“Yes. I have. You know, it’s always interesting, when you are breaking a man. The three-hundred-pound German warrior cries out for his mama, while the scrawny thirteen-year-old might prove tough as sword steel. You never get what you expect.” He paused, his eyes fixed squarely on mine. The room was silent; all I could hear was the steady ticking of the clock, and the blood thrashing between my ears.
“With Ceracchi…you know what I found out that I didn’t expect?” he asked me.
I resisted the urge to fidget, forcing myself to return Napoleon’s stare. “What is that?”
His voice was toneless as he declared: “Your husband owes him money.”
The air fled my lungs. “What…what for?”
“Now, that I have not yet been able to extract.” Napoleon crossed his legs.
“Surely I don’t know. My husband is…as I said…he’s not in Paris.”
Napoleon looked away now, back toward the Ceracchi bust. When he spoke next, his tone was suddenly light. “Desiree, you know that I care for you, don’t you?”
“Of…of course.”
“And I feel as though I may be candid with you. Speak plainly. Is that the case?”
Where was your candid speech when you were breaking my heart? I wondered. Evading and avoiding, while I ached for the truth. Only a girl waiting for the man she trusted. But of course I said none of this; what purpose would it have served to dredge up the history buried so deeply in our shared past? And what did it matter now? Instead, I merely nodded my assent.
“Good,” he said. “Yes, I am glad of it. Your sister is married to my brother. We are family. Corsicans value family above all else. Even when we should throw them all out to sea.” A mirthless laugh, and then he went on. “I have been very forgiving of my family. You know that, right?”
I nodded.
“And now you’re going to do something for me, in return for my loyalty.”
I was? I said nothing, allowing him to continue. “Your husband is on his way back to Paris, even at this very moment. He’s done leading a third of my army. He’s done flinging muck at my government. He puts on a nice enough smile at my parties, but I know it’s because you tell him to. I know his true feelings. I’m going to offer him a post, and you’re going to tell him to accept it.”
“I…what is this post?”
“Governor.”
It hardly seemed a punishment. “That’s most gracious of you,” I said.
“Governor of our colony Louisiana. I’m sending you and that hot-headed Gascon to the Americas.”
Chapter 26
Southwest France
Summer 1803
OUR CAVALCADE MOVED SLOWLY, LABORIOUSLY, southwest along the Loire River toward the western coast and the Atlantic. We passed fertile countryside and farmland, swaths of green, fields warmed and ripened by the long days of sun. Endless rows of vines, plum-red and green bunches swelling ahead of the grape harvest. Oscar squealed in delight at the sights of the stately châteaux and their bustling villages. France, you are glorious! How can I leave you? My soul cried as my eyes stared listlessly out the coach windows, hungry to record and remember every last detail of my native land.
We spent nights in Orléans and Blois and Tours, during which my husband and I took our own rooms and barely spoke to each other save to bid good night. During the long days on the road, I did my best to put on an agreeable smile, if only for Oscar’s sake, but in truth, I was terribly distraught. I had no interest in a long sea voyage and some barbaric swamp posting in this colonial region of New France. I ached for Paris. I felt Julie’s absence like a missing bone, and we hadn’t even left French soil.
Each night as we stopped at the modest auberges—the country inns—the soldiers in the area went to very little trouble to mask their presence. “Napoleon’s agents,” Bernadotte explained, when he saw me looking curiously at the armed men who lurked outside our first inn. “We are under surveillance, and we will continue to be until our anchors lift and we are adrift on the Atlantic.”
I didn’t know how to speak to my husband about the concerns that had arisen within me. On the one hand, I resented that his obstinacy had once more put him at odds with our nation’s leader. But on the other hand, I did not suspect that he could ever be involved in a plot to assassinate Napoleon, particularly not with the seedy sculptor Ceracchi as some hired murderer. I felt that Bernadotte was being treated unfairly. I suspected that the latent hostility between my husband and Napoleon had more to do with pride and principle than any real malice.
But then I would remember back to the night at the opera, the night of the Christmas Eve bomb explosion on the Rue Saint-Nicaise. How my husband, who was to have been awaiting us at the theater, hadn’t been there when we’d arrived. I recalled his sudden appearance, his face tight with tension. But no. Surely not. He never would have sanctioned a plot when his own wife would be riding in the carriage behind Napoleon’s. Even if the words on his chest did say Death to Kings.
No. I couldn’t believe it. And yet, I knew I would never have peace until I put my nagging doubts before my husband for him to address. For him to renounce them one and all. But not here, not on the road when we were under constant surveillance and spending our nights in cramped, foreign quarters. There could be no way of knowing just who was listening on the other side of the thin walls. But later. When we were alone. Perhaps once the vast Atlantic stretched between Napoleon and us.
Sometimes I tried to be positive, if only because my worry grew to be too heavy a burden to carry all day long. “I wonder what the governor’s palace in Louisiana will look like?” I posed the question to my husband in the coach as Oscar looked out the window at a passing herd of cows.
My husband crumpled his brow as he answered: “Hope that it has plenty of windows, because I hear that New Orleans is a swamp.”
