“This is the first I’ve heard of these wicked things, I assure you.” “No doubt you have been taken in by the assurances of others.” “I trust those I work with.”
“You have been led astray. It’s time you stopped dabbling in business affairs. You should be devoting yourself to domestic matters—and, of course, to your public role as my wife. The newspapers continue to denounce you. You must alter your mode of dress.”
“I will look into it.” Clearly Bonaparte’s conversation with his humorless brother had upset him. He clutched his stomach, as he always did when in distress.
“Let me get you some oil of wintergreen,” I offered. I kept a bottle of the potent green liquid near at hand. I poured some into a glass. Bonaparte drank it, then collapsed on the sofa beside me, putting his head on my lap. I knew what he needed. I began to rub his temples, humming a soothing African song Euphemia had sung to me as a child. In a few moments Bonaparte, his eyes closed, began to look more peaceful. His lips turned upward in a smile.
“I miss Hortense,” I said after a time. Eugene I saw now and then, as he was serving as Bonaparte’s aide-de-camp in Italy, to his unutterable delight. I was so proud of him! But Hortense was in school near Paris, and I had not seen her in a long time.
“When do you think we can go home?”
Bonaparte sighed, nestling farther down into my lap. “My home is on the battlefield,” he said. “With my men.”
I knew that the way to handle my husband was not to argue with him or confront him but to soothe him, gentle him as one would a restless horse, until he was calm. Then, sometimes, it was possible to persuade him to do something I wanted—though those times seemed to come less and less often now.
“In Corsica,” he began in a conversational tone, “our family had vineyards and orchards, groves of chestnuts and olives. My grandmother kept goats. She was a great woman, my grandmother. She used to say that if she was ever in trouble, all she had to do was call out and two hundred relatives would be there in minutes to help her.
“Family! Family is everything,” he said, looking up at me.
“I know. That is why I want to go back to Paris, to be with Hortense and Aunt Edmee and the marquis.”
“You have all the family you need here. But you must find a way to ingratiate yourself with them. Talk to them. Entertain them. Sing and drink a cup of wine and laugh with them. We Corsicans love that.”
I made efforts to approach the prickly, hostile Buonapartes, especially the gentlemanly Louis. But all I got were sour looks and chilly words. Louis politely avoided me. Paulette referred to me, very loudly, as “the old woman” and Elisa swore at me in Corsican.
One night at supper Bonaparte stood and raised his glass. “I have happy news,” he said, beaming. “This afternoon my beloved Paulette became engaged to General Victor Leclercq, with my blessing, and I have given Elisa’s hand to an upstanding Corsican patriot, Felix Bacciochi. I want the joy of a double wedding, to be held here at the villa. Dear Josephine, as my hostess you will have the pleasure of making the wedding arrangements.”
The family burst into applause, and Paulette and Elisa were hugged and cheered and teased and toasted again and again.
I clapped with the others, and tried to feel pleasure at the thought of my two sisters-in-law making happy marriages. But my heart sank. How was I to undertake all that would be necessary to prepare for this grand event, with only the small villa staff of servants to help me? Already I felt the weight of the Buonapartes’ criticism, for I knew that nothing I did could possibly please them.
My head began to pound. I felt ill, and soon retired to bed. I did not get up at all the following day. I did not want to face my in-laws. But early the next morning Bonaparte threw open the door of our bedroom, pulled back the curtains with a noisy scraping of their wooden rings across the poles, and shouted, “No more of this laziness! You’re not in Martinique now! Time to be up and productive!”
The sudden glare of the sun coming through the windows hurt my eyes and made my lingering headache worse—as my husband knew well, for I was often troubled with headaches and he was accustomed to how sensitive to light and noise they made me. He himself rose early, often before dawn, and refused to acknowledge or tolerate any illness in himself. It was one of many ways in which we differed: he was dynamic and restlessly energetic, while I was calm and dreamy and moved through my days at a leisurely pace.
“Please, Bonaparte, the light is hurting me! Please, make it dark again. Let me rest!”
