ANASTASE COLINNA WALEWSKI, the NOBLE OLD HUSBAND OF MARIA LACZYNSKA

Excerpts: Pages 28-29;

Anastase Colonna Walewski lived less than an hour's drive by carriage from Kiernozia - a pleasant enough journey in the summer on the sandy road. Ornate and massive, with pediment-ed porticoes, spreading balustraded wings and a colonnaded entrance hall, Walewice was an imposing mansion, a mixture of eighteenth century French and American Southern plantation style. It was designed by a Polish architect who had fought in the American War of Independence......

The owner of this splendid domain, then sixty-eight years of age, had been married twice; first at the age of twenty-three, then at thirty.  He had been a widower for ten years..... 

It was rumored in Warsaw that the esteemed Chamberlain had undergone a mysterious rejuvenating cure ' in the hands of a special masseur, while in Paris.  His clothes fitted him to perfection.....

Walewski's tastes, unlike those of most of the Polish aristocracy, were essentially urban.  After the death of Stanislaus Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, whose friendship he had enjoyed for so long, and in view of the tragic political situation in the country, he had deemed it "essential and proper: to retire to his rural seat to cogitate....

Stuck in the country, even with his massive library to keep him occupied the noble Walewski grew bored. Perhaps this is why he decided to marry again and pursue the young neighbor girl who was a beauty.

He threw a ball in Marie's honor at her coming of age.  She was not attracted to the old Anastase Colinna Walewski, but she decided to marry him thinking of the welfare of her family. She was either sixteen and a half or seventeen and a half and married him in either 1803 or 1805. What followed was some time at home followed by a long honeymoon in the warmer weather of Italy, where they included Rome.

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