Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe

by Sandra Gulland

  I caught Bonaparte’s eye, smiled—children!—but he was preoccupied. The valet was helping him on with his boots. “I’ll see you later then—after the revue?” And before the dinner, I thought, which reminded me: had the silver been packed? Worrying: should I take my new pug dogs with me now?

  Bonaparte stood, pulling at the bootstrap. “I can’t get my foot in.” The boot went flying.

  I touched his shoulder. He turned, as if startled. Addressing soldiers, Bonaparte was at ease; addressing civilians terrified him. Every Royalist country in Europe would be praying for a stumble. “It’s going to be splendid,” I said, giving him a kiss.

  The parade was splendid. Eugène looked wonderful (as did his new horse Pegasus), and of course the crowds went wild for Bonaparte. It was a moving moment when the tattered flags of the Army of Italy went by. Bonaparte removed his hat and bowed his head; the crowd suddenly became hushed, reverent. This little man with such big dreams has filled all our hearts with hope. If there are angels (and there must be, surely), they are with him now.

  Indeed, even my daughter is falling under his spell. As soon as the cavalry went by she, Emilie and Caroline excused themselves to go to the powder room. I remembered Bonaparte’s instruction just in time. “Wait, Hortense.” The military band was marching out into the courtyard, the brass instruments bright in the sun. “Just one moment, please.”

  “Why?” Caroline demanded as Hortense slipped back into her chair overlooking the palace courtyard. The members of the band were in position and an orderly was running across the courtyard with a stool for the conductor to stand on.

  “I don’t really know.” The conductor mounted the stool and lifted his baton. The musicians raised their instruments and the opening chords were struck. The piece sounded familiar, yet I could not place it. Hortense sat forward, her hands on her knees.

  “Can we go now?” Caroline asked, standing by the door. Hortense raised her index finger.

  “Hortense, isn’t that your song, the marching song you wrote?” I asked. “Partant pour la Syrie?”

  “Hush,” she cried out. “I want to hear it!”

  Evening.

  “What did you think?” Bonaparte asked, bursting into my dressing room. “I thought it went rather well.”

  “It was brilliant,” I said. He hadn’t noticed Hortense sitting by the door.

  “Why is it so dark in here? Where are the children? What did your daughter think?”

  I looked at Hortense in the looking glass, smiled. Bonaparte followed my gaze. “Oh!” he said, taken aback.

  Hortense stood, her hands clasped in front of her. “I was so honoured.”

  Bonaparte smiled and tugged her ear. (Gently, for once!) “You were surprised? Good. The musicians want to know if you would write another for them.”

  Hortense nodded, tongue-tied, a flush covering her pale cheeks. “Caroline is expecting me!” she cried and bolted out the door.

  “Is she pleased, do you think?” Bonaparte asked, puzzled.

  “She’s overcome.” I pressed his hand to my cheek. “That was a very nice thing for you to do.”

  “It’s a good piece,” he said, shrugging, sitting down so that the valet could pull off his riding boots. “Why do you have the drapes drawn?”

  “People look in.” I’d had a fright earlier when I saw a man’s face pressed against the iron grill. “But it’s dark in here even when the drapes are pulled back.” The rooms are set below ground level; the windows are high on the wall. Sitting, one cannot look out. “Your new breeches are on top of the trunk with your sash.”

  In moments he reappeared, his valet following him like a shadow.

  “Excellent,” I said, although the fit wasn’t perfect. There hadn’t been time.

  Mimi came to the door, lovely in a new muslin gown. “Third Consul Lebrun and his wife are—”

  “Already?” I looked at the clock. It was only five! We weren’t expecting guests to arrive until six.

  “Good,” Bonaparte said, pulling on his dress shoes. “I need to talk to him about the deficit.”

  “I’ll only be a moment.” I stood in front of the large looking glass as Mimi fastened my pearls. The Queen had studied her image in this very glass, I thought.

