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

by Carolly Erickson

  I saw that others were staring at me, observing my strong physical reaction. Would they doubt my patriotism? I swallowed very hard.

  “Vive la Sainte Guillotine!” I yelled—and was gratified to see those around me grin, and clap, and take up the cry. I was one of them again.

  But when the delicate young girl was brought up from the cart and handed over to the black-hooded executioner I could hardly bear to watch. I forced myself to keep my eyes on the girl, though my sight was blurred by tears as she begged for mercy, on her knees, imploring the implacable butcher in his stained apron to spare her life.

  There was no pity to be had, no pity and no mercy. The girl was thrown down head first upon the plank, amid catcalls and rude noises and obscene suggestions. Swiftly the blade fell, swiftly the spurt of blood sprayed outward, staining the red apron afresh. With a quick heave the slim red carcass was discarded.

  Now the scaffold was drenched in blood, blood dripped off the reddened planks and onto the thirsty brown earth, turning it the color of rust. I seemed to see blood everywhere I looked, on the faces of the people around me, on the stone facade of the Tuileries Palace facing the square, on my own hands.

  “Red lady, red lady,” I chanted, with the others, “Kill kill kill.”

  Could that really be my voice? Was I no different from the others, with their grotesque eagerness for death, their blood lust?

  They were still eager, but as the morning went on their eagerness was losing its edge. They had begun to shout at the executioner to hurry, to chop off two victims’ heads at once. They were stripping the discarded carcasses of their meager blood-drenched garments and tossing the garments back and forth, whooping when each shirt or smock was caught and hissing when one was dropped. My nausea had been replaced by a burning thirst. Near me, a man was talking.

  “A bigger guillotine is coming soon,” he was saying. “One with four blades. Think how fast it can work! Chop, chop, chop, chop!” He sliced the air with his hand.

  The last of the victims was being brought out of the cart. A short, black-haired man with fleshy lips and a broad nose. A familiar man.

  “Baron Rossignol!” I started to say, then quickly checked myself. “Citizen Rossignol! The moneylender! He lent money to the Widow Capet!” (The former Queen Marie Antoinette was known by the humbling title of “Widow Capet,” her husband having been executed by the Red Lady several months earlier.)

  The baron shook off his guards as he climbed the steps to the scaffold. He lost his footing and slipped, then recovered. I saw now that his hands were not tied, as those of the other prisoners had been. Had he bribed the guards to free his hands? He was clever—though not clever enough to avoid the fate he now faced. Or was he?

  He opened his shirt and collar and then, to the surprise of the onlookers, stepped rapidly to the edge of the scaffold and began to speak.

  “I am Henri de Rossignol, descendant of Hugh Capet, France’s first king. Royal blood runs through my veins. To kill me is regicide! Regicide!”

  At a signal from the officer in command the guardsmen began their loud drumming, drowning out the baron’s urgent words. Two soldiers reached for him, but he was nimble. He began shinnying up the side of the tall guillotine, his short legs remaining just out of reach of his pursuers as he climbed.

  Avoiding the sharp blade, which hung suspended near the top of the wooden structure, he scrambled up onto the heavy horizontal plank that crowned the device and stood there, shouting, though the drums muffled his words.

  Now the crowd was intrigued. A few people yelled encouragement to the baron, admiring his daring. But the majority, inflamed by his mention of the monarchy and of his royal blood, wanted him dead.

  “Get him! Catch him! Don’t let the aristo escape!”

  One of the soldiers tried in vain to climb the guillotine but stopped halfway up, daunted by the hanging blade. A cavalryman urged his horse up the scaffold steps and slashed at the baron with his saber, but it was not long enough to reach him. The little man was too high. He laughed at his pursuers.

  Watching the drama, I could not help thinking, this is his moment of glory Despite my discomfort, and the renewed jostling of the restless crowd, I could not help but smile.

