Her face was undoubtedly beautiful, in a unique sort of way. While all throughout Paris I’d noticed that the fashionable, affluent ladies powdered their hair and faces to make themselves ghostly pale—even going so far as to pencil thin blue lines on their faces to give the appearance of veins through translucent skin—Josephine wore the sun-drenched olive coloring of her Caribbean upbringing proudly. She wore no pale poudre, or powder, on her face or in her thick chestnut hair, and she’d even rouged her cheeks to add more color to her already-dark complexion. Her wide-set hazel eyes were lined in kohl, giving her an almost exotic appearance, and she’d smeared some dark shadow, I guessed elderberry, on her eyelids. Perhaps, I thought, Josephine had realized that the white powder so en vogue among the upper classes—even now, when the Versailles nobles who’d first made it fashionable were long in their mass graves—would never fully mask her olive coloring and the effects of her colonial childhood and so she’d decided to embrace the opposite effect. She had enough social cachet to do so; I guessed that she might even be setting an entirely new trend, undoing what Marie-Antoinette herself had done.
As we made our way to the dining room table, Josephine swayed her hips slowly, and the diaphanous material of her dress rippled like water as the skirt fluttered around her ankles. It was then that I first spotted her ankles and noticed that she wore open-toed sandals! In Paris, in winter! They were leather, with complicated crisscrossing straps, reminiscent of what one might expect on a gladiator’s foot in ancient Rome. I imagined Maman’s horrified gasp. No lady that I’d ever known would have dared to wear such sandals—flaunting bare feet and ankles!—to a formal luncheon in another lady’s home, no matter how warm the weather. It was especially unthinkable given the layer of snow on the streets outside. I turned to my sister, my mouth falling open, and noted that she had seen the same thing.
“Josephine has the most perfect little feet,” Napoleon said, his eagle eyes catching the wordless exchange between my sister and me. “A childhood running barefoot over soft Caribbean grasses, not clopping around in too-tight heels. Isn’t that right, my little Creole?”
She smiled through her blush, lifting a hand to her mouth before letting out a small giggle. “I’m afraid it’s true. I just can’t bring myself to squeeze my poor feet into those instruments of torture that you French ladies call shoes.” Her voice was as warm and smooth as her skin tone, and her accent had a melodic cadence, no doubt from the island dialect on which she’d been raised. “Life is precious—so why should we suffer?” She leaned into Napoleon, resting her head momentarily on his shoulder before adding: “And for the same reason, I can’t be bothered with a corset.”
Napoleon looked to Joseph with a satisfied, proprietary smirk. “Josephine is an islander, just like us, brother.” Napoleon then guided his lover to the seat beside his. I took my seat beside Julie, opposite my former fiancé, and Julie nodded to the footmen to begin serving the meal.
We lunched on a poached turbot with a lemon wine sauce and steamed potatoes. I had little appetite, nor did it appear that Josephine ate much from her plate. Napoleon barely looked at me throughout the meal, so solicitous was he of his new mistress. He refilled her wineglass several times; he leaned close to whisper occasional secrets into her ear; he asked her repeatedly whether the food was to her liking. He showed care and attention the likes of which I had never known him capable.
He had been taken with me—smitten by my fresh and youthful beauty, impressed by the grandeur of my home, cowed by the wealth of my family. He had felt an attraction to me, clearly, and probably even a real affection, given everything he’d said and written. But with Josephine, he was a different man. He had claimed to love me, but it was clear to all of us at the table that afternoon that he worshipped Josephine.
I noticed throughout the meal that Josephine smiled often, but rarely with her lips parted. The few times she did open her mouth to take small bites of her fish, she revealed fleeting glimpses of frightful brown teeth. She was a sugar heiress, after all, raised on a plantation where the stuff would have been present at every meal, and she’d clearly done lasting damage to her teeth as a result. So she does have a flaw, I thought with a small twinge of satisfaction.
