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

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The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon's Bird of Paradise Page 22

by Carolly Erickson

“One of the gardeners in the park saw something on the day your balcony collapsed. Two men came to work on it. He assumed you had hired them, or your friend Monsieur du Roure had. But later on he saw a stranger paying them, and it looked as though he was paying them awfully well for making a simple repair.”

  “Yes? Tell me the rest.”

  “Monsieur du Roure and I have discovered who the stranger was. The gardener described him for us. We have gone to every landlady in Plombieres and asked whether a man of that description was staying in her lodgings around the time your accident took place. Madame d’Aigrefeuille said yes, and showed us the name written in her registry.”

  I leaned forward, though the pain almost made me cry out.

  “It was Joseph Buonaparte.”

  38

  I FELL ASLEEP, and dreamed.

  In my dream I was drowning, thrashing and flailing under water, trying desperately to breathe. I choked. I knew I was about to die.

  Then suddenly I felt myself lifted up by unseen hands and carried across seas, mountains, beaches, green forests. I am dead, I thought. I am dead, and I am being taken to heaven.

  Yet it was not in heaven that the unseen hands deposited me, but on Morne Gantheaume, at the Sacred Crossroads. It was night. I saw, by torchlight, the large clearing where I had first seen Orgulon, the great quimboiseur. The clearing was deserted, save for the stump of a large tree. On the stump sat Orgulon, smoking his pipe.

  The light was dim, but I could make out his red cloak and the red feathers in his sparse grey hair, and his necklace of shark’s teeth.

  He looked at me, out of his one good eye.

  After a time he removed the pipe from his mouth and spoke.

  “Once again the fer-de-lance has come for you. To kill you. Beware of that fer-de-lance! You have been bitten, but you will not die. I will not let you die. You must be saved. You have a purpose. Find it, and live!”

  “Orgulon!” I called his name, but my voice was weak. The torchlight faded, the Sacred Crossroads dimmed, then disappeared.

  I heard Hortense calling me.

  “Maman, maman, wake up! You are having a nightmare!”

  “Orgulon!” I said once again, and opened my eyes. I was in my bedroom in the rented house in Plombieres, and Hortense was sitting beside me, looking down at me anxiously.

  I felt groggy, but calmer than I had been in all the months of my illness.

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I am going to be all right. The snake came for me, but I am stronger than he is.”

  To myself I added, I am going to find my purpose, and live.

  39

  RIGHT AWAY i BEGAN TO FEEL BETTER. The pains in my back, arms and legs grew more bearable, and I was able to move my arms enough to feed myself. Everyone said how much more color I had in my cheeks and I had Euphemia dress my hair with more attention to style and put a different silken dressing gown around me each day.

  It was as if a curse had been lifted, not only from my aching body but from my mind as well. I began to look forward to being healthy again, to being able to move without agony I worried, however, that the accident might have left me unable to have more children. I knew that Bonaparte wanted a family, and I imagined that my body might be overtaxed, or permanently weakened, by all that I had been through.

  I had, to be sure, a much larger worry. It seemed overwhelmingly certain that my hostile brother-in-law Joseph had hired assassins to bring about my accident. Therefore he wanted me dead—and would go on making attempts on my life, unless he was stopped. I began keeping a pistol near me at all times, and took some comfort from knowing that Scipion too was armed.

  “I have arranged for our travel back to Paris, Rose,” Scipion told me one day. “I think you are well enough. I’ve written to the Ministry of Marine and they say they can use me in their offices in the capital, even though I am not fit to go back to sea.”

  We left soon afterwards, Scipion escorting me and Hortense and

  Euphemia in our large traveling carriage with four armed outriders. Lord Falke went south to Naples, hoping to cross to Egypt, despite the British blockade, to join Bonaparte’s army.

  Though it meant a longer and much rougher journey, we avoided the main roads and large towns on our way northward toward the capital. I knew it would fatigue me to receive long and tedious official greetings at every town we passed through and I did not want the pity of those who would see me in a wheeled chair (for I could not walk far as yet unaided).

