The Josephine B. Trilogy

by Sandra Gulland

  “Well!” Minerva exclaimed, “perhaps we should play charades?”

  It seemed that nothing would leaven the mood. The presence of the man in the corner had a sobering effect on us all.

  “That Barras!” Thérèse exclaimed in the privacy of Minerva’s boudoir. “He has taken his projects too far.”

  “Deputy Barras pressed me to introduce Citoyen Buonaparte into our circle,” Minerva told us. “He is new to Paris and in need of social contacts—”

  “He is in need of social manners,” Thérèse said. “What is he—Corsican or something?”

  “Napoleone Buonaparte…? Why is the name familiar?” I asked.

  “He was the general who saved Toulon,” Minerva said. “Remember?”

  Toulon?

  “Two years ago—when the English invaded?”

  I remembered. The festivities, the dancing, the toasts throughout the night. “So that’s how Barras knows him,” I said. “Wasn’t Barras in charge at Toulon?”

  “It is impossible for me to believe that that man could be a general, much less a hero,” Thérèse said, dusting her face with rice powder.

  “My dear citoyennes, is it possible you are blinded by this man’s poverty, his lack of breeding?” Minerva asked. “Stand as my witnesses: I predict he will have a great future. I see it in the shape of his chin.”

  Future or not, Thérèse and I did not stay long—we left on excuse that her baby was ill.

  “What a miserable evening,” Thérèse groaned, settling into her carriage. “I hope Barras knows better than to drag that Corsican with him everywhere. Next thing you know, he’ll be insisting I introduce him at La Chaumière.”

  August 9.

  It is just as Thérèse feared—Barras is intent on making a project of the Corsican. He and the strange little man showed up at La Chaumière and now Citoyen Buonaparte comes on his own. Thérèse, ever the soft heart, has offered to help him obtain fabric for a new uniform. “If he’s going to be coming here, he should at least have proper clothes,” she told me.

  “Take care, Tallita—I think he is in love with you,” I whispered to her.

  “It would seem that Citoyen Buonaparte falls in love easily,” she said, rolling her eyes. “He’s engaged to marry a girl in Marseille, he talks endlessly about a girl in Châtillon, and now Barras informs me he intends to propose to La Montansier.”

  “The lady Barras rents his town house from?”

  “Lady? Rose, you are too kind.”

  La Montansier was proud of the fact that she had started her career as a prostitute. The loges in the theatres she manages are furnished with extra-wide divans. “But she’s over sixty—” I protested.

  “And with three million livres hidden under her well-used mattress.” Thérèse raised her eyebrows. “In Corsica, apparently, they make no pretense of such matters.”

  Tuesday, August 11.

  Last night, close to midnight at La Chaumière, Thérèse came to my side. “Meet me in my boudoir,” she whispered.

  I extracted myself from my group. When we got to the privacy of her room, she fell onto her bed clutching her sides. “Buonaparte…!” She burst into laughter again.

  “The Corsican?”

  “He’s made a proposal of marriage!”

  “To you?” I stared at her. I smiled imagining it: Thérèse was so much taller than the Corsican. “Just now? In the parlour?”

  Thérèse nodded, making a great effort to control herself. “I was with Fortunée, Madame de Crény and Minerva. He came up to us and said, ‘Citoyenne Tallien, may I speak with you…in private?’ So I retired with him to the entryway. And it was there he said, ‘Now that you are free, I would like you to consider me.’ At first I did not understand. He became a bit impatient. ‘I am making you an offer of marriage,’ he finally burst out. Then he said, ‘Together we could have a great future, for Fortune smiles on me.’”

  “He said that? That Fortune smiles on him? What a curious thing to say.”

  “Especially for a man who is in such dire need. If Fortune smiles on him, she should rather start paying attention.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him he should consider you instead,” Thérèse said, adjusting the pearl ornaments in her hair in the looking glass.

  “No!” She was teasing—surely. “Tallita?”

  She never did say. But now the Corsican watches me.

  August 12.

  It has been hectic at Barras’s. He complains he has no time for the gaming tables, the hunt. “Democracy!” he cursed. “It’s so time-consuming! All these tedious meetings.”

  I pushed a guest list toward him. For two days, I had been trying to get his approval.

  “Citoyen Buonaparte? Is he not included?” he asked, looking it over. “The ladies have wearied of my Corsican protégé? You do not perceive his brilliance for his long and, I admit, distasteful hair, his smelly boots. I assure you, he is an ambitious man—he will go far.”

  “I perceive his ambition,” I said, “his ambition to woo every woman of standing in Paris. He shows no moderation in his passion…for women of wealth, that is.”

  “Moderation be damned. Moderation belongs to the past. Napoleone is in need of a wife. Perhaps you should oblige him.”

  With that he was gone. I sighed and added the Corsican’s name to the list. I will hear more on this matter, I fear.

  August 14.

  Barras came to my salon last night in the company of the Corsican.

  “Do Corsicans never laugh?” Thérèse complained. “He is so serious.”