Nevertheless, in her uniquely sensual way, Josephine had turned even that shortcoming into a tool of seduction, much as she’d done with her unfashionably bronzed skin. I noticed this throughout the meal: how she spoke with her lips close together, her voice low. One had to move closer to hear her words; in doing so, the unsuspecting listener couldn’t help but catch the delicious scent of her jasmine eau de toilette, or the almond perfume of her thick, glossy curls. Feel the brush of her smooth, bare flesh. Catch a glimpse down her plunging, uncorseted neckline. She was a cat who lured her quarry ever closer without having to raise a paw.
We concluded the meal with platters of pungent cheese, then fruit that had been grown elsewhere than frozen Paris. I was ready to be gone from this room and this gathering. Napoleon was just finishing a recounting of an unpatriotic play he had recently ordered shut down when Joseph asked his guests if they would like a tour of his new home.
“Indeed!” Napoleon said, rapping the table. “I think it’s high time I inspect these quarters of yours, make sure my government is giving my brother decent accommodations.”
“I assure you, it is most certainly more than we need,” Julie said, and I could see my sister balancing the split desires of being a gracious hostess to the man who employed her husband while not wishing to puff up Napoleon’s ego any more.
“Well then, you’ll just have to fill it with little Bonapartes,” Napoleon said, nodding at his brother as if dispatching an order. My sister’s cheeks blanched, and I shifted in my chair. “Well then, a tour,” Napoleon said, rising from his chair, oblivious of the offense he’d given.
“My darling?” Josephine placed an ungloved hand on his arm, halting him. He looked at her, paralyzed by her touch, alert for whatever it was she wished to say.
“I’d like some air. I think I’ll take a walk outside while you see the home.” Her hazel eyes landed on mine across the table. “Desiree, dear, perhaps you would join me, since you are already familiar with the house?”
I was speechless and so was Napoleon. Eventually, he stammered, “But…you don’t wish to stay with me?” He was a wounded puppy, stricken at the thought of even a moment out of her presence. She tilted her face at an angle toward his, demure, her voice soft and secretive as she said, “You know how often we will be back here, my darling. After all, he’s your beloved brother. You’ll give me the tour next time. But for right now, I’d like to ask Desiree how her trip was from the south. I remember what a harsh hostess Paris in winter can be for those of us girls who don’t know the snow.”
Napoleon was completely vanquished. He didn’t look in my direction but simply nodded once, giving Josephine his blessing. She turned her gaze on me and said, “Then that’s settled.”
* * *
Did Josephine know about me? Was she aware of the role I had played in her lover’s past? I was certain that she must have had an idea, for why else would she have singled me out for this stroll? She was beautiful and charming, but I suspected she was also quite shrewd, and that very little of what she did was par hasard—by chance, without a deliberate reason.
“Do you have a preference as to where we walk?” she asked as we exited Julie’s door, her eager eyes fixed on me as if my satisfaction was her only interest in life.
“I’m still unfamiliar with the city,” I answered, shaking my head. And you are the one who invited me on this outing.
She nodded knowingly, fluttering her thick lashes as she smiled. “Of course you are. Why, it took me ages to feel in any way at home here. I’ll take you to an interesting spot; it’s just down the street this way.” We headed south, soon taking a right turn, and even though I was new to the city, I deduced that we were walking
toward the river.
The afternoon was bitter cold, and our breath misted in front of our faces as we walked. “My!” Josephine shivered beside me. “Do you mind if I put my arm through yours? I get so cold, still.”
I could not believe she had asked me to take such an outing, while the rest of our company remained warm inside the house. I glanced down at her inexplicable sandals. “Aren’t your feet cold?”
“A bit. But it’s not much farther. Just down this street.” Her arm felt thin in mine. “Besides, whenever I feel cold, I only have to think of the frigid basement prison where they held us at Les Carmes. During the Terror?” She glanced sideways at me and I nodded to indicate that I understood. She squeezed my arm tighter. “But of course you and I would both bristle at a Parisian winter. We are from warmer climes. We have that, and so much else, in common.” She said it as if we might have been sisters in our former lives.
