I lay in bed with Julie, Joseph elsewhere in the house, probably conferring with his sisters or the aides and ministers who had been opposed to Josephine for so long. Perhaps they were dancing downstairs with bottles of champagne; I had no interest in gloating over the wreckage of Josephine’s private and public disaster.
“He told Joseph that he still loves her,” Julie said, slowly pulling the pins from her hair and placing them on the bedside table.
“He certainly has a curious way of showing it,” I said.
“He said that he loves her and wishes to keep her, that the only happiness he has ever known is because of her, but he will not be controlled by his own wishes. He will do what is best for France. He tells Joseph that his dynasty is only a few years old; it cannot withstand a war of succession. He must have an heir. A son born to his wife and no ambiguity. You know he is such a scholar of history.”
I nodded.
Julie’s hair was loose now, and she shook her head, allowing the graying waves to fall over her shoulders. “He says, ‘Think of the civil wars that followed Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great’—neither of whom had surviving sons. Napoleon believes he comes from them, and so he won’t repeat their mistakes. Not when he has studied them so faithfully.”
* * *
—
Napoleon wanted it done quickly and decisively—it would be an annulment. But an annulment required credible reasons why the marriage could not stand. So he declared publicly that he had been forced into the union by Josephine and that their certificate was an invalid document because they had both lied about their birth dates. I remembered back to that night, the dark upper room with no chairs; I remembered noticing how they had each changed their dates of birth. Back then, it had been an act of love, an effort to bridge the chasm between their ages. Now, Josephine’s age was once again to be used against her.
That took care of the legal side of things. In addition, Napoleon avowed that there had not been witnesses for their church ceremony because Josephine had insisted on doing it the night before the coronation—in secret, with only the Pope, so that no member of the Bonaparte family could present any impediment. The Pope, all the world knew, was a man whose authority Napoleon no longer recognized. That, then, took care of the religious side of things.
Over the next few weeks, as I watched all of this unfold alongside my sister and her husband and their family, I could not help but think: Does anyone in this world know how Josephine feels so much as I? A secret exchange of vows, promises made from heart to heart, put aside when his heart changed.
As was the case in my own life, Napoleon decided it was done, and so it was done. Now he just needed to sell it to the public. A public that had long loved its Empress.
Like the Caesars of his beloved antiquity, he turned to bread and circus to dazzle and distract: Napoleon announced that the official annulment ceremony would be carried out with a grand party, and the entire court would attend. It was to be in the throne room at the Tuileries. All of us who had participated in their glory at Notre Dame only a few years earlier were now required to come and watch this final unraveling.
Josephine arrived looking more regal than ever, composed even, in reams of purple satin that hugged her still-enviable figure, her jewels glittering in her upswept chestnut hair. Her son, Eugene, held one hand, her daughter, Hortense, the other.
Joseph told me that Napoleon had broken down just that morning, saying that he wished to cancel the annulment. Josephine had refused his tearful pleas, saying that now that he had made plain what his intention was, she could not go on living as his Empress. Then he begged her to continue to live with him at court as his mistress. She would not do that, either. She would take her refuge with Eugene and Hortense at her beloved Malmaison, where Napoleon would be welcome to visit at any time, as a dear and special friend.
The Bonapartes entered the throne room en masse, unlike the coronation just five years earlier. Letizia was in scarlet satin, her daughters trooping around in various shades of garish jewel tones.
Josephine smiled and curtsied before those who greeted her and ignored those who slighted her, not showing a crease of pain on her flawlessly made-up face. The food and champagne were set forth on the long, candlelit banquet tables. Musicians played, and our host implored us to dance. Napoleon sat beside Josephine on their two thrones, clutching her hand, visibly trembling. Weeping, even. Now that it was done, he appeared, by far, the more bereft of the two.
He had been generous to her—she’d keep not only Malmaison, which he would continue to pay for, but also the Élysée Palace, just a short walk from the Tuileries in the capital. He’d give her a yearly income of three million francs, and she’d retain both her imperial title and her mob of servants, hundreds of them, their salaries and households funded by her distraught former husband.
Shortly before dawn, as the musicians began to pack up their instruments and the servants entered to clear the debris from a night of uneasy feasting, Napoleon and Josephine rose from their thrones, hands still intertwined. We looked on in silence as he kissed her one final time, walking her toward the door, though it looked like it was Josephine who held him upright, and not the other way around.
An imperial coach waited in the forecourt of the Tuileries, where a drizzle of gray rain had begun to fall. We were not to join her there for any official farewell; we were not to see her off. Before gliding out the door, Josephine turned around one final time, her amber eyes sweeping the room before landing on Napoleon’s, then Julie’s, then mine. When my eyes locked with hers, my frame went rigid, a strange jolt shuddering through me, a serpent of sensation writhing from my belly up to my chest. I gasped in a quick breath as my vision began to swim. This is not the end—for Josephine and me. She, who had melded herself so firmly to my own fate when she’d usurped my fiancé and the position and the family that was to have been mine—she was destined to be in my life yet.
I knew not when or how.
And yet, somehow, I knew.