  Then one of the officers was handed a musket. He took aim and fired. The baron paused, convulsed, and fell heavily, landing at the executioner’s feet. His corpse was tossed onto the ground.

  A huge shout arose from the crowd, there was clapping and cheering and sporadic singing.

  “Long live the nation!”

  “Power to the sansculottes!”

  “Blessed Sainte Guillotine, pray for us!”

  I noticed, though, that as the crowd began to disperse, quite a few of those who had come to watch the spectacle, to savor the punishing of the traitors to the Revolution, made their way to where Baron Rossignofs small body lay sprawled on the ground, and furtively dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood of the last of the Capetians.

  24

  THEY CAME FOR ME on an April morning in the year 1794, Citizen Lacombe and Citizen George, knocking on my door and holding a warrant for my arrest.

  “Citizeness Beauharnais,” the tall, owlish Citizen George announced, “by your conduct, and your connections, you have shown yourself to be a partisan of tyranny. You are an enemy of the Revolution. You are to be detained, by order of the Committee of General Security.”

  I fainted then, and Euphemia had to revive me with smelling-salts before they could take me away.

  “The children—” I said to her as she bent over me.

  “Don’t worry. We know where to go.”

  We had often talked of what Euphemia would do if I was arrested. We agreed that she would take Eugene and Hortense and Coco to the house where my Aunt Edmee and the marquis had lived before they immigrated to Italy. The landlady there promised that she would find room for them.

  For several months, ever since the former queen was executed and the Law of Suspects was passed, I had been more and more afraid that I would be arrested. I carried my certificate of citizenship with me, and was careful of where I went and what I said, lest I be reported on negatively by spies, but every day more and more former aristocrats like myself were taken off to prison, to await execution, and I felt increasing dread that I would be arrested too.

  Only a few weeks earlier Alexandre had been taken to the Carmelite prison, despite his service to the Revolution. His emigre brother Francois was winning battles against the French armies, while Alexandre, when given command of the Army of the Rhine, lost every battle he waged. He was accused of treason, and taken away. When I heard that that had happened I sensed that my time was running out.

  I thought of trying to escape, of fleeing into the countryside in disguise, even of stowing away on a ship bound for the Windward Isles. It could be no worse there, I reasoned, than in Paris. I would take my chances among the people I knew best, the Africans and Grands Blancs of Martinique.

  But of course I could not run away, for the same reason I had not left France months earlier: because of the children. Alexandre had refused to give his permission for Eugene and Hortense to leave France, and without their father’s written permission they could not get past the border guards. I could not bear to go on my own, without them. So I waited, hoping and dreading at the same time. In the end, that which I dreaded most came with a knock at my door.

  From the first, I had no doubt that I would die—and soon. The pace of killings by the fearsome Red Lady, the cruel guillotine, was accelerating. The prisons of Paris were nothing more than waiting rooms, holding pens for cattle waiting for the slaughter.

  Along with dozens of others arrested that April day I was herded into the former Carmelite monastery, where I knew Alexandre was, a place notorious for the massacre of monks that had happened there only a few months earlier. Bloodstains were splashed along the dull grey stone walls, the once crimson blood turned dark magenta. We were led along dim narrow corridors and assigned to
small, low-ceilinged rooms that had been the monks’ cells. There were six of us in the room assigned to me, six people sharing one thin, stinking straw-filled mattress alive with bugs, six people sharing a common waste-bucket.

  “Don’t worry,” the guards said when they brought us our one daily meal, a bowl of gruel and a small coarse loaf of black bread apiece, “it won’t be for long. Soon you’ll be leaving here.” They smiled as they said it, for of course what they meant was, “Soon you’ll be sent to your deaths.”

  How soon? It was the question that haunted us all, day and night.

  Each evening a roll call of names was read out. The names of those who were to die the following day. As each name was read there came a scream, a gasp, a shout—some response from the condemned. When the list had been read, those of us who had not heard our names felt enormous relief. Another day of life! But another day, too, of dread, for our name might well be on the list the following night.