  Also we had been hearing ongoing rumors that the campaign in Egypt was going badly for the French—something I expected, but did not know for certain. There was no word of new victories, only of Bonaparte’s marching his men into the Syrian desert, with what result we did not know. I was eager to get to Paris so that I could once again be close to the best sources of information—the bankers and financiers in Paul Barras’s circle. It was a measure of how well I was healing that I wanted to be well informed. In the meantime, the last thing I wanted was to be pressed for news by townspeople and villagers, most of whom did not know where Egypt was, much less what its conquest might mean for France. (Or what Bonaparte’s failure there might mean.)

  I could not help but wonder whether I would see Donovan in Paris. I had had no word of him in many months. We had agreed, before I left for Plombieres, that it would be best if we did not try to communicate with each other, because of Bonaparte’s suspicions. After my accident I asked Fanny to write to Donovan at his lodgings in Paris and tell him what had happened to me, but she said she had received no reply.

  There was no question of our going on with our provisioning business; the company we had worked through, the Bodin Company, went bankrupt and Monsieur Bodin himself was in jail for fraud. I hoped that my personal fortune was still safe in the bank but I couldn’t be certain. Despite my protestations to Bonaparte and others, my dealings had in fact been dishonest, at least some of the time; the dishonesty had not been mine, others had committed it, but I knew of it and did not protest. Still, I reasoned, this was the way those with army contracts always did business. It was expected. Someone would be certain to profit, why not Donovan and me? After all, I had always been a good businesswoman.

  Once we were settled in Paris in the rue des Victoires, I sent Euphemia to inquire discreetly after Donovan. When she came back from her errand I could tell at once by the look on her face that she was bringing bad news.

  “He’s gone. He’s been gone a long time. It was either that or go to jail, his neighbors said.”

  “Did he go back to Martinique?”

  “Most likely. He left this note for you.”

  I unfolded the large sheet of paper and read it, slowly.

  “My dear,” it began,

  I leave today for my plantation Bonne Fortune and I hope that you will come and join me there. It is not safe for you in France—for either of us. Your husband is a remarkable man but he is malevolent. I do not trust him and neither should you. You are forever in my arms,

  Donovan de Gautier

  Where was I to turn? What was I to do? I was the wife of an extremely prominent man, yet in Paris, that was, for the moment, a liability. For the government was in turmoil, its leaders caught up in petty squabbling and Parisians angrily dissatisfied with their rulership. Little or nothing had been heard from my husband for many months. My money, I soon discovered, had been seized when the Bodin Company declared bankruptcy. I was supposed to have an allowance supplied to me by Joseph Buonaparte, my enemy, but I did not dare go to him and demand payment. Food was scarce in Paris, and even going to the market was unsafe, for thieves roamed the streets and crime had gotten much worse.

  I remembered a lovely country house Bonaparte and I had visited, a riverside mansion surrounded by vineyards and wheat fields called Malmaison. I had wanted to buy it, but Bonaparte had said no, it was too costly. Perhaps, I thought, in this time of turmoil and scarcity the price of the house might have come down?

  In a country house I
would be safe, not only from the thieves of Paris but from my Buonaparte enemies. I could stay there in peace, surrounded by trusted servants, behind the thick old walls and ornate metal gates, until Bonaparte came back from Egypt.

  There was one man who might lend me the money to make my country dream a reality. With Euphemia’s help I put on the most fashionable of my gowns, fastened an embroidered white cap over my hair and did my best to look like a woman who had not undergone a terrible physical ordeal. Thus arrayed, and feeling an upsurge of hope, I set off to visit Paul Barras.

  40

  MY EUGENE CAME BACK TO ME one morning as I was pruning roses in my new garden at Malmaison. He was not in uniform, and at first, as he approached, I did not recognize him as his body had thickened during his year-long stay in Egypt and he wore his soft, broad-brimmed black hat pulled low over his forehead.

  His smile was still warm and youthful, however, and when I saw who it was approaching I cried out for joy and hugged him very tight.