  Toward the end of the evening I found myself sitting beside Citoyen Napoleone (an impossible name to pronounce). In an attempt to make conversation, I complimented him on his valour at Toulon. “It is said you are a genius,” I told him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You have a large family in Marseille? I am told one of your sisters is particularly charming.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Deputy Fréron,” I said.*

  Then abruptly he stood and left the room!

  “Is he angry?” I asked Barras. Had I said something to offend him?

  “He’s a little strange sometimes.” Barras took my arm, drew me into the entryway. “I’d like you to befriend him. Get to know him,” he whispered.

  “He is not an easy man to talk to,” I protested. “I don’t know if I—”

  “If anyone can, Rose, you can,” Barras said. He took several coins out of his pocket, slipped them into my hand.

  “What’s this for?” The three gold louis were worth over seventy livres.

  “I can count on you?” he asked.

  August 15.

  “Napoleone has become a regular member of your Tuesday night salon, I see.”

  Barras and I were enjoying a private lunch in his garden.

  “I am getting to know him,” I said. “A little.” Napoleone Buonaparte was a complex person; one evening, he talked openly, and the next, he did not say a word. “It is difficult to know where one stands with him.”

  “And how would one like to stand?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Barras ordered his butler to bring the dessert. “Do you ever discuss politics with him?”

  “He supports the Republic,” I said, “if that’s what you want to know.”

  “But with who running it?”

  “I believe him to be more of a leader than a follower—at least in his own mind.”

  Barras laughed as he filled my glass. “And that’s why we must keep our eye on him, my dear.”

  In which I find a home

  August 16, 1795.

  I have fallen in love…with a house.

  Julie Carreau’s, to be precise, on the slopes of Mont-Martre. One approaches it by a long walled-in drive opening onto a most charming setting: a small hôtel, a carriage house, a stable with a garden behind. A tiny, perfect world.

  It was a hot day, but cool there, the breeze
coming up the mountain from the city. “This is like a country home,” I told Julie, “yet close to the heart of the city.” I was enchanted.

  “I will miss it,” she said.

  “You are moving?”

  “It’s small. I can’t keep enough staff here. And there’s only room for one carriage.”

  I walked down the garden path. There were rosebushes on both sides. “Are you selling it?”

  “Leasing.”

  “I’ll take it.” I did not ask the price.

  August 17.

  I signed the lease. Ten thousand livres a year—almost half my allowance from Mother, if it ever comes through. I move in five weeks, on the Republican New Year. I’ve made arrangements to have my cow brought from Croissy. A house, horses, a cow, garden, staff. A modest establishment, yet even so, so much to attend to…so much to pay for.

  Wednesday, August 19.

  Thanks to Tallien my appeal for compensation on Alexandre’s La Ferté property has been granted. We are to get back the books in his library (an extensive collection), the silver that was confiscated, as well as an advance of ten thousand livres (only!) against the value of the property, which the government sold.

  “It will take time for the paperwork to go through,” Tallien warned. “It’s unlikely that you will see anything until spring.”

  “How can I thank you?”

  “You have done enough already, Rose.”

  I looked at him with a question in my eyes.

  “You are perhaps the only person who overlooks my more visible weaknesses in favour of my more hidden strengths. That is thanks enough.”

  August 17, 1795—Rennes

  Dear Rose,

  The post is being watched. Give letters and parcels addressed to me to Deputy Barras. The government couriers are secure.

  I love you.

  Your soldier, Lazare

  August 27.

  In the post this afternoon I received a hand-lettered bulletin regarding a school for girls in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, next to Collège Irlandais, a school for boys.

  I showed the bulletin to Lannoy. “Madame Campan is running it,” I said. I had known Madame Campan’s brother and his wife in Croissy—the Augiés. Hortense often played with Adèle, their daughter.

  “Ah, Madame Campan!” Lannoy whispered reverently. As former lady-in-waiting to our poor departed Queen, Madame Campan was close to being royal herself, in Lannoy’s eyes. “That would be the perfect school for Hortense,” she said.

  And the Collège Irlandais next door for Eugène.

  But for the cost…

  Sunday, August 30.

  Today the children and I visited the two schools in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Eugène succumbed with resignation. His is a Spartan institution, as one expects in a school for boys. He liked the playing fields.

  Madame Campan’s school is situated in the adjoining Hôtel de Rohan, a beautiful if run-down estate on a rambling country property. Hortense and her friend Adèle Augié ran about in a fever of excitement. I rejoiced seeing them together again; one would never know, hearing them laugh, that Hortense had not so long ago lost her father, Adèle her mother to the violence of the Terror.

  Madame Campan greeted me with elegant simplicity in the foyer. “Please, call me Henriette.” She is a plain woman with heavy features. She was wearing a simple black dress, severely cut. Mourning, I wondered? For her sister, the Queen, the Boy? I had heard stories of what she’d been through, her own narrow escapes from death.

  She invited me into her office. I was surprised to see a framed copy of the Rights of Man on the wall above her desk. Noting my expression, she slyly turned it over to reveal a portrait of the Queen.

  “Comtesse de Montmorin has told me of the heroic efforts you made to save her husband,” Madame Campan said, taking a seat beside me.