  Anxious, sleepless, half-starved, we paced like uneasy specters along the corridors—and were pulled into the arms of strangers.

  For since we all faced death, we felt an overpowering urge to affirm life, and to express love. Or rather, to express lust. We reached out for one another blindly, instinctively, craving the solace of the flesh. I do not know how many lovers I had in the Carmelite prison, only that I was not alone, and that I gave as much pleasure and comfort as I received. Lovemaking, not revolution, was the true leveler in those senseless, blood-mad days; lovemaking brought aristo and commoner together, rich and poor, former master and former servant.

  I found Alexandre along a dark corridor one night, and forgetting all that had gone before, we lay together on a filthy blanket, with water dripping down the wall beside us. Having been in the prison longer than I, he had suffered more; when I held his naked body I could feel his ribs, he had grown so thin. His cheeks were covered with a matted beard, his hair was long and dirty and he smelled of sweat and slime.

  There was no violence in him that night, no sense of possession. The last ounce of arrogance seemed to have leached out of him, in the face of death.

  “I am for the Red Lady soon, Rose,” he said to me as we lay together. “Promise me that you will not be sad, when my hour comes. I am glad to be giving my life for my country, for the Republic.”

  “But this is senseless! All this slaughter, the sacrifice of so many good lives, for what!”

  “For purity. To cleanse the nation of traitors.”

  “But you are no traitor! Nor am I.”

  “In purging the genuine traitors, some loyal citizens must be sacrificed.”

  “Absurd nonsense. The old Alexandre, the Alexandre I married, would have laughed at such foolish logic.” “I have learned much since then.”

  I laid my head on his bony chest and he stroked my hair. I wept, partly from exhaustion, partly from sorrow. There was no truth any more, no sense. Only cravings, and pain, and a world from which all the humanity had been taken away

  Amid the madness I clung to one hope: that I might become pregnant. Pregnant prisoners were not executed, but moved to another prison to await their deliveries. If I conceived a child I would be spared execution for nine months—and by then, I hoped, France might come to her senses. Or she might be invaded by a foreign army, and the monarchy might be restored. King Louis was dead but his little son, it was rumored, survived in a prison somewhere. He could reign over us. All could be as it was before.

  My monthly flow had stopped and I hoped I was indeed carrying a child. I told the surly guard who watched the six of us in my cell that I felt ill, clutching my stomach and pretending to be on the verge of throwing up. He stared at me suspiciously at first, then disappeared down the corridor. Much later he returned with a young, blond curly-headed physician who listened to my heart and examined me and looked at me sympathetically

  “I wish I could send you to join the mothers-to-be,” he said. “But I cannot be certain of your condition. When a woman doesn’t eat much, her monthly flow ceases. It happens quite often here. I will come and see you again in a few days.”

  “If I live that long,” I snapped.

  He did come back, and I learned that his name was Karel Osnolenko, and that he came from Cracow. He was very kind to me, even attentive, with a well-bred courtesy that I found to be very sweet and touching. He held my hand and stroked it as he talked to me, a fatherly gesture. It soothed my jangled nerves.

  I confided in Karel. Feeling that death was very near, I told him the story of my life, and he listened with interest and concern, stopping me when I recounted painful things and making me pause until my heart stopped pounding.

  I lost track of time. One day was like another in the prison. We were in constant darkness, save for the torches on the walls; day and night meant nothing to us, except that the terrible roll call came with our evening meal. I felt myself growing weaker, losing vitality. Two of the women in my cell got sick and died before they could be executed. All along the corridors we could hear sounds of coughing and spewing and feverish voices calling out for water.

  I now come to the worst night of my life, the night I very nearly gave in to despair.

