Two Empresses

by Brandy Purdy

  I shook my head. His tone told me that it was an endearment, but I had no idea of its exact meaning.

  “That is your new name. It means ‘embroidered upon the heart.’” He kissed my hand and laid it over his heart as he spoke my name again: “Nakshidil!”

  PART 3

  JOSEPHINE

  CHAPTER 20

  From the moment Bonaparte changed my name, my life would never again be the same; I would never be the same. The moment I let him touch me, I felt my true self, Rose, fading away. Josephine—in truth, I hated the name! Only one thing good could be said about it: It provided a means by which I could always divine and divide my true friends from the flatterers and favor-seekers; the latter always called me Josephine, but to the former I would always be Rose.

  When Bonaparte left my bed that chilly dawn, still in muddy boots and rumpled uniform, he uncorked the champagne that had sat all night, untouched in a silver bucket filled with ice. He insisted that we must drink a toast—“To Destiny!”

  Without giving me a chance to take even one sip from my glass, he drained his, flung it into the fire, and fell on me again, spilling champagne all over the pink coverlet as the glass tumbled from my hand.

  “You, Josephine, are my destiny!” he cried as he ravenously took possession of me again.

  I didn’t say anything. I was too overwhelmed to speak or even clearly think. My body instinctively did what was required of it while my thoughts were racing about, lost and afraid in an indecisive fog. I didn’t want this, Bonaparte wasn’t the man for me, but the alternative was too terrible to consider. My instinct was to run away as fast as I could, but where to? Where could I be safe? Was there anywhere far enough away to escape Barras’s campaign of slander or Bonaparte’s mad, obsessive passion? They would pursue me to the ends of the earth, I was sure. And what hope had I, at my age, of starting over again? I was thirty-two, though I lied and told everyone I was twenty-nine. I was certain I could never make a success of it even if I tried. I would surely die a pauper.

  I was a coward and I took the coward’s way out. I decided that it was better to marry Bonaparte and make the best of it than risk Barras’s wrath and spending the rest of my life a poor outcast. Security was like a drug I craved and Bonaparte could give me a lifetime supply of it. He would “love” me in his way and always take care of me, even if his embraces and kisses stifled me to the point where I wanted to scream.

  * * *

  I woke to his letter lying on the pillow beside mine with a pink rose, wilting from the cold, on top of it.

  I wake up filled with thoughts of you. Your image and the intoxicating pleasure of your touch allow my senses no respite. Sweet and thrilling Josephine, what strange power you have over my heart! My happiness depends on you. Are you annoyed with me? Are you unhappy? Are you upset? My soul is broken with grief and my love for you denies me repose. But how can I rest when I submit to the feeling that overwhelms my very self, when I drink from your lips and from your heart a soothing flame? Yes! One night has taught me how short your portraits fall of reality! You start at noon; in three hours I shall see you again! Till then, a thousand kisses, mio dolce amore, but give me none back for they set my soul on fire!

  I glanced at the clock, groaned, and pulled the covers up over my head. God save me, he would be at my door again in half an hour! It was all too much! I wanted to bury my head under the pillows and pretend I wasn’t home, but I didn’t dare.

  * * *

  I know that I should have been both grateful and flattered to be the object of so great a love. Here was a man who would lay down his life to keep me safe, my tears melted his heart, my smile warmed it, and just the touch of my hand drove him wild, yet I felt suffocated by his attentions; he was always there. As soon as I woke up, he was the first person I saw except for my maid, and the last when I went to sleep at night. He would not give me air; he would not let me breathe! I felt like an animal in a trap—his trap—I wanted him to just let go. The truth is I think I saw too much of myself, and my foolish girlish young dreams, which had been so coldly and cruelly shattered by Alexandre de Beauharnais, in Bonaparte’s passionate adoration of me. He was so besotted, and I was so indifferent, and he was so oblivious and blindly confident that he could win me and I equally certain that he could not. I don’t think either of us really knew what love was. I had been selling my body for too long, to buy security or just to escape unpleasant realities, I had forgotten, if I ever really knew, what love felt like. I was afraid I already knew how this story would end, but I didn’t want to think about it. Facts are brutal; lies soften and sometimes evade or delay the blows. Was it any wonder that I far preferred the latter?