But he was already throwing back the bedclothes and grasping my arm, pulling me out of bed. My maid, the perpetually sullen, silent Clodia, brought me a morning robe and had the big iron hip-bath brought in. I asked her for a powder of willow-bark for my head.
“Paulette and Elisa are waiting. They want to know why you haven’t done anything about the wedding.”
“Didn’t you tell them I wasn’t well?”
“In our family, illness does not interfere with obligations.”
Clodia brought me the packet of willow-bark powder and mixed it in some wine. I drank it thirstily, praying for relief from my throbbing head. I needed Euphemia. She always had a charm or an herbal concoction to heal me, and unlike Clodia, Euphemia was sympathetic.
I managed to bathe and dress and, after eating a bowl of fruit, asked Clodia to admit Paulette and Elisa to my sitting-room.
They came in, looking piqued and aggrieved.
“This is the gown I want,” Paulette announced imperiously, holding out a sheet of paper with a crudely drawn green gown. “And I want it right away.”
“I want a gown covered in gold and pearls,” said Elisa. “A big, fancy one, with a headdress to match. You have to get it for me. My brother says so.”
“Wouldn’t your mother want you to wear white wedding gowns?” I asked. Letizia was a traditionalist, that was quite evident.
“This is our wedding,” Paulette snapped. “We will wear what we like.”
I felt trapped. If I did as the brides asked, Letizia would surely condemn me for abandoning custom and defying the church—for in church weddings, brides always wore white gowns. Yet if I disappointed Paulette and Elisa they would be certain to hate me forever.
Bonaparte had left for his military camp, which was some ten miles from the villa. I could not turn to him to solve my dilemma. With some trepidation I decided to seek out Letizia. Just possibly, I thought, if I appealed to her for help she might look favorably on me.
I found her in the huge kitchen of the villa, sitting among the servants, chatting away to them in Italian. She sat in a rocking chair, moving it back and forth on its wide rockers with her small black-booted feet.
She was knitting, her needles flying, an immense ball of black wool unrolling from a basket on the floor. I approached her shyly, hesitantly, feeling awkward.
“Madame Buonaparte,” I began, then murmured, “Letizia.” She looked up at me, with a look that made me self-conscious and uncomfortable. “Madame Buonaparte, what’s that you are knitting?”
She smiled, a cold smile. “Your shroud,” was all she said.
32
MUCH TO MY SURPRISE AND DELIGHT, Euphemia came to join me at about this time. I had been writing to her often, urging her to make the journey to Italy and reassuring her that much of the fighting was over and that she would not be in any danger from cannonfire or marauding soldiers if she came. I was so glad to see her that I burst into tears.
We sat together in the garden and she told me all her news. She handed me a portrait miniature of Hortense, who looked so grown up I almost didn’t recognize her.
“She’s a young lady now. Almost pretty. She misses you such a lot. She has an admirer. He’s English, I’m sorry to say. Young Lord Falke. Very dashing.”
“And Coco? How is she?”
“Into everything. A strong little thing. She turns cartwheels like you used to do. Hortense is teaching her her letters.”
“As you once taught me
, Euphemia.” The memory of Euphemia, then a young girl herself, teaching me my alphabet reminded me that my beloved half-sister was getting on in years. I thought of her as eternal, as someone who had always been there and always would be, but as I looked at her now, I could not help but realize that of course she was aging, her tightly curling hair in its neat bun turning grey, her shrewd yet kindly eyes ringed with lines. She moved more slowly than I remembered, and her large, capable brown hands with their pink palms were losing their plumpness and becoming gnarled, the finger joints swollen.
Having Euphemia with me at the villa made the surly coldness and hostility of the Buonapartes even more evident, and stiffened my resistance toward them. My husband’s youngest sister and brother, Caroline and Jerome, I could tolerate but the others irked and angered me more and more. Louis, who I thought of as the civilized Buonaparte, cornered me one morning as I was leaving my bedroom and slipped his arm around my waist.
Startled, I whirled out of his grasp. He laughed. “Come now, sister-inlaw,” he said in a honeyed tone I had never before heard him use, “you won’t deny me a kiss. From what I hear you’ve never denied anyone.” He reached toward me and I eluded him. At that moment he was repellent.