  “My dearest, dearest boy, how glad I am that you are safe!”

  “We’ve both been through the wars, have we not, maman? You with your terrible accident and I, I fear, with this permanent souvenir from Syria.”

  He took off his hat and I saw that the entire left side of his head was wrapped in bandages.

  “Eugene!” was all I could manage to say, my surprise and horror were so great.

  “I didn’t write you about my wound because I didn’t want to worry you. At first they gave me up for dead—” “As they did me, in Plombieres,” I put in.

  “—and later, they thought I might never see again, but they were wrong. I have a little trouble remembering things, and my ears ring sometimes, but otherwise I am very fit.”

  “How did it happen? Tell me everything.”

  We sat on a bench and Eugene recounted his perilous months in Bonaparte’s army.

  “We were never able to control much of the country. We took Cairo, as I wrote you, but the people there rebelled and every time we left the city we were always under attack from the Bedouins and the peasants. Bonaparte was savage. He cut off more heads in a week than the revolutionaries in Paris did in a year. And he didn’t seem troubled by it. I know, I was there with him most of the time, in his tent, sitting beside him as he wrote out his dispatches, even helping him shave and dress himself. He made me ride alongside his carriage when he went out with his mistress, the one I wrote you about, the one he calls Bellilotte.”

  “That was cruel.”

  “I was enraged at first. Then I realized he wasn’t trying to hurt me, he was trying to punish you by hurting me.”

  “We need not say any more about that. We both know him well.”

  “I’m very sorry, maman. I never meant to be disloyal to you. I thought of leaving my post, but—”

  “But if you had done that, your army career would have been over. I quite understand.”

  He shook his head. “I was angry about it all. But there were much worse things to be angry about.”

  He got to his feet and paced back and forth, his hands behind his back, looking down at the grass. I thought I detected an occasional unsteadiness in his gait, and I wondered if it was the result of his head wound.

  “So many of our men died. They got syphilis, or the Egyptian eye disease, which drove them mad, or the plague. It swept them away like the Nile sweeps away boats at flood tide. And all General Bonaparte could think about was how he was going to conquer India once he had taken Egypt and Turkey.”

  He paused, shaking his head, then continued.

  “We marched all the way to Jaffa. We took the Turkish garrison there. The general said we couldn’t take any prisoners, we had no food for them. So we slaughtered them, thousands of helpless soldiers, most of them too old to fight. And not only the soldiers”—his words caught in his throat, and for a minute or two he could not continue—”but their wives and children. So many children! Oh, maman, if you could have seen them, the poor little things clinging on to their fathers’ legs, cut down without mercy—”

  I crossed myself and murmured a prayer.

  “It was ghastly. I felt sick and weak, but the general only taunted me.

  “ ‘Be a man, Eugene!’ he said. ‘Be a soldier!’ He laughed in that way he has, a snide laugh, and he pinched my cheek, too hard. I swear, at that moment I could have killed him, I hated him so much.”

  He sat down again, beside me on the stone bench.

  “We set siege to Acre then, just like the crusading knights did centuries ago. I was careless. I got too close to the walls. I was hit. Bonaparte had me put aboard an Arab dhow, and sent to Cyprus. There were very good physicians there. I rested for a month, then found a Portuguese merchant vessel to take me to Marseille. I landed two weeks ago.”

  “I hope you will stay here with me for awhile. We will get you the best physicians in Paris.”

  Eugene agreed to stay on with me in Malmaison, and grew stronger by the day. Through a courier he maintained close contact with events in the ministries in Paris—for he was still Bonaparte’s aide-de-camp, even though thousands of miles away—and we were both aware that the power of the five Directors was in decline.

  I felt stronger, having all my family around me again, Hortense and Coco, Euphemia and now Eugene. I isolated myself at Malmaison, doing my best to ignore the gossip that reached me, the nasty things my in-laws were saying about me and the inevitable rumors that Bonaparte would soon divorce me.