  “Would that I could have saved him from death.” And others. “I was grieved to learn of your sister-in-law.” I remembered Madame Augié as a sweet-tempered, somewhat distracted woman, always trying to keep track of her three active young daughters.

  Madame Campan offered me a cup of weak tea in fine china, slightly cracked. “I tell the girls their mother died in her sleep.” Her cup began to rattle in its saucer. Quickly she put it down. “I am mother to them all now. An invalid husband, a son, three nieces to look after as well as a school for one hundred girls.” She took up her cup again, took a sip. “I don’t have time to mourn.”

  She outlined the school’s program: the girls would be given a classical education with special attention to art (Jean-Baptiste Isabey, a portrait painter I admire, will be teaching there) and history. She glanced at the Queen’s portrait. Although hers was a well-to-do establishment, she assured me the girls would not be indulged—they would be taught to cook and to clean up after themselves. “And, as well, in spite of the fashion now, my girls will be taught good manners and the art of conversation.”

  I heard a child shriek. I looked out the window to see Hortense wildly chasing both Eugène and Adèle across the lawn. Manners? Bonne chance, I thought, smiling. “Hortense has a cousin, Émilie—the daughter of an émigré,” I said. “Her family is ruined, now, of course. She’s in need of education; I’d like to provide for her, but—”

  Madame Campan agreed to take both Hortense and Émilie, charging only for Hortense. As well she offered the use of second-hand uniforms. “Adèle speaks so often of your daughter, I regard her as one of the family. I must beg your forgiveness for charging at all.”

  September 6.

  I had a meeting scheduled with Barras at his house in Chaillot but the afternoon proved to be too hectic. He’d just come in from a hunt and his excited spaniels were running up and down the halls barking at Toto, the minature greyhound. There were two men waiting in the foyer and a courier with an urgent message to respond to. “Come back at six,” he suggested. “It will be quieter.” I gave him a letter to forward on to Lazare (none for me again, alas) and left.

  In the evening, however, it was not much different: messengers, men waiting. Barras told them all to go away. “If it isn’t the Jacobins, it’s the Royalists,” he cursed. “We put down one, only to be attacked by the other.”

  “You’re anticipating violence?” I’d noticed an increase in the number of National Guardsmen posted near the Assembly. Now, too, one had to apply for a special passport even to go into that neighbourhood.

  “I dare say the worst is yet to come.”

  “Who is behind it?”

  “Sometimes I think it’s Royalists disguised as Jacobins. At other times, Jacobins disguised as Royalists. It’s the damndest thing.”

  “Why do you smile?”

  “The fact is, who cares? The people are exhausted. How many turned out for this last election? One in thirty? But announce the results, and the rocks come flying.”

  After supper he got around to the subject of Buonaparte.

  “I haven’t seen him lately,” I said. “Not at any of the salons, not even at the theatre.”

  “I daresay he’s been busy. I got him a job in the topographic department, making maps. Strategic stuff—his passion. A curious enthusiasm.”

  “Yet you respect him.”

  “I just wish I could trust him. He’s impoverished, with a huge family to support. One wonders what he might do for money. And certainly the Royalists have plenty to throw around. If Buonaparte went over to them…”

  “It’s hard to imagine. If anything, he is a bit of a Jacobin.”

  “Yes—he’s got the rhetoric.”

  “You doubt his sincerity?”

  Barras shrugged. “There is nothing more dangerous—or perhaps the word unpredictable is more accurate—than a revolutionary in want of a fortune.”

  September 12—Fontainebleau.

  I’ve been two days in Fontainebleau, without the children—already Eugène and Hortense are involved in school activities—yet I spent the entire time talking about them. Aunt Désirée and the Marquis were charme
d by my reports of what Hortense’s teachers were saying, how she is doted on by Madame Campan (“La Petite Bonne,” she has been named). “She loves school,” I told them. “I don’t think I’ll ever get her to leave.” I’ve become a little jealous, I confess; Hortense speaks reverently of Madame Campan.

  We had a good visit, without Aunt Désirée’s customary lectures on the sins of idleness, revels and reading romances. But as I was preparing to leave, she came to my door. I knew by her manner that there was something she wanted to say. Finally, with some hesitation, she confessed she was concerned about rumours she’d heard about Madame Tallien. I assured her Thérèse was an angel, a friend in every way.

  “And you’re not having anything to do with these criminals who are running the government now, I hope.”

  “Criminals?”

  “Deputy Barra…Bassar…You know who I mean.”

  Barras, she meant. I kept quiet. I did not have the heart to tell her that it was “this criminal” who was paying for Hortense and Eugène’s education.

  September 15, 1795—Hôtel de Croisoeuil, Croissy

  Dear Citoyenne Madame Beauharnais,

  My mother has asked me to respond to your letter, as she is not well. She regrets that she will not be able to come see you. She asked me to congratulate you on acquiring the Talma residence, but also to express her sorrow that you will be giving up the château at Croissy. Do you plan to move your cow? We hope to be seeing you soon. Mother is in need of diversion.

  Citoyenne Madame Lucie Hosten de Croisoeuil

  Note—Maman asked me to tell you that she recommends Citoyen Callyot, an excellent cook who can make créole dishes. (I recommend him too!)