  Every time Bonaparte looked at me and called me his Josephine, Rose was screaming inside, pounding on the door, trying to get out. I had never been good enough for Alexandre either. Josephine was his ideal, his creation. It was not only a name! Shakespeare was wrong: Names do matter; a rose must be called a rose. My name was only the beginning. I was already losing myself in Bonaparte’s love, and it frightened me, because I thought it meant that he didn’t really love me; he had to make me into someone else he could love. From that first dawn after I let him into my bed there was anger and resentment, and fear, always fear, lurking behind my sweet smile.

  When I tried to talk to them about it, Theresa and Barras laughed at the vision of Bonaparte at my feet worshipping me like a goddess. They knew the real me; to them I was all too earthy and flawed. They didn’t understand; they thought such adoration should please me. Everyone said I was doing the right thing; marrying Bonaparte would give me security. It was “the perfect tonic to an aging woman,” as Barras rather bluntly put it.

  If Bonaparte continued on his self-ordained path to greatness, I, as his wife, would share his glory. His victory over the recent royalist uprising had already brought him a measure of fame. The boorish little Corsican general was no longer a nobody. People cheered him in the streets. Shades of Alexandre again, I thought, and shuddered, remembering how my estranged husband’s fame had brought me almost to the guillotine.

  My children and I would be protected and provided for, Barras continued persuasively, and it was hoped that I could rub some of the rough edges off Bonaparte. We would be so good for each other! He would lend me strength; I would give him gentleness in return. My softness would pillow his hardness; my elegance would be an antidote to his crassness. We would each supply what the other lacked.

  Barras told me not to fret; after the wedding Bonaparte would soon be on his way, chasing glory, off to conquer Italy, and I would be left in Paris, in peace, to do as I pleased. The Directory thought my presence would prove too distracting; they wanted a victory. Bonaparte must give his full attention to military matters, not bedchamber idylls, so there was no question of my accompanying him.

  And after that . . . Barras was quick to remind me that ardor is always most intense in the first flush of passion, but after that it fades so quickly; a man soon discovers that one woman’s kisses are very like the rest. There is no such thing as undying love. Bonaparte’s ardor would be only a minor, and fleeting, annoyance; then I would be back weeping on Barras’s shoulder again because my husband never paid attention to me anymore. “Women,” said Barras, “are fickle and never satisfied.”

  CHAPTER 21

  We were married at midnight on March 9, 1796, at the decaying Hôtel du Mondragon, which had been converted into a town hall. Theresa, Tallien, Barras, and one of Bonaparte’s aides acted as witnesses. The hour was so late because Bonaparte had lost all sense of time poring over his maps of Italy and plans for the upcoming campaign. The candles were sputtering and the registrar had already gone off to bed in a huff declaring that when—if—the groom ever arrived his subordinate, already dozing at his desk, could marry us.

  Theresa and I shivered in our thin white dresses and huddled near the fire. As usual, we had considered our appearances before the weather. To please my husband-to-be, who often told me he
found no sight on earth more pleasing than a graceful woman gowned in white, I was wearing white on our wedding night, though it was only a civil ceremony. My arms were bare and the straps of my filmy, flowing Grecian-style gown were held up by bronze cameos of Julius Caesar crowned with laurel leaves, and a third cameo belted the red velvet sash just below my breasts. There were red satin ribbons crisscrossing my limbs from ankles to knees to fasten my golden sandals and I was wearing ruby and sapphire rings on my toes. I was so cold I longed for a full-length ermine coat, but all I had was my red and gold cashmere shawl.

