Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe

by Sandra Gulland

  “She was lucky. I approve that the girls learn to make soup and have to tidy their rooms themselves. I’ll enrol my younger sisters.”

  Bonaparte has four brothers and three sisters—my family now. “Your sisters who are living in Marseille with your mother?” In town now, we were passing the castle, a ruin, like so many.

  “I’m going to move them all to Paris.”

  “That would be lovely,” I said, smiling in spite of a pain in my side. “How much does Campan charge?” “For the year? Three thousand francs.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said, opening a book he’d been reading on the way down, the life of Alexandre the Great.

  “Eugène’s school is even more.” And I was paying for my niece Émilie’s tuition as well—or trying to. It had been a long time since I’d had any income from home.* My coachman cracked his whip. I let my head fall back against the tufted upholstered seat and closed my eyes, the memory of Hortense’s tears coming back to me.

  “Not feeling well?”

  “I’m fine,” I lied.

  Now, in the quiet of my little dressing room, I give way to despair. What am I going to do? Not long ago I’d promised my daughter that I wouldn’t marry Bonaparte. Now she will think I’ve betrayed her. She is too young to understand what is truly best for her, too young to understand the complexities of love, and of need. Too young to understand that promises made with love may also with love be broken.

  Late evening, I’m not sure how late. Still raining.

  More meetings, visitors. Bonaparte is downstairs still with two of his aides. The smell of cigar smoke fills the air. I’m bathed and dressed for bed, awaiting my husband. This is our last night together before he leaves.

  After a fast evening meal (he eats so quickly!), Bonaparte read out loud the letter he’d written to the Directors announcing our marriage. Satisfied, he folded the paper, shoved it into an envelope, dripped wax on it and thumped it with his seal. Then he put the envelope to one side and rummaged through the drawer where the papers were kept, pulling out a sheet of rag bond. He stood and motioned for me to take the seat at the escritoire. “I need a letter to my mother from you.”

  Of course! I put my lacework aside. He would be seeing his mother in Marseille, informing her of our union—his mother who, according to Corsican custom, should have been asked for permission first. His mother, who would have refused permission had she been asked. His mother, who was opposed to her son’s marrying a widow with two children, a woman without a dowry, a woman six years older than her son.

  Bonaparte paced, dictating what he thought the letter should say: that she was now my honoured mother, that I was looking forward to meeting her, that I would visit her on my way to Italy to join my husband, that—There was a sudden rush of pouring rain. I held the raven’s tail quill suspended. I was to go to Italy? “But Bonaparte—”

  “In six weeks, after I run the Austrians out.”

  I smiled. Was he joking? I was saved from my dilemma by the sound of a man calling out from the garden, “Open the damned door!”

  “Was that Director Barras?” I asked Bonaparte, going to the door to the garden. “It is you!” I kissed my friend’s wet cheeks.

  “And good evening to you, General Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Italy,” Barras proclaimed in a mock official voice, balancing his gold-tipped walking stick against the wall. “My heartfelt congratulations on your recent appointment.” Bonaparte looked sullen, even as the Director shook his hand.*

  “Thanks to you, Père Barras,” I said, draping his military greatcoat over a chair by the fire to dry. Less than a year ago Bonaparte had been unemployed. Barras had been instrumental in getting him a series of promotions, but this last, to General-in-Chief, had taken considerable persuasion on Barras’s part. The Directors had been reluctant to grant the command of an army to a Corsican.

  “Not bad, not bad,” Barras said, turning Bonaparte like a mannequin, examining his new uniform. “A little big at the shoulders perhaps?” His own jacket seemed a little tight on him, I noticed; the tails split open at the back. “But why these frayed epaulettes?”

  “What were you doing out in the garden, Paul?” I asked, changing the subject. I’d brought up the matter of the epaulettes earlier, but without success. (Bonaparte is so stubborn!)

  “I knocked and no one answered. How you can manage on such a small staff, Rose, is beyond me,” Barras said, running his hand through his thinning hair. (Dyed black?)

