The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon's Bird of Paradise

by Carolly Erickson

  The wagon in which we rode swayed dangerously from side to side, the terrified horses that pulled it neighing and plunging, as Donovan struggled to veer away from burning buildings and the sound of explosions. Hortense put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes. Euphemia, the Ibo Red Goddess dangling from a cord around her neck, held the sleeping Coco.

  Finally we reached the crowded dock and hurried aboard the Sensible, the sailors reaching out to help us scramble up the improvised gangplank. Donovan and I had time only for the briefest of embraces.

  “Remember me,” he whispered. Then I ran along the uneven boards, pulling Hortense along, and up onto the heaving deck of the ship. When I turned back toward the rail I could no longer distinguish Donovan’s wagon from the mass of vehicles and horses and clamoring people, the air was so thick with dust and smoke from the pounding guns.

  Then we were launched on the outgoing tide, the sails of the Sensible belling outward, her prow plunging and rearing in the hilly seas.

  WE WERE EIGHT WEEKS ON THE VOYAGE back to France, and during those long weeks I took comfort from Scipion.

  He had put on weight since I last saw him in Paris, his strong, compact body not as lean as it once was, his grey eyes less keen and a large blond moustache decorating his upper lip. When he came to greet me he was warm and kind, anxious to hear what had happened at Les Trois-Ilets and to confirm the story he had heard about my dangerous adventure on the night the cane fields burned.

  “You are a heroine, you know,” he said as he hugged me. “It’s all over Fort-Royal how brave you were, going down the escape tunnel and saving that slave girl and her baby.” He was grinning, but his eyes were filled with concern. “I’m just glad no harm came to you, Rose.”

  His solicitude meant much to me. He invited me to dine at his table (and thoughtfully sent extra food to my cabin for Euphemia and Hortense). When the weather was fair, he took me for leisurely strolls around the deck of the small ship, and sometimes, in the evenings, we played cards with other passengers.

  Gradually our warm comfortable friendship led to lovemaking, but it was the affectionate, nurturing lovemaking of devoted friends, not the all-consuming, fiery passion I knew with Donovan. I sought shelter in Scipion’s arms. That was understood, just as it was understood that when our ship docked at Brest, I would go ashore with my family and Scipion would take on another command. When the time came, we parted lovingly.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the startling change that had come over Paris in the years that I had been away. The old Bastille was gone, of course, its ruin a shrine to liberty. Gone too were the fine carriages and costly clothes and gems of the nobility, the well-kept mansions and immense households of servants, the expensive shops where I had once spent money so extravagantly and incurred Alexandre’s wrath.

  Paris had always been dirty, but now it was much dirtier, with huge mounds of reeking sewage and refuse from kitchens and stables heaped in the center of every street and each alley full of trash and teeming with rats. There were still crowds in the streets, but the faces we saw were hollow-cheeked and anxiety-ridden, not jubilant or carefree. I had not been in the capital long before I realized that everyone was feeling the burden of rising prices and shortages of food. My own wealth, I discovered, had been confiscated by the Constituent Assembly, the current ruling government. As Viscountess Beauharnais I had been affluent; now that I was plain Citizeness Beauharnais I was in want.

  Monuments to the Revolution were everywhere: statues of the goddess of Liberty, altars to the Citizen, posters praising an end to tyranny and the dawning of a new age. But everyone was on edge, as if the enthronement of the new ideals unnerved them and made them frightened. Shoppers in the marketplace hurried from stall to stall, counting out their assignats (the new paper money issued by the government) in haste and furtively hiding their purchases in their pockets or under their coats. No one seemed to trust anyone—or to trust the future.

  I rented a modest room in a lodging-house for myself, Euphemia and the children, but the rent took the last of my money. I went to find my former business partner, the moneylender Baron Rossignol—Citizen Rossignol now—and was told that he had been arrested by the Committee of Public Security and taken away

  When I heard this I felt a shiver go up my spine—a shiver of dread. Who were these new rulers, who took it upon themselves to confiscate the money of citizens and arrest people at will?