  As the clock struck the last stroke of twelve, Bonaparte bounded up the stairs, seized me in his arms, and kissed me on the lips. Declaring me “the most beautiful bride who ever lived,” he hung round my neck a great gold medallion with a wreath of laurel leaves encircling the boldly etched words To Destiny! It felt cold and heavy between my breasts and I lifted it to examine it as best I could in the light of the dying candles. I had the ominous feeling that it was more than just a pretty ornament but something akin to a dog collar to let the world know who my master was.

  But I didn’t have time to think; Bonaparte was shaking the clerk awake and urging, “Let’s get on with it!” Thus we were married in haste with, I feared, years’ worth of leisure yawning before us in which to repent. I just hoped I was doing the right thing. It was so hard to be certain! But Barras would ruin me if I didn’t go through with it, Bonaparte thought he loved me, and he certainly loved my children. Be sure to tell them that I love them as if they were my own, he had once written. What is yours or mine is so mixed up in my heart that there is no difference there. He was taking Eugène to Italy with him as his aide-de-camp and he thought Hortense was a darling and doted on each little painted porcelain knickknack she gave him as though it were a great work of art.

  “Don’t worry,” Theresa whispered in my ear. “If it doesn’t work out you can always get a divorce!”

  But I failed to find much comfort in her words.

  I should have taken his lateness as an omen. It would indeed prove to be my destiny—to always wait for Bonaparte, in every way, in all things.

  * * *

  In my bed that night, my dear old pug, Fortune, growled at Bonaparte and refused to budge. I shrugged and told my new husband that he would have to share the bed or sleep elsewhere, as Fortune had the prior claim. When Bonaparte instead tried to shift Fortune, my cantankerous pug lunged and sank his teeth deep into Bonaparte’s leg. This time he ruined my coverlet by bleeding all over it.

  Two days later when Bonaparte rode off to Italy he was still wearing a bandage. I got up long enough to kiss him good-bye.

  “There has never been a love like mine,” he said as he embraced me one last time. “It will last as long as my life.”

  I just wanted to go back to bed, but he insisted that I stand, framed in the window, so he could see me one last time before he rode away.

  I was already turning away from the window, yawning, pulling up the sagging straps of my nightgown, and staggering back to bed while he was still blowing kisses and waving good-bye, as excited as a little boy. I was sure I wouldn’t miss him at all; as Barras had said, I would have all the pleasures of Paris to console me. And there was work for me to do—as a wedding present, Bonaparte had said I could redecorate the house to render it worthy of a returning hero. “Just make sure to put portraits of yourself everywhere and whatever else you do I shall be pleased,” he said.

  Before he had even been away a week he had bombarded me with so many letters anyone would have thought that I was the one he was laying siege to. Like cannonballs they came at me, ardent sentiments such as:

  You are the constant object of my thoughts, my incomparable Josephine, away from you there is no joy—away from you the world is a wilderness in which I am alone.

  To live for Josephine, that is the story of my life!

  I would be so happy if I could help undress you, and see and kiss your small shoulders, supple, firm white breasts, and pretty little face with your hair tied up in a scarf à la Creole. You know that I always remember the visits to your little black forest. I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment when I will again be in it. To live with Josephine is to live in the Elysian Fields! Kisses on your mouth, your eyelids, your shoulders, your breasts, everywhere, everywhere!

  * * *

  It made me tired just to look at them. Just touching them it seemed I could feel the heat coming off his words and the holes the impatient pen had poked through the paper. How the blots must have sizzled as soon as the ink was spilled! He was so ardent, obsessive, and untiring! Many times I would toss them on my little rosewood writing desk, promising I would open and read them later, always later, and write a line or two in answer. But it was so difficult; there were so many of them! They just kept piling up day after day until I could no longer see the surface of my desk and they were spilling off onto the floor. Soon their very number, not just their content, was overwhelming me. Such relentless passion is very fatiguing!

  When I didn’t answer his letters he only grew more fervent and frantic, impatient, and possessed of wild notions that I was ill or unfaithful or that I didn’t love him. But if I did answer he cursed me for the brevity and blandness of my letters, counting the lines, at most three or five—I really was a poor correspondent and had always hated writing letters—and taking them to heart, as an insult, as the true measure of my love. He said I wrote as coldly as though we had been married fifteen years.