  “I’m looking for a lady’s maid, in fact.” On learning that I was going to marry a Revolutionary, my former maid had quit. “If you hear of one—”

  “Her name is Josephine now,” Bonaparte said.

  “You’re changing your Christian name as well?” Barras frowned, considering. “Josephine—yes, I like that, Rose, it rather suits you. As does your gown, I must say. Don’t you look lovely. I do know of a maid though. My aunt was telling me of a girl. But only one? You need at least three more. Enough of this Republican simplicity. Republican romanticism, I call it. And speaking of romance, how are my lovebirds this miserable evening?”

  “Just fine,” I said with more enthusiasm than I felt.

  “The Directory can only provide me with eight thousand francs,” Bonaparte said.

  Barras flung back his tails and sat down. (Was he wearing a corset? Barras, at forty, was becoming vain.) “I know, it’s not enough, but at least it’s not the counterfeit stuff England is flooding us with in an effort to ruin our economy.” Raising his hands to heaven. “As if our economy weren’t already ruined.”

  Bonaparte wasn’t humoured. “How am I supposed to feed and equip an army on only eight thousand?” He drummed the chessboard with his fingers, sending two pieces tumbling to the floor.

  “Prayer?” Barras caught my eye and smiled, his beguiling lopsided grin. “After all, it’s legal now—well, almost.”

  “Barras, you do amuse,” I said, offering him a glass of the Clos-Vougeot burgundy I knew he favoured.

  “No, thank you—I just came by to drop off the list you asked for, General,” he said, handing a folded-up sheet of paper to Bonaparte.

  “But these are only the names of the generals,” Bonaparte said, scanning the list. “I asked for the names of all the officers in the Army of Italy.”

  “Even the captains?” Barras stood, reaching for his walking stick.

  “Even their aides.”

  “You’re leaving tomorrow evening? I’ll get my secretary to bring it over to you in the morning.” He punched Bonaparte’s shoulder in a soldierly fashion. “Best of luck liberating the Italians from the Austrians, General, as you so nobly put it. Don’t neglect to liberate their paintings and sculptures while you’re at it, as well as all that gold in the Church coffers. That’s where you’ll find the money to feed your soldiers.” He threw his walking stick into the air and caught it, looking to see whether I had noticed.

  Have to go—I hear Bonaparte’s footsteps on the stairs.

  March 11, morning, a light rain.

  Sleepy this morning, but smiling. Bonaparte approaches conjugal relations with the fervour of a religious convert and the curiosity of a scientist. He’s intent on trying every position described in a book he found at a stall by the river. There are over a hundred, he claims, and we’re only on position nine.

  Indeed, I’m learning never to predict how things might be with him. He can be imperious and insensitive one minute, tender and devoted the next. Last night we talked and talked …

  “Like foam on the wave,” he told me, caressing my breast.

  “I like that,” I said, watching the watery undulations that the firelight was making on the wall, thinking of the sea. “The poetry or this …?”

  “That was poetry? And that.” His hands are soft, his touch surprisingly gentle.

  “It’s a line from Carthon by Ossian. Her breasts were like foam on the wave, and her eyes like stars of light.”

  It took me a moment to rea
lize who he meant. Bonaparte pronounced the Scottish bard’s name like “ocean.”

  “Alexandre the Great chose Homer as his poet, Julius Caesar chose Virgil—and I have chosen Ossian.”

  “Bonaparte, you disturb me when you talk like that.”

  “Why? Don’t you like that progression: Alexandre, Caesar … Napoleoni?”

  “I’m serious. Can’t you be a normal man?”

  “Aren’t I a ‘normal’ man?” He pressed against me.

  “Well, in that respect, yes.” In that respect, absolutely. Except that Bonaparte was insatiable.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course!” I was enjoying the quiet intimacy of our talk, this late-night pillow confession.

  “Sometimes I think I’m the reincarnation of Alexandre the Great.” He glanced at me. “Now you’ll think me mad.”

  “I notice you read about Alexandre the Great a lot,” I said, not knowing exactly how to respond to such a statement. It was true—there were things about Bonaparte that seemed strange to me.

