Desiree

by Annemarie Selinko

  ‘No, Oscar, Stockholm has a King of its own.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling.’

  The guns thundered again and made Oscar jump. Frightened, he pressed his face against my neck.

  ‘You mustn’t be afraid,’ I said, ‘they are only shots in honour of the Emperor.’

  Oscar raised his head. ‘I am not afraid of guns, Mama. I want to be a Marshal of France some day, like Papa.’

  The snowflakes continued to dance. I didn’t know why, but out of the past the rhythm of the falling snow brought the horse-face of Persson back to my mind.

  ‘Perhaps you will be a good silk merchant like your grandfather,’ I said.

  ‘But I want to be a Marshal. Or a sergeant. Papa told me that he had been a sergeant. And so was Fernand.’ Something important seemed to have occurred to him. ‘Fernand told me that I may go to the coronation with him to-morrow.’

  ‘Oh no, Oscar. Children must not be taken into the church. Papa and Mama did not get a ticket for you.’

  ‘But Fernand wants to be outside the church with me. Fernand says we can see the whole procession from there. The Empress and Aunt Julie and – and, Mama, the Emperor with his crown. Fernand promised me that.’

  ‘It’s far too cold, Oscar. You can’t stand outside Notre-Dame for hours. And there will be such a crowd that a little man like you would be trampled under foot.’

  ‘Please, Mama, please, please!’

  ‘I shall tell you later exactly what it was like, Oscar.’

  He put his little arms round me and gave me a sweet and rather wet kiss. ‘Please, Mama, if I promise to drink all my milk every night?’

  ‘No, really, Oscar, it’s impossible. It’s so cold and you’ve got a cough. Be sensible, darling.’

  ‘But, Mama, if I drink the whole bottle of nasty cough cure, Mama, may I go?’

  ‘In this town of Stockholm,’ I began, ‘close to the North Pole there is a big lake with green ice-floes—’ But he was no longer interested in Stockholm.

  ‘Mama, Mama, I want to see the coronation, please, please, Mama!’ He was sobbing now.

  ‘When you are grown up, then you may go and see the coronation.’

  Sceptically Oscar asked: ‘Is the Emperor going to be crowned again later?’

  ‘No – o – o. We shall go to see another coronation, Oscar, you and I, I promise you that. And it’ll be a much more beautiful coronation than the one to-morrow.’

  ‘Madame de la Maréchale is not to talk nonsense to the boy!’ came Marie’s voice out of the dark behind us. ‘Come on, Oscar, drink up your milk and cough medicine.’ She lit the lamp, and the snowflakes became invisible in the dark outside.

  Later on, when Jean-Baptiste came up to say good night to Oscar, he started complaining again. ‘Mama won’t let me go with Fernand to-morrow to see the Emperor with his crown.’

  ‘Nor will I,’ said Jean-Baptiste.

  ‘Mama says that she’ll take me to another coronation later on when I’m grown up. Are you coming too, Papa?’

  ‘Whose coronation is that?’ asked Jean-Baptiste.

  ‘Mama, whose coronation is that?’

  I didn’t know how to extricate myself. So I put on a very mysterious air and said: ‘I’m not telling now. It’ll be a surprise. Good night, darling, sweet dreams.’

  Jean-Baptiste carefully tucked him up and extinguished the light.

  For the first time for I don’t know how long I prepared our evening meal myself. Marie, Fernand and the kitchen maid had gone out, probably to one of the free shows that were running in all the theatres of Paris. Yvette, my new personal maid, had disappeared long before the others. I had had to engage Yvette because Julie insisted that the wife of a Marshal of France must neither do her hair nor her sewing herself. Before the Revolution Yvette had been lady’s maid to some duchess or other and so, naturally, she thought herself several rungs above me in the social ladder.

  After the meal we did the washing up and Jean-Baptiste put on Marie’s pinafore and helped me dry. ‘I always used to help my mother,’ he said with a smile.

  Turning serious he went on: ‘I heard from Joseph that you had a visit from the Emperor’s physician.’

  I sighed. ‘In this town everybody knows everything about everybody else.’

  ‘No, not everybody. But the Emperor knows a lot about a lot of people. That’s the way he governs.’

