“But how can I agree to something that binds my son—er, Sweden’s future monarchs?”
Napoleon looked toward me, perhaps wondering whether he might count on me to help make his case; I lowered my eyes. Apparently deciding against that course, Napoleon turned his gaze back toward my husband, sighing. “Very well. I see that you are in an oppositional humor, Bernadotte. Something new, eh? How might…one million francs…help my case?”
“Sire.” Bernadotte shook his head, a sad smile creasing his dark features. “It’s not a question of money. It’s the principle.”
Napoleon grinned. “It always is with you, is it not, Bernadotte?” But it did not sound as though Napoleon meant it as a compliment, and his face showed no mirth.
“Sir.” Bernadotte leaned forward, his voice quiet. “Would you make me a greater man than yourself by requiring me to refuse a crown?”
Napoleon jerked upright in his chair, his entire frame going rigid. I felt the breath constrict in my lungs, suspended. Napoleon opened his mouth as if to snap at my husband, but in the next instant he checked himself, cut his words short. When the Emperor spoke, after a long pause, his tone was steady but filled with steel: “Very well then, Bernadotte. Go. And let our destinies be fulfilled.”
* * *
In the coach on the return home, Bernadotte was subdued, even a bit solemn. I studied him in the shadowy light that seeped in through the windows. “So then, it is settled,” I said. When he offered no reply, I added: “I thought you would be happier.”
He took a moment before answering. “I…I am. It is simply, well. It’s a big thing. King. An entire nation looking to me.”
I shrugged. “It can’t be that terribly difficult. Joseph is rarely in Spain.” My voice sounded casual, but then my husband leaned toward me, pressing a hand into my arm. “Desiree, do you understand?”
“Understand what?”
“What it means?”
“You’ve told me: it means you’ll be Prince Royal of Sweden, the heir to the throne. Just like you are Crown Prince of Pontecorvo. You’ll go sometimes to visit, and then—”
“No, Desiree.” My husband shook his head, his brown curls falling around his darkened face. “No, I won’t simply visit Sweden. I shall live there. We all will. Oscar will be King of Sweden one day as well. And you will be Queen beside me.”
* * *
The magnitude of it all did not truly pierce me until Bernadotte left in September, dressed as a Swedish officer, with a smiling Count Mörner in the coach beside him. Standing in the forecourt of the Rue d’Anjou, clutching Oscar’s hand as we waved our farewells to the receding carriage, I could not help but think of Marie-Antoinette and Marie Louise; what an odd thing it was to take up the crown of a foreign land. Those princesses were taken to an island in the Rhine River, a slip of earth between nations, where they were ordered to shed their Viennese gowns for new Parisian ones. The curious things we did in order to win and keep crowns, I thought, even those of us from a country that had claimed, only years earlier, to reject all crowns.
Though my husband had spent the past few months furiously studying Swedish under a tutor, I had refused to join in the lessons. A part of me still clung to the hope that I would be allowed to remain in France with Oscar. I did not wish to go. I was a bride wed in battle, accustomed to prolonged separations; I could accept the distance and the time apart from my husband, as long as we would be permitted visits. But Sweden? How could I make my home in Sweden? All I knew of the country was that it was a region far to the frozen north—a place of great white bears and bleak, sun-starved days.
And yet, even as I held firm to my hope, the time of our scheduled departure neared, and Bernadotte still insisted that my place, and Oscar’s, was in Sweden with him. We were to join him in time for Christmas, so, in November, Oscar and I prepared to say farewell to our homeland.
My sister was in Spain for the holidays, and so I reached out to an old friend, someone I had traveled with before and knew I could trust: Josephine’s former lady-in-waiting Elise la Flotte. Widowed at a young age, Elise had never remarried, and she had no place at court now that Marie Louise was installed as Empress, and so, to my great relief, she accepted my invitation to travel north to Sweden.