  After dinner with the Consuls (boring!), I went on ahead to the bedroom, to prepare for my husband. I dismissed Mimi. Alone, I bathed, changed into a simple flannel gown. I was weary of lace and pageantry. Wrapped in a comforter, I sat by the fire thinking of the woman who had once sat thus, in this room, by this fireplace, also waiting for her husband to join her. Her husband: King Louis XVI. I recalled the day he was guillotined, the slow, steady roll of the drums. And then I recalled the day of the Queen’s death less than a year later, a ghost of a woman already, widowed, her children taken from her. She was thirty-eight when she died, only a few years older than I am now.

  Queen Marie-Antoinette. How curious it is for me to be living here, writing at her escritoire. How curious, and how very unreal.

  Bonaparte arrived as the clocks chimed midnight. “I’ll ring for the valet,” he said.

  “No, don’t.” I helped him out of his coat.

  In his nightshirt, his head wrapped in one of my madras scarves, he regarded the room thoughtfully. “Well.” He took in the bronze-trimmed mahogany bed, a monument of (ugly) ornate ormolu.

  “I still can’t believe we live here.” I did not say, I can’t accept that this horrible place is now my home.

  Bonaparte went to the grandiose bed, pulled out the little step. “Come, little creole.” Smiling, he bowed at the waist, arms wide, like a courtier. “Step into the bed of kings.”

  “Bonaparte, don’t you feel as if you’re in a dream?” The centre of the enormous bed was like a valley; we kept rolling into it. (I’ll have a new mattress made.)

  Bonaparte grunted, on the verge of sleep, and pulled me closer, his arms around my waist. “Yes,” he said a moment later, “a dream of my creation.”

  I lacked the courage to ask him what that dream entailed. “I keep thinking of all the things that happened in this room, the kings and the queens who have slept in this bed.” The kings and the queens who have lost their lives.

  “And I keep thinking how lovely you are, how I’m luckier than any of those kings.” His hands were roving again.

  “Bonaparte, I’m serious. It frightens me, being here, living here. I don’t belong.”

  “You’re questioning God when you make such a statement.” He propped himself up on his elbow.

  I rolled over onto my back, looked into his sad-serious eyes. “What do you mean?” There was no limit to Bonaparte’s energy, to his dreams, to what he aimed to achieve. Was it faith that gave him courage?

  “Remember the fortune you were told, that you would be Queen?”

  Tears came to my eyes. “I don’t want to be a queen, Bonaparte.”

  “But I’ll need you beside me,” he said, joking gently.

  I put my hand on his cheek. “I love you.”

  I lay beside my husband for what seemed like hours, listening to the sounds of the night. I could hear the prostitutes laughing in the gardens, whisperings outside our windows. I lay listening to my heart, and to the strange, silent dark of the cold marble corridors.

  The bells had just rung out one note when I felt it again, that chill. Bonaparte, often so deep in sleep I fear him dead, murmured and turned, pulling the comforters around him, as if he too could feel it. I sat up, watchful. I saw a light approaching.

  “Mimi?” I hissed. My heart began to pound. Only bad news came thus, in the night. I pulled the comforter around me. Why was it suddenly so very cold? And then I saw her again: that plain white gown, that plain white cap. The Queen—in prison clothes. A cry escaped me, I reached out for Bonaparte. The moment I touched him, she began to recede, fade. And then the room was dark again, and silent, but for the pounding of my heart.

  * The actual vote was 5,009,445 in favour, 1,562 against. Sieyès and Du
cos stepped down to be replaced by Cambacérès as Second Consul and Lebrun as Third.

  In which I am called Angel of Mercy

  February 22, 1800.

  “Twenty-seven already this morning,” Mimi told me, her eyes wide.

  Twenty-seven petitioners? Yesterday there had been twelve, and nineteen the day before. Proud, starving aristocrats, trembling beggars. Weeping women, tongue-tied men, stuttering children: all desperate, all needing help.

  “Madame Bonaparte.” The girl bowed. The elderly woman accompanying her was dressed in the uncomfortable style of the Ancien Regime. With the help of a walking stick she struggled to stand.

  “Oh, please, do sit,” I insisted. Her bustle had slipped sideways, giving her a deformed look.

  “M-M-Madame B-B-Bonne …” the old woman stuttered, but she could get no further.

