Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe

by Sandra Gulland

  “It is unseemly for women to mingle in business.”

  He was talking like an old-fashioned country friar. “Things have changed. Many women—”

  “Not my wife!”

  “We have an agreement, Bonaparte: you pay for your expenses and I pay for mine.” I clenched my hands, digging my nails into my palms. “I’m the one who must pay for Hortense’s schooling. I’m the one who must raise a considerable sum for her dowry, who must provide uniforms for my son. How do you expect me to do this, I ask you? I’d be on the street, frankly, if it weren’t for my so-called dabbling.” (Well, perhaps I was exaggerating a little.)

  He stomped out of the room. He is sleeping in the study tonight. Bien. He can stay there, for all I care.

  March 18.

  Mimi helped me on with my wool cloak. “Not your fur?” she asked, giving my shoulder a motherly squeeze. “It’s cold out.”

  “I’ll be fine.” To Mimi, it was always cold. “Should Bonaparte ask, tell him I’ve gone to the stay-maker’s.”

  She looked at me for a long moment. “But the stay-maker is coming here tomorrow.”

  “I mean the milliner’s,” I said, my cheeks heated. I’d never lied to Mimi before. I was becoming a person who did not trust—a person who was not trustworthy. At the door I looked back. “Forgive me?”

  In a reckless clatter my coachman drove the horses out the gate. Approaching Monceau Park, I pulled my black shawl from my basket, draped it over my head. My coachman helped me down, cautioning me against the mud. Fortunately, it was no longer raining. An army of beggars cried out, holding out their hands. I gave them a bag of crusts. Where was Captain Charles? I wondered, opening my parasol in spite of the clouds. I’d sent him word to meet me at ten. I felt uneasy entering Monceau Park unescorted. I was relieved, finally, to see a man approaching on a black horse, trotting smartly down the central path. He waved a white plumed hat. I headed for a bench by some Roman columns.

  “I meant to get here before you,” Captain Charles said, dismounting East Wind with a graceful leap, “but I got tied up making arrangements for Milan.” He looped the reins over a branch. Then he pitched two empty wine bottles into the bushes. “Here,” he said, taking a silk tasselled scarf out of his saddlebag and spreading it over the stone bench.

  I sat down at the far edge in order to give him room—more than he needed. I pulled my cloak tight. It was a damp and miserable day; now I regretted not wearing my fur.

  “I talked to Hugo,” he said, sitting forward, looking out over the pond. His full lips grazed the edge of his blue neck scarf, tied so that it completely covered his chin. He cleared his throat. “You were right. It was the banker Jubié. It turns out he knows your husband’s brother.”

  “So.” I crossed my arms across my chest. I didn’t like it when I felt this way—so distant. “And Jubié told Joseph I was involved in the company?” Captain Charles nodded. “But how did he come to know? Hugo vowed to keep it confidential.”

  Captain Charles threw a pebble into the pond. “Hugo said he had to tell him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have advanced us the money.”

  Of course, of course, I thought angrily. I watched the rings of water opening. I wanted to throw something into the pond too, but I felt too old for such games, and that thought made me sad.

  “Jubié and your brother-in-law went out on the town, apparently.” Captain Charles grinned. “To three taverns, a gambling establishment and a brothel.”

  I shrugged. I’d heard stories of Joseph’s debauchery before, usually from his tearful wife.

  “Are you going to quit the company?” he asked.

  “No.” I couldn’t—even if I wanted to. I’d borrowed a small fortune in order to join. If I pulled out now, I’d be ruined. “I’d sooner get a divorce,” I lied.

  “That would please your brother-in-law. Apparently he told Jubié that he would not rest until he’d succeeded in getting his brother to divorce you,” the captain said, tapping a stick against the toe of his boot.

  “Oh?” That helped explain why Joseph had been spying on me, his mean little smile. Yet even so, it surprised me. I knew Joseph didn’t care for me, but I didn’t think he’d go so far as to try to get Bonaparte to divorce me.

  “He told the banker that you married his brother for his money.”

  I laughed, I confess. When we’d married, Bonaparte had had no money. “That’s amusing. What else did he say?”

