The Second Empress: A Novel of Napoleon's Court

by Michelle Moran

  The girl turns a little pale, and her quill hesitates above the paper.

  “Write!” I exclaim. I don’t care that her friends are among the women who shall never be invited back.

  She does as she’s told, then waits for me to continue.

  “I also want him to know that Paul …” I take a ragged breath. What? Paul left me for a handful of dirt and memories in Saint-Domingue? That in the end, he abandoned me like everyone else? “That Paul … is not coming back,” I conclude.

  The girl glances at me. “Monsieur Moreau is gone for good?”

  “It would appear that way,” I snap. Although there was one moment, on the balcony of the Hôtel de Crillon, when I could have sworn he was standing there, watching me with my arms raised above the crowds. It’s not impossible to think he might have heard Napoleon announce that the slave trade throughout the French Empire was henceforth abolished. If he was anywhere in Paris, then surely he would have gone to the Crillon to hear my brother speak.

  I imagine the look on his face when he heard the news. It’s what he’d been waiting for, why he persisted in quoting Rousseau to my brother long after Napoleon warned him that France’s colonial slaves would never be freed. But as a prisoner on the island of Elba, my brother realized the value of freedom.

  If Paul were here now, we would be speaking of this. He would bring me my medicine, then we would read together from Cinna, or Racine, or his favorite—The Social Contract. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”

  “Is there anything else you would like me to add, Your Highness?”

  I lie back on the pillows and think. “Tell him not to worry. We will retrieve his son, even if it means destroying Austria.”

  CHAPTER 36

  PAUL MOREAU

  Haiti

  “Bondye bon.”

  HAITIAN PROVERB MEANING “GOD IS GOOD”

  I SEE THE GLOW OF THE HOUSES BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, and as the ship sails into the harbor of Port-au-Prince, I watch the dawn break over the sleeping city. It has been thirteen years and forty-seven days, but I am home.

  The captain shouts that the ship has docked, but I wait at the rails to see the sun rise over the forested hills, and when the light touches the farthest reaches of the bay, I pick up my leather bag and disembark.

  Everything is familiar and foreign, all at once. I recognize the smell of the charcoal fires on the shore, and the scent of cooking fish, snapper or kingfish. Even the heavy rolling mist looks like an old friend. A coachman recognizes from the quality of my dress that I’ll be needing a carriage, and I pay him to take me to the Moreau house.

  “I’m sorry, monsieur.” He speaks to me in French, the language of our nation, despite our freedom from their tyranny. “I don’t know of any place like that.”

  “It was a farm,” I say, “just outside the city. White farmer, black mistress—”

  He scratches his head. “There were plenty of those types before the war. They’re all gone now,” he says regretfully. “What have you come here for?” He glances at my dress and laughs. “Not many Haitians on this island like you.”

  “I’ve been away for some time. I’m hoping to return to my family’s farm.”

  The coachman looks profoundly sorry. “I hope you don’t expect to find anyone alive.”

  I lower my head. “No.”

  He nods. “There might be a building, but that’s all there’ll be.”

  I climb into the coach and watch the city of Port-au-Prince wake up. She has been nearly razed to the ground, and on every corner there is evidence of her destruction. But my people are rebuilding. For each burned-out building, there is a brand-new shop. And the roads, which were almost destroyed during the war, have been repaved.

  We pass the church where my father took me to school, and the courthouse where my mother received her freedom. Then we stop at a house with a white sign at its front, and I shout through the window, “This is it!”

  He opens the door, and I read the black lettering: Maison Moreau.

  I pay the old coachman and blink back my tears.

  “No shame in crying,” he tells me. “If we don’t cry for the dead, then what will we cry for?”

  Every house on my street has been abandoned. Where there were farms, now there are weeds and fallen trees. I step onto the porch where my father taught me how to carve leather and wood, and make my way into the house that sheltered me for more than seventeen years. Every piece of furniture is gone, looted by the French or by impoverished Haitians.

