The Second Empress: A Novel of Napoleon's Court

by Michelle Moran

  “We are almost at Elba, Your Highness. Would you like to come see?”

  I follow Madame de Montbreton, the youngest of my twenty-five ladies-in-waiting, to the railings, and catch sight of the island of Elba. In the warm autumn light, it’s pretty to behold. But it’s no place fit for the emperor of France. From the Roman Empire to this tiny isle. Six months ago, Portoferraio welcomed my brother with cannons and a parade. Today the little port is still excited, thronged with people who have come out to see the arrival of my ship. I search the faces, but no one familiar leaps out. Somewhere in those crowds is my brother. And with him is my mother, who has kept the title of Madame Mère. She arrived three months ago to comfort my brother in this terrible exile, and she has sworn never to leave his side until death.

  As we draw closer to the dock, I open my réticule and take out my mirror. I pinch my cheeks and wipe a stray hair from my brow. And as the ship is moored, I smooth my skirts.

  “There he is!” Madame de Montbreton exclaims. I follow her finger to a distant figure on the pier. It’s true. There is no mistaking him, though he has gained weight since. He is dressed in his favorite hat, with white pantaloons and a crisp military jacket. I hurry to the gangplank, and my women step back, allowing me to be the first to disembark. There are hundreds of people waiting on the shore, but he is the only one I have eyes for. Napoleon meets me midway on the pier. I run into his arms, embracing him as tightly as my black dress will allow.

  “Paoletta,” he says tenderly, then draws back. “Why are you wearing this? When we arrive, you will change into something lively.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty.” His eyes meet mine, and nothing has changed. “Where are you living?” I ask.

  “In the Palace of Mulini.” His brows raise. “You’ll see.”

  Our mother steps forward and embraces me warmly. “Paoletta.” Her lower lip is trembling. “Mio Dio, you actually came.”

  “Of course.”

  “None of your siblings have.”

  “Then they’re not worthy of being called Bonapartes,” I say.

  My brother escorts us to the imperial carriage, and in a long procession of wagons and coaches, we make our way through the narrow streets. “So tell me the news,” Napoleon says. But this isn’t the time. How do I tell him that our new king has made Hortense the Duchess of Saint-Leu, or that her brother, Eugène, has taken his family to Munich? Has he heard that his wife has taken his son back to Austria? That Joséphine …

  My mother complains, “They tell us nothing on this island!”

  I look out the window of the carriage, and there, perched on a rugged cliff, is the Palace of Mulini. The carriages stop, and Napoleon offers first my mother, then me, his hand.

  “Welcome to the Palazzina dei Mulini,” he announces, and I can hear the sarcasm in his voice. The Palace of Mulini is a two-storied villa overlooking the sea. From the courtyard, the entire harbor can be seen, and all seven of the ships that comprise his navy.

  “There’s the Piazza Cavour,” Napoleon points out, “and the Piazza della Reppublica. The Medici fortified this island,” he tells us. “Those walls are almost four hundred years old. Alonso will show you to your chambers,” he tells me. “Tonight, at seven o’clock, we dance!”

  I follow the young chamberlain through the ancient villa. “How old is Mulini?”

  “Almost a hundred years,” he says proudly. “It was built for the Medici in 1724.”

  I had ancient Egyptian tiles in Château de Neuilly in better condition. I recall my beautiful home in Paris, which now belongs to our new king, Louis XVIII. I imagine him enjoying its winter gardens, and strolling through the chambers, and I feel sick. But I have come to Elba to be a spark of light. I cannot sink into despair.

  “These will be Your Highness’s rooms,” Alfonso says. “Your trunks will be delivered when—”

  “I will need them now.”

  He hesitates. “Your Highness?”

  “The emperor has commanded me to change my dress, and I must do so at once.”

  “Of—of course,” the young man stutters. Immediately, he is gone. I go to the window and look out over the placid Tyrrhenian Sea.

  “What is it you were waiting to tell me?”

