Two Empresses

by Brandy Purdy

  Scipion understood and took the cup of coffee from me. “You need sleep more than you need this,” he said as he set it aside.

  “But first, let me tend to your wounds,” he said. “I’m afraid those cuts will fester if I don’t.”

  As he moved about the cabin, fetching a basin of water, a jar of ointment, and a roll of linen bandages, I touched my face and then looked down at my bare arms, legs, and feet. I was covered in a multitude of little red, stinging cuts, most of them thankfully so fine they would not leave scars. My feet had suffered the worst—long red, jagged cuts along the sides and on the soles. They looked like some madman had attempted to shred them with knives.

  Scipion drew up a small three-legged stool and carefully washed my face, arms, and legs, gently daubing ointment onto each cut; then he took my feet onto his lap, into the basin, and bathed and bandaged them. When he was done, he helped me to lie down, drew the blanket up to my chin, and kissed my brow.

  “Go to sleep, Rose,” he whispered. “Tomorrow will be a new and brighter day.”

  And it was! Each of the next fifty-two days we spent at sea was brighter than the one before. The sky might have been cloudy and gray, but inside Scipion’s cabin I felt the sun shining radiantly down upon me. And oh, how I basked and gloried in it! I cursed the voyage for being so swift.

  One of the officers had been bringing home a bolt of gay yellow cotton covered with tiny blue flowers as a gift for his daughter, but since Hortense’s need was clearly the greater—like me she had nothing to wear but a thin muslin shift—he gave it to her. A sailor, who had been apprenticed to a tailor before he went to sea, stitched a neat little frock for her. And another officer presented her with the red satin dancing slippers intended for his own little girl’s birthday. Every evening the sailors sat in a circle and made music with Hortense right in the middle, dancing and singing for them. They adored her one and all.

  As for myself, I found I didn’t mind my conspicuous lack of garments; I was more than content to stay in Scipion’s bed even after my shift had been cleansed with rainwater and dried out and the aforementioned sailor who was skilled with a needle had fashioned me a dress out of odds and ends of spare cloth that he found about the ship or were offered up by the crew.

  I broke my rule and took a young man as my lover and, for the first time in my life, I fell in love, truly in love.

  * * *

  Caught up in passion’s thrall, I ignored reality. Martinique was Scipion’s world, but it was no longer mine. I had no desire ever to go back; the slaves’ rebellion had spoiled it for me. But he would be going back, just as soon as the Sensible took on fresh supplies and men. He was determined to douse the hellish fires of revolution, to rebuild the gentle, languid world he had always known and loved, and to start anew. He was ready to give up the sea for a plantation and a family.

  A family! How could I have been so foolish and reckless? Without the special herbal teas Rosette brewed for me there was nothing to keep my womb from quickening, but I could no more have insisted that Scipion withdraw at the crucial moment than I could have cut off my own hand with a butter knife. Our passion was too intense to be interrupted! Yet I was quite certain that I didn’t want another child and Scipion said he wanted a dozen; for his future wife’s sake I hoped he was joking. I loved the two children I had like a lioness loves her cubs, I would fight for them and I would die for them, but I was rather inept at providing for them. Being pregnant would keep me out of the social whirl for months, my lovers would leave me, and then how would we live? I was going back to Paris with far less than I had left with! I hadn’t a coin to my name, I was barefoot, and I didn’t have one decent dress to stand up in.

  Wisely, I didn’t tell Scipion of my suspicions. I let him think that the horrors of my ordeal—that army of black devils chasing after me; the cannonball landing so close to me; seeing my childhood home consumed by flames; my uncertainty about my family’s fate—had temporarily stopped my monthly flow. I assured him I would be all right again once I was back in Paris. It was not exactly a lie—I knew a woman who could help me.

  We knew as we stood on deck, watching the silhouette of Brest—the same seaport that had given me my first dismal welcome to France—appear upon the horizon, that we could never agree. We two could never be one; it was foolhardy even to think so.