  “You don’t believe in that sort of thing?”

  “Sometimes. But not always. When I was a girl, a fortune-teller predicted I would be unhappily married and then widowed.” “So you see? The prediction came true.”

  “Yes.” My first marriage had certainly been an unhappy one. “But she also predicted that I would become Queen.”

  He propped himself up on one elbow. “That’s interesting.”

  “More than a queen, she said.” But not for very long. “So you see, predictions are often just foolishness.”

  “Let’s be foolish now.”

  “Again?” I smiled, wrapping my legs around him. “You have no idea, do you, how beautiful you are. You are the most beautiful woman in Paris.” “Bonaparte, don’t be silly.”

  “I’m serious! Everything about you enchants me. Don’t laugh. Sometimes, watching you, I think I’m in the presence of an angel come down to earth.”

  I stroked his fine, thin hair, looked into his great grey eyes. I felt confused by the intensity of his feeling. I have never been so loved before. My first husband scorned me; Bonaparte worships me. It makes me want to weep. The truth, the terrible truth, is that I feel lonely in my husband’s arms. If I am an angel, then why does my heart not open?

  Throughout the night, I heard the clock chime one, two, three o’clock. At four bells, Bonaparte wasn’t there. I listened for the sound of his footsteps, watched for a flicker of candlelight, but the house was dark, silent. I tried to go back to sleep, but could not, night thoughts haunting me. Night doubts, night fears. Finally I put on my dressing gown, my slippers, and with a candle walked the rooms. From the half-storey landing I saw a light below. I slipped down the stairs and went to the open door of the study. Bonaparte was there, leaning over the octagonal table, holding a lantern above a map. I watched him like a thief. What did he see, looking over that map? He looked so intent. What were his thoughts, his dreams?

  “Bonaparte?” I called out, finally.

  He looked up, startled. “Josephine,” he whispered wondrously, as if he had found me.

  Early afternoon.

  What commotion! I have only a minute. Tonight Bonaparte leaves for the south, to take command of the Army of Italy. The entire household is engaged in frantic activity. My scullery maid is taking in his breeches (he balked at the expense of a tailor). I asked my manservant to put a proper polish on his riding boots and the cook to prepare a basket of travelling provisions—hardtack, hard-cooked eggs, pickled pork brawn, beets. I sent my coachman to the wine merchant for a case of Chamber-tine—an undrinkable wine, in my estimation, but the one Bonaparte insists on (it’s cheap)—and to a parfumerie for the almond meal and rose soap he likes to use on his face. I must remember to boil elecampane root in springwater for his rash. And what else? What have I forgotten? Oh, the—

  A half-hour later—if that!

  Bonaparte burst into the upstairs drawing room and took a seat. I knew what his little smile meant. I told my scullery maid, “Agathe, perhaps I could have a word with my husband—alone.”

  Bonaparte’s rumpled linen shirt was off even before we got to my bedchamber. “Junot and Murat will be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “That doesn’t give much time.”

  “I can be quick,” he said, as if this were an accomplishment.

  I turned my back to him so that he could unfasten the buttons on my gown. He ran his cold hands over my breasts, pressed against me. I turned to him and kissed him. He is a small man, but vigorous. And quick, as he said.

  “I’d like you to wash,” he said, disentangling his pantaloons.

  “I was going to.” I was taken aback by his soldier bluntness.

  Naked (small body, big head), he climbed into the bed and pulled the bed sheet up over him, looking at me expectantly. I went into my dressing room and re-emerged in a gauze nightgown trimmed with violet ribbons. “Take it off,” he told me.

  I did so reluctantly (Bonaparte is six years my junior) and lay down beside him. “Position ten?” I asked, teasing.

  “Twenty-three.” He ran his hand over my breast, my belly. “I’ve jumped ahead.”

  I smiled. Was he joking? (It is so hard to know with him.)

  Then he sat up, said, “Close your eyes. You just lie there.” I did as instructed. I felt him crawl down to the end of the bed, felt his hands part my legs, felt the warmth of his breath, his … Mon Dieu. I swallowed, took a sharp breath.