  You are the only woman I have ever loved and adored! If you do not love me anymore, there is nothing left for me! If I have lost your love, I have lost more than life, more than happiness, I have lost everything! he agonized in words so blotted by tears and ink that it overtaxed my poor eyes just to read them.

  One day when he discovered that the glass on the miniature portrait he always carried of me had cracked he became convinced that it was a sign that I was either dying or unfaithful. The whole situation really was too tedious for words! All that hard riding and gunfire, the cannonballs that shook the earth and showered shrapnel, I would have been more surprised if the glass hadn’t cracked! But there was no telling Bonaparte that. I was his superstition, his talisman, his good-luck charm, and he considered me one of the rays of his star.

  * * *

  My husband should have been less demanding; after all, I was only doing what he asked me to, renovating our home to make it worthy of him. I threw myself into a frenzy of shopping, consulting with decorators and designers, carpenters, painters, and furniture-makers. I ordered pink roses and swans painted on my bedroom walls and bought a harp and new bronze chairs and tables topped in rose-colored marble and a new, even bigger bed with a tent-like canopy of pink satin. Since I must take even greater care of my appearance now that I had a husband six years my junior to please, I had my dressing room lined entirely, floor to ceiling, with mirrors, and a new marble bath. I had the dining room done over in gold and red and purchased a new mahogany table and chairs.

  Since Bonaparte said that he desired to see my portrait everywhere, I took him at his word. I began to pose each afternoon for artists. Many of them were eager to have me pose for them now that I was famous again. So there I was, my painted presence, everywhere in every room, in flowing white dresses and colored shawls glimmering discreetly with gold threads, with cameos and diadems evocative of ancient glories or pink or white roses in my hair, which I had let grow long again. I posed in profile, face forward, or full figure, sitting, standing, or half-reclining on sofas, always with a wistfully sweet, closemouthed smile that lent me a provocative air of melancholy that always made men long to comfort me. Sometimes the paintings showed me standing at windows longing to see my husband return, waiting alone on a garden bench surrounded by roses; they even depicted me reading his letters with a stack of them in my lap and scattered like white rose petals around my feet.

  One grand larger-than-life canvas showed me as “Our Lady of Victories
,” standing with the torn and bullet-riddled flags of conquered nations at my feet and a portrait of my husband on the wall behind me, looking over my shoulder. And there were engravings of me in all the newspapers—Barras saw to that—showing me kneeling in prayer at Notre Dame, praying for my husband and the men who had gone into battle with him, giving alms to wounded and crippled soldiers, or visiting them in hospitals. I felt guilty because these images made me look more selfless than I was. I had never been particularly religious, and the sight of blood, lost limbs, and rotting wounds made me sick and faint. Those pictures were not true portraits of me.

  Everyone knew of Bonaparte’s great love for me and that he carried my likeness above his heart into battle with him, like a lucky charm he was never without, pressing it to his lips before the first charge and again in thankfulness after. I was his lucky star. As long as he had me, he believed that he could never be defeated, and his ever-increasing string of victories seemed to prove it.

  “Vive Madame Bonaparte!” the people would shout every time I appeared in public. Every time my husband scored another victory there was dancing and singing in the street outside our house. I couldn’t step outside without being pelted with flowers, poetry, and praise. Everyone adored me and wanted to kiss my hand or hem. I was the subject of songs and sonnets. My likeness was everywhere, sold in shops and on street corners, in every newspaper and magazine, even on painted fans, playing cards, and snuffboxes. There were balls and supper parties in my honor; plays and operas were dedicated to me; every time I went to the theater everyone stood up and cheered when I entered my box. No merchant dared deny me credit. All I had to do was walk into any shop in Paris and point and say, “I want that!” and it was mine; it didn’t matter if it was diamonds or dancing slippers, an Oriental carpet, a suite of rosewood furniture, or an ancient Etruscan urn.