  Martinique—that was the true sticking point. Even if peace was restored and the plantations rebuilt and the smell of sugar hovered in the air again, and there were fields of sugarcane, coffee, and cocoa waiting to be harvested as far as the eye could see, and the drums only sounded on the nights of voodoo rituals, I still wouldn’t want to go back.

  I was selfish; I wanted Scipion to stay in Paris with me. But Scipion despised the shallow, artificial life, constantly changing fads, and fickle morals of Parisian society. He disdained the so-called march of progress the Revolution with all its talk of liberty, equality, and fraternity was ushering in. He questioned its principles and intentions; he said its ideology was as full of holes as a moth-eaten coat. He wanted the grand old, placid, peaceful life of his childhood in Martinique back: evenings spent taking his ease on the veranda after a day riding out to inspect the fields; visits to friends and family at neighboring plantations; monthly trips to Fort Royal to purchase supplies and dance with girls in white satin at the Governor’s ball; nights of love with a devoted wife; and a big white house filled with happy, laughing, carefree children.

  But that was not the life for me. I found the pace of Martinique, even at its best, far too slow after Paris. Now when I remembered the years I had spent on the island everything seemed sluggish and dull in a maddening way instead of lovely and languid. Paris had become my home and I longed for its fast pace and pleasures. I was ready to throw myself back into its mad, giddy whirl. I would try to stop my ears to all the boring and danger-tinged talk of politics and revolution and dance away from anyone who seemed too serious. I just wanted to be happy, have money to spend, beautiful dresses to wear, and, most of all, to have fun and try not to think about tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 9

  The moment I set foot off the Sensible a crowd surrounded me. “Citizeness Beauharnais?” asked those who did not know me. “Citizeness Beauharnais!” cried those who recognized me, their eyes lighting up at the sight of me despite my bedraggled, woebegone appearance with my crude patchwork gown, straggling, unwashed hair, and bare feet.

  Suddenly I found myself being hefted up high onto the shoulders of strong men and carried in triumph to the inn. All around me people waved and cheered and blew kisses and threw flowers at me. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why, unless it had something to do with my escape from Martinique. But how could they have known about that? Still, I smiled and waved back; I didn’t want to appear standoffish or rude.

  Scipion trailed along behind us, the lone frowning face in the jubilant crowd, with Hortense clutched protectively against his chest and Fortune scampering along beside him, barking and nipping at the ankles of anyone who threatened to tread on him.

  * * *

  At the inn I was given the best room. The first thing I asked for was a bath. A tub was brought without delay and placed by the fire along with perfumed soap and towels, and a hearty meal and strengthening red wine were laid out on a table nearby.

  An assortment of dresses, shoes, hats, and all the other garments necessary to equip the wife of the Revolution’s brightest shining star—Alexandre Beauharnais (he had doffed the aristocratic “de” along with his title)—lay spread out upon the bed, most in the requisite revolutionary red, white, and blue.

  There was also a bound copy of Alexandre’s speeches, which I found so boring I regretted in years to come that I had not saved it to use as a sort of literary sleeping potion on all the long, restless nights that lay before me.

  Alexandre was now the darling of Paris. With his blond hair tied back with a black ribbon, natural and unpowdered, in his austere black suit and plain white neck cloth,
with a tricolor rosette blooming from his lapel, and steel instead of silver buckles on his black shoes, he shunned and distanced himself from his aristocratic birthright. Every time he stood up in the National Assembly, which now ruled the nation while the King and Queen languished in prison, people poured in, crushing and falling over one another, and spilling out of every door and window, to hear Alexandre’s rousing speeches. They hung on his every word as though their very lives depended on what he would say.

  I attended one of his speeches once—once was enough. I was given a seat of honor away from the crush of worshipful humanity screaming his name. I must admit I was not impressed. I hid my yawns behind my fan and had to jab myself with a pin to stay awake. It seemed to me that he talked a great deal but never really said anything. But every time he uttered one of the magic words—liberty, fraternity, equality—the crowd stood up and cheered and threw their hats in the air. In the speech I heard, Alexandre must have used those words at least fifty times.

