Despite not receiving letters from my Bernadotte, I knew in my heart how difficult it all was for him; he did not want to make war against his own countrymen any more than I wanted him to. But he was a man divided now, sworn to protect Sweden’s interests, balancing the desires of new allies such as Russia and Britain and Prussia, all the while carrying the deep and abiding love in his heart that he would always feel for his native France. What he wanted, more than anything, was an end to this constant scourge of war across Europe.
But there was to be no end, it appeared. As the summer warmed, Napoleon was moving east, seizing Polish and Russian territory with apparent ease. He crossed the Neman River and marched into Russia with the largest invading army in human history, boasting, according to the triumphant French newspapers: “I will take Russia in twenty days.” And it seemed that his boast was not exaggerated. We heard in Paris how the superstitious Russian peasants watched him crossing their land, believing him to be the coming of the Antichrist, the harbinger of the approaching apocalypse following the comet that we had all seen burning its way brilliantly across the sky.
The bells pealed from Notre Dame to Saint-Denis when the news arrived that Napoleon had taken Moscow. It was early autumn, and our cool Parisian night burst with the noise and color of massive fireworks. Napoleon declared victory. The Russians, unbelievably, had burned their own capital before abandoning it to the French.
And now, my husband was forced to honor his allegiance to Britain and Russia, and he joined the army of nations against Napoleon. This meant that I, too, faced a harrowing decision of my own—attempt a winter journey across hostile roads and waters to return to my husband and our new home, or remain in the country that felt like home, but now viewed me as an enemy of the state.
Chapter 39
Paris
1812
PERHAPS EVEN GOD HIMSELF HAD grown tired of the insults and had joined the alliance against Napoleon. That was what I came to believe, that’s what people began to whisper all across Paris and France and then Europe, after the Russian snow and ice managed what all the armies of Europe had not. It was as Tsar Alexander had predicted: A Frenchman is brave, but our winter will fight on our side.
The Tsar had been correct; as conquering Frenchmen braced for the harshest winter in living memory, fear began to harden over the windswept steppes of Russia. More cold was yet to come, and thus, more disaster for the once-indomitable Grand Armée.
As winter rolled into Paris, so did news of a mounting disaster to the east. Napoleon had been speedy and successful on his march into Russia—but what of it? As Moscow burned, as the golden breezes of September turned into the biting winds of October, France’s conquering army found itself in an untenable spot: their supply lines were fractured, food stores had run out, and the massive army was left stranded, trapped between a burned capital city and a wasteland of ice, snow, and angry Russian patriots.
I read in the journals that Napoleon ordered a retreat, but battering snowstorms made movement of such a large force nearly impossible. Merciless winter temperatures sunk below zero degrees. I could see it all in my mind as it was described: horse corpses piling up beneath fresh piles of snowfall, soldiers’ lips frozen together so they could not cry out in their agony. The men who did not freeze to death found themselves dying of slow and cruel starvation; desperate men resorted to eating their frozen horses and dogs. Rumors, even, of Frenchmen eating other fallen Frenchmen. Others who did not freeze or starve or go mad were stalked by Russian soldiers and angry peasants, eager to enact vengeance at long last.
Napoleon, seeing the utter uselessness of it all, fled on a horse-drawn sled, racing across the snow in his sable coat and fur-lined boots. I heard in Paris about how he had arrived back to the Tuileries in time for the court’s Christmas balls, while his men, far from home and without food or boots, lost their limbs and their minds to ice and snow and frostbite. Well, I thought bitterly, he always did know how to take care of himself.
* * *
And now, the armies of Russia, Prussia, Britain, and, yes, Sweden were chasing Napoleon’s ravaged army back across Europe. By spring, they looked ready to march into the French Empire. Julie and I sat together most afternoons reading the journals, or pacing my salon, wondering how it might all fall apart. All of Paris waited on the blade of a knife.
Napoleon, we realized, was not invincible, as we had all supposed him to be. In fact, these other nations might actually be able to defeat the man whom they saw as the scourge of Europe. But they could accept only complete and total surrender.
As the allies closed in on France, my husband was encamped with his army near Brussels, just outside our own French border. I wondered—my heart filling with longing for him, but also pain for Julie—if I would see him right here in Paris. I was grateful that Oscar was settled in Sweden, but I prayed for my husband’s safe deliverance.
“The Russian troops are moving closer,” Julie told me, in what had become her usual harried voice. “The Tsar’s troops are already on French soil. Joseph tells me they are now an easy march from the capital. All of the Bonapartes are frantic.”
Seeing the inevitable, Napoleon fled to Fontainebleau, the glorious castle I remembered as a place from a fairy tale; the place where he had shattered Josephine’s heart. For her part, Josephine sped to Malmaison, her favorite jewels stitched into her undergarments. Marie Louise was staying in Paris with her son—no doubt excited at the idea of falling into Austrian hands.
I, too, saw the inevitable; my sister was married to Napoleon’s closest ally. His favorite brother, his constant confidant. Joseph and Julie would have to flee, and so they made plans to travel to the west, where they would be near the Atlantic and a quick water escape.