  “Hello?” I call, but there is no one. Even the rats are silent.

  I stand in the doorway to my father’s salon and can’t believe what has happened. In thirteen years, the room has managed to shrink. What had seemed like a palace is really just four small walls covered in paper.

  I turn from the salon and make my way to my old chamber. The bed is still here! Not a bed, but a cot, with strings for a mattress and an old wooden frame. And they left my armoire. I carved it with my father when I was eleven years old. I go to the cabinet and open the doors, and there, like some ancient treasure from Egypt, is a woman’s comb. I take it out and hold it in my palm, flat and cold like the woman it belonged to.

  I wonder where she is and what she’s doing now.

  I sit on the bed and remember the captain’s words on the ship: “The emperor has won the Battle of Ligny. Only God and His angels can stop that man now.” But I don’t know. Love can inspire men to great feats. And Marie-Louise is deeply loved. Her father won’t give up so quickly. Nor, I hear, will Count Neipperg.

  The Empress Marie-Louise once asked me if I believed in ghosts. “I find it hard to believe in something I’ve never seen,” I told her. But perhaps ghosts aren’t meant to be seen. Perhaps they are meant to be felt.

  I walk to the back of the house and stand in the empty fields. The dry weeds look golden in the soft morning light, and the palms sway gently in the early breeze. For all the kingdoms the Bonapartes conquered, they never had riches like this.

  CHAPTER 37

  MARIA LUCIA

  Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna

  “There is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men.”

  —NAPOLEON

  I WON’T LEAVE.”

  “You must, Your Majesty!”

  “Under whose command?” I ask. Metternich watches me furiously, but he will never have power over my movements again. I look around the Council Chamber, crowded with faces I remember from my girlhood, and none of them dare to challenge me. I turn to Metternich. “You may have convinced Napoleon that I would make a fine bride in order to further your interests,” I say. “You may even act as my brother’s regent when I am gone. But you are finished controlling my destiny. I have a son, and it is my duty to keep him where I believe he is safest.”

  The prince turns red with indignation. “And what, exactly, are these interests of mine, Your Majesty?”

  “I’m sure your banker could tell us. Napoleon desperately needed a royal bride, and you were kind enough to provide him with one.” I savor my reply. Then I rise from the council table, and the men rise with me. “If the British lose this battle,” I tell them, “I will leave Vienna. But until it is done, I will remain at Schönbrunn.”

  There is stunned silence as I leave the Council Chamber to find Maria with Sigi and Franz in the gardens.

  “What happened?” she asks when she sees my face.

  I sit beside her next to the little pond and watch my son with the ducks. “Metternich wants us to flee,” I say quietly. “He believes this battle is a turning point.”

  “Where is it being fought?”

  “In the Netherlands, at Waterloo. He says it may decide this empire’s fate. There are two hundred thousand men.”

  I don’t sleep. I pace the floors, thinking about Adam somewhere to the south and my father with his army in the north. But there is no word on Saturday, before the battle’s begun, and nothing on Sunday, despite my prayers in
the church. Five days pass before Austria’s given any word.

  And then he comes.

  I open my chamber door, and Adam is there, dressed in Austria’s bright red and gold. For several moments, I am too afraid to ask. Then he smiles widely, and I begin to weep. He pulls me into his embrace, and all the strain of these past six years is lifted. I will never have to fear Napoleon again … Franz will never be taken …

  “He lost the Battle of Waterloo,” he says. “Fifty thousand men dead. He will be banished to the island of Saint Helena to live out his days.”

  I close my eyes and exhale. “And France?”

  “Has been restored to the Bourbon king.”

  So it is true. The world will never know Bonaparte rule again. I lead him inside, and we stand at the window overlooking the lake. Someday I will paint a scene of this moment, and I will call it Liberation.

  EPILOGUE

  MARIE-LOUISE, DUCHESS OF PARMA

  Parma, May 1821

  I KNOW BY THE WAY THE BOY WALKS ACROSS THE FIELD that his message is urgent. It isn’t anything in his face, un-lined by worry and still supple with youth. It isn’t even the way he walks—his steps steady, his eyes focused. It’s something in the way he holds his letter, as if the contents are so searing, he can’t even bear to touch it.

