls.
They
had little more than six good years as king and
queen in Naples, and then the tide turned, meaning that
Napoleon was through—and with him, all of his relatives.
After the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815,
Murat tried to retake his old kingdom by a small-scale
invasion on the Calabrian coast; he failed and was executed. His wife,
Caroline, fled to Trieste, where she wrote some memoirs,
styling herself as the “Countess of Lipona”—an obvious
anagram of “Napoli.” (Better than “Anilop,” I suppose. On
the other hand, “Alpion” isn’t bad, and it even recalls
“perfidious Albion"! In any event, at that stage of her
life she had a lot of time to play word games.)
Stories
and rumors about Caroline are endless, including one that
says she became Metternich’s lover (Metternich had
brokered the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which had
restored the Crowned Heads of Europe) in order to achieve
a royal future for her son, Achille. (If it’s true, it
didn’t work, Achille died in 1847 in Florida! The future
Napoleon III, the later and only emperor of The Second
French Empire, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte [1808-73], was the
son of one of Caroline’s other brothers, Louis.) Whatever
the rumors, even Caroline’s political enemies respected
her. Tallyrand said that she had “…Cromwell’s head on
the shoulders of a pretty woman.” (That doesn't mean
that Caroline actually looked
like Cromwell; it's a comment on her abilities.) Caroline
died in Florence, Italy, in 1839.