  When I went to visit my oldest friend in Paris, Fanny de Beauharnais, I found that her salon was nothing like it had been before the fall of the Bastille and the supremacy of the new government. Her red velvet salon was now decorated in the revolutionary tricolor, with walls, carpets and furnishings covered in patriotic stripes of red, white and blue cloth. Fanny herself was liberty personified in her simple togalike gown with revolutionary cockades in her hair.

  “I only compose hymns to the Revolution now,” she told me on the first night I visited her. “You never know who might be listening.” It was a common topic of whispered conversation that the Constituent Assembly had spies everywhere, reporting on what people said and did.

  Fanny’s literary colleagues were equally careful about what they wrote. Seraphin Lamblin, the tall, thin, wispy-haired poet I had met at Fanny’s house several times before, told me that he was at work on a new epic poem, “The Bastille,” and the two men Fanny always called the Inseparables, Henri and Bernard, had joined forces to write an angry sonnet called “Aristocrats Must Die.”

  “But you are both highborn,” I protested. “You have renounced your titles. We all have. Who is left to die?”

  Henri raised his eyebrows. “Those who oppose us. Those who rebel. And those who are gathering on our borders, preparing to invade France, to try to destroy the Revolution.”

  I had heard that there were regions in the west of France that were holding onto the old ways, resisting the changes brought by the Revolution. They were fighting against the revolutionary armies. And I knew that many nobles had fled France for Austria, Italy, the Swiss cantons. They were collecting arms and hiring soldiers and forming themselves into armies, planning to invade France and force a return to the pre-revolutionary state of things.

  People spoke of these uprisings and dangers in whispers, glancing around furtively; heaven forbid that they should be overheard, or that it should be thought that they were sympathetic to the rebels or the emigre armies.

  No matter what our fears or misgivings, we all had to act as if we would defend the Revolution to the death. We wore our tricolor cockades and gave up every jeweled button and silver shoe buckle we owned. We denounced the king and queen, cursed the church and the priests (the revolutionary government had turned against religion), swore loyalty to the people of France and called each other Citizen and Citizeness. We tried to be brave—but in truth we were cowards.

  We did not stand up and say, Enough!

  We did not protest when the violence increased.

  We did not defend France against herself.

  One hot August night I was awakened by a loud clangor of bells coming from every part of the city. There was shouting in the streets, and the sound of running feet and galloping horses. Soon I could hear an angry murmur and, looking out the window of my rented apartment, I saw hundreds of people, milling about in noisy clusters, waving torches and singing revolutionary songs. Hortense and Coco slept through all the commotion—Eugene was not with us, he was away at his military boarding school—but Euphemia came to stand beside me at the window, shaking her head and talking to herself in the Ibo tongue.

  We could not sleep at all that night, and when we tried to nap the following day our sleep was interrupted by neighbors and street criers announcing terrible news. The rampaging crowd had invaded the royal palace of the Tuileries, killing and mutilating the guardsmen and servants who were attempting to protect the king and queen. Gruesome stories spread, stories of crazed Parisians cutting off heads, hacking at arms and legs, slicing off women’s bre
asts—sparing no one. We were afraid to go out, or even to send our single servant girl or Coco’s wetnurse, who lived with us, to the bakery or the marketplace for food.

  But those dark days were only the beginning. I tremble as I write this, for I am now coming to the part of my story that sent me into such a state of fear I thought I might be losing my mind. My Nightmare Days were about to come upon me.

  From out of nowhere savage men in blood-red caps, wearing butcher’s aprons, began running through the streets, killing every priest they met. There were still many priests in Paris in those days, and they were murdered, one by one, until the very gutters in the streets ran red with their blood. The red-capped assassins were not satisfied with killing all the priests they could find; shouting that Paris was under attack, they assaulted the prisons and dragged out the poor prisoners, stabbing and bludgeoning them and hacking off their quivering limbs.

  We lived very near the Abbaye jail and I could hear the prisoners screaming and begging for mercy. Five poor men were carried out into the courtyard and hacked to pieces practically before our eyes and the blood spurted over the low wall into our garden.