  “That you have Bonaparte under your spell.” I smiled. Well…. “And that you’re a witch.” He made an apologetic shrug.

  A witch? What had I ever done to Joseph to deserve such a hateful slur?

  “I’m sorry, Madame Bonaparte, but I thought you should know. It helps, I think, knowing who you can trust—”

  “And who you can’t,” I said, kicking a pebble. It skittered across the path and into the water. I watched the rings opening, one upon the other. How far did it go, the deceit?

  After, I went to Thérèse’s. I was in a state. “Look,” I told her, pacing, “I can’t quit the Bodin Company even if I wanted to.” I owed almost half a million francs to Barras alone. The only way to get out was to stay in long enough to pay off my debts.

  “May I make a suggestion?” Thérèse said, trying to calm me. “Talk to Bonaparte. Tell him he’s been a cheap tightwad—impossible to live with!—that he’s put you in an untenable position, that you didn’t intend to compromise him by doing what everybody in Paris is doing, including all the members of his avaricious family, and then tell him you intend to withdraw. So, maybe extricating yourself will take a little longer than you let on, and maybe he’s better off not knowing. From the apoplectic fits he throws over the purchase of a hat, I can guarantee you that he doesn’t want to know the extent of your debts. Frankly, all he really wants to hear is that you love him. So why don’t you just tell him?” She laughed at my cross expression. “Well, you do, you know. Why don’t you just admit it?”

  [Undated]

  “Yeyette?” Mimi set a tray down on the table beside the bed. “I got the cook to make some plantain bread for you.” She handed me a piece.

  “Oh Mimi, I’m so miserable,” I confessed. I’d slept alone for three nights, tossing and turning.

  “The General is unhappy, as well.”

  “Oh?” I bit into the heavenly smelling loaf, my childhood welling up around me in my mind.

  “I’ve never in my life seen a more miserable man.” “Good!” I said, but blinking back tears.

  “I think it’s time we talked,” she said, handing me a flannel to dry my face.

  And so we did. I told her how confused I was about Bonaparte, how angry he made me, how exasperating he was. And then I told her how brilliant I believed him to be, how his mind was volcanic, always thinking—and how it frightened me sometimes, knowing the thoughts in his mind, knowing his dreams. I told her how different we were, how hard it was to live with him. And then I told her how alike we were, how we’d both grown up on islands, far from France, how we knew what it was like to be an outsider. And then I told her how he loved me more than anyone had ever loved me, and how he needed me, how I was his good luck star, and how sometimes I felt we were fated.

  “Do you think he is your spirit friend?”

  “I fear so,” I cried, weeping anew.

  March 19, Feast of Saint Joseph.

  I was combing my hair at my dressing table when I heard footsteps in the bedchamber. “Bonaparte?” I called out, standing.

  He stuck his head in my dressing room, his hat still on. “There you are.”

  “I’m …” Sorry, I started to say.

  Solemnly, he held out a brass-plated chain. “It’s your name day today.”

  The nineteenth of March, of course—feast of Saint Joseph. I was surprised he remembered, surprised he even knew. “How kind of you.” I slipped it on. “It’s lovely,” I lied.

  “Josephine, I …”

  I looked into his great grey eyes, his melancholy eyes so f
ull of dreams. “I know, Bonaparte.”

  “The Sultan of Turkey has over a hundred wives,” Bonaparte told me, “beauties awaiting their turn, devoted to pleasing, to the art of pleasing.” He stroked my breast, my hip. “Like my wife.” For I please this man, my husband.

  “I want to go with you,” I told him.

  “To Egypt?” he whispered.

  “Wherever you go.”

  * Tea made of rue, an evergreen shrub, was commonly used by women wishing to abort.

  In which I must stay behind

  March 20, 1798.

  The Black Land—it haunts my thoughts. I have been reading about it, hiding the text under my mattress. We will arrive in June, after the simoon, a suffocating wind that blows across the desert. The temperature will be hot. “I’m a créole,” I reassure Bonaparte. “I will be able to take the heat.”

  There is no rain in Egypt. Every year the Nile River overflows and inundates the land with a slimy substance. But for this, nothing would grow.