  Falling asleep I heard the guns thunder once more. Dreamily it went through my head that I would have been very happy in a country cottage near Marseilles raising chickens. But neither Napoleon, Emperor of the French, nor Bernadotte, Marshal of France, would have been interested in chicken-farming.

  I woke up to find Jean-Baptiste shaking me by the shoulders. It was still quite dark. ‘What is it? Is it time to get up?’

  ‘No,’ said my husband, ‘but you were crying so bitterly in your sleep that I had to wake you up. Did you have a bad dream?’

  I tried to recall my dream, and slowly in the telling it came back to me. ‘I went to a coronation with Oscar, and we had to get into the church at all costs. But there were so many people outside that we couldn’t get to the doors and were pushed and shoved and jostled. The crowd grew bigger and bigger, I held Oscar by the hand and all of a sudden the thousands of people turned into chickens which got under our feet and cackled for all they were worth.’

  ‘And that was so dreadful?’ he asked soothingly, tenderly.

  ‘Yes, dreadful,’ I said, snuggling up to him, ‘dreadful. The chickens cackled like – like – yes, like people when they are curious and agitated. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was the crowns.’

  ‘The crowns.’

  ‘Yes. Oscar and I were wearing crowns, and they were awfully heavy. I could hardly keep my head up; I knew all the time that my crown would fall down the moment I bent my head the slightest little bit. And Oscar too had a crown which was much too heavy for him. I could see how he stiffened his neck to keep his head straight, and I was so afraid the child might collapse under the weight of the crown. And then, thank God, you woke me up. It was such an awful dream.’

  He put his arm under my head and kept me close to him. ‘It is quite natural that you should have dreamt of a coronation. In two hours’ time we shall have to get up and get ready for the ceremony in Notre-Dame. But however did the chickens get into your dreams?’

  I didn’t try to answer that, I tried to forget the nasty dream and go to sleep again—

  It had stopped snowing. But it was much colder than last night. Yet in spite of that the people of Paris had started collecting outside Notre-Dame and lining the streets through which the gilded equipages of the Imperial family were to pass from five o’clock onwards.

  Jean-Baptiste and I were to go to the Archbishop’s palace, where the procession would be formed. While Fernand was helping Jean-Baptiste with his uniform Yvette arranged the white ostrich feathers in my hair. I thought I looked dreadful in this headgear, like a circus horse.

  Every two seconds Jean-Baptiste called from his corner, ‘Are you ready, Désirée?’ But the ostrich feathers refused to stay put on my head.

  Marie burst into the middle of my dressing difficulties with a little parcel which, she said, had just been delivered by a lackey of the Imperial Household. Yvette placed it before me on the dressing-table. Under Marie’s watchful eyes I stripped off the paper cover and a casket made of red leather appeared. Jean-Baptiste came up and stood behind me, and our eyes met in the mirror over my dressing-table. Without a doubt, I thought, Napoleon has thought of some more terrible things and Jean-Baptiste will be furious. My hands shook so badly that I couldn’t open the casket. At last Jean-Baptiste said, ‘Let me do it,’ pressed a little lock and the casket opened.

  ‘Oh!’ sighed Yvette, and Marie muttered admiringly ‘Mhm!’ The casket showed a box of gold, glittering gold with an eagle with outspread wings engraved on its top. Uncomprehendingly I stared at it.

&n
bsp; ‘Open it,’ said Jean-Baptiste.

  I fumbled awkwardly with the top of the box. At last it came off. The box was lined with red velvet, and what shone out at me from among the velvet folds? Gold coins!

  I turned round to Jean-Baptiste. ‘Do you understand?’

  Jean-Baptiste didn’t answer. He stared indignantly at the coins. His face had turned pale.

  ‘They are gold francs,’ I said, and absent-mindedly I took out the top layer of coins and spread them on my dressing-table, around and between hair brushes, pieces of jewellery and my powder bowl. In doing so I heard a slight rustle and discovered a folded piece of paper among the coins. I pulled it out and opened it and recognised at once Napoleon’s writing, his big untidy letters.

  ‘Madame la Maréchale’ it said, ‘in Marseilles you were so very kind as to lend me your personal savings to make the journey to Paris possible for me. This journey turns out to have been a journey into good fortune. On this day I feel the need to pay my debt and to thank you. N.’ A postscript added: ‘The sum involved at that time was 98 francs.’