  “Bon à Parté, Grandmaman.” The girl threw me an embarrassed look.

  “Mademoiselle de Malesherbes, is it not?” The girl had come to me weeks earlier. I guessed her to be twelve years in age, thirteen perhaps.

  “You remember!” She flushed.

  What I remembered was the charm of her devotion to her grandmother, whose name had been put on the List during the Revolution and who was destined to die in Germany, alone, far from her family, her loved ones.

  I took the elderly woman’s hand. “Then you must be Countess de Malesherbes.”

  “In Germany they call you the Angel of Mercy,” the old woman said, her voice clear now. She had a vise-like grip on my hand. “I want you to come to my funeral.”

  I smiled. “I trust it will not be soon.”

  “It will be a splendid fête. My daughters have promised.”

  “We have come to say thank you,” the girl said.

  “And God bless!”

  Over twenty petitioners later, I was growing fatigued. No wonder thrones are cushioned. “Only one more,” the hall porter informed me. “Mademoiselle Compoint.”

  I tilted my head to one side. “Pardon?”

  He squinted at the card. “Mademoiselle Louise Compoint.”

  Lisette?

  “I could tell her to return tomorrow, Madame.”

  I drummed the arm of my chair—as Bonaparte so often does, I realized. Soon I would have all his nervous mannerisms—his twitches, his tics. Soon I might even have his short temper. If only I had his judgement, I thought. Should I refuse to receive Lisette? “Send her in,” I said finally, putting back my shoulders.

  She looked older than I expected. There were frown creases between her eyes that her heavy make-up could not hide. She looked like a grisette,* I thought, with an unexpected feeling of sympathy … and guilt. I knew what happened to maids who were let go without a reference, knew what choices they had.

  “Madame,” she said, standing nervously before me as she had stood only four years before. “I have come to beg your forgiveness.” She dropped her head, a subservient gesture as superficial as her words.

  “Forgiveness is a great deal to ask.” I didn’t like the feeling that had come over me, the realization that I had power and she had none. “Tell me why you have come,” I said finally.

  “I wish to marry, Madame—but I am in need of a dowry.”

  Ah, of course: she had come for money. Once upon a time, in a more trusting time, I had promised her a dowry. “You are betrothed?” I asked, both angry and repentant. None of us was innocent, if the truth were to be told.

  “Almost, Madame. If I had a dowry, an English jockey would marry me, he said.”

  “Would you be moving to England then?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “Very well then.”*

  Evening.

  Fouché slumped into the chair by the fire. “Discouraged, Citoyen?” I asked. The Minister of Police had just had a meeting with Bonaparte.

  “I confess to defeat. It appears I’ve been unsuccessful in my attempt to dissuade the First Consul from going ahead with his plan to resurrect the odious custom of the masked ball.” He made a wry face. “The Laundresses Guild won out, I regret to say.”**

  “You will get no support from me on that score, I’m afraid.” It had been over seven years since the last masked ball. All of Paris was in a state of excited anticipation, the shops displaying costumes, fanciful creations. It was impossible to buy bright silk. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to go as an Egyptian god, a Mameluke, a Turk or a harem dancer. I myself was going as a butterfly. And Bonaparte—whom I had finally persuaded to attend—as Caesar.

  “That surprises me not in the least,” Fouché said, tapping his snuffbox. Made of black and gold enamel, it matched his jacket exactly—a fashionable detail curiously out of place in a slovenly man. “But then, the safety of the good citizens of Paris is not your responsibility.”

  He offered me a pinch of snuff. I refused. “Am I being reprimanded, Citoyen Minister of Police?”

  Fouché snapped closed his pretty little box and slipped it into his pocket. “Put masks on the good citizens of Paris and give them, for one night, the freedom to act without consequences?” He shrugged. “Nous verrons.”

  Sunday.

  “You haven’t told Émilie? She doesn’t know?” Aunt Désirée was dusting her china figurines for the third time in ten minutes.