  Oh, the stench of it! With every breath of that blood-reek I remembered the screams of the men as they died, and the grim, merciless assassins who killed them. For a week I tried to wash the gore from the wall, pouring buckets of vinegar over it and brushing it as hard as I could. But the red stain remained, no matter what I did. There are many red walls in Paris to this day.

  Wearing my most garish red-, whiteand blue-striped gown, and hoping I looked patriotic, I went in search of Alexandre. He was a member of the new government, the Convention, that had just declared that France no longer had a king and queen and was a republic. I could not help feeling sorry for poor King Louis and his beautiful wife Queen Marie Antoinette. People said such terrible things about them but I thought, they are just a family, they have children and want to keep them safe, just as I do.

  I found Alexandre in the great hall where the Convention met, arguing with other delegates over the new republican army. He still looked handsome but his face was thinner and more lined than when I had last seen him. He wore the long loose-fitting black trousers of a laborer, with a laborer’s rough clogs on his feet and a cheap red vest and stained blue neckcloth. A black beret with a cockade covered his blond hair, which had begun to be streaked with grey.

  The transformation in his appearance startled me at first. All trace of the arrogant, well-to-do young nobleman he had been was gone, and in its place was the earnest, well-spoken man of the people, Citizen Beauharnais.

  “Citizen,” I called out to him, trying to ignore the stares of the other men, “I wonder if I might have a word with you. It is about our children.”

  For a brief instant he looked alarmed, then resumed his impassive demeanor and detached himself from those he was debating with.

  “What is it? As you can see, I have urgent business here. The people’s business.”

  “I want to send Hortense and Eugene away, to safety,” I told him. “An old friend, the Prince de Salm, has offered to take them to Coblentz with him. He leaves in two days.”

  Alexandre’s eyes darkened. He pulled me aside, as far as possible from the milling delegates. He spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Have you no common sense! Never mention the name of an aristocrat in this chamber! Especially not that of a traitorous Austrian!”

  “This traitorous Austrian, as you call him, may be our only hope to get our children out of Paris!”

  “And how would that look, Rose? A delegate to the Convention like myself, a man who took the lead in abolishing the monarchy and declaring the French Republic, sending his children out of the country like a coward!”

  “You would look like a good father. Now, do I have your cooperation in this, or will I have to make what arrangements I can, on my own?”

  “You will find it difficult.” His tone was detached, his words brusque. “The gates of Paris are going to be closed. No one will be allowed in or out. We expect an invading army within weeks. I am to take command of the Army of the Rhine”—his chest puffed with pride as he spoke these words—”and Eugene will come with me, as a junior aide-de-camp.”

  “But he is only twelve years old!”

  “I am well aware of my son’s age, Citizeness. And of his patriotism, and his desire to serve France.” “What of Hortense?”

  Alexandre’s shrug was eloquent. “France has need of all her children. She can sew. She can grow vegetables. She can make bullets. Little hands are always useful.”

  I saw that there was no point in arguing with him. I prepared to take my leave, drawing on my red, blue and white gloves. But I had one more thing to say.

  “Do you imagine, Alexandre, that you will command your Army of the Rhine against your brother Francois, with his Austrian Army of True Patriots?”

  His eyes blazing, Alexandre quickly moved toward me and roughly put his hand over my mouth.

  Under his breath, he called me a string of obscene names.

  By mentioning Alexandre’s brother Francois de eauharnais I meant to touch a nerve, but the violence of Alexandre’s response, and the evident fear that lay behind it, surprised me. The Revolutionary Commune that now governed all that the Convention said and did had begun singling out for punishment all those who had emigre relatives. Alexandre’s brother—my brother-in-law—was not only an emigre, and a strong supporter of the deposed King Louis, but he had been given a prominent command in the Austrian army.

  “If you ever speak that name again I’ll make you sorry we ever met,” Alexandre whispered. “You and your stupidity will get us all killed!”