  Bonaparte was curiously unrushed. A voluptuous warmth came over me. I curled my fingers through his hair as waves of pleasure rose in my blood.

  After, I lay for a moment, catching my breath, drying my cheeks on the covering sheet. Bonaparte was sitting on his haunches, regarding me with an awed expression. Then he grinned. “Well, that’s the best one so far,” he said, swinging his feet onto the floor.

  “Come back here,” I said, grabbing his hand.

  9:00 P.M.

  A kiss and he is gone.

  I hear the crackling of the fire, my scullery maid singing tunelessly in the bath chamber, the heavy tread of my old manservant’s wooden shoes on the narrow stairs, carrying up buckets of hot water for my bath. My pug dog Fortuné sniffs in all the corners, looking for “the intruder.” I listen to the busy clicking of his little nails on the parquet floor.

  The sounds of normal life, I realize. But for the battered tin snuffbox forgotten on the window ledge, the dog-eared volume of Ossian’s Carthon on the mantel, one would not know that Bonaparte had ever been here. This man, who has come into my life like a whirlwind, has just as suddenly gone, leaving me breathless, dazed … and confused, I confess.

  * Joephine’s first husband, Alexandre Beauharnais, the father of her two children—Hortense (twelve) and Eugène (fourteen)—was beheaded on July 23, 1794, at the height of the Terror, the violent phase of the French Revolution in which thousands of aristocrats were guillotined.

  * Madame Campan had been lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Antoinette, who had been beheaded two-and-a-half years earlier during the Terror, when the monarchy had been abolished and a democratic Republic installed in its place.

  * Josephine’s mother, a widow, lived on the family sugar plantation in the Caribbean island of Martinique (“Martinico”), where Josephine had been born and raised. A small percentage of the plantation’s earnings constituted Josephine’s main source of income—when she received it, that is, which was rarely. Formerly under French rule, the island was now controlled by England.

  * The executive authority of the Republic was vested in a council of five directors—”five Majesties.” Director Paul Barras was considered the most powerful of the five, and hence the most politically powerful man in the French Republic.

  In which I break the news to my family & friends

  March 17, 1796—Paris. A bright spring day.

  I’ve a new maid. She curtsied at the door, lifting the hem of her linen shift. Her long chestnut locks were pu
lled into a tight braid that hung down her back. She is young, not yet of an age to pin up her hair. “Louise Compoint, Madame,” she said, taking in the furnishings. “But I am called Lisette.”

  I slipped a finger through Fortuné’s collar and asked her to come forward. Her mother had been a maid-of-the-wardrobe, she informed me, her father unknown. She’d been “adopted” by the aristocratic family her mother worked for and educated in a convent. Now her mother was dead and the aristocrats had fled during the Revolution. “I can wick lanterns, Madame, as well as dress hair. I understand clear starch and my needlework is good. My mother taught me well.”

  “This is a small household,” I told her. “My lady’s maid must serve also as a parlour maid and even as a kitchen maid, should the need arise.”

  “Yes, Madame. I’ve churned butter and blackleaded grates. I can also let blood. My mistress was often ailing,” she explained, in answer to my startled look.

  She is only seventeen, but I liked her forthright spirit. She had a natural grace. “We are a Republican family, Lisette. I will treat you with respect; I expect the same in kind. I permit no followers, and if any man makes advances, I expect you to inform me. You are allowed a half-day off a week to do as you please. Your room is in the basement. It is small, but it has a window and it will be your own.” “Yes, Madame!” Her teeth are excellent.

  March 20, just past noon—still in Paris.

  It was early, not yet ten in the morning, when I heard the children in the foyer. I stood and prepared to face them, clasping my hands to hide my betrothal ring. Nothing has changed, I was going to tell them; marrying Bonaparte did not mean I loved them less.

  “… and then my horse jumped the cart.” Eugène lumbered into the drawing room with the grace of a heifer. Hortense followed, frowning, pulling at her hat strings.