With Elise, I finished my packing and finalized the plans for our departure. We would leave Paris in a cavalcade of three coaches, bound for the northern city of Hamburg. From there, we would travel farther than I had ever been from home, north into Denmark, before crossing by boat over the Öresund Sound into Sweden.
What my new homeland would look like, I had little idea. Indeed, what my new life would look like, I knew even less.
Chapter 36
Stockholm
Winter 1811
“YOU SHALL HAVE TO CHANGE your name.” Bernadotte said it to me as if it were the most mundane of statements. And yet I knew that he understood my shock, because he was avoiding eye contact as he inspected his Swedish military coat in the bedroom mirror.
I stared, openmouthed, toward my husband. Just behind him, on the other side of the tall windows, the snow swirled, an erratic to and fro, borne on a strong winter wind that seemed to blow relentlessly off the gray water. I cleared my throat, winced at the soreness there, and looked back to Bernadotte: “Change my name?”
He nodded. “It sounds too”—he grasped for his word, waving his broad hand, still avoiding my eyes—“French.”
I sat in bed under a thick comforter, propped up by half a dozen downy pillows. In the next room, Elise oversaw the unpacking of my trunks while Oscar sat with her, arranging his soldier figurines for some imaginary battle. I turned my focus back toward my husband. “Too…French,” I said, repeating his words.
“Indeed.” Bernadotte swept his hands aloft, as if conducting instruments as he said: “Desiree.”
“It’s a French name,” I replied, my tone wooden.
“Right.”
“Because we are French.”
“Yes, I know.” He sighed.
I crossed my arms before my chest and leaned my head to the side, a posture of passive but stubborn resistance. “Presumably, the Swedish people understand this fact as well, seeing as they came to Paris to offer you their crown. They wanted you because you are French, Bernadotte. Connected to Napoleon.”
“This is true, my dear,” he said, exhaling loudly. An effort, I sensed, to remain patient. “But now we are here. In Sweden. Representing the Swedes. I believe…my ministers very much believe…that such a move would be received as a highly symbolic gesture. A token of goodwill to our new people, one they would very much appreciate.”
“Well, Jean-Baptiste is as French a name as one could have,” I said, my words now tinged with a childish petulance.
His dark eyes met mine as he answered, “Precisely. Which is why I’ve changed my name as well.”
My mouth fell open. “You…have?”
He nodded. “Henceforth, in public, I shall be Carl Johan, Crown Prince of Sweden.”
“Carl Johan,” I said, repeating the odd-sounding name. I scrunched my face, unable—unwilling—to conceal my distaste.
“A good Swedish name,” he said, turning back to the mirror, ignoring my expression.
I coughed before saying: “But not your name.”
“I am to be their king. If I say that I’ve changed my name, it is changed.”
So that was it? That was all it took to change one’s name? One’s nation, one’s heritage? To wipe out an entire life? Was my husband so unfeeling, so unattached to our French lives, the lives we’d led together for so many years, to issue an edict and wipe away all that came before?
“I’ve asked them for some suggestions for you as well,” he said.
I stared at him, felt the blood of my cheeks growing warm. “Have you?”
“They’ve suggested one.”
I sat up taller in bed, twisting the handkerchief in my hands as I placed them primly in my lap. “Well? I would be interested to hear what they have proposed.”
“Desideria.”
I lifted an eyebrow; surely he was teasing me. But his face showed no signs of a jest. I looked away from him, back out the window. Gray. A vast vista of gray: iron-colored skies and stone buildings and choppy water, touched only by the white of snowfall. That’s what it had been since we’d arrived. My first glimpse of Sweden had been one of chop and fog across the pewter gray Öresund Sound—a boat ride that I’d had to wait three days to take because of the inclement weather and the waves.
I’d arrived in Stockholm with Oscar and Elise in the middle of the night, our carriage bearing us through the snow-covered capital, a dark cold unlike anything I’d ever experienced. A gun salute heralded our entry into the city, where people lined the icy streets, cheering and waving their Swedish flags. How could they stand it, waiting as they did in the black and bitter wind? I myself had been wrapped in furs, encased in a covered coach, and yet I’d felt that I would never thaw.