  I gasp. “Napoleon.”

  He strides into the room, silent as always, and seats himself on the leather chaise. For a crumbling villa, the furnishings are well done. I suppose that’s something. I open the window to let in the sea breeze and wonder how I should tell him.

  “If it’s terrible, just tell it to me at once. I don’t like guessing.”

  I sit on the other end of the couch and nod. “Then you should know. Joséphine is dead.”

  He is still for what seems like an eternity, looking at the empty wall and breathing deeply. Then he covers his eyes and rises from the chaise.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There will be no dancing tonight or any other night!”

  “Wait!”

  But he puts out his arm to stop me from following him.

  “It wasn’t a painful death,” I say. “Fever.”

  He turns to me in the hall. “July?”

  “August.”

  “Three months after my exile,” he realizes, and puts a hand on his heart.

  He loved her in a way he has never loved me.

  FOR THREE DAYS, even my mother can’t reach him. Then, on the fourth day, I hear a creaking in the hall, and slowly someone opens my door. “Napoleon!”

  He hasn’t bathed since we met. His hair is entangled and his face is unshaven. But there’s a fierce determination in his eyes. “Paoletta, I have a son,” he says. “And I have the jewels in my coat. The Allies have left me with this small toy kingdom. But even toys can be dangerous.” He puts his lips to my ear, and a chill goes down my back. “I need you,” he says, and I close my eyes.

  Portoferraio, February 26, 1815.

  To General Lapi,

  I am leaving the island of Elba. I have been extremely satisfied with the conduct of the inhabitants. I confide to them the safety of this country, to which I attach a great importance. I cannot give them a greater mark of confidence than in leaving my mother and my sister in their care, after the departure of the troops. The members of the Junta, and all the inhabitants of the island, may count upon my affection and upon my special protection.

  Napoleon

  CHAPTER 33

  PAUL MOREAU

  Paris February 1815

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO SELL THE TRUNKS AS WELL, MONSIEUR?”

  I look at the empty boxes and smile. “Everything.”

  The owner glances up at me in surprise. “You don’t look like a man who’s fallen on hard times.”

  No, but then I dressed this morning with care. A red velvet coat with black breeches and boots. A black hat with a white ostrich plume on the side. “I have been very fortunate these last few years, monsieur. I am hoping the hard times are long behind me.”

  He smiles as if he understands, then hands me the price he’s willing to pay for all of my possessions. There is enormous freedom in selling it all. It’s a liberating feeling, which after all these months arranging my departure, is as heady as wine. Besides, what would I do in Haiti with a mahogany walking stick? Or a box made from mother-of-pearl?

  “Acceptable?” he asks, and I look down at the price.

  “Acceptable,” I say, and it is done. I am free.

  I wander the streets of Paris for one last evening, passing through the Boulevard du Temple with its countless shops and dimly lit cafés. Tomorrow my coach will leave for Le Havre, and from there a ship will take me to Haiti. I wonder if anyone here will remember my name in twenty years, or whether I’ll simply be remembered as the Princess Borghese’s black chamberlain. If I could choose, I would have them speak of me as the courtier who returned from the riches of Paris to the riches of his father’s land. I can employ two hundred workers when I return. And now that I am thirty, I feel old enough to inspire a natio
n.

  I make my way to the Café Procope and listen to the men argue politics. Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—some of the greatest thinkers in history have sat in these chairs. I raise my hand to the woman to order coffee when a sound like shrieking echoes outside. The patrons freeze in Café Procope, and then we rush to the door. Men are running through the streets. “What’s happening?” I shout, and a newsboy answers.

  “He’s escaped! Napoleon. And he’s marching with an army into Paris!”

  There are shouts from behind me, and the café’s owner closes his doors. I run to my room in the Hôtel de Crillon, and as word spreads, the city descends into chaos. Women and children are begging for coaches, screaming at drivers to stop, while men are locking up their homes and their shops. “It isn’t true,” a woman tells her friend, but when a cannon sounds in the distance, no one is in doubt.