  ‘Ninety-eight francs in gold, Jean-Baptiste,’ I said, ‘but I only lent him paper money at the time, assignats.’ I noticed to my relief that Jean-Baptiste was smiling. ‘I had saved up my pocket money to buy a decent uniform for the Emperor; his field uniform was too shabby. But then he needed the money to pay debts, and the bills for Marshals Junot and Marmont which they had run up in their hotels. Otherwise they couldn’t have got away.’

  Shortly before nine o’clock we arrived at the Archbishop’s palace. In an upper room we met the other Marshals and their wives. We drank hot coffee and watched from the windows the exciting scenes outside before the portal of Notre-Dame. There six battalions of grenadiers supported by hussars of the Guards were trying to keep order. Inside the Cathedral feverish hammering was still going on. A double row of soldiers of the National Guard kept the curious crowds at bay. Jean-Baptiste had been told by Murat, who, as Governor of Paris, was in command of these troops, that 80,000 men had been mobilised to guard the Emperor’s coronation procession.

  At about this time the Prefect of Police closed all streets leading to the Cathedral to vehicular traffic. Thus it came about that the ladies and gentlemen invited to attend had to walk the last stretch to Notre-Dame. What was worse, whereas we, the participants in the procession, were allowed to leave our coats in the Archbishop’s palace, these other guests had to leave theirs in their coaches, and had to arrive at Notre-Dame without any overcoats. It made me shiver to see the ladies trip through the cold weather in the thinnest of silk robes.

  Something funny happened. One group of these unfortunate ladies ran into a knot of red-robed High Court judges. These gentlemen gallantly opened their wide robes to grant the freezing ladies some protection in their folds. We could hear the screaming laughter of the spectators through the closed windows.

  A few carriages were allowed through, however, those of the foreign Princes who were considered guests of honour. ‘Third raters,’ said Jean-Baptiste to me, and pointed out to me the Margrave of Baden and the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, and immediately behind him the Prince of Hesse-Homburg, for all of whom Napoleon pays travelling and hotel expenses.

  How good Jean-Baptiste is at pronouncing those impossible Teutonic names, I thought, leaving the window for another cup of coffee. Meanwhile some dispute had arisen by the door. But I became attentive only when Madame Lannes came and told me: ‘I believe, dear Madame Bernadotte, that the argument by the door concerns you.’

  True enough, it did! A gentleman in a brown jacket and a somewhat disarranged scarf was trying in vain to slip through the guards by the door. ‘I must see my little sister, Madame Bernadotte, I must, I must.’

  It was Etienne. When he caught sight of me he shouted like someone drowning: ‘Help, Eugenie, help!’

  ‘Why don’t you allow my brother in?’ I asked one of the guards.

  He mumbled something about ‘Strict order to admit only participants in the procession’.

  I pulled Etienne into the room and called Jean-Baptiste. Between us we sat Etienne, who was perspiring with agitation, in an arm-chair.

  He had been travelling day and night to get here for the coronation. ‘You know, Eugenie,’ he said, ‘how close the Emperor is to me. He is the friend of my youth, the man on whom I had staked all my hopes—’ he panted, a picture of misery.

  ‘In that case, why are you so miserable?’ I asked. ‘Your friend of your young days will be crowned Emperor any moment now, what else do you want?’

  ‘To see it,’ he implored me, ‘to see the ceremony.’

  Jean-Baptiste said soberly: ‘You ought to have come earlier to Paris, brother-in-law. There are no tickets left now.’

  Etienne, who has grown very stout these last years, wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘The bad weather,’ he said, ‘it held up my coach every few hours.’

  ‘Perhaps Joseph might help,’ I said to Jean-Baptiste in an undertone, ‘we can’t do anything now.’

  ‘Joseph is with His Majesty in the Tuileries and can’t see anybody,’ wailed Etienne. ‘I’ve been there.’

  I tried to soothe him, and said: ‘Listen, Etienne, you never liked Napoleon very much, you can’t really be all that keen on seeing his coronation.’

  At that Etienne exploded. ‘How can you say such a thing! Don’t you know that in Marseilles I was his most intimate, his best friend, his—’

  ‘I only know that you were disgusted because I wanted to get engaged to him.’