“Do you miss Marseille?” she asked, her voice filled with what sounded like genuine curiosity.
I considered the question a moment before answering. “I miss my maman, and my brother. The sea. My childhood home. But I was ready to leave.”
She nodded. And then I felt as if etiquette required me to return the question: “And you—do you miss your home?”
“Martinique, you mean?” she asked. “No. Paris is my home.” It was a decisive answer, one that required no deliberation. When I said nothing, she added: “The air was warm. And filled with the salt of the sea, the fragrance of the tamarind and orange trees. But it was also filled with the smell of burning sugar. The screams of the slaves, the poor wretches. I remember once, when I was a little girl, one of the poor creatures got a hand stuck in the machinery of the sucrerie. I could hear him screaming all the way from the big house as the blades chewed him up.”
I gasped, horrified, and she turned to me, her eyes studying mine. “I’m sorry. I’ve offended you,” she said, her tone low.
“It’s only that…I’ve never heard of such…”
“Slavery was an awful thing to witness. Worse perhaps for the soul of the slave owner than for the slave himself. That’s a blessing of our Revolution, to be sure, that we’ve ended slavery in France. I tell Napoleon that all the time.”
I nodded, less familiar with speaking about politics than apparently she was. We walked in silence a moment, and I wondered where she was leading us. When we turned a corner around a row of buildings, we faced straight into the knife blade of the wind. My feet ached from the cold even under my boots and stockings; surely hers had gone numb.
But her voice remained warm as she said, “I had a hard time adjusting to life here in Paris after growing up in the islands. So I can understand how you might be feeling, Desiree.”
I very much doubted that she understood how I was feeling, but I did not wish to speak about it with her. She, on the other hand, seemed entirely eager to speak about herself with me. “I’m not even referring specifically to surviving the Revolution, you know. My husband…the viscount…I don’t know what you might have heard? Or read.”
I shook my head, as if to say I did not know much. Even though, of course, I had read some.
“He was a vicious man. He would beat me. He would lock me in rooms in his home and take my children from me for days on end. He once spat on me, hissing that I was ‘beneath all the sluts in the world,’ accusing me of debauchery when it was he who was bedding a different woman every night. I would hear him in there with his women, sometimes four at a time. A few times, he made me join in with them…but mostly, he simply locked me up in a separate room.”
“That sounds…dreadful,” I answered, my voice made tenuous by my confusion; why was Josephine confiding in me this way? How was I, a relative stranger, to respond?
“I was just a girl and I didn’t understand. How could I? I was far from home, far from anyone who knew me or loved me or might have saved me. There were days when, truly, I thought he might kill me. Or wondered if perhaps I shouldn’t do it myself, to end my misery before he had the chance. He was not well,” she said, her voice low and toneless. “And yet, even though he insisted that I was no wife of his, even though he’d rage at me that I was a harlot and that our children weren’t his, I went to prison along with him when the Terror began. As did our two poor children.”
I nodded, overwhelmed by her story.
“Now, prison, that was something. Would you believe me if I told you that the walls of my cell were still covered in the dried blood and brains of the poor souls who had been massacred in that hovel before I occupied it?”
“No,” I gasped, horrified at the grisly images swirling in my mind.
“Yes,” she said, staring into my eyes as we walked. “I envied the mice and rats that scurried through our opened windows to eat the shit out of our overflowing latrine buckets. At least they could leave. God, how it reeked in there, of piss and blood and so much human misery. At night, I would hear the moans of the women who did their time à l’horizontale with the filthy prison guards. I’m talking about the widows of dukes, the wives of counts, spreading their legs like common street whores, each hoping to become enceinte with the baby of any gutter-rat guard who would take her. You know why? Because an expecting prisoner couldn’t be sent to the guillotine until after her baby was born. That bought a girl nine months. We were all just doing whatever we could to stay alive another day.” Her accent wrapped these vile words in her languid drawl, and I stared at her, shocked to silence by these unimaginable scenes she so candidly described.