We hugged farewell at my sister’s mansion on the morning of her departure. No words could capture how I felt at saying farewell; no words could put any certainty on a departure that we little understood. For as long as I could remember, and even further back than that, Julie had been the one constant in my life. The defining relationship, more so than any relationship with my husband or son or even Napoleon. “The most dreadful thing about this,” I said, swallowing back my tears, “what makes it harder than any farewell in our past, is that I don’t know what comes next.”
“None of us do, my dear,” my sister said, her arms holding mine. “But then, when have we ever known, really? Certainty is not a luxury we have ever had, not in times such as ours.”
With Julie gone, my body capitulated. I was carried to bed that afternoon, my chest racked with a cough, my limbs aching as rheumatism enflamed my joints. The physician came and mixed me a draught, which I swallowed in three eager gulps. I shut my eyes and burrowed into the downy plushness of my old bed, slipping into the welcome reprieve of a dark, thoughtless slumber.
* * *
The Russians were the first to reach Paris, marching in through the eastern barrier. From there it only grew—the Russians and Prussians and Austrians descended on the city, as the French remained indoors in a nervous and silent huddle. But where were the Swedes? I wondered.
I dared not go outside. I kept my gates locked and my doors barred, but through the sliver of my curtained windows, I could see bearded men—Russian Cossacks—in their braided wool tunics and blue pants. I could hear snippets of their odd, impenetrable language. To think, these were the same men who had burned their own capital rather than allow it to fall into enemy hands, and now, here they were, tying their horses at the front steps of our grand limestone buildings and peeing on our springtime shrubs. Tsar Alexander rode at the head of a grand parade down the Champs-Élysées. I heard from my servants that His Excellency was staying with Talleyrand in his magnificent mansion just off the Tuileries, a mansion that Talleyrand had been given by Napoleon. The Tsar was reportedly eager to meet Josephine.
I was afraid, but I didn’t need to be. Ironically, I was safer now that the
allied troops were in the city than I had been under Napoleon’s reign. I was the Princess Royal of Sweden, married to one of the heads of the coalition, even if I did in my heart still identify as a Frenchwoman. I just wanted my Bernadotte to be here with me.
Week after week, I waited. Every clamor of footsteps below brought with it the fresh hope that I’d see my officer, Sergeant Belle-Jambe, riding up at the head of a Swedish force. But he didn’t come.
* * *
On Easter morning, I awoke to a riot of church bells. I pulled on my silk dressing robe and descended the stairs, wondering if the servants had picked up any news on their morning errands. There, in the grand salon at the foot of the stairs, my eyes landed on a sight I had not been expecting—one that brought tears of relief and joy to my sleepy eyes.
“Happy Easter, my darling girl.”
“Bernadotte!” I ran to my husband and flew into his arms. “At last! Oh, I have been waiting for you. Thank goodness you’ve come.”
He pulled back to take me in his arms for an inspection. I also swept his entire figure with my appraising gaze and could not help but find him dashing, dressed in an officer’s tunic of plum velvet with a high collar and gold epaulets. He wore white breeches and high boots. His hair was longer and his face ruddy from such a long march. He offered me a weathered smile as he said: “You look well, my dear.”
“Oh, but I’ve been sick. Sick with worry.” I pulled him to the nearest sofa and sat him down. “What took you so long?”
“War, my dear. Napoleon was not easily conquered.”
We sat together for hours as Bernadotte told me of the fighting of recent months. The final battle had come at a decisive gathering known as the Battle of the Nations, near a German city called Leipzig. Napoleon had been defeated, but his government had been quick to make its own separate peace. “Talleyrand is already hosting the Russians,” I told him.
Bernadotte nodded. “Yes, and we hear that Josephine has entertained the Tsar in her gardens in Malmaison. And who knows where else.”
“Good for her,” I said, clasping my hands in my lap. “She would have fled with him and remained by his side, even in defeat. But he put her aside, taking up with his Habsburg princess when it suited him better.”
“And now that Habsburg wife has betrayed him,” Bernadotte said, sighing. “He should be little surprised. She’ll raise his boy in Vienna, and he’ll grow up to think of his father as the enemy.”
I blinked, my mind spinning to absorb this stunning turn of events. All in a matter of months.
“But what has it been like in Paris?” my husband asked.
“Quiet, at least among the French,” I said. “Most retreated indoors. I haven’t gone outside. The foreign troops have been here, of course. But I’ve been seeing the Bourbon fleur-de-lys on the lapels of those who walk about the city.”
Bernadotte listened, nodding decisively. “Louis XVIII will be put on the throne—the dead king’s brother. France’s top generals have denounced Napoleon and taken an oath of loyalty to the Bourbons.” Now his brow creased, and I noticed that his face bore new and deep lines as he frowned. After a long exhale, he said, “It was all for nothing, in the end.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Because Napoleon ruined it.”
I leaned forward, my hand reaching for his. “But you are safe, Bernadotte. And so am I. We will be all right, won’t we?”
