The Princess of Nowhere

by Lorenzo Borghese

  They lay entwined for a long time. The candles burned down; the lamps began to sputter. Camillo felt sad and happy all at once. It was a little calm space in the storm of Pauline; he knew it would not last. For Pauline, grief was anger. He drifted off to sleep, breathing in her scent and feeling the ragged edges of her soft hair under his chin.

  He woke at dawn, suddenly cold. His arms were empty. Pauline was standing next to the sofa, brushing the creases out of her skirt, her movements savage and careless. When she saw him looking at her, she gave him a mirthless, terrible smile.

  In a flash of understanding, he saw what was coming.

  “I want to thank you, prince husband, for consoling me.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. He could picture it eating into his skin like acid. “In my grief, you see, I became a bit confused. I blamed myself for driving off to take the waters without Dermide. But after you went to sleep, I remembered something. I remembered that it was your idea to go to Pisa. Your idea to leave my son at Frascati. I wanted to take him with us. But ‘the lodgings were too cramped, the inns were too dirty, the carriage ride would make him sick.’” This last was delivered in a scornful imitation of his patrician Roman accent.

  She pointed her finger at his chest. “Your brother could keep him here, in the hills, where he would be safe from the contagion in Rome. Safe! Yes, and my brother and his family would be nearby. You told me that, too. It was one of his cousins who infected him!”

  He looked up at her, not bothering to defend himself. It would be no use, not when she was in this mood. And if she was set on blaming one of them for her son’s tragic illness, he would rather she blamed him than herself.

  Still in her stocking feet, she scooped up her sandals and headed for the door. Wrenching it open, she turned. “You killed my son,” she said flatly.

  He said nothing, just looked at her. Her eyes were red; her clothing crumpled and tear-stained; her cropped hair was jagged and ugly. He remembered the day he had decided to marry her, when he saw her exhausted and filthy by Sophie’s sickbed. Why did he think she was beautiful no matter what she wore, no matter how ill she was, no matter how spiteful or cold her expression?

  “You killed him,” she repeated. “And I will never forgive you. Ever.”

  The door slammed behind her.

  PART II

  The Yellow Rose

  Warmth, Jealousy,

  Promise of a New Beginning

  Paris

  Frimaire 13, Year 13

  [December 4,1804]

  Dearest Jerome:

  You have been away so long, and by the time your letters reach me from America they are months old. But I will be one of the first to send you this news: our brother was at last crowned emperor two days ago, and the balls and parties continue as I write this; no one is sleeping, there is noise and activity everywhere, and food and drink of every possible description. The prince joined me here some weeks ago and it is some comfort to have him with me, but I still mourn for my son and must find some quiet time to be alone occasionally and suffer constantly from headaches. In any case Camillo will be gone in a few weeks; Napoleon has given him a commission in the Grenadiers, and he will be sent to Prussia, or perhaps it is Russia? I don’t see why all the men in our family have to be in the military. Certainly I wish he had never made you a naval officer; you are so far away all the time. Please come home soon, dearest brother, you were still a boy when you left and I long to see you and embrace you.

  Your Pauline

  Plombières-les-Bains

  25th September 1806

  Dear Napoleon:

  I must ask what it is that keeps Camillo so constantly with his regiment. I see other officers in Paris and even here in the spa towns in the mountains; why is my husband home so seldom, for such short periods? Surely now that I am an imperial princess and a duchess I might expect to enjoy some of the privileges of rank? Also, I request that you authorize some additions to my household staff, notably, the appointment of a Monsieur de Forbin as a chamberlain. I met him here while taking the waters; he is of good family and will be a great help to me when I return to Paris and must play my part and help you at court.

  Your affectionate sister,

  Pauline

  Gréoux-les-Bains

  30th June 1807

  To the Comte Auguste de Forbin, Hôtel de Charost, Paris

  Auguste, my dearest love, what delays you? I command you as your beloved, not your employer, to make haste to join me here at Gréoux. Surely as my chamberlain you need no excuse to be with me. I am not well, and it is very hot here in the south at the moment, but I know I will be better the moment you arrive. I have been very good and am drinking the waters every day.

  You ask about my husband—Camillo has been promoted to general and writes me very affectionately. There was great excitement here a few days ago when we received dispatches from the army; it seems Camillo led a ferocious charge against the Russians and was personally commended by my brother. So he is well, and I do not think he will be in France at all this summer but if he does come we must bear it and be discreet. Caro, come quickly to

  your beloved, P.

  Nice

  13th March 1808 Dear Napoleon,

  I wish you would not order me about as you do your soldiers. Camillo will simply have to take up his new post as governor in Turin without me. I am not at all well and cannot possibly travel over the mountains right now; the climate of Turin is also very bad and my doctors advise me to remain here in Nice.

  Your dutiful sister,

  Pauline

  NINE

  Turin, Spring 1808

  The princess was unhappy.

  No, more than unhappy. Her unhappiness, like her new, exalted status, was oversized. She was miserable. She was wretched. After all, Pauline was no longer simply a princess. She was an imperial princess. Her Excellency Princess Borghese was now Her Imperial Highness, Princess of France, Duchess of Guastalla, Princess Borghese, wife of His Excellency General Prince Camillo Borghese, Knight of the Golden Fleece, Grand Dignitary of the Empire, and Governor-General of a new province of France: the Departments-beyond-the-Alps.