  That he had a pretty young mistress in Egypt had become common knowledge in the capital. I still had many friends and was a sentimental favorite of the Parisians, having been one of them for so many years and having been a victim of the Terror who was miraculously saved from death through a stroke of good fortune. However, Parisians are notoriously fickle and feel a frisson of excitement when a new love threatens to upset an established marriage. I knew that if I went out in society, there would be a thousand questions about my marriage. I would feel tense and uneasy, even among those I knew best.

  I also knew that, if I visited the capital, I might, if I were very unlucky, meet my nemesis Joseph Buonaparte, who had a country house not far from the capital. He was never out of my thoughts in those worrisome days, the fear of him nagged at me terribly Would he try again to bring about my death?

  I kept watch from my window each night, unable to go to sleep for many hours as I imagined assassins creeping across the garden toward the house, coming to kill me. I kept my loaded pistol under my pillow and slept with my newest companion, a big Russian wolfhound I called Mitka, by my side.

  41

  “HE IS COMING! He is coming!” Word of Bonaparte’s sudden, unannounced return from Egypt swept up from the coast and there was rejoicing from one end of France to the other.

  No one seemed to care that little, if anything, had been achieved in Egypt or Syria. (Bonaparte had claimed much but done little.) Or that while he was away on the other side of the Mediterranean, his conquests in Italy had been reconquered by the Austrians. All that mattered was that the hero Bonaparte, the savior of France, was returning, and that he would sweep all difficulties away.

  We heard that he was at Lyon, then Montlucon, then Orleans. He would soon be among us.

  I dreaded his return, and braced myself for quarrels and confrontations. I did not expect Bonaparte to appear the way he did, on my doorstep, with no warning.

  His gaudy gilded carriage, ornamented by sphinxes and with golden pyramids at each corner of the roof, swept into the forecourt of Malmaison, causing much excitement among my servants, who rushed out to greet the general and applaud him.

  He alighted from the carriage, looking somewhat bilious, I thought, even dissolute. His skin, which had grown darker and more leathery in the Egyptian sun, had a yellowish cast. Joseph stepped down out of the carriage next, making me shiver and reach for Eugene’s arm, and then out stepped a buxom blond woman in a preposterous, ill-fitting purple gown and hat.

  “The coo
k’s daughter,” I murmured to Eugene, as we stood in the vestibule, watching the scene in the courtyard through the open door. Soon Euphemia came to join us, leading Coco, and finally Hortense came to stand beside her brother. Thus arrayed, we waited for Bonaparte to enter the house.

  But he did not. Instead he stood on the gravel of the forecourt, speaking in a loud voice to Joseph.

  “I leave it to you to sell this overpriced extravagance of my wife’s,” he said in a loud voice. “Find a reputable land agent and get what you can for it. I am sure she paid far too much.”

  “Whatever she paid, I doubt it was cash,” Joseph replied drily. “It is said she has returned to her rich boyfriend Barras. He gave her the money to buy the estate.”

  “She is still my wife. She cannot acquire property without my permission. As for Barras—” He did not finish his sentence. His tone was dismissive.

  Joseph spat. “All Paris hates Barras. He can’t last. The Parisians are behind you, Nabulio. You, as always, are the man of the hour!”

  “Never mind Barras and my wife. She is no more to me than the dirt under my feet. I will divorce her and marry this beautiful girl”—he put his arm around his mistress’s plump waist and hugged her to him. “She won’t deceive me, will you Bellilotte? She will be a faithful and loving wife to me. She is not a whore like the other one.” He squeezed the blond woman until she squealed, making him laugh.

  “Go in and look around,” he said to her, giving her a little push toward the house. “See if there is anything inside you want.”

  She ambled toward the entrance. She had no grace. There was a sort of wobble in her walk. People said, of my walk, that I did not walk at all: I floated.

  As we watched, she came through the doorway with a swish of her awful purple skirts. She looked up and down the marble columns in the foyer (they were not real marble, of course, but she couldn’t have known that) and the beautiful tiled floor, the fresh flowers from the greenhouse—and then she looked at the five of us.

 

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