  A land without water! Even the names of the oases sound dry on my tongue: Khârgeh, Dâkhel, Farâfra, Sîwa, Bahrîyeh.

  Diseases flourish in that land—plague, cholera, ophthalmia, dysentery … even boils so deadly that they can kill a man.

  A land of crystalline rock, covered by shifting sand.

  A land without trees. It is impossible to imagine such a place. I am curious to see a papyrus plant, from which the paper used throughout the ancient world was made. The lotus is a water lily that grows on the Nile.

  Oxen, horses, asses, sheep, goats—familiar creatures. But camels! And cats without tails. (Fortunately, crocodiles are seldom seen.) The pelican, the beloved bird of my youth, abides in the north.

  The cities are inhabited by white vultures, which are worshipped—as are certain beasts, reptiles and even vegetables. The sun god is Ra, a hawk-headed man, the moon god is Thoth. Seth is the power of evil, a spirit with a gentle, seductive name.

  “Egypt is the first nation known to man,” Bonaparte told me with awe in his voice. He works by candlelight on the floor of our bedchamber, studying the maps, tracing the footsteps of Alexandre the Great, Julius Caesar. He dreams of desert sands.

  April 2.

  Meetings here all day preparing for “the expedition”—the mysterious expedition. Eugène emerged from the smoke-filled study, laughing with the men. “We’re going to Portugal,” he told me confidentially. “Oh?” It is all I can do not to tell him the true destination.

  April 3.

  The widow Hoche called on me today, her worry about Père Hoche overcoming her timidity. Her father-in-law was suffering, rage and grief were burning him up. “Is there nothing you can do?”

  April 4.

  “There’s a strange man to see you,” Mimi said, crinkling her nose.

  It was my old friend Fouché,* looking like a beggar. “How kind of you to come so soon.” For I had sent for him only this morning. I offered him a glass of orange water—Fouché did not partake of spirits, I knew. His hooded eyes, his disordered clothes, his stale odour, all brought on a feeling of affection in me. He was an eccentric, this slovenly man, this ardent Revolutionary with bad breath. This man who was devoted to his ugly red-haired wife and all their ugly red-haired children. This man who was making a fortune (I’d heard) as a partner in Company Ouen, a military supply company. This man, the extraordinary spy. “There is a document I need to obtain,” I ventured. “Might you be available?”

  He opened his snuffbox. “For a price,” he said, sniffing a pinch. I flushed. “You mistake me, Citoyenne. It is information I trade in. I give you what you want, you repay me in kind.”

  He made it sound so innocent, a simple exchange. But I knew what he meant, in truth. In exchange for whatever answers he might deliver, I would become a spy on his behalf. “I would never compromise a friend,” I said.

  “That would hardly be necessary. You are no doubt aware that you have a number of enemies who could provide you with numerous opportunities to fulfill such an obligation.”

  “Perhaps you could begin by telling me who they might be?” I smiled behind my fan.

  “It does not take a clairvoyant to see that the Bonapartes wish you dead, but given the inconvenience of being caught with blood on their collective hands, would settle for ruin, no doubt. And in their midst, of late, a rather lovely young woman has been seen—a girl who was, at one time, your lady’s maid.” He took a small, careful sip of his glass of orange water. “It is a wisdom well understood by our ci-devant nobility that one should never reveal oneself to a man or woman who is in one’s pay. Servants thus taken into confidence come to know a great deal, putting them in a position to profit from the sale of such. And profit, even a Revolutionary will tell you, is an irresistible force of Nature. Perhaps it is this young woman who concerns you.”

  Lisette had been seen with the Bonapartes? I went to the window, my cheeks burning. “No, it is not Citoyenne Compoint.”

  “Perhaps it has to do with your present state of”—he paused—”embarrassment.”

  My debts, he meant. “It has nothing to do with that.” Appalled, I confess, by how much Fouché knew.

  “Then no doubt it regards the somewhat suspect practices of your business associates, the brothers Bodin.”

  Suspect practices? “The name Bodin is unfamiliar to me, Citoyen Fouché,” I told him with splendid calm.