“Wait till I tell my husband about this!” I said through clenched teeth.
Louis shrugged. “He won’t mind. We’ve shared many a servant girl, Nabulio and I.”
“I am no servant girl!”
Louis curled his lip disdainfully. “No. You’re a slut. Everyone says so.”
I slapped him and went downstairs where the Three Graces—or so I had begun to refer to Letizia, Paulette and Elisa—were waiting for me. Letizia sat in her rocking chair, knitting, and glanced up at me with a frown. Elisa glared at me, her double chins shaking, and muttered something under her breath. Paulette, I saw, had gone into my wardrobe and taken my favorite gown, a gossamer-thin ball gown made of fine peach-colored Milanese silk, and put it on. She had arranged her hair like mine, with curls framing her face, and fresh flowers entwined among the curls and when I entered the room she walked toward me, swaying her hips in an exaggerated fashion, her lips pursed coquettishly a little lapdog like mine in her arms.
“Oh, Bonaparte,” she cooed, batting her eyelashes, “can’t you just please let me go back to bed? I have the most awful headache—I may never get out of bed again!” It was a grotesquely acute caricature of me, startlingly recognizable and very cruel. Paulette was clever—and she knew how to wound.
Elisa laughed until she choked, and even Letizia let out a surreptitious snort of amusement. I watched impassively, my face stony, until Paulette tripped on the hem of the gown—which was too long for her by many inches—and fell, ripping the precious silk and upsetting a table that held a small antique statue of Aphrodite, one of Bonaparte’s favorite acquisitions. The statue shattered. Clodia appeared, broom and dustpan in hand, and began to sweep up the translucent white fragments. Paulette, uninjured by her fall, picked herself up and resumed her impersonation. She had hardly opened her mouth to speak when I interrupted her.
“If you say another word I’ll tell Bonaparte you’ve broken his favorite statue. Then I’ll tell him that you’ve ruined my ball gown that was a gift from the city of Milan, and that the city fathers and all the members of the silk guild will be offended when I fail to wear the gown next week at the reception they are giving me.”
Paulette’s defiant posture began to crumple under the weight of my words, but she silently mouthed “old lady.”
“And then there is the matter of your wedding. What would the bridegroom say, I wonder, if he knew you had been meeting Corporal Trenet in the garden late at night?”
“What?” Letizia, startled, sat up in her chair and stared at her beautiful young daughter.
“How did you know that?” Paulette demanded of me.
“Gesu!” cried Letizia and crossed herself, her knitting needles falling to the marble floor with a clatter.
“All the servants know. Including my Euphemia.”
“That black devil!” Letizia spat out. “Only witches have black devils for servants!”
“Witch! Hag! Whore!” Elisa shouted every epithet she could think of at me, but ran out of words when I took from my pocket a silver watch fob and dangled it before her.
“But that’s Felix’s!” she cried out in surprise, leaving her string of epithets incomplete. “I gave it to him. You thief! You stole it!” She reached out a fat hand to grab the heavy silver object but I pulled it back, out of her grasp.
“His manservant brought it to me, along with this note.” I took a folded sheet of paper from my pocket, on which a letter was written in large, somewhat uneven handwriting. It was signed, in large letters, “FELIX.” I unfolded the paper and held it up. Elisa made a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a groan.
Paulette began laughing.
“Shall I read the note?”
“No!” was Letizia’s command.
Elisa’s face was very red. She looked to be on the verge of tears. Paulette giggled.
“My dearest lady beautiful Josephine,” it began, “when I see you the moon begins to hide and the sun goes behind the cloud and the stars snuff themselves. It is you, bright light lady, who make them ashamed. I, Felix Bacciochi, must hold you in my arms. It is your wish also I believe. Most dear lady, tell me of your heart.”
FELIX
The clumsy love letter from Elisa’s fiance was so touchingly sincere that it was almost endearing, except that fat, loutish Felix who stank of garlic and doused his sparse hair in olive oil, was himself repellent.