Eugene whispered something in his mother’s ear and she nodded, standing taller. When she broke from my gaze, the thrum of curious energy coursing through me ruptured, a cord snapping, and I heaved a sigh. All I could do was stare at her slender figure as she held fast to her son beside her. And then she walked out, pale, visibly shaking, but her face a mask of resolved dignity, so different from the sniggers of Pauline and the other sisters, so different from the despondent weeping of Napoleon as he watched her go.
We heard the rattle of her coach as it rolled through the rain and out of the Tuileries. The room throbbed with a thick, unpleasant silence as we stood in her wake, and I wondered: Would it always feel this way, now that she was gone? Would the air henceforth hang this heavy and joyless without her, the gracious lady who had stood beside our charmless leader?
Though I never would have admitted it to our Emperor, I was sad to see her go. She, Josephine, my one-time rival and the woman who had been the cause of my first and harshest heartbreak, had nevertheless, somehow, become a woman I cared for, rooted for, even admired. Josephine had gone with as much grace and allure as she had entered. A lady, lost and broken, but a lady until the very end. When the weak sun rose over the drizzly winter morning in Paris, Josephine was gone, and we were in the capital city of an Empire without an Empress.
Chapter 34
Paris
March 1810
HOW COULD NAPOLEON REPLACE JOSEPHINE? He couldn’t. But as it always happened with him, he acted swiftly and decisively, catching us all completely unaware.
We had suspected that he’d choose the Countess Walewska, the “Polish Wife,” the pliable beauty for whom he clearly felt much affection; she’d already given him one son. But we knew, also, of his hopes for Grand Duchess Anna, sister to Russia’s Tsar. Marriage to Anna would be a deft strategic move, a clever step to neutralize the vast behemoth to the east.
<
br /> But a Habsburg princess? The eighteen-year-old daughter of France’s greatest enemy? The child of Napoleon’s unrelenting and most frequent foe? No one had seen that coming.
As a Habsburg princess, Marie Louise had been raised to expect a political marriage, one made to advance the dynastic interests of her father’s empire, to be sure, and yet I could not help but wonder how she must have felt. How did Marie Louise react when her father’s stern ministers told her the news, that she would be expected to wed the same man who had forced her and her family to flee their own palace? Had she not been taught since childhood to hate this man? Did she not think it supremely unfortunate?
Marie Louise was less than half Napoleon’s age, and she’d no doubt been raised to loathe the French, the nation that had been at war with her own family for the entirety of her life. We were the same people, after all, who had beheaded her great-aunt Marie-Antoinette. Now she would travel here to be our Empress and to sleep in the former bed of her unfortunate ancestor.
“The rumors are that she looks just like Antoinette,” my husband told me. It was the morning of the wedding, which had been put together in great haste, as Napoleon was as impatient on matters of the heart as with everything else. We sat together at breakfast, Bernadotte and I, in our home on the Rue d’Anjou. My husband was in a foul mood; he had been so for months, ever since the announcement of Marie Louise’s betrothal. “Did so many millions of our countrymen die fighting the Habsburgs, only to now put another one of their princesses on our throne?”
Outside, the cold March rain slapped the windows, dousing the pebbled walkways of our walled gardens. “Some introduction to Paris she shall have—splashing in this rain,” I said, steering the conversation toward the bland and, I hoped, safer territory of our unrelentingly wet spring. “And it doesn’t appear as if it will let up.”
“The parade route will be slicked,” Bernadotte said, flipping through the news journals sprawled across our breakfast table, the familiar knit pulling tight on his brow. “And if the people were already unexcited, these storms will quench any festive spirits.” Bernadotte coughed, scanning the next page of headlines. “Ah, here we are. More news of our former Empress…”
Napoleon had been ordering for months that the papers stop printing stories about Josephine, but still she dominated the pages. The people still loved her, still believed her to be their true Empress. She had been the First Lady of the greatest years of the Republic and the proudest years of the French Empire. She had been French in her blood, and hers was a tale of modest beginnings, a rise that followed the ascent of our very nation. What fondness could they feel for an Austrian princess from Europe’s most blue-blooded monarchical dynasty?
Plus, the people knew that they were not alone in their nostalgia, their longing for their erstwhile Empress. The Emperor himself still loved Josephine. It was common knowledge that he visited her almost daily at the Élysée Palace, where she had been given residence, and that they escaped on weekends to stroll, hands entwined, through the gardens they’d designed together at Malmaison. Though the bonds of their marriage had been dissolved, theirs was a bond not easily broken, and they were still lovers, more intimate and close than were most husbands and wives whose official marital vows had not been put asunder.
Napoleon declared publicly that he was a man very much enchanted by his new Austrian fiancée, but he did himself no favors with the common people by planning his upcoming wedding to follow the exact marital rituals of the old Bourbon princes. A man who relished the oversight of all details, he’d ordered his secretaries and imperial historians and archivists to resurrect the records of Louis XVI’s marriage to Marie-Antoinette, declaring that he’d wed his Habsburg bride in precisely the same manner.