  ‘Really?’ said Jean-Baptiste, and slapped my brother’s shoulder. ‘Were you really? Did you want to forbid Désirée’s engagement? Etienne, brother-in-law, you are my friend indeed, and if the church were so crowded that I had to sit you on my knee I’d take you, I’d get you in.’ Laughingly he turned round and shouted: ‘Junot, Berthier, we must smuggle Monsieur Etienne Clary into the Cathedral. Come on, we’ve done more difficult things than that.’

  From the window I watched brother Etienne, under cover of three Marshals’ uniforms, disappear inside Notre-Dame. After a little while the uniforms reappeared. Etienne, I was told, had been found a seat among the members of the Diplomatic Corps, next to the green-turbaned Turkish Minister in fact.

  At this moment the Papal procession came into view, headed by a battalion of dragoons and followed by Swiss Guards. Behind him came a monk on a donkey, holding aloft a cross. We heard Berthier murmur, ‘That donkey costs 67 francs per day to hire,’ and Jean-Baptiste laughed. The monk was followed by the Pope’s coach drawn by eight grey horses. We recognised the coach at once as the State equipage of the Empress, which had been put at the Pope’s disposal.

  The Pope entered the Archbishop’s palace, but we did not see him. In one of the ground-floor rooms he put on his insignia, and, leading a group of the highest Church dignitaries, he left the palace and walked slowly towards the portal of Notre-Dame. We heard someone open a window. The crowd was silent; only some women knelt down, whereas most men did not even uncover their heads. Once the Pope stopped, said a few words and made the sign of the cross over a young man who was standing, with head lifted high, in the front rank. We were told later that the Pope had let his eyes rest smilingly on this young man and those around him and said, ‘I don’t think that an old man’s blessing can do any harm.’ Twice more he made the sign of the cross in the air, before he disappeared inside the Cathedral. The robes of the cardinals floated after him like a red wave.

  ‘What is happening in Notre-Dame now?’ I wanted to know.

  Somebody explained to me that on the Pope’s entry the choir of the Imperial church intoned ‘Tu es Petrus’ and that the Pope was going to take his seat on a throne to the left of the altar. ‘And now the Emperor ought to be here,’ my informant added. But the Emperor kept them waiting for another hour yet, the people of Paris, the regiments on duty, the illustrious guests and the head of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

  At last gun salvoes announced the ap
proach of the Emperor. I don’t know why, but suddenly everybody fell silent. In silence we prepared to leave the palace, and when I put a last dab of powder on my face I noticed to my surprise that my hands shook.

  ‘Vive l’Empereur! Vive l’Empereur!’ At first it sounded like the rushing sound of wind carried over a great distance: it grew louder and louder, and finally it came roaring round the next corner.

  Murat appeared first, on horseback in the gold-braided uniform of the Governor of Paris: behind him came dragoons, and heralds in purple tunics with gold bees painted on their batons. I stared, mesmerised by this purple splendour. ‘That,’ I thought, ’is all for the man for whom I once wanted to buy a uniform because his old one was too shabby …’

  Then came one gilded equipage after another, each drawn by six horses, unloading first Despreaux, then the Emperor’s adjutants, then the ministers, and finally the Imperial Princesses all in white and with tiny crowns in their hair. Julie came to me and pressed my hand with her ice-cold fingers. ‘I hope everything will be all right,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered in a whisper, ‘but look after your crown. It’s sitting on one side.’

  When the Emperor’s carriage turned the corner it was like the sun suddenly rising over a grey winter scene, such was the splendour of its colour and its ornaments. Eight horses with white plumes drew it majestically. It came to a stop. We had gone out of the palace to form a guard of honour.

  The Emperor sat in the right-hand corner of the carriage. Dressed in purple velvet, wide Spanish knee-breeches and white stockings strewn with diamonds, he gave the effect of a stranger, a man in disguise, an operatic hero with short legs as he descended. The Empress on his left, however, looked more beautiful than ever. The biggest diamonds I had ever seen shone from her babyish curls. She smiled, a radiating, youthful, oh so youthful smile, and I could see in spite of her heavy make-up that her smile was genuine. The Emperor had married her in church, he was having her crowned. What had she to fear now?

  When Joseph and Louis went past me I couldn’t believe my eyes. The way they had got themselves up! All in white from top to toe! But Joseph, who, I noticed, had grown fat, strode into the palace grinning from ear to ear, whereas Louis waddled along gloomily and on flat feet.