The Princess of Nowhere

by Lorenzo Borghese

  Pauline glared. “No one ‘summons’ him these days. He ‘summoned’ himself to inspect that camp, just to spite me. We were to be married in Paris, with a grand ball afterward, and instead here we are back in Mortefontaine with my mother and my sister-in-law.”

  “We will have a ball in Rome, to introduce you to everyone there,” he said, moving behind her chair and caressing her curls. He loved the feel of them, like little feathered arcs under his hand.

  She twisted around to look at him. “Really? A ball?”

  “More than one, in fact. We will give a formal ball soon after we arrive, and then during Carnival there is a masked ball at our villa, just outside the city.”

  Now she was smiling. “Masks? And costumes, as well? Oh, I have always wanted to go to a masquerade! May I have any costume I please?”

  “Certainly.” He ran his hands down the side of her neck. “What would you like to be?”

  She sighed with pleasure and leaned her head against his arm. “A bacchante.”

  His hand stopped moving. “A bacchante?” Surely she did not mean that. Pauline’s education had been somewhat haphazard. Presumably she had heard the word or seen a painting and did not really know what she was saying.

  “Yes, one of those wild women who follow Bacchus, with vines in their hair, and animal skins, and their breasts bare.” She sprang up and crossed over to the mirror, pulling her dress off her shoulders and tousling her hair. “I would look very well, I think. And you could be a satyr.”

  Camillo pictured his mother’s reaction to the news that the Prince and Princess Borghese had hosted the family’s carnival ball dressed as a priapic goat-man and drunken slut, respectively. And he realized, with a heavy, sick feeling in his stomach, that he could no longer put off talking to Pauline about her duties as his wife.

  They were married now in the eyes of the world. Her flirting, her disregard for convention, her brazen physicality, were now a danger to his own reputation. There could be no more nude chases through the bedroom, no more crescendos lit by a myriad of candles, no more frantic couplings in the carriage. This woman would be the mother of his children. It was time to stop pretending she was his mistress.

  “Pauline,” he said, speaking to her in the mirror, over her shoulder. “You know, as my wife—that is—” He stopped.

  She turned and looked at him. “Well?”

  He took a deep breath. “Yes, that is, now that we are publicly known as man and wife, there are a few matters—” He stopped again.

  “You’re going to preach at me, aren’t you?” she said, folding her arms. One bare nipple peeked out from the crook of her elbow. “Go ahead. I’m used to it. My mother does it, my brothers do it, my uncle does it. I thought you were different.” Her eyes were dark with anger. “You are not different. You are just like Napoleon. My sister must not do this! My sister must not do that! Only now it will be my wife must not wear such a costume, or dance with such a man, or do anything else amusing!”

  “It is not fitting,” he said, exasperated.

  “What is not fitting?”

  He pointed at her nipple. “Well, that, for example.”

  “Oh? And what else?”

  “You should wear a nightdress.” He would get this over with quickly. “Always. Even when we are, well, together. No candles. No mirrors.” He closed his eyes, remembering how the mirrors had made her skin shimmer with reflections. And he brought out the carefully constructed sentence he had been practicing for the past six weeks. “Marital relations should be conducted with dignity and discretion in the bedchamber of the wife.”

  “Now you sound worse than Napoleon,” she said, pulling up her dress with an angry jerk. “You sound like that damned Almanac National. Did my brother give you a copy, with the passages about wifely behavior specially marked?”

  “He did not have to give me a book,” Camillo snapped. “I know what is due to my name and my dignity.”

  “You and your name and your dignity can go to hell,” she said, furious. And before he could stop her, she had slammed out of the room.

  He searched the whole house for her. At first, he was quiet and careful, so that no one else would know they had quarreled. As it grew later and later, he became worried and called in the servants.

  No one had seen her.

  Just before dawn, he thought to try the children’s rooms. Dermide was asleep next to his nurse, a Corsican virago who terrified Camillo. Hastily, he closed the door. The next room was Sophie’s.