“Yes, we will be all right. Sweden is part of the alliance.” But he looked neither happy nor relieved as he said it. “And even France shall be better off as a result of this defeat. He is gone, at last. The diplomacy is up to Metternich and the Tsar and Talleyrand now.”
“What about you?”
My husband was on edge, I could see that as he fidgeted in his creaky seat, his tall frame suddenly appearing unwieldy and restless. “They show me little respect. I’ve tried to advise them throughout the campaign, but the audiences are always brief and inconsequential. Should they treat me as French or Swede? Foe or friend? They can’t seem to make up their minds on that.”
I reached for him, putting my hands on his rough, chapped skin. He let out a slow exhale. I knew how tortured he was by the fact that he had been forced to fight against the French. To put on the uniform of the same enemy against which he’d been willing to give his life on so many other occasions. What a mad time in which we lived. “Darling,” I said, searching for the right words, words that might grant him some small measure of comfort. I wanted to remind him that he was a leader now; he was worthy of his place among kings, even if he felt like only a soldier without a country.
But before I could find the words to say this, to lift him from his anguish, Bernadotte’s whole frame was suddenly racked by a sudden and violent shudder. “Oh, Desiree!” He began to weep, something I had seldom seen him do. “The pain I felt in crossing into these lands alongside a conquering army, lands I have so many times defended with my life. And then to hear of the devastation of the French. I gave money from my own purse to the captured French soldiers, do you know that? I wish I could have done more. But now, I feel like a traitor in my own lands.”
“You are no traitor, Bernadotte.”
“I was not fighting against France, I was fighting against him. You believe me, right?”
“Of course I do.”
“He has ruined our nation for our countrymen. He has ruined the Revolution and everything for which we fought. And do you know what he did? He’s attempted to poison himself at Fontainebleau.”
I gasped. “Attempted? Then, he didn’t succeed?”
Bernadotte shook his head. “No, he lives on to see the full scope of his defeat.”
“What will become of him?” Even more pressingly, what would happen to my sister and Joseph? But that had not yet been decided.
“It will be exile for him,” Bernadotte said. “He can sit on the isle of Elba and torture himself with memories of his failure. Thinking about the abandonment of his wife and son, and his own abandonment of his men.”
Chapter 40
Rue d’Anjou, Paris
Spring 1815
I AWOKE TO THE HEADLINE AND knew instantly what it meant, though it was only a single word:
NAPOLEON!
He was back, according to Le Moniteur. He had returned to Paris, escaping his exile on the rocky island of Elba. Within minutes of seeing the journal, my entire household was in a state of disarray. Elise burst into my bedchamber clad in only a thin dressing gown, her loose hair tumbling around her flushed face. “Does he rule once more? Is Louis gone? Should we go to the Tuileries? Send a note?”
I ordered a servant to go out into the streets to gather more information, and by luncheon, we had some answers. Napoleon ruled France once more, the servant told me, breathless. He had escaped and sailed, in secret, from Elba with just a small force of loyal men.
“Why do I always feel as though Napoleon catches me completely unaware?” I asked Elise, who sat across the table; neither of us was eating much of the lunch.
“Because he does,” she answered. “He catches us all unaware. All of Europe. You can be sure that no one is more alarmed at the moment than Austria’s emperor.”
I shook my head, looking down at the fish on my plate, considering all that had happened as the rest of us slept, completely unsuspecting. Napoleon had made an arduous but stealthy trip back to Paris. He’d landed on French soil on the southern coast, camped out in the mountains near Cannes, and marched over the Maritime Alps and up through Provence in secret. For eighteen days, he had moved, undetected and entirely unopposed, toward Paris. Only the army knew, and excited whispers had spread in secret, the fires of a beacon seeping its light across the nation; officers and enlisted men rallied to his side, swelling his numbers until he had a veritable army. “Paris or death,” they whispered as they marched toward the capita
l with their one-time Emperor.
They’d arrived in Paris several weeks later, under cover of darkness. Louis, our fat, gouty Bourbon king, had been hoisted from bed by frightened attendants, packed into a carriage, and whisked from the city. Unlike his dead brother, the unlucky Bourbon namesake who had ruled before him, Louis had made it successfully across the frontier and into Belgium before forces favorable to the Emperor caught him.
Napoleon marched into the Tuileries unopposed and declared himself Emperor of France once more, greeting the shouting crowds who had flocked there to welcome him home.
Paris erupted into a state of stunned celebration.
Europe’s leaders scrambled, aghast, while in the Tuileries Napoleon ordered his men to rip the Bourbon fleur-de-lys off the walls. The rumor popped up that the Bonaparte bee insignia was still woven into the underlayer of the carpets and drapes of the palace, and David’s imperial paintings were pulled from storage and hung back in their original places.
I considered all of this, wondering if ever a woman had felt so divided—in her mind, in her heart, indeed, in her very soul. While I was unsure how my Bernadotte was receiving this news from his Stockholm palace, I was certain of one fact: Julie would come back to Paris. And that filled me with a greater joy than I had allowed myself to imagine.
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