  Her new state had its compensations. The Duchy of Guastalla (which Napoleon had created from an obscure small town of the same name) was leveraged to produce a payment of six million francs to Pauline’s personal fortune. Her staff had trebled in size: she now had an almoner (a cardinal, no less), two chaplains, a dame d’honneur, twelve ladies-in-waiting (not including Sophie), six chamberlains, and four equerries. And those were only the official attendants; she also had a physician, a music master, readers, an ever-revolving bevy of pages, and an army of servants. Her clothing and jewels were worth a king’s ransom (or, indeed, an emperor’s ransom, as future events would suggest), and she now traveled in such state that one coach was designated largely to carry her tub, held ready for her daily ritual of bathing in milk.

  Still, it stood to reason that the unhappiness of an imperial princess should be greater than that of a mere princess.

  Part of her discontent was, in fact, the direct result of Napoleon’s coronation. Four years ago, she had been the only princess in the family. Now all her sisters were imperial princesses, and Elisa was also Duchess of Lucca (which, unlike Guastalla, was a large and wealthy province), while Caroline was a Grand Duchess of Cleves and Berg. Her sister-in-law Julie, a queen, outranked her (Joseph was King of Naples and Sicily); so did Catherina, Jerome’s wife, since Jerome had been named King of Westphalia; and Hortense, wife of Louis, the new King of Holland. Only one of her sisters-in-law remained in Pauline’s good graces: Lucien’s wife, Alexandrine. True to his revolutionary ideals, Lucien had refused to accept any titles or offices from Napoleon and had denounced his older brother’s assumption of imperial power.

  Worse than the proliferation of royal titles in the family was the loss of privacy. Four years ago, her love affairs had, for the most part, been a game—a vicious one, to be sure—between herself and Camillo.
Estrangement, jealousy, reconciliation, passion, estrangement. It was a dance they both knew well. The players were extras, visitors to Rome or Paris or whatever spa Pauline believed would cure her that year. They came; they fascinated or were fascinated (briefly); they left.

  Now the affairs had become matters of state. And the players were members of her own household. Napoleon’s re-creation of court life in the miniature monarchies fashioned for his siblings meant that Pauline was constantly surrounded by attractive, ambitious young men. She had already had a liaison with one of her chamberlains and, more recently, had seduced her music master, a shy young Italian. But her courtiers and ladies-in-waiting were loyal to the emperor, not to her. She was a public figure, and sooner or later, her brother would receive reports that his sister was creating more scandal.

  That was why Her Imperial Highness Pauline was having difficulty persuading Napoleon to allow her to leave Camillo and go back to France. She could plead illness all she liked; he did not trust her, and so far he had refused every one of her increasingly abject letters begging him to let her leave Turin and go to France.

  “I am ill, and would like to take the waters in Aix-en-Savoie,” she wrote.

  “You may go to one of the hot springs in your husband’s province,” he wrote back.

  “I am very ill, and my doctors recommend Aix,” she tried next.

  “It is likely just a spring cold; your duty is to your husband and the people of the region” was the reply.

  She turned to Camillo’s secretary, Monsieur de Villemarest. One afternoon, she realized that she had eaten something that disagreed with her; she made certain to have the secretary shown to her apartments during a violent episode of vomiting.

  He wrote the letter.

  Napoleon told Villemarest to make sure that Pauline got the best of medical care. But she belonged with Camillo, in Turin.

  Pauline did not want to be in Turin, hemmed in by clouds and mountains. Hemmed in by the rigid, narrow-minded matrons of Piedmont and the even more rigid rules Napoleon had laid down for her behavior. The rules specified everything from the number of forks at dinner down to the time and place of the weekly public receptions he commanded his new governor-general to host for the people of northern Italy. The rules said that Pauline was to be a dutiful and discreet spouse. The rules required her to receive the wives of the local nobility in her private apartments at least once per week. The rules stated that Pauline was to appear at every public event at Camillo’s side.

  Above all, Pauline did not want to be with Camillo. Because Napoleon’s coronation had not only transformed Pauline’s siblings into kings and queens and Pauline’s own life into a constant battle with her own attendants. It had also transformed Camillo. And Pauline had to be honest: the whole thing was her fault. She was the one—at least indirectly—who had sent Camillo off to war.

  Napoleon had always liked Camillo. Unlike the French hostesses who thought Camillo an idiot, he spoke to him in Italian and therefore actually received replies to his questions. And the first time the First Consul had seen his would-be brother-in-law on a horse, he had whistled in astonishment. His later comment to Lucien, who transmitted it verbatim to Pauline, was “My God, that fucker has the best seat I’ve ever seen!” (Pauline had to admit that the sight of Camillo on horseback was often all it took to prompt her to move from the “jealousy” stage of their marital game to the “reconciliation” stage, to be followed as soon as possible by “passion.”)