* * *
“Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Marshal of France, Prince of Pontecorvo, and Desiree Bernadotte, Marshaless of France, Princess of Pontecorvo.” We were announced into the wedding feast in the grand Salon d’Apollon, a sprawling hall inside the palace, where thousands of glistening candelabras sprinkled their light over long banquet tables heavy with platters of rich food, vases of fresh-clipped flowers, and crystal flutes of chilled champagne.
The couple was married by the cardinal before a jeweled altar at the front of the hall. My sister served as an attendant, as did the three frowning Bonaparte sisters. “They’ve realized their error,” my sister had explained to me earlier that week. “At least with Josephine, they had no heirs as rivals. Now, they stand to lose so much more than they ever did under her. Marie Louise is young; she’ll give him a dozen sons where Josephine would give him none. Fools, all of them, to direct their venom as they did.” Nevertheless, they were there, as was Letizia.
As for the French people, equally withholding of their approval, Napoleon hoped to dazzle them into acceptance, if not sanguine support. At the moment the imperial union was blessed by the Almighty, fireworks burst across the Parisian sky, and red wine began to flow in the squares from the public fountains. Skewers of mutton legs and sausage links were delivered across the capital, and concerts and parades filled the streets with festive music and dancing. There was even, I noted with a bite of my tongue, a hot-air balloon display over the capital.
Inside the palace, we were among more than a thousand guests, and I stood beside my husband in the endless queue, dutifully awaiting our chance to congratulate our Emperor and meet his young bride. Bernadotte grumbled beside me, shifting in his starched uniform, clearing his throat with impatient coughs. He was eager to leave this feast and be home. “And you, my dear, shall have far more time on your hands,” Bernadotte said to me.
I nodded. I was not to be in Marie Louise’s household as I had been in Josephine’s. The Austrian princess came to court with her own cadre of German-speaking attendants, and she would fill out the rest of her household with the allies she acquired in the Tuileries. I was a member of the old guard, a longtime confidante of her powerful predecessor, and thus of no use to our new Empress. “Whatever shall you do with all your free time?” he asked.
I looked around the palace, affecting an expression of indifference, even though I had pondered the same question myself. “I shall be delighted to have more time with Oscar,” I answered. “Perhaps I shall teach him a bit about art, since his papa is so intent on teaching him about toy soldiers.”
Finally, we reached the front of the interminable line, and I got my first close glimpse of our new Empress. She wasn’t an exquisite beauty—she didn’t have the innate allure that Josephine so powerfully exuded—but she wasn’t unattractive; the freshness of her youth and the splendor of her rich attire gave her a pleasant enough appearance. I blinked as I studied her. She did look alarmingly similar to the portraits of her murdered great-aunt: strawberry blond hair, fair skin, a round face with the notable jut of the Habsburg chin.
Marie Louise had a good build—she was thicker than the willowy Josephine, her figure one that might well turn to plumpness with age and childbirth. Like Josephine, she was tall. Taller than Napoleon. But in spite of her solid frame, the poor girl looked as if she strained to keep her neck upright under the massive diamond crown that covered her head. I followed my husband, bowing before the pair of newlyweds.
“Ah, Bernadotte, you are welcome here. And my dear sister, Desiree.” Napoleon really did look quite round in his ermine cloak crusted with diamonds. He wore a satisfied smile—everything was going according to plan. He was pleased with his bride. He was pleased with the peace it had brought between France and Austria. But most important: he would have a son. At last, after all these years, his succession might finally be secure.
Following the feast, we were invited to dancing at the mansion of Austria’s Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg—a family friend of Marie Louise’s—whose diplomacy had been helpful in facilitating the marriage. My husband loathed the man as he did most Austrian ministers, but we knew that Napoleon would notice if we were
not there. These days, my husband could not risk arousing our Emperor’s temper.
“We will go, dance one dance in front of him, and then slip away,” my husband grumbled. It sounded like a fine plan to me. I was just as happy to get home and under our warm covers. Outside, the rain still came down—inauspicious weather, though it didn’t seem to dampen Napoleon’s ebullient mood.
We took our places beside Julie and Joseph for the quadrille. I let my husband guide me, but I noted how his steps fell heavily, so unlike his usual grace on the dance floor. As the music progressed, I began to detect an odd smell and I crinkled my nose. My husband noticed as well. My eyes traveled toward the far side of the room, where a flurry of activity had broken out. I saw why, and I screamed: “Fire!” Bernadotte followed my gaze. There, against the far wall, the flames from the candles had traveled to the muslin drapes, setting them ablaze. The room was rapidly filling with an oppressive cloud of smoke. I began to cough.
“It’s spreading. Come.” Without hesitation, Bernadotte pulled me off the dance floor and we ran to the door. Julie and Joseph were beside us. I heard screams as we dashed out into the forecourt, gasping in the clean night air. All was chaos around us; there were so many hundreds of people inside the palais and only a few doorways. Through the windows, I looked with horror as the entire hall succumbed to a roiling blaze of orange and smoke. More shrieks, but I could not see Napoleon or our new Empress; I did not know whether they had made it out. All the while, the flames showed no signs of stopping. Soon, if it continued at this pace, the whole palace would be engulfed in fire, with hundreds of souls still trapped within.
Chapter 35
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