  Pauline was curled up next to the girl, her arm carelessly lying across Sophie’s chest. She was sleeping heavily and did not even stir as the door opened and Camillo peered in, holding up his candle. But Sophie was not asleep. She was lying very still, wedged against the headboard of the narrow bed, her arms pinned to her sides by Pauline’s weight. Her eyes were open, and as she looked up at Camillo, she gave a little smile of triumph.

  SIX

  Rome, February 1804

  Sophie was sitting by her window looking out at the dawn and thinking about Camillo. Today was the first day of Lent, when Catholics began forty days of penance. Sophie was not Catholic; nevertheless, she decided gloomily that Lent had come to her and assigned her a penance anyway. Her penance was thinking about Camillo. She did not particularly want to think about him. She hated him—or, at least, that was what she told herself. It had started to take on the character of a reminder rather than a fact.

  It had not been hard to dislike him initially. All suitors of Pauline were suspect in Sophie’s eyes: if they ignored her, they were rude boors; if they courted and flattered her in the mistaken belief that she had any influence with Pauline, they were fools. Camillo was doubly damned—he had the warm, open smile of the fools and the glazed focus on Pauline of the boors.

  Then had come the rumors, the family meetings, the consultations with the oily and sinister Angiolini. Suddenly Camillo was no longer a suitor; he was the suitor. Which meant, in Sophie’s eyes, that he had graduated to the status of declared enemy. And when he and Pauline fell in love, Sophie was engulfed in rage, the black, bitter rage of someone who has been betrayed and discarded.

  After the first wedding, she had lain awake every night, listening for the sounds in the room beneath hers that told her that the prince had crept back into the hôtel and was with Pauline. In Pauline’s room. In Pauline’s bed.

  She was not quite sure what they did in the bed, although she knew several different coarse terms for it, and Nunzia kept trying to describe it to her. But her imagination refused to connect scenes of dogs and horses with Pauline or any other rational human being. Whatever it was, it involved a great deal of giggling by Pauline and episodes of furniture-thumping that made Sophie burrow down in her bed with her hands over her ears in an agony of jealousy and embarrassment. Whatever it was could also apparently happen in their carriage, or in the garden, or, if she could believe the cook’s shocked account, in the wine cellar of Pauline’s hôtel while guests were waiting for dinner.

  The entire household was caught up in the delicious secret of the hidden marriage. All the servants were delighted to be coconspirators, and when Pauline and Camillo smiled meaningfully at each other in public, their friends and attendants exchanged echoing smiles—except for Sophie, who clamped her teeth together and wished furiously for something terrible to happen to the oh-so-charming prince. She was the only one, the sole island of resistance. Even Dermide liked him.

  “Don’t you remember your own father?” Sophie had asked him one morning, exasperated. “Do you really want a new father, a stepfather, who won’t love you?”

  “But he does love me,” Dermide had said placidly. “Everyone loves me.”

  It was true. Everyone did love Dermide.

  No one loved Sophie.

  Pauline, never an attentive guardian at the best of times, had ignored Sophie completely in those early, heady days of the marriage. When Camillo was not with her, she flitted from room to room with a dreamy expression o
n her face or stood for hours in front of the cheval glass in her boudoir, holding up dresses and jewels and asking anyone nearby whether they became her and would Camillo like them.

  So Sophie had ground her teeth until her jaw ached and looked so sour that Nunzia started giving her dandelion tea and asking pointed questions about her bowel movements. She did her lessons and practiced her music every morning; she played with Dermide in the afternoon; but she was not really there. Her real existence began at night, when she lay awake and concocted ever more elaborate fantasies involving herself, Pauline, and the prince.

  In her favorite one, she was dying—yes, dying—poisoned by the prince. She lay pale and lovely in her bed, surrounded by vases of flowers. The whole household stood outside her bedroom door, weeping. Pauline would nurse her, but it would be too late, and as Sophie drew her last breath, Pauline would beg her forgiveness and curse the name of Camillo Borghese.