  I had fallen ill, and though Dr. Osnolenko did what he could for me, I felt myself sinking lower and lower. The summer was very hot and we sweated in our airless cells. How I longed for cold clean water to bathe my face! I lay on the straw mattress allotted to us, in a stupor of pain and weakness, my mind disordered, imagining at times that I was in Martinique, and that I saw my dead sisters walking toward me on the veranda of the sugar mill, or that I was in Fontainebleau and the queen was riding past in her carriage. All was a blur, a jumble of images and sounds.

  One sound I heard distinctly: the voice of the head jailer, that dismal night, reading from the dreaded roll call.

  “Citizen Beauharnais,” he read. And then, “Citizeness Beauharnais.”

  I am told that my scream filled the prison and reached the street outside.

  I remember calling out, crying out in protest, though my voice soon grew hoarse and I coughed uncontrollably. I sank into a terrible despair— a despair so profound and so painful that I wanted to die, just to be relieved of its crushing weight. Oh, the blackness of that night! The sorrow, the loss, the tears I shed for my dear children.

  As if in sympathy with my dark emotions a storm broke over Paris and for hours high winds whistled around the corners of the old monastery and rain beat down on the roof like the ominous drumming of the soldiers on guard around the scaffold.

  I must have slept, finally, for I was shaken awake by the guards tipping over my mattress and rolling me roughly onto the stone floor of my cell. It was one of the indignities that preceded execution; when a prisoner was due to be killed the mattress was removed from his or her cell.

  But to my amazement, a new mattress was soon brought in and I was laid upon it, with a clean blanket over me. I was speechless. What was happening?

  Dr. Osnolenko came in, the head jailer accompanying him.

  “She cannot last more than a day or two,” I heard the doctor saying. “She has the prison fever. You might as well let her die here. You can hasten another traitor’s death by giving him her place. Save the Republic some time and expense.”

  “Yes, that always pleases the Committee of General Security.” There was a pause, and then the jailer added, “Who was she—not that I care, but I will have to strike her name from today’s list.”

  “Citizeness Beauharnais.”

  “What was her crime?”

  “I believe she had an in-law who was an emigre. She herself is quite blameless. Of that I’m certain.”

  “None of us is blameless, doctor. For all have sinned against the Republic, and come short of the glory of Robespierre.”

  His ironic words made me smile, for the first time in many hours. My smile broadened when the jailer left and Dr. Osnolenko sat down on the mattress and took my hand.

  “Don’t be frightened. You are
not really dying, and you are not going to be executed today.”

  I thought of Alexandre with a pang of sorrow.

  “My husband?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I cannot save him. He must be left to his fate. You, on the other hand, have a reprieve of sorts. You only have to do one thing: look as though you are dying, for as many days as possible.”

  I did my best to look fatally ill. The guards ignored me. Dr. Osnolenko brought me food, and I ate in secret, when everyone else was asleep. And after a week of this subterfuge, I learned, much to my amazement, that the terrible reign of the Red Lady, the time they now call the Terror, was over. A new group of revolutionaries had come to power. The killings had stopped—for the time being at least.

  I was free to go home.

  Never have I felt such joy as on the morning of my release from the Carmelite prison. I was still quite weak, and had to lean on Dr. Osnolenko’s strong arm as I made my way out of the dark corridor and into the light of freedom.

  At first, the light outside was too bright for me, unaccustomed as I was to seeing the sun or feeling its warmth on my upturned face. I blinked, then closed my eyes, then blinked again. Gradually my vision began to clear, and I saw the most welcome sight anyone can ever see— the smiling faces of my beloved children, holding out their arms to me in welcome and homecoming, their eyes brimming with tears.

  25

  OH, HOW WE REJOICED THAT SUMMER, after the Great Terror ended and those of us lucky enough to have survived were set free! So many had died—we had to live twice as intensely, for their sakes. And in truth, we did not know what the future would bring; perhaps there were more terrors to come. So we went wild, enjoying a surfeit of pleasure each day and making each night a feast for all the senses, a banquet to be savored until we were replete.