I thought my time during the Terror had been harrowing, simply because Maman had been in a panic and my brother had been imprisoned and I’d had to walk by the city square where they carried out the daily executions. But, in fact, even though Papa had died in the midst of it all, I’d always been safe within the walls of my family’s comfortable compound. Josephine now described a scene far worse than any hell I had ever known. We were all just doing whatever we could to stay alive another day. Of course, I wondered whether she herself had done these things she described—these ghastly things with the guards. But I’d never dare ask.
She sighed, pulling my attention back to her beside me, both of us shivering as we walked. “Then one day, I was told that I was being transferred to the Conciergerie the next morning. Of course, we all knew that the Conciergerie was the last stop for all the poor wretches on the way to the guillotine. Someone else came in and was given my bed. I was told I wouldn’t have use for a bed starting the next day. I passed the longest night of my life on the filthy, piss-covered straw. Crying and praying. Wondering if my children, my Eugene and my Hortense, were beheaded yet. Wondering if in fact there is a heaven, and whether I would be permitted to go there. It certainly didn’t feel as though God existed. It hadn’t felt that way in quite some time. I watched as dawn came in through my cell window. I waited for the sound of the guard coming to fetch me. But then, that very same morning, we heard other news. Unexpected news. Men running up and down the corridors yelling that Robespierre was killed. His Reign of Terror was over. Can you believe it? I was to be set free. So, you see, I really am quite lucky, after all.”
“Napoleon was imprisoned just after that,” I said, recalling that time. My mind swirled with the images: dancing in the garden with Napoleon on Julie’s wedding night, the very same night that Josephine now described as the longest, worst night of her life. That was the first time he’d raised the topic of our marriage. And then Napoleon’s disappearance the next day amid the Thermidorian Reaction. Those interminable days when he was held at Fort Carré, memories of our feverish reunion and his fierce determination to ensure our betrothal.
My heart fluttered as I recalled all of it, and I decided to tell her these things. They were my memories, as real as my time with Napoleon had been, and I had a right to them, but just as I braced to begin, she cut me off, saying: “Yes, I know. Of course I know that.” Her v
oice had a sudden edge to it, her sugary sweetness momentarily forgotten. And then, just as quickly, she smiled, her hazel eyes holding me with renewed warmth, and she turned to the street before us: “Ah, here we are.” Her tone was light again, carefree.
“Look around,” she said, waving her hand before me. I had been so immersed in our exchange that I had not paid attention to where we walked. Now we stood in a large, empty place on the Right Bank, where gracious buildings lined the four sides of the square, and a grand boulevard bisected its middle. “We know this place informally as La Place Vendôme, because the Duc de Vendôme used to have his palace here. He was the king’s bastard. Then the Bourbons took it over, of course, and we had a grand statue of Le Roi Soleil, King Louis XIV, the Sun King.” She looked to the vacant center of the square, wrapping her thin arms around herself, as if that might do anything to fend off the cold.
“That statue, of course, was smashed in the Revolution. This place smelled like blood; the entire center of the city reeked of it. No one wanted to live in this quartier, so near to so many daily executions. Buildings went vacant. They kept moving the guillotine in an effort to spare any one neighborhood from its horrible effects, but it was too late. This place was marked with death.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders, her wide eyes scanning the area with a sort of detachment, perhaps recalling her own near-visit to this place.
“Now it’s just a bare square—and no one seems to know what to do with the space. Napoleon has some ideas.” She turned to me, her eyes alight and intent, suddenly fixed on our present once more. “But Desiree, why have you allowed me to prattle on like this? Talking about slaves and prison cells and smashed statues. And we’ve only just met. You must regret ever coming on this walk with me.”
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