  “He’s making his way to the Crillon,” people are saying. When I reach the Place de la Concorde, I see that it’s true. Thousands of Parisians have filled the square, and I push through the crowds to see for myself.

  He is standing on the balcony, dressed in his familiar black and gray. He raises his hat above his head, and the people around me cheer wildly for this man who, eight months before, was shouted down in the streets. Then someone steps beside him into the light. I catch my breath. She has never been more beautiful. She is dressed in white silk, with pearls in her dark hair and diamonds at her throat. She takes his hand, and she is absolutely radiant.

  “I have returned,” Napoleon shouts, “for the people of France, and I am here to serve the greatest empire in the world!”

  The sound in the courtyard is deafening. The lamps cast a golden sheen on the emperor, and from below, he appears like a gilded statue.

  “From this day forward, no man shall live in tyranny. As emperor,” he begins, and I hold my breath, “I abolish the slave trade to make all men free.”

  All around me, there is wild celebration, and tears blur my vision as I realize what he’s done. After thirteen years, he listened.

  “Furthermore,” he continues, and the masses grow silent, “whether it is under my rule or that of my son, there shall never be tyranny in France again!”

  Fireworks burst with perfect timing in the air, and from inside the Crillon music begins to play. He holds Pauline’s hand above his head in triumph, and I realize what he’s doing. It’s a show. There’s a different stage with different lines, but he’s freed the slaves not on any great principle of his, but because freedom is a suitable theme for this act.

  I turn from the spectacle and make my way across the Place de la Concorde.

  With a single word, I could be back in the Tuileries Palace, watching over Pauline as I have these thirteen years. I could be eating at the finest banquets and dancing beneath the glittering chandeliers in Fontainebleau. But whatever happens for the Bonapartes in France, I will not be here to see it.

  CHAPTER 34

  MARIA LUCIA, DUCHESS OF PARMA

  Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna

  “I wanted to rule the world and in order to do this I needed unlimited power … I needed world dictatorship.”

  —NAPOLEON

  THERE IS SHOUTING IN THE HALL, AND ALTHOUGH I CAN’T tell one voice from another, I am certain the men are my father’s generals.

  “What is it?” I sit up in our bed, and immediately Adam is dressing. He opens the door, and although we can never be married unless Napoleon dies, none of the soldiers are shocked to see him. All of Austria knows what he is to me, and what he’s become to Franz.

  “There is news from France,” says General Leiberich.

  “King Louis XVIII?” Adam asks. I hurry to find my robe, and when I reach the door, I hear, “There is no longer a king of France, lieutenant. Napoleon has taken the Tuileries Palace.”

  It isn’t possible. It is unthinkable. “There must be some mistake,” I say.

  “He waited until the Allied ships were gone,” he explains. “Then he disembarked at Cannes and collected soldiers as he went. He has an army of more than six thousand men.”

  Adam wraps his arms around my shoulders. “You’re going with Franz to hide outside Vienna.” Boots echo in the hall, and my father appears with Franz in his arms. I reach out and take my son in my arms, smoothing back the hair from his forehead as he cries. “Shhh …”

  “Your Majesty is welcome to join us in council,” General Leiberich tells me.

  I look to my father. “Shall I return him to the nursery?”

  “I want him with me so the men remember what they’re fighting for.”

  Adam waits for me to dress, and I think of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare. How the woman is asleep on her bed, her arms flung above her head so that her long neck is exposed. In the grips of her nightmare, she is helpless, while above her an incubus lies in wait. He will come for me. I know he will.

  Adam holds up my coat, and I slip my arms into the winter fur. When I turn to face him, he takes me by the shoulders. “He will never find you, Maria Lucia. I promise.”

  “He doesn’t have to, Adam. He only has to imprison my father. Do you think I could remain in hiding if that happened? And he will come for us first,” I warn. “I have his son—”

  “Listen to me!” There is something in his voice that is utterly compelling. “The Allies will rise up and defeat Napoleon. His army is weak. We will crush him.”