Other times, when the crowds gathered along the route to cheer our passing carriages—we were, after all, traveling in Napoleon’s service as proxies of his popular administration—my husband would clench his jaw and grumble, “All for the glory of France? This is not some promotion. This is exile gilded with laurels.”
If it was exile, I only wished it would not be permanent. Julie and Joseph had promised that they would make our case and never relent. We would be called back after my husband served his duty—or rather, his sentence?—as Governor of Louisiana. I did not wish to raise my son away from France and my sister, nor did I wish for my niece to grow into a stranger whom I did not recognize. My sister assured me that her husband would intercede for us. I trusted Julie. Even Joseph, I knew, could be trusted. And so as Paris receded ever farther behind us, I clung to that hope as my lone solace and refuge.
“I wonder how different France will be when we return,” I said one afternoon toward the end of our journey. The quality of the air was changing—the breeze was growing stronger and crisper, now with the faintest hint of salt; I guessed that we were nearing the Atlantic and our waiting ship.
“What does it matter?” my husband replied, looking at me, his black eyes devoid of the love and joie de vivre they had once carried. Now I saw only anger in them—or perhaps pain. “Everything is just as it was before—we have a king and we are once more a nation of superstitions and subjugation. The only thing that is different is that we have two million fewer Frenchmen, all of whom died for what they believed was liberty.”
Our land journey brought us, at last, to the Atlantic port city of La Rochelle, from where we would take to the sea. La Rochelle, an ancient fortified city first built by the Romans and the one-time stronghold of French Huguenot resistance, was now the center of a thriving maritime trade with all of New France. Ships anchored and restocked in this city before sailing anywhere from Quebec in the north to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean.
Fitting, I thought, that my husband’s last glimpse of French soil would be the
city known for its valiant resistance against the kings of old.
La Rochelle was a noisy city of seagulls and sailors, merchants and housewives hawking everything from salt to hand-painted porcelain. Our ship, the Sibella, awaited us in the harbor. We were to spend our final night in a cramped, crowded seaside auberge. We sat down to supper in the inn shortly before nine o’clock, the hostess placing bowls of a flavorful fish stew before us. My stomach grumbled after the long day, and the stew smelled fragrant, as did the warm, freshly baked bread. I was just about to begin my meal when my husband’s aide knocked.
“What is it?” my husband growled, glancing toward the door as Maurin entered.
“Word for you, General, from Paris.”
“Paris?” Bernadotte reached for the letter and ripped through the wax seal. Out fell a folded newspaper clipping from Le Moniteur. Bernadotte’s features were inscrutable as he read first the letter, then the clipping.
I did not touch my stew, but rather kept my eyes fixed on my husband, eager for this news Maurin had brought. Eventually, Bernadotte lowered the papers, heaving an audible sigh before turning to me. His dark eyes had a new light in them, one that I had not seen in weeks, perhaps months. “Well, my darling,” he said. “It is good that you have not yet loaded your trunks onto the frigate.”
“What is it?” I asked, my voice faint.
“Your fears have all been for naught. You will return to Paris, to your comfortable villa on the Boulevard Monceau, right near your sister.”
I stared at my husband, unsure of his meaning. My words were toneless as I said, “I will not leave Oscar. I wish to be with you two.”
“We will be returning with you. My appointment has been retracted.”
“But—” I lowered my spoon, my supper forgotten. “Why?”
Bernadotte pushed the papers across the table toward me as he answered: “It seems our much-loved First Consul intends to sell Louisiana to the Americans, to their new president, Monsieur Thomas Jefferson.”
I glanced over the papers, confused. “Why would Napoleon do such a thing?”
“There’s only one reason why any ruler would sell a parcel of land as vast and lucrative as the Louisiana Territory. Napoleon needs money,” Bernadotte said, his tone sober. “And that must mean he plans to go to war.”
“With whom?” I asked. “We’ve signed a peace treaty with all of the European powers.”
Bernadotte sighed, his fingers absentmindedly kneading his brow. “England would be my guess.”
“But what of the peace? There’s no reason for war with England.”
“Certainly there is,” he answered. “Napoleon wishes to go to war so that the people will be so distracted, they won’t mind when he crowns himself Emperor.”
Chapter 27
Paris
December 1804
“THE WITCH TOLD ME I would be greater than a queen,” Josephine said, her voice a low warble, her hands gently stroking the waterfall of white satin that rippled across her lap, awaiting her scrutiny and approval.
I looked at her, confused by her statement. At first I wondered if this witch to whom she referred was her mother-in-law, or perhaps Pauline or one of the other Bonaparte women. But then I realized that she might have been referring to some actual sorceress. My skin prickled.
“Yes, this will do.” Josephine nodded, handing the delicate fabric to her head dressmaker with an approving nod. She turned back toward me. “Do you know what my first husband said to me when I told him this story? ‘There’s no such thing as “greater than a queen.” ’ But it all makes sense now, does it not?”
I looked around her busy salon, the large space teeming with harried attendants and hairdressers and seamstresses and artists, all preparing the final details for the next day’s coronation.