“What do you think of your Felix now?” Paulette said. “We all know Nabulio had to buy him for you. He never loved you.”
“He did! He does!” Elisa insisted, stamping her foot. But her voice broke.
“Enough!” Letizia stood, gathered her knitting, and limped out of the room without looking at me. Elisa and Paulette followed.
I had triumphed—for the moment. But I still had the responsibility of arranging the double wedding of Paulette and General Leclercq and Elisa and the faithless Felix Bacciochi. Bonaparte insisted that it be a very grand event, with hundreds of guests, a sumptuous banquet and a noisy artillery salute plus fireworks to round out the evening.
Fortunately I had Euphemia to help me with the preparations. But Euphemia, shunned and despised by the Buonapartes as a “black devil,” and indignant over their constant ill treatment of me, saw the upcoming celebrations as a way of evening the score against my spiteful inlaws.
“You must put the spirits on your side,” she told me. “The spirits will take revenge.”
In one corner of my dressing room she built an altar to the Ibo Red Goddess and spent time each day in front of it, asking the goddess’s aid.
“Big storm coming,” I heard her say under her breath. “Big storm on the wedding eve, sure as anything.” The guests were invited to come to the villa for a banquet on the night before the wedding, then to stay overnight with us and attend the ceremony the following morning.
Euphemia and I went together into the nearest town and visited the marketplace. Euphemia sought out the vegetable vendors.
“Do you remember the big yams we used to grow at Les Trois-Ilets, the kind that made your whole body itch if you ate them raw? They must have yams like that here in Italy.”
We searched the stalls until we found what Euphemia was looking for, large healthy-looking yams with thick skins. We brought some back with us and stored them in the cellar. The wedding day approached.
The guests were invited, the villa chapel decorated with greenery from the garden and bunches of pink and yellow and deep red roses. Ten cannon were drawn up the hill to the villa from the military camp by laboring oxen and put in place in the courtyard to fire the salute to the newlyweds. A team of fireworks technicians was hired to put on a dazzling display. The bridal gowns were sewn and fitted (white gowns, to the brides’ dismay; as I suspected, Letizia insisted on
white).
General Leclercq had a new dress uniform and the unhappy Felix Bacciochi, frightened to death of his brother-in-law-to-be, was measured by a tailor from Milan for a new suit of fashionable cut that would, it was hoped, diminish the appearance of his protruding belly and stout legs.
As Euphemia had predicted, when the wedding eve came, the weather turned cloudy and rain began to fall. A hailstorm churned the road to the villa to a muddy quagmire, and the guests, in their finest gowns, coats and trousers, arrived wet and disgruntled, the women’s feathered headdresses damp and their skirts mud-spattered, their satin slippers hopelessly ruined.
The banquet tables, which had been laid in the garden under canvas tents, had to be moved indoors in great haste, with many a broken dish and smashed goblet as casualties of the move. Delayed by the worsening storm, the guests were late in arriving and it was after midnight when the first course was served.
Everyone ate hungrily, especially the Buonapartes. Euphemia made certain that Paulette, Elisa and Letizia all were served generous portions of raw yam, flavored with spices and garnished with goat cheese, a Corsican delicacy.
It was nearly four o’clock in the morning when the banquet ended and the guests made their weary, tipsy way to the rooms prepared for them. But they got little sleep, for shortly after dawn the peace of the villa was shattered by loud screaming.
“My arms! My arms! My legs! My face! Oh God, my face!”
It was Paulette’s shrill voice, bewailing the bright red welt-like marks that had appeared all over her body. Soon Elisa joined in with shrieks and wails and before long everyone in the villa—wedding guests, servants, even the grooms and gardeners—knew that the brides-to-be had broken out in hives.
Paulette and Elisa, beside themselves with panic and humiliation, and tormented by severe itching that no amount of scratching could assuage, refused to put on their wedding gowns and locked themselves in Paulette’s room. Bonaparte, using tactics that had made him famous in Paris, turned the villa’s heavy furnishings into battering rams and broke down his sister’s door, while I and others watched in amazed horror.
The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon's Bird of Paradise Page 18