  Afterward, crude, dirty men in the clothes of the common man—loose, ragged striped trousers, red carmagnole jackets, liberty caps, and clogs—carried him from the Assembly on their shoulders into the nearest tavern. Women followed, pelting him with flowers. While he sat inside and drank his beer and ate sausages, hundreds of people gathered in the street outside, swaying and holding hands, singing songs about liberty and brotherhood, hymns of freedom and equality.

  I thought the whole spectacle was absurd, but I forced myself to keep smiling. I pretended that I was proud and adored my husband just as much as those people in the street did.

  Even though we were estranged and parted, I, rather than whatever woman was his mistress of the moment—and apparently there were many mistresses and many moments, but who was I to judge?—was the one the public had chosen to adore alongside Alexandre.

  * * *

  I had left Paris deeply in debt and dependent on the generosity of aged gentlemen, but I had come back to find myself famous, celebrated, and adored, without my having done a single thing to deserve it. Everyone knew my name and wanted to know me. Everyone wanted to hear about my daring escape from the slave uprising in Martinique and to see my scars. My picture was sold on every street corner, often framed alongside Alexandre’s as though we still cared for each other; our estrangement never penetrated the public’s imagination. Women were avid to know, and then imitate, what I was wearing, and more men than I could count wanted to be nice to me and pay my bills. I was able to pay for a dancing master and music lessons for Hortense and a lovely white-haired spinster with steel-framed spectacles came twice a week to teach her to paint roses on teacups—her future husband would be so pleased! When I took up residence in an elegant white house on the rue Saint Dominique everyone wanted to be invited to dine at my table and dance in my ballroom. People climbed the fences just to pluck roses from my garden, to take home and press to have a souvenir of me. They fought just to touch my hand or the hem of my gown and to hear my soft, husky voice addressing them; men told me they could die happy now that they had heard me speak their name. If I dropped my handkerchief, rather than gallantly returning it someone would run away with it, calling back over their shoulder that they would cherish it like a holy relic until their dying day. When I rode out in my carriage handsome young men would unhitch the horses and put themselves into harness and pull me through the city streets, even out into the country for a picnic if that was where I wished to go. I loved being famous! And to think I owed it all to Alexandre!

  Maybe Euphemia David had not been wrong after all? Alexandre was so popular perhaps the Parisians, even though they said they were done with kings and queens, would elect him their emperor and we would reconcile and he would cover me with diamonds and ardent kisses and set upon my head the crown of empress. I was certain I could see my future unfolding before me like the regal purple velvet carpet I would walk upon on the day of my coronation, leading right up to the altar where I would be, at long last, crowned. Every night, before sleep closed my eyes, I lay awake planning my coronation gown. It would have to be red, white, and blue of course, to pay homage to the revolution that had paved the way to my throne.

  * * *

  I was so caught up in my newfound fame that I forgot all about Scipion. I didn’t even have a chance to thank him and say good-bye before he sailed back to Martinique.

  “Safe voyage and happy life, my love,” I whispered when I realized that he had gone.

  I tried to be stoic, but I couldn’t quite manage it.

  “Why didn’t he come to see me one last time?” I wailed to Fortune, and flung myself weeping onto my bed, supremely conscious of the fact that the one man I truly wanted was not there to share it with me.

  For the first time, I had a tiny niggling feeling that perhaps fame wasn’t everything. I had the sudden sad realization that even if I pulled myself together, dried my tears, painted my face, and put on my prettiest gown and went out to dance and let the masses adore me, no matter how many people surrounded me I would still be lonely. I found such thoughts so disturbing that I quickly banished them from my mind.

  I roused myself from my bed of sorrow and hastily scrawled a note to the midwife I knew who could void my womb of its mistake.

  She was prompt in coming to my aid the next day. She had a sure and steady hand with her long bone knitting needle. I trusted her and was certain I would soon recover. After she had left me and I lay in bed, atop an old quilt to spare the fine linen sheets, with my womb racked by cramps and still seeping blood, I read the letter that had come that morning from Martinique.