  On nights when she did not feel like dying, she produced slightly more realistic visions. For example, Pauline would quarrel with the prince over money (Sophie had overheard many such quarrels between Pauline and her brothers). Or a mysterious letter would come from Rome, heavy with seals, and the prince would open it and turn pale and leave Paris, never to return.

  The prince did not poison her. No mysterious messages arrived from Rome. Sophie grew heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, but the calendar marched on inexorably through September and October and the first week of November. She stood in a new silk gown and matching silk slippers at the second, official wedding, still wishing with every atom of her will for some blight to strike down the prince. And when it did—when Pauline burst into her room, flushed with anger, late that same night, crying and cursing and imploring Sophie to hide her—she was so astonished and thankful that for the first time in her life she considered the possibility that there might be a divine being. Her prayers for help in the battle for Pauline’s love were not directed at anything or anyone more specific than the cosmos; freethinkers did not pray, in the conventional sense of that word. But if there was no God, then who had answered her prayer?

  She had still hated the prince when they left for Italy ten days later.

  The prince had clearly hoped to have Pauline to himself during the journey. There was ample space in the other vehicles for Pauline’s attendants (ten, not including Dermide’s nurse and governess) and Camillo’s (a mere three). But the enormous berlin conveying the newlyweds was certainly wide enough to hold more than two passengers. And while Pauline’s other attendants took Camillo’s hints and excused themselves tactfully to ride with the senior servants or with the nursery party, Sophie clung tenaciously to her spot next to Pauline.

  In part, this was because the prince had made a very bad blunder the first time he tried to hint Sophie away.

  “Perhaps you would like to ride with Dermide?” he had said, smiling at Sophie. It was a patronizing smile, an I-am-an-adult-and-you-are-a-child smile. Any self-respecting eleven-year-old would at that moment have resolved to be carried from the carriage kicking and screaming before ever voluntarily accepting a place in the children’s vehicle.

  But that was not the only reason. Sophie considered it her duty to safeguard Pauline from her own infatuation. As painful as it was to watch the sickening displays of affection in the carriage, it would be even more painful to leave Pauline and Camillo alone and ride in another vehicle, imagining what was happening in her absence. Without wanting to, she kept remembering the coachman’s account of meandering late-night rides around Paris during the “secret” phase of the marriage. “The whole carriage would shake!” he told the servants, enjoying himself hugely. “Like an earthquake! I could barely steer, the chassis was bouncing so hard!”

  There would be no bouncing carriages on this trip, not if Sophie could prevent it. She was willing to endure Camillo’s odious presence, and his increasingly open hints that she was unwelcome, so long as it kept her out of the nursery carriage and at Pauline’s side.

  What Sophie had not anticipated was that Pauline would turn into a monster. The princess loved the idea of travel but hated the actual traveling. She was cold. She was hot. She could eat nothing. She was famished. It was too bright; draw the shades. It was too dim; open them.

  “I need to walk—stop the carriage!” she would say suddenly. The entire cavalcade would stop, the couriers would run back and forth advising all the coachmen and servants of the delay, and Pauline would emerge, walk a few dozen steps, complain of the mud and the cold, and return to the carriage.

  “I have a headache. I must have the carriage to myself,” she announced at another time. Even Sophie was evicted on that occasion. Servants were constantly being sent ahead to order special food or arrange for hot baths with mineral salts to be waiting at the next inn. When Pauline was cold, she would hold out her hands and feet and demand that Camillo or Sophie or one of her ladies warm them; when she was hot, all the carriage windows were lowered, in spite of the rain and wind of the mountain passes.

  Sophie, determined not to be banished, had made herself indispensable. She put all of Pauline’s favorite medicines in a basket that she kept under her skirt between her feet. It was very uncomfortable—the basket bruised her shins even through her stockings—but they did not have to stop the carriage and fetch cases from the luggage coach every time Pauline’s symptoms changed.

  The princess took Sophie’s ministrations for granted. It was the prince who thanked her, very courteously, every time she handed Pauline a handkerchief soaked in cologne or excavated a box of pastilles from the basket at her feet. He never lost his temper or gave any sign that he noticed the wild and illogical variety in his wife’s complaints.