  He passes through the heather, and I admire the way the sun gleams in his hair, bronzing the tips of his dark curls. When he reaches my easel, he isn’t sure whom to approach. The father of my two youngest children, Count Neipperg, who is bouncing his son and daughter on his knees while I paint, or me, the Duchess of Parma. He looks from one of us to the other, then decides the message is best suited for me.

  “From His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Francis.”

  I glance at Adam, but my husband frowns. My father’s health is good, and there’s no reason to believe there’s political upset in Austria. I break open the seal and skim the contents. “It’s happened,” I whisper. I walk to where Adam is sitting on a blanket and show him the news.

  The first line is all he needs. He puts down our children, who are four and two, leaving them with Sigi. Then he rises to comfort me, squeezing my hand. “Six years.”

  “Does Your Majesty care to respond?” the boy asks.

  I shake my head. “No. Not now.” I sit down at my easel and take a few moments to comprehend what has happened.

  Napoleon is dead.

  Never again will there be a night when I lie awake with Adam, wondering if the Bonapartes will return to seek vengeance on our family. Month after month, year after year, my husband’s shadow has loomed across the ocean to darken our lives. Today he is my husband no longer.

  I look at my beautiful children, Albertine and William, who will never have to know the despair of always sleeping with one eye open. But my joy is not complete. For as relieved as I am, my eldest, Franz, is now without the father he was born to.

  Adam raises my hand to his lips, then places it tenderly on his heart. “Austria can sleep well tonight.”

  “And Parma,” I say, since this is now our home, nestled between the Kingdom of Sardinia and Tuscany. “Do you remember that Francesco Guardi painting?” I ask him.

  “In Vienna,” he replies.

  “There were ships being tossed by the waves. Dangerous, but beautiful somehow.”

  “Yes.” He loves paintings as I do.

  “The sea is finally calm.”

  AFTERWORD

  Napoleon

  A year after signing the Treaty of Fontainebleau, Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena, a remote island half the size of Elba located in the Atlantic. This time only thirty people accompanied him. He arrived with more than two thousand books and spent much of his time reading plays and dictating his memoirs to General Bertrand. One of his recollections was the fact that he had “never loved … except perhaps Joséphine, [and only a little at that].” He also regretted his marriage to Marie-Louise, particularly after news arrived that she was living openly with Adam Neipperg in her new Duchy of Parma.

  All these regrets did not stop him, however, from forging new relationships with women. Even on the island of Saint Helena, he managed to seduce Madame de Montholon, his dearest friend’s wife, resulting in the woman’s separation from her husband on her return to France. But Napoleon’s days of romancing did not last long. The island—cold, damp, and infested with both mosquitoes and rats—did little for Napoleon’s health. He began to complain of stomach pain and experienced severe vomiting and chills. When he was diagnosed with hepatitis, he began to use leeches and large doses of calomel, making him even sicker.

  On May 6, 1821, six years after he arrived on Saint Helena, the former emperor of France and self-proclaimed successor to Alexander the Great died at fifty-one years old. Reportedly, his last words included “Joséphine,” just as Joséphine’s last words were “Bonaparte … Elba … the king of Rome.” An autopsy performed by British doctors concluded that the emperor had died of stomach cancer. Since his death, some historians have argued that Napoleon was poisoned, citing the high levels of arsenic found in his hair and the numerous enemies he had made both on and off the island (one of them being Monsieur Montholon). Still others have suggested that the arsenic found in his hair was the result not of poison but of a coloring known as Schalers Green, which contained copper arsenite and could be found in the wallpaper on Saint Helena. In a comprehensive article published in 2011 by Dr. Alessandro Lugli et al., called “The Medical Mystery of Napoleon Bonaparte: An Interdisciplinary Exposé,” the authors present convincing evidence that in the last six months of his life, there was no dramatic rise in arsenic levels in Napoleon’s body, which would certainly have occurred had he been poisoned.