I longed for color. Did the golden arms of the sun never reach this place? Even indoors, inside this unfamiliar and odd palace, I shivered. I remembered thinking that Paris had been cold, back when Julie and I had first arrived from Marseille. That had been nothing in comparison. Here, my nose was always red, my handkerchief always at the ready, and my throat burned with pain each time I coughed. Was I destined to never again live in the sun?
“The good news is that Oscar will not have to change his,” my husband said, pulling my mind back to the present.
“What’s that?” I asked, lifting my kerchief to my nose.
“His name, Oscar, it’s a good Scandinavian name. No need to change it.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, I suppose we can thank Napoleon for that, then.” Bernadotte frowned at me. “Why do you look at me like that? It was Napoleon, after all, who chose the name,” I said, feeling no remorse for the barb against my husband in my current ornery mood.
“But he will convert to Lutheranism,” Bernadotte said. Now I was certain he was joking. I laughed.
“Desiree, I am serious.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oscar. He shall have to convert.”
I grimaced. After a moment, I said: “But…but we are Catholic. France is a Catholic nation.”
“Yes, but Sweden is a Lutheran nation, and we are the heads of Sweden. Oscar will be king someday. Sweden will only be ruled by Lutherans.”
I made to say that I would never abandon my Catholic faith—not that I was particularly devout in my practice, but it was simply who I was. I was French. To be French meant to be Catholic. I’d been raised in the schooling of a convent. Even through the years of the Revolution, when all signs of a Catholic faith had been outlawed on fear of death, that strand of my identity had somehow continued, persisted. No pale Swedish minister would tell me that it could not be so. But before I could say all this, I began to cough. Oh, this cough; it had been terrible since Hamburg. My throat hurt, my head throbbed, even my gums ached.
“Your cough persists,” Bernadotte said, a statement so obvious that it barely warranted a reply.
I made a grand show of my next cough to affirm his observation. He watched me, his frustration from a moment earlier turning to a look of genuine concern.
When I had recovered myself enough to speak, I said: “Of course my cough persists—how could it not, in this frozen place?”
He heaved a long, heavy exhale. “I shall order you a broth. And you must rest. You must get well.”
“I have been resting,” I answered. I would never be well. Not here. I pulled the blankets closer around my shoulders, eager to simply roll over and shut my eyes. To stop seeing, for just a few hours, this deadening view of gray. I yearned for color. Birdsong in a fragrant garden, tree branches heavy with blooms. The first bite of an orange slice, its juices like a burst of sunshine on my tongue. Perhaps my dreams could bring me some refuge, if only this soreness in my throat would allow me to drift off to sleep.
“I’ll let you rest,” Bernadotte said. He crossed the bedchamber, walking toward the door in several strides. I let him go without another word.
But he paused at the threshold, wavering, and turned back to me. “Tomorrow…”
“Yes?” I opened my eyes and reached for my cashmere shawl, pulling it to my body, remembering as I did so the first time I’d bought myself cashmere—the colorful marketplace at Les Halles, with Julie, our first winter in Paris. I’d never needed it before, but now it seemed as if it was all I would wear.
Bernadotte looked away, out of the room toward the swirling snow, then back toward me. “Tomorrow will be your formal presentation to the court.”
* * *
“You must tell us, my dear madame, what do you think of our palace?”
I stared into the oval face of Queen Hedwig; she was an unsmiling woman, with an unusually high forehead and bland, pale features. Her body, like her face, was long and narrow, and she wore an elaborate gown of golden damask, layers of lace cascading down her lengthy white arms. If she had once been a beauty, that bloom had faded along with her youth.