  Mama was alive, thank God, but Papa and Manette were dead, of disease and no will to live, not, thankfully, murdered in their beds or tortured by the slaves. There was nothing left but ashes, debts, and graves. Papa could leave nothing to me. What little he hadn’t squandered had gone up in flames. Mama was determined to rebuild Trois-Ilets, to manage it herself, and make it into the fine plantation it should have been all along. But it would take years before all the debts and loans were repaid and Trois-Ilets began to yield a true profit. I wished her luck, but that was all I could give her. I felt like I had suddenly become an orphan; the place I had always thought of as home wasn’t home anymore. There was no going back anymore, only forward. I had become a true daughter of Paris.

  CHAPTER 10

  Every star that rises must also fall. Adored today, reviled tomorrow. And so it was with Alexandre. He became so caught up in his speechifying that he neglected his military duties. Something he was responsible for went terribly wrong, I’m not sure exactly what—perhaps a battle was lost, or too many men were killed, or some aim was not accomplished—and his star plummeted down to earth. Those who had once cheered and kissed him cursed and spat at him. Instead of throwing flowers, they pelted him with horse dung scooped up out of the streets.

  He was taken to Les Carmes, the former Carmelite convent that was now the most abysmal prison in Paris. Abandon hope all who enter here should have been engraved in the stone above the door. It was rare indeed for anyone who went in to ever walk out again except to go bow before the Revolution’s killing machine, Madame Guillotine.

  When I heard the news, I decided to leave Paris and go to the country. I was dancing too close to the edge of the precipice. I must think of my children.

  Eugène, my dear little man, was back with me. Alexandre and military school had not spoiled Eugène’s sweet nature at all; he was just as loving as ever. He was determined to be the man of the house and protect his little sister and me. Most likely they would soon lose their father, and I didn’t want them to lose me too; the world is not kind to orphans. So I made up my mind to live as quietly and inconspicuously as possible until the danger had passed.

  Paris was now a very dangerous place. Robespierre, with his mad delusions that made him see an enemy around every corner, was the man of the hour. Everyone was suspect. Anyone nobly born or with any aristocratic associations, even the most tenuous, was suspect and l
iable to be arrested. Envy and revenge, the pettiest of grudges, were enough to get rid of a rival, enemy, erstwhile lover or friend, or inconvenient relation; in those days many a detested mother-in-law ended her life upon the scaffold. All one had to do was whisper their name in the right ear or write it on a slip of paper and drop it in a box. The guillotine was venerated and worshipped like a saint; it became the most popular form of entertainment for the common people. Women took their knitting and sat and watched the heads fall.

  The King had his neck shaved by the National Razor, one of the many pet names for the killing machine, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, soon followed.

  Before I left Paris, I watched from a window, for one last sight of her, as the crude wooden tumbril rolled slowly past, its wheels bumping clumsily over the cobblestones. There were no cushions, no grand gilt-trimmed carriages, at the end for Marie Antoinette. How sad and weary she looked in her loose white gown and mobcap, adorned by nothing but her dignity. A pale, pathetic figure, old beyond her thirty-eight years, with her hair, blanched white by sorrow, crudely hacked off, she stumbled and stepped on the executioner’s toes as she struggled to mount the thirteen steps of the scaffold with her hands bound behind her back.

  “Pardon, monsieur, I did not mean to do it,” were her last words. One had the sense that she was apologizing for so much more than treading on one man’s toes. I also think she was ready to be done with it all. She had learned by then that she could never win. I heard it said later that when she left her prison cell and someone tried to speak some comforting words, about the swiftness of this method of death, she declared that dying is easy, it takes far more courage to live.

  * * *

  I took a house in Croissy, but it wasn’t far enough.

  They came for me on Easter Sunday, not an hour after I had tucked the children into their beds. The sun had barely set on what had been a pleasant day with a picnic in the rose garden behind our house. We were a patriotic family and had made our own Tree of Liberty, decorating it with tricolor rosettes and red, white and blue streamers. We danced around it until we fell down dizzy and then we had some more lemonade and cake. Then I had sat in the grass, leaning back on my hands, with my children’s golden heads resting in my lap, and gazed at the château of Malmaison, glimmering in the distance, through the trees, across a wide green park, and dreamed that it was mine.