  I nod, and he takes my arm. We walk the dimly lit halls to my father’s Council Chamber. Six years ago I was called to this room for a similar purpose: to talk about a man who would decide my fate. Now, as I take a seat between Maria and Adam, I wonder if anything has changed. I look around the chamber, and once again every person of importance has been assembled except Ferdinand. In the crown prince’s place is Metternich, and we purposefully avoid each other’s gaze.

  “By now,” my father begins solemnly, “there is no one in this room who doesn’t know that the emperor of Elba has escaped. What we propose is to form a Seventh Coalition against the man who now claims the crown of France.”

  Everyone begins talking at once, and my father holds up his hands for silence.

  “On March first, Napoleon landed at Cannes with more than eight hundred men. These were soldiers he trained during his nine-month vacation on the island of Elba, which the British saw fit to give him while writing the Treaty of Fontainebleau.”

  General Leiberich stands. “We warned the Allies, telling them that an island off the coast of Italy would never be safe.”

  “But our voices were outnumbered,” my father adds, “which is why he escaped. He began at Grenoble, where few soldiers put up any resistance. But when he reached Laffray, he came across a battalion of the Fifth Regiment of the Line. Apparently the men were ready to shoot, but Napoleon opened his coat and stepped toward them, shouting, ‘Let him that has the heart kill his own emperor!’ Despite the king’s instructions to cage him like a wild beast and bring him to Paris, there was no further resistance throughout France, and in Lyons they paraded him through the streets.”

  The men in the chamber shake their heads, but this is the Bonaparte gift—theatrics, showmanship—and I have come to believe that it is as necessary to a ruler as his army or treasury.

  “What about the king’s soldiers in the Tuileries?” Metternich asks.

  “By the time he reached Paris,” my father replies, “the king had escaped. They stand with Napoleon now.”

  “So what does this mean for Austria?” Metternich asks.

  My father says grimly, “We are at war.”

  CHAPTER 35

  PAULINE BORGHESE

  Château de Chantilly, north of Paris June 1815

  I LOOK AT THE BRILLIANT SWATHS OF CLOTH LAID OUT ON the floor of the château and decide I want them all: the yellow silks, the rich velvets, the airy muslin. “Make me one in everything,” I decide.

  The tailor stares at me but doesn’t object. After all, we are restored. The Bonap
artes are once again the greatest family in Europe.

  “And where shall I have them delivered, Your Highness?”

  I smile at my lady-in-waiting, who’s been told to pack everything by tonight. “The Tuileries Palace.”

  The dream of Egypt isn’t dead. My brother has regained the throne of France despite every Allied soldier who stood in his path. The gods have given him a second chance, and this time it shall not be squandered. As for those who betrayed us after his star fell—let them reap the same ruthlessness they have sowed.

  I think of Marie-Louise fleeing to Austria with my brother’s son and want to rip that traitorous woman limb from limb. My brother can say whatever he wishes—She was following her father’s orders. She was obeying the Allies. But I know the truth. She fled into the arms of her two great loves—Count Neipperg and Austria. I asked him once how he could ever think to make her regent. I even warned him that she would give away Paris. The thought wouldn’t even enter her mind, he replied. She’ll be loyal to me. So where is she now? Where is the king of Rome?

  “Come,” I instruct my lady-in-waiting, who is seventeen and hoping for an important position in this new court. And why not? She is pretty and competent, and her family never hoisted the Bourbon flag—not once—after Napoleon was sent to Elba. She follows me into the lavish chamber that the Duc d’Aumale has furnished me with. The Bonapartes will not forget his hospitality in these uncertain times.

  “I wish to compose a letter to my brother,” I say. I lie on the bed while she dips her quill in the ink. “Ready?”

  “When you are, Your Highness.”

  “I want him to know that I will choose my new suite upon my official arrival in the Tuileries Palace. Not a single lady should be chosen for me, and I will not entertain any woman who abandoned me after his downfall.”