  “Her Excellency needs fresh air,” he would say, beckoning one of the outriders over to the carriage. And then, a few minutes later, “The princess is fatigued from walking and must lie down and have complete quiet.” Then he would assist her very gently back into the carriage, arrange all the cushions and covers, close the window shades, and sit across from her, looking as anxious and affectionate as though this were the first such episode that day instead of the tenth.

  Reluctantly, Sophie found herself his ally—two nursemaids trying to coax an ill-tempered princess across the Alps. When she went to bed each evening, usually with Dermide and Carlotta, she no longer lay awake plotting disasters for the prince. She was too tired and stiff. And she heard plenty of good-humored but uncomplimentary descriptions of Pauline from the servants.

  “Our Paolina was certainly not at her best this evening,” Carlotta had said one night. They were in a small mountain village, and earlier that evening Pauline had suddenly declared that her throat was sore; she required blackcurrant brandy. The inn was turned upside down; villagers came forward with various alternatives—cherry brandy, apple brandy, even a treasured local recipe made from sour pears. Pauline rejected them all and appealed to the heavens for mercy; this trip would kill her; no one could imagine what she was suffering; why had they not stopped earlier/later in village X/town Y, where there would certainly have been a supply of the stuff.

  “She was not feeling well,” said Sophie.

  “When does she feel well, these days?” Carlotta tucked Dermide in more firmly next to Sophie and climbed onto her own trundle bed.

  “It isn’t her fault,” said Sophie defensively. “Travel doesn’t agree with her.”

  “Travel doesn’t agree with anyone! The rest of us are just as jostled and tired as she is, but you don’t see anyone else complaining of something new every two hours! The blessed saints only know what she will decide is wrong next. I swear, if she could feel pain in her fingernails, she would be demanding a fingernail doctor.”

  Sophie couldn’t help it—she snorted with laughter.

  “Don’t put it past her.” The nursemaid pinched out the candle. “How you endure it, Sophie, is beyond me. And His Excellency—he is so patient with her! If I were her husband, I would beat her.”

  He was pat
ient, thought Sophie. And just for one moment she felt sorry for him.

  “I wonder what it will be tomorrow,” said Carlotta drowsily. “We’ll be sent to find mare’s milk, maybe.”

  “Or fresh peaches,” Sophie ventured. “Peaches in November in the mountains.” She gave a nervous giggle, half-amused, halfdismayed at her own treachery. She waited to see if Carlotta would laugh in response. But Carlotta was asleep.

  Once they had reached Rome, Sophie had seen very little of the prince or princess. At first she was glad, grateful for her own room, for time to read and walk, for a respite from Pauline’s complaints and demands. But within a few days, she was bored and lonely and homesick for her well-ordered life in Paris and the evening ritual of bidding her goddess good-night. Rome was noisy and foreign; the Borghese palace was an enormous warren of cold, echoing rooms that led endlessly into one another. Sophie regularly got lost on her way from her bedchamber to the kitchen. Anything or anyone familiar began to seem very appealing—even Camillo. And that was before the battle with Camillo’s widowed mother over Sophie’s heresy.

  The third morning after their arrival was Sunday, and the dowager princess was getting ready to display her son and new daughter-in-law at mass. The palace had its own exquisite little chapel, but this was to be a grand excursion to Santa Maria Maggiore. Sophie was helping Dermide put on his gloves when Donna Anna noticed that she was not dressed to go out.

  “Why is the little cousin not ready?” she demanded, turning to Camillo. “We will be late! She must follow after us; one of the servants can bring her.”

  “Oh, Sophie is not coming,” Camillo said hastily. He took his mother’s arm and tried to shepherd her toward the doorway, but she frowned and turned back.

  “Sophia,” she said loudly and very slowly, in Italian, “are you ill?”

  Sophie looked up, startled. “No, Your Excellency.”

  “Why are you not dressed to go to mass?”