“Empress is greater than queen, yes, madame,” I said.
“I confess I did not know what she meant, the blind old crone.” Josephine shrugged her narrow shoulders. “She was an odd woman; she lived alone in the hills of Martinique, a long walk from my family’s plantation. I had to sneak out to visit her in the middle of the night, accompanied only by my slave girl.”
A flurry of chills rippled my flesh, my body’s instinctive response to such talk; I knew that tales of witchcraft were the devil’s work and I should listen to none of it. And yet, I did not tell her to stop.
Josephine sensed my curiosity, and she flashed a conspiratorial grin as she continued, her voice low, only for the two of us: “The old sorceress took my hand in her wrinkled palm, and she squeezed it hard. She stared straight into my eyes, though her own gaze was vacant, glazed as if by some sort of coating. She said—and I still remember it vividly, as if all of these years had not passed in between—‘You shall marry a dark man of little fortune. But he shall cover the world with glory, and he shall make you greater than a queen.’ ”
I stiffened in my seat, deaf to the noise of the attendants all around us as Josephine carried on. “My slave girl laughed beside me. She thought the blind old hag had to be speaking in jest. But I knew.” Josephine sat back in her chair, crossing her bare legs and tilting them languidly to one side. “Do you know how often I’ve repeated those words to myself? In the dark. In the cold. All of those nights in that dreadful basement of Les Carmes prison, when they told me that death would greet me at dawn’s first light. I knew they were wrong…even then. All of them. I knew what awaited me. I never lost my faith.” With that, she reached for her glass of wine and took a long, slow sip.
I breathed out, my exhale audible as I considered all that I had just heard. Whether it had been faith or something else, Josephine’s unwavering belief in her own eventual and inevitable elevation had in fact proven correct. For the next morning, she, Josephine de Beauharnais, the barefoot daughter of an impoverished Caribbean slaveholder, the condemned widow of a brutal nobleman, would stand beside her husband at the front of Notre Dame Cathedral, covered in diamonds and satin and ermine, and be crowned Empress of all of France.
Her husband had moved with speed and with stealth, but most of all with his unrivaled shrewdness, and the day was upon us already, even while those of us who had been privy to all of it were still scratching our heads, wondering how we had arrived at such a moment.
Napoleon, sensing the mood of the people, had rightly guessed that they were tired of warfare and hunger. They were weary of foreign threats. They wanted clear, competent, and decisive leadership, even if they had to forfeit their republican ideals in order to get it.
Just this past spring, after several more victories against the alliance led by the Habsburgs, Napoleon made his move. Newspaper articles and pamphlets started to appear across Paris. They were never written by Napoleon—at least, not overtly—but they always lauded him as our nation’s hero and savior. While public opinion of him climbed, he put forth a demeanor of self-effacement and humility, all the while predicting openly that assassins from Britain to Russia were trying to murder him and plunge France back into anarchy. “Daggers hang in the air. The foreign tyrants seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it, for I am the Revolution,” he told the adoring crowds who gathered everywhere he went.
The French newspapers, censored as they were by Napoleon’s government, began to extol the virtues of a monarchy. Napoleon outwardly reacted to this with hearty reluctance at first, insisting that his government did not wish to change the structure from a Consul. “The people do not want another king,” he declared publicly.
If not a king, then perhaps something else? The senate—that body appointed and controlled by Napoleon—then proposed a change in his title. Consul for Life was not decisive enough; it did not go far enough to ensure the stability of France. If Napoleon would not be king because of his deep reverence for the Revolution, then there would have to be another title. What about looking to the genius of antiquity
? Rome and Greece—how had they handled such a question? The senate proposed, then, to make Napoleon’s title Emperor.
“Only if it is what the people want,” was Napoleon’s answer, his modesty recorded for the public by his newspapers.
Using the great senate plebiscites of ancient Rome as his guide and precedent, Napoleon declared that it must be put to a vote, a popular referendum decided only by the people. And so, the people of France voted. They voted by the millions. And they decided that Napoleon’s title would be changed from Consul for Life to Emperor.
I knew from my husband that the vote had been arranged in such a way that there was no possible outcome other than decisive victory for Napoleon. What with his pamphlets and press corps directing the public conversation, his ministers manning the polling locales, and his brothers counting the results, what could we expect? But still, the French experiment in republican government had left many of our citizens sorely disillusioned, their families no better off than during the hard times of the Bourbons, and so the will of the people was clearly behind the idea of this one strong leader.
And how did my husband—the man who wore Death to Kings emblazoned across his chest—feel about all of this? For him, it had simply been the final step in a process he had long understood to be taking place. He knew the heart of Napoleon Bonaparte. My Bernadotte had seen the man’s ambition laid bare on occasions enough to understand what he had wanted for himself. Now it was simply a title to make official and permanent what had already been set in motion. And Bernadotte had watched with misgivings.
And yet, in spite of that—or perhaps directly because of that—Napoleon had worked harder to win over my husband than he had to win over the millions of France. He’d called both of us, my husband and me, to another private meeting at the Tuileries before the results of the plebiscite vote were announced.
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