  “Do you think I should have?” I asked, looking out the window into the courtyard. Why were they late? It was quarter-past three. Lavalette and his very special charge—Émilies father and my former brother-in-law, Vicomte François de Beauharnais—were supposed to have been here fifteen minutes earlier, one full hour before Émilie herself was due to arrive. The anticipation was unendurable.

  “When I told the Marquis that his son was coming, the shock almost killed him. Imagine if François had walked in without any warning? Émilie is frail, she might …” Aunt Désirée blinked, sniffed. “Oh dear, François is not even here and already I’m weeping!”

  I helped her to the sofa and rang for her maid to bring hysteric water. “And the salts,” Aunt Désirée exclaimed, fanning herself. “I sent the scullery maid to the apothecary this morning just to make sure we had them on hand. Oh!” she shrieked when the doorbell sounded. “It’s them.” With a terrified expression.

  “Sit down, sit down,” I said soothingly, but practically pushing her back onto the sofa. “You stay here.”

  “Is my hair all right?”

  “You’ve never looked lovelier,” I assured her, hurrying into the foyer where I found Lavalette helping a middle-aged man off with his jacket. It was François, looking heavier, true, and curiously old-fashioned in his powdered periwig, but distinguished, gentle François nonetheless. Without ceremony I rushed to him and took his hands in mine, blinking back tears; he looked so very much like Alexandre.

  “Rose?” He folded me in his arms. It had been … how long? Seven years since he’d fled? In those terrible seven years his brother had been guillotined; the King and Queen had been beheaded; we’d endured a Reign of Terror and established not one but three Republics (trying to get it right). And I had remarried, a man who had saved the nation, and the Palace of Kings was now my home. “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said, drying his eyes.

  “Fou-Fou?” Aunt Désirée exclaimed the moment François entered the drawing room, calling him by his baby name. François stooped to give the woman who had been a mother to him a tender kiss. “You look so old!” she exclaimed, crossing herself. And then she started to bawl. “I’m going to be fine, don’t worry, don’t worry!” she cried out, honking into an enormous kerchief.

  François helped her to her feet and took her in his arms, his chin resting on the top of her coiffured hair, blinking and blinking, shyly patting her heaving back.

  “That’s enough!” Aunt Désirée said, standing back, sniffling. “So. There. I’ve wept and now I’m finished. Let’s go see your father, lest he die before you even get up the stairs. Did you know that we’re married now? You may call me Maman.”

  “Maman,” François ec
hoed obediently, smiling with tender affection.

  I caught Lavalette’s eye. “Émilie will be here at four,” I whispered to him, glancing at the clock. Only fifteen more minutes.

  “I’ll wait for her down here,” he said, taking off his silly round hat and running his hand across his balding head. “Does she know?”

  I rolled my eyes, shook my head and ran up the stairs.

  François was standing on the landing outside his father’s door, his hand on the crystal knob. “Désirée—Maman—told me to wait out here,” he said, his voice nervous.

  “Go, go,” I said, taking hold of his elbow, urging him in.

  The room smelled of aromatic vinegar and roses.

  “Father?” François said, with a hint of disbelief in his voice. The shrunken man in the feather bed was not the stern patriarch he’d known.

  “Let’s wait downstairs,” I whispered to my aunt.

  The Marquis held out his trembling hand. François pressed his father’s fingers to his lips. His face was glistening with tears and his lower lip was quivering uncontrollably.

  I tugged at my aunt’s sleeve. “Let’s leave them alone together,” I repeated. Frankly, I didn’t know how much more my heart could take. But just as I said that, I heard light footsteps on the stairs—Émilie?

  She appeared in the door, her veil covering her face.

  “François, there’s someone here to see you,” Aunt Désirée said.

  Emilie began backing out of the room, but her husband was behind her—she couldn’t. “Don’t be frightened, sweetheart,” I said, reaching for her hand.

  “Emilie?” Her father’s voice was thick with emotion.

  “Don’t be silly,” Aunt Désirée said. “This is your father.”

  With aristocratic gentility, François bowed. Emilie slowly raised her veil.

  “Very well, that’s enough tears for today!” Aunt Désirée said, opening the window and taking a deep breath of cold air. “Whew!” she exclaimed, fanning herself. “Whew.”