  Whatever his final cause of death, Napoleon’s burial took place on the island, far from the empire he ruled and the family still plotting for his return back home. In 1840 the French king sent his son, Prince François, to retrieve the emperor’s body so it could be interred at Les Invalides in Paris. His tomb remains there to this day.

  Marie-Louise

  Once it became clear that Napoleon’s exile to Saint Helena would be permanent, Marie-Louise settled in Parma with her lover, Adam Neipperg, and their first child was born in 1817. Although much of Europe frowned on their relationship, a second child was born to them in 1819, and on Napoleon’s death two years later, Marie-Louise and Adam Neipperg were married. They went on to have one more child. This was clearly the happiest period of Marie-Louise’s life. “Were I not to commit the sin of pride,” the Duchess of Parma said, “I could say I deserve it, because God knows all I have suffered in life.” Marie-Louise died at the age of fifty-six and is buried near her father and elder son, Napoleon II (who died of tuberculosis at twenty-one), in the Imperial Crypt.

  Pauline

  After her brother’s banishment to Saint Helena, Pauline and her mother moved to Italy, where Pauline’s husband, Camillo Borghese, was living happily with his mistress. On her arrival at Camillo’s home in Rome, Pauline ordered that her husband’s mistress be thrown out, and when Camillo refused, she appealed to the pope for help. When the pope instructed the hapless Camillo to return to Pauline, there was nothing for him to do but bid farewell to the woman who had been his companion for more than ten years.

  There is strong evidence that during the last years of her life, Pauline was taking medication for venereal disease. At the time, one of the most popular medications for both syphilis and the clap (also known as gonorrhea) was mercury. Today we know that taking mercury can lead to mental deterioration and eventually madness. In fact, the term “mad as a hatter” was coined after hatters working with mercury were seen to develop dementia. It’s possible that some of Pauline’s more eccentric behaviors stemmed from mercury poisoning. If this is true, then she was suffering mentally as well as physically.

  Yet throughout her many bouts with illness, it was Camillo who tended to her, much as Paul had before his return to Haiti, and slowly, a grudging respect developed betwe
en Pauline and her husband. Although her health continued to deteriorate, Pauline hosted daily parties at her home, and her legendary beauty seemed to be unaffected. Recalling her afternoon with Napoleon’s famous sister, the Irish novelist Lady Morgan wrote, “The day before we left Rome, we breakfasted at the Villa Paolina, with a circle composed of British nobility, of Roman princes and princesses, German Grandees and American merchants.… It is the most hospitable house in Rome.… No lady was ever so attended by Cardinals as the beautiful Pauline.”

  But the news of Napoleon’s death on Saint Helena came as a devastating blow to Pauline. After years of writing letters to the British prime minister, she had only recently received permission to visit her brother on his remote island in the Atlantic. Now it was too late. Suffering from cancer of the stomach, she succumbed to her illness on May 18, 1825, four years after Napoleon’s death. With her dying breath, Pauline instructed her ladies-in-waiting to be sure her hair and makeup were done after she expired.

  As for Paul, who served her so faithfully for thirteen years, his fate is unknown. But after his dramatic escape from Elba, Napoleon did indeed abolish the slave trade. It was one of the emperor’s first acts during his one-hundred-day return to power.

  Hortense

  With the final fall of the Bonapartes in 1815, Hortense was exiled from France for supporting Napoleon after his escape. When her lover, the Comte de Flahaut, requested her hand in marriage, she refused, afraid that divorcing Louis Bonaparte would mean losing her beloved sons. It must have been a terrible choice for Hortense, since in 1811 she had secretly given birth to their son, the future Duc de Morny. But her refusal meant she was free to take her sons to Switzerland, where she settled near Lake Constance and proceeded to write her memoirs. Hortense died in 1837, fifteen years before her son, Charles-Louis-Napoleon, became Emperor Napoleon III.