Elise, a far better gossip than I, told me that the queen had borne several princes, one-time heirs to the throne of Sweden, but all of her babies had died young; she had no hopes of producing more children. She was born a German duchess—I knew that from my husband—but she’d asked me the question in French. Hedwig. What an odd name, I thought. Hedwig Elisabeth Charlotte, now Queen of Sweden, wife to the sickly man beside her, King Charles. He fidgeted in his seat, appearing uncomfortable in his high-necked military coat and golden epaulets. A large, heavy-looking medal hung around his neck. His sparse white hair receded from a lined brow, and his narrow eyes darted nervously around the salon.
“Hedwig is in charge—everyone knows it,” Elise had confided to me that evening as she helped me into my heavy dinner gown of dark purple brocade. “Though, outwardly, Hedwig declares herself more interested in sewing than in politics, I hear that, in fact, the opposite is true—she visits the king’s private chambers every day to set the agenda, and she sits with him during the meetings of the council and helps him respond to his petitions and letters. So, have a care when speaking with her.”
The king hadn’t yet spoken to me this evening, other than a formal and cursory greeting upon my entry into the salon, but Queen Hedwig cleared her throat now, an expectant gesture on her features. “Well?” Hedwig prompted, lifting an eyebrow. She had asked me a question, but I had forgotten it. “Our palace?”
Ah, that was it—she wished to know what I thought of the palace. But how could I answer? To tell the truth would be to offend. How could I explain that I’d spent my days in the grandeur of the Tuileries and Fontainebleau? How could I describe for her the brilliance of Malmaison, with its massive, frescoed rooms? Endless galleries of priceless Italian art framed in gold. Gardens filled with swans and lilies of the Nile, unfurling with a splendor to shame Babylon. To think of those places, I found this residency to be as bland and unimpressive as any basic French army barracks.
“My wife, Your Highness, is a lady from the south,” my husband said, stepping beside me, a broad smile turned toward Hedwig. “Marseille, if you are familiar with the city. She will be happier when spring comes.” He, too, spoke in French. We were to begin our Swedish lessons soon, but for now, the court was obliging us by speaking in our native tongue.
“Ah, a delicate flower of the south.” Hedwig nodded knowingly, as if to say that she had heard of my breed, though she herself most certainly did not identify with it. “And shall you be so sensitive in other aspects of life here at court as well, my dear girl?”
I turned from Hedwig toward my husband, unsure of how to answer.
The queen continued:
“I hear you have the sort of constitution that renders you…shall we say, less adaptable?”
“I’m not…not certain what you mean, madame.” I looked around the room, desperate for Elise to come to my rescue; perhaps she’d know how to handle this disagreeable woman.
“Your dear husband keeps requesting broth for you. And the servants tell me you ask for ever more blankets.”
I stared blankly at my hostess for a moment, mouth agape. Josephine, born on a run-down plantation in the Caribbean, had presented a far more gracious and queenly bearing than this woman, groomed in her ducal castle since birth to wear a crown. I could not imagine Josephine ever making a new acquaintance feel so uncomfortable. Just then, dinner was announced, saving me from this dreadful conversation, and I gladly took my husband’s arm as we made for the table.
It was my husband’s forty-eighth birthday, and thus the banquet was in his honor. As the servants brought out the platters of food, I stifled the urge to draw my napkin to my nose and block the pungent odors of these dishes. “Madame?” A footman hovered beside me, his face expectant, gloved hands poised to serve from the platter he held.
“Oh…yes, please.” I nodded. He leaned forward with a flourish of his silver fish spoons. As he placed a long, slimy, gray lump on my plate, my nose filled with the horrid scent of a salty, frigid ocean. I crinkled my face.
Before I could remember my manners and hide my scowl, Hedwig noticed. “Ah! She doesn’t like our food, either?”
I looked up, away from the gray filet and toward my hostess. “No,” I stammered, searching for the right words. “It’s not that at all.”
“It looks delicious,” Bernadotte interjected. “What is this dish called?”
“Inlagd sill,” King Charles said, joining the conversation for the first time. “Pickled herring is a national treasure of ours.” He took a bite.
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