  In the benign afterglow of the coronation, it had not been hard to persuade Napoleon to find an excuse to keep Camillo in France. And, therefore, an excuse for Pauline to remain in France.

  At the time, she had not been thinking very clearly. It had been barely five months since she had returned to Paris with Dermide’s body; she would still wake nearly every night in the small hours of the morning, terrified, convinced that something dreadful had happened, and then realize, as sleep dissolved, that something dreadful had happened: her son was gone forever. Because Dermide was so young, she had not been required to observe a formal mourning period; this meant that she had been immediately swept up into the maelstrom of preparations for the coronation. By the time the grand event was over, she had been exhausted, disoriented, and could only think of one thing: she wanted to stay in France. Italy was a dangerous place, where boys were playing in fountains one minute and dead the next. France was safe; she had been happy here; she must find some means of postponing her return to Rome. Her brother was now emperor; he could help her. He could create some position for Camillo in the new regime.

  She had forgotten that Napoleon was an emperor second and a soldier first.

  The emperor had granted Camillo French citizenship. The soldier had made Camillo an officer in the Horse Grenadiers.

  Camillo had been delighted, and, at first, Pauline had been delighted as well. Her husband had looked very dashing in his bearskin hat and gold-braided uniform. Mounted on his black charger, he had looked even better. On the day he rode the horse to the Hôtel de Charost for the first time, she couldn’t even wait to get back into the house. They made love in the stables, with the gelding kicking and stamping in the next stall. Afterward, Pauline had sewn the epaulette back onto Camillo’s jacket herself. It still had four tiny little dents where she had bitten into it.

  Pauline should have known better. She had, after all, been married to one of Napoleon’s senior officers before. Yet somehow she had deluded herself, had pictured Camillo going off to war for a few weeks, perhaps a month—just time enough for a charming flirtation while he was gone—and then returning on his sleek, muscled black horse to whisk her off to the stables again. After a month or two, he would sally forth on another mission; again, a few weeks later, he would return. Pauline would stay in Paris and he would circle around her, at a distance, like a kite on a string.

  Unfortunately, both Camillo and Napoleon believed that officers in cavalry regiments belonged with their troops. So Camillo went off to Boulogne and disappeared into the gaping mouth of Napoleon’s war machine. He was promoted to colonel, then general.

  The man who came back in 1808 to assume his governorship was very different from the man who had left Paris for Boulogne in 1805. This Camillo was proud instead of shy. This Camillo could not be goaded into fits of jealousy or tearful and passionate reunions. He had seen battle; he had led cavalry charges; he had held his own in the most elite fighting unit in Europe. No one could accuse the prince now of being a fop or a coward. No, this Camillo had proved that he was a soldier, a fighter.

  He just wasn’t interested in fighting for Pauline.

  Pauline had tried everything she could think of. When he arrived in Nice, where she had been spending the winter, she had expected they would resume their usual magnetic oscillation between attraction and repulsion. Since she was, at that time, feeling exceptionally healthy and contented, she had decided to forgo the normal first stage (a violent quarrel) and proceed straight to the romantic reunion. That evening, she gave Camillo her most meaningful smile as they retired from the salon after dinner and set about making herself ready for him in her bedroom. She remembered that he did not like bright light or complete nudity and considerately quenched the lamps and retained a wispy film of drapery over her torso. When all was ready, she disposed herself charmingly on her pillows and waited.

  Two hours later, she roused herself from the light sleep she had fallen into, put on a wrapper, and rang for a maid. “Please inform His Excellency that I am waiting for him,” she said.

  The maid reappeared after a few moments to tell her that Camillo had retired for the night. Quite some time ago.

  Very well, she thought. We will try jealousy. It had always worked before. She got up early the next morning, determined to provoke Camillo into acknowledging her hold over him.

  Pauline’s latest lover, Felix, had made himself very scarce from the moment it was announced that the prince was coming to Nice to collect his wife and take her to his new
capital of Turin. She found him packing his trunk in the small room he was now sharing with one of Camillo’s aides, engrossed in sorting through a pile of sheet music.

  Yesterday she would have been delighted to hear that he was leaving. Now she needed him. “Felix!” Her tone was horrified. “You are not leaving; you cannot leave!”

  He whirled around, startled.

  “But—your husband,” he stammered.

  She tossed her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  He was turning bright red. Really, thought Pauline, he was so young!

  “I was told—the secretary—he showed me the list of appointments to your husband’s household. I am not on it.”

  This was more like it. “Well, you are now,” she said. “Wait here.”

  She found Camillo conferring with two of his aides on the terrace. There was a breeze off the sea, and the wind ruffled Camillo’s hair. He stood straighter now, she noticed, and his profile looked almost stern. The contrast with the timid, blushing Felix was very appealing.

  “I must speak to my husband,” she informed the aides imperiously.

  Camillo raised his eyebrows. “One moment, madame.” He pointedly continued his conversation for another few moments, then excused the young men.

  “You have dismissed my music master,” she said accusingly.

  He frowned. “Who is that?”

  “Felix,” she said, deliberately using his Christian name. Then, ostentatiously correcting herself. “Signor Blangini.”

  “I have dismissed no one.”