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

by Carolly Erickson

  We had not intended to stay so long here in Malmaison, but Donovan’s old wound has been plaguing him again and I have been overwhelmed with guests and uninvited visitors eager to gape at the former empress and I confess that I am overtired at times by all that has happened in recent months.

  The Russians have taken over Paris, as Prince Tchernichev told me they would, and Bonaparte has been forced to abdicate and the new king, Louis XVIII, has come to the throne.

  All Paris is agape at the spectacle of a new court and a new monarch— even though the monarch is not very regal. I have seen him from a distance, and he is very fat, and pompous, and quite ridiculous. He limps from gout and they say his toenails are so long he has to have special shoes made.

  What will I say to him, when we meet? My voice is soft and scratchy and he is said to be hard of hearing, as he is nearly sixty years old.

  If we get along I may invite him to my fete, to celebrate my birthday next month. (That is, if we have not yet left for Martinique.) I will be fiftyone years old, as Euphemia never ceases to remind me. She says I am trying to do too much, but in truth I am enjoying myself, despite the weariness that overtakes me from time to time. There are so many people to see, old friends like Fanny de Beauharnais, who has proclaimed herself Louis XVIII’s most loyal subject, and Juliette Recamier and the Prince de Salm, and old enemies like Bellilotte, once Bonaparte’s mistress, who has become my friend, and Laure de Girardin, my first husband’s mistress, on whom I conferred a pension years ago and is grateful to me, and the haughty Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, who now curtseys to me on her ancient bony knees and pretends that she always served me with a good grace. Poor Marie Louise is long gone from Paris; she left with her son and returned to her family in Austria. They say that she was relieved to go.

  I confess that I am basking in all the attention, even though the most energetic of my guests wear me out with their longwinded talk and their demands that I use my influence with the new king to acquire court appointments for them. I am being used, of course; that was to be expected.

  I am eager to go to Martinique, yet I want to linger here at Malmaison, at least until I have met the king. I imagine that he will offer me a place at his court, some sort of position created just for me. I am not a relative of the royal family but I was once empress, after all, and that is no mean thing. (My husband’s name is never mentioned, needless to say. But then, he was a usurper, pure and simple, whereas I am a French aristocrat by birth, and my father served at the court of the new kings grandfather Louis XV)

  Scipion has come to stay here at Malmaison, and he has promised to escort me to the Tuileries to meet the king. He arrived nearly a week ago, after Eugene sent for him. Eugene is worried about me. He frowns when he looks at me and says I am much too thin and my face is too red. He tries to convince me to eat more but I am not hungry, I am too excited about all that is going on.

  Eugene is just a worrier, my doctors agree with me about that. Though I do notice that I am not sleeping well and that my nerves are so on edge that the least sound unnerves me. At times I imagine that I hear soldiers tramping into the courtyard, and then I sit up in bed and cry out, and Euphemia comes and soothes me.

  Soldiers! The very thought frightens me. I wonder, will this new king Louis lead France into war again, and will we ever be free of the fear of battle? We will never be free of soldiers, of that I am sure, not even on Martinique. But as they say on that beloved, green island, we are all in the hands of fate, and now, as I wait for my fate to take a new turning, I look ahead with eagerness to the bright future.

  EPILOGUE BY SCIPION DU ROURE

  I FEEL IT IS MY SAD TASK to take up Yeyette’s tale and tell the end of her story. Euphemia knew her longer and better than I did, but she is too lost in grief to put down any words, and Donovan, poor, broken man, is beside himself with sorrow

  Like a bright candle, my Yeyette burned herself out. In her last weeks she was quite dazzling, attending balls where Tsar Alexander honored her and danced with her, taking tea with the King of Prussia, entertaining guests at Malmaison, reading and answering letters sent to her each day from people who asked for her help. From a distance she looked like a quite young woman. It was only when one came close that the lines on her face and the shadows in her tired eyes showed her age. She moved with the grace of a younger woman, only she could not seem to stop moving. She would not pause, or rest, and she was in too much of a hurry.

  We all tried to convince her to rest, and all three of the doctors Hortense brought from Paris ordered her to eat more and to drink sleeping draughts. But it was no use. I saw that. I knew her well. She lost the languor she had always possessed, and when I saw that that quality in her was gone, I knew that she could not last long.

  She had so hoped to meet the king, but two days before we were to go together to the Tuileries palace she began sneezing

  and her cough grew much worse. Her poor body itched from a terrible rash (she called it, for some reason, “the revenge of the Bonapartes” and laughed about it) and within hours she was struggling for breath.

  We all gathered around her bedside, Hortense and Eugene, Euphemia, Donovan and I, and her devoted servant Christian. There were many others who wanted to see her, but we kept them away, even the tsar, though we allowed his physician to examine her.

  She embraced us warmly at the end, but could not speak. I saw that she was trying to, and imagined that the word she was trying to say was “love.”

  Among the papers she left behind in her final days was one I shall never forget. She wrote, “Part of me has always walked through this world as a stranger, bearing a gift I have never understood. I pass through, my tasks accomplished. I leave behind a whiff of mystery, a sweet scent that comes from a far place. Remember me.”

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  Like my previous novels, The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette and The Last Wife of Henry VIII, The Secret Life of Josephine is a historical entertainment, not a historical novel. In it I tell Josephine’s story in her own words and through her own lens of perception—fictionally imagined, and fictionally embellished. Readers eager to know more about the historical Josephine will find her life described in my biography of her.

  The historical Josephine never went to Russia, never had a lover named Donovan, never (so far as is recorded) delivered a baby in the midst of a slave rebellion. But she was a very venal army contractor, and she did suffer terribly from migraines. And she did have many lovers, among them a younger man named Hippolyte Charles to whom she was lastingly attached.

  Having written many biographies and histories, and several pseudonymous novels, I have turned very happily to historical entertainments as a way of blending fact and whimsy. Many thanks to my kind readers who have responded to this somewhat frothy mix with enthusiasm.