  Fouché unbuttoned his jacket, revealing a dapper silver-trimmed waistcoat underneath. “Citoyenne, you are an effective liar, a quality I have always admired in you. Tell me, then—what is it you wish to know?”

  “General Hoche’s widow has solicited my help.” Fouché sat back, surprised. It pleased me, I confess, to startle a man such as Fouché, a professional in the matter of knowing. “Her father-in-law, Père Hoche, the late General Hoche’s father, is subject to morbid dreams, rages that have weakened his constitution. He has become obsessed with finding out how his son died.”

  “Case closed, Citoyenne. It is common knowledge General Hoche died of consumption.”

  “Specifically, the elder Hoche has tried, without success, to obtain a copy of the autopsy report—”

  “Which, being a military matter, is confidential, of course.”

  I nodded. “So I was told. The fact that no one is permitted to see it has inflamed Père Hoche’s imagination further.”

  “But no doubt Director Barras could obtain a copy for you.”

  “I’m afraid not.” I paused, unsure whether I should tell Fouché how emotional Barras had become at the very mention of it. “The problem is, Père Hoche is convinced his son was poisoned.”

  “Père Hoche and the rest of Paris.” Fouché made a dismissive gesture. “Does he have cause? Or is he feeding off rumours like the rest of us?”

  “He claims his son suffered convulsions in his dying moments.” I swallowed, a wave of tears rising dangerously within me. “Apparently, convulsions are not symptomatic of consumption.”

  Fouché bit the inside of one cheek, considering.

  “I’m of the view that the father’s grief is driving him mad. If he could just see the autopsy report, it might put his imaginings to rest. But after talking to Director Barras, I have come to the conclusion that obtaining a copy of the report will not be easy. Indeed, that it might require a certain degree of, well—”

  “Sleuthing?”

  I smiled apologetically. “Not to mention discretion. For I’m sure you can understand, Citoyen Fouché, how important it is that my own involvement in this matter be kept strictly confidential.”

  “Secrecy is my passion, Citoyenne.”

  April 6.

  At Barras’s salon last night Fouché sidled up to me. “The autopsy report appears to be missing from the Ministry of War’s files,” he whispered, widening his eyes.

  I motioned to him to be silent. Talleyrand had just entered the room.

  “I have a contact at the School of Medicine,” he went on. “He should be able to
give me the name of the surgeon who performed the autopsy.”

  “How good to see you this evening, Citoyen Talleyrand,” I said, giving the Minister of Foreign Affairs my hand.

  April 7.

  “I located the surgeon who performed the autopsy, but he demands one hundred francs,” Fouché informed me tonight in the corridor at the Luxembourg Palace. “Are you willing?”

  “To pay one hundred francs? Just for a copy of the report?”

  Fouché shrugged. “I was surprised he didn’t ask for more.”

  April 8, Easter Sunday.

  “You got it?” I asked Fouché, my voice thick. I did not care for this, did not care for any of it, neither the seeking nor the finding. I wanted it to be over. Were it not for my promise to help the widow Hoche, I would wash my hands of this business completely.

  Fouché arched his thin red eyebrows, his hand on his coat pocket. “I did. But it will not appease the father,” he warned, unfolding the single yellowed sheet. “According to the autopsy report, the cause of General Hoche’s death is”—he paused for effect—”unknown.”

  It was not at all what I had expected. Barras himself had told me that the autopsy had determined that Lazare had died of consumption. “So General Hoche did not die of consumption?” I scanned the document and then folded it. I did not want to read it.

  “Possibly—because if he had died of consumption, it seems to me that the surgeon would have clearly stated so. But if one were to die of poisoning—let us say, just for the purpose of inquiry—the effects being subtle and therefore mysterious, then the cause of death would, most likely, be reported as—”

  “Unknown!” Père Hoche shook the report in the air, as if at the gods. “My son was poisoned. There’s nothing unknown about that. And I’ll tell you who did it—Director Barras.”

  I glanced at the widow, dismayed. She was standing by the fireplace, her hand on the blue urn on the mantel. I wanted to speak out in Barras’s defence, but I knew that it would only enrage the old man further.