  23

  JUST AS THE SOLDIERS began their sharp crackling rat-tat-tat on the drums I felt the cruel weight of a hard wooden heel on my toe. I cried out, pulling my foot back, but no one heard me. I could not tell who it was that had trodden on my toe. I stood amid hundreds of others in Revolution Square, crowded in tightly, hardly able to move. Like the others I was watching the tall scaffold where the guardsmen in their blue jackets, swords out and bayonets at the ready, stood to attention around the dreaded guillotine.

  It was Aunt Edmee who warned me that I had to attend the terrible spectacle—or risk coming under suspicion as an enemy of the Republic. I had to join the enthusiastic, noisy, milling crowd that gathered in the square each morning to watch the executions, she said. I had to show to the world—and especially to the many spies that reported all our movements to the revolutionary tribunal—that I was an ardent patriot who loved to see justice being done.

  There were so many, many spies. They kept their eyes on all of us, it was said, but especially those, like me, who had once been titled ladies.

  A fat bare arm shoved up against me, nearly knocking me off balance. It was a woman’s arm, and she was clapping and chanting, heedless of those around her. A seamstress, I thought. Or a flowervendor, or a laundress. She was well along in years, her face painted with thick powder and rouge, her lips a bright crimson, her brassy blond hair threaded with gray.

  “Red lady, red lady Kill kill kill! Red blood red blood Spill spill spill!

  The chant was taken up, many voices rose above the clatter of the drumming.

  “Here they come!” someone shouted, and in a moment I felt squeezed even more tightly by the bodies around me as the crowd parted.

  A plain wooden cart with slatted sides was being dragged through the mob, toward the waiting scaffold. Inside were a half-dozen of the most wretched-looking people I had ever seen. Not even the slaves on Martinique, after they had been whipped and deprived of food as punishment, were as dejected and pathetic as these three women and three men, thin and dirty and glassy-eyed, their hands bound, the women’s soiled mobcaps askew.

  One of the women, I noticed, was hardly more than a girl. She was delicate, slight, with a face that had once been pretty. Who was she, I wondered. An aristocrat’s daughter, like me? Or a girl of the streets
? She wore a wisp of lace at her neck, a keepsake, I imagined. A small reminder of her former life. She looked around her at the eagerly chanting, clapping spectators with such fear in her eyes, fear like that of a doe in desperate flight from the hunters.

  The chanting died away, giving way to a murmur of acclaim. The executioner, an enormous man with a wrestler’s muscular physique, wearing a blood-stained purple apron, was taking his place beside the tall mechanical killing machine whose gleaming, razor-sharp blade hung suspended, as if in midair. His face was hidden beneath a black mask, so that he appeared expressionless, inhuman. The crowd was greeting him.

  The drumming ceased. A hush fell. The first victim was brought out of the cart. A mature woman. She was spat upon and jeered. She stumbled as she was being pulled up the steps toward the guillotine, and appeared to faint.

  “Coward!” someone yelled.

  “Damned aristo!”

  “Traitor!”

  She was hastily lifted up and laid face-down on a rough plank beneath the gleaming blade. The drum roll began again. The executioner lowered the wooden neckpiece in place and pulled the lever that loosed the heavy slicing knife.

  With an audible thwack! the head was severed and a fountain of red blood spurted forth, drenching the wooden platform and splashing onto those in the forefront of the cheering onlookers.

  The dead woman’s headless corpse had hardly been thrown onto the ground when the next victim, a man, was brought forward, shouting and protesting.

  “It is the clockmaker, Citizen Carteret!” came a voice from the crowd. “It’s too late for you, Carteret. Better look at your clock! There’s no time left!” More jokes followed, and laughter mingled with the frisson of excited horror that passed through the gathered spectators when the clockmaker’s head was severed and his body flung over the edge of the scaffold.

  I was feeling ill. Waves of nausea rose to my throat and I struggled, swallowing, to prevent myself from vomiting. The stench of blood, combined with the overpowering odor of the unwashed bodies all around me, hemming me in and making me feel trapped, was having a strong effect.