The Second Empress: A Novel of Napoleon's Court
Page 9
“Up there. Largest door on the right.”
I climb the stairs and imagine how warm it must be right now in the Tuileries Palace. A careless servant has forgotten to shut a window, and outside a heavy mist has enshrouded the trees. There is no understanding how these people can survive like this, in cold so intense it can take away your breath.
When I reach the empress’s door, a pair of Austrian guards step forward.
“What is your business here?”
“I’ve come to wake the empress.”
“Her Majesty has ladies for that.”
I look at the young man and can see him fighting to keep awake. “This is by order of the queen, who has been given her orders by the emperor of France. The empress must be woken at five o’clock.”
The boy glances at his fellow guard, and the other man shrugs.
The men move aside and allow me to knock softly. I am expecting a sullen maid instructing me to come back later, so when the empress herself answers, I step back. “Your Majesty.” I bow quickly, and behind me, the guards immediately do the same. It is obvious she has not had any sleep. Her eyes are red and swollen. I peer over her shoulder into the dimly lit chamber, but there is no sign of Count Neipperg. If he has been here, she has hidden any traces of him.
“You’ve been told to bring me to Caroline,” she guesses.
I nod. “The queen’s desire is to leave by eight.”
“Her desire, or her instructions?” she asks.
We stare at each other in the flickering light, and I can see the cleverness in her gaze. She knows this is not a woman’s decision. This is the whim of a man who is accustomed to getting everything he wants, a man who doesn’t like having to wait.
“Her instructions,” I say honestly. When her eyes well with tears, I add quietly, so that not even the lady-in-waiting behind her can hear, “He will be surprising you in a week at Compiègne.”
CHAPTER 10
MARIE-LOUISE, EMPRESS OF FRANCE
Compiègne, France
“I think of you always, and I always shall. God has given me power to endure this final shock, and in Him alone I have put all my trust. He will help me and give me courage, and I shall find support in doing my duty toward you, since it is all for you that I have sacrificed myself.”
—LETTER FROM MARIE-LOUISE TO HER FATHER, EMPEROR FRANCIS I
IF MY FATHER WERE TO SEE ME TODAY, WITH MY GOWN cut so low a seasoned Strichmädchen would blush to wear it, he would never recognize me. From my narrow leather shoes lined in pale green silk to the cameo of Napoleon around my neck, I am all but French. I think of Joseph Wright’s Portrait of a Lady with her ridiculous hat and impertinent gaze and wonder if this is what Napoleon hopes I’ll become. A tear escapes and lands on my necklace.
“What theatrics,” Caroline snaps. “It’s a change of clothes.”
I do not reply. If she can’t see that this is nothing to do with fashion, then there is no reasoning with this hateful woman. And while she may be ten years older than I am, she would do well to remember that I am an empress.
Caroline claps her hands for Collette. “Fix her hair,” she instructs.
I sit patiently while Collette gathers my hair into a bun, and listen as both women discuss the weeklong journey ahead. We are to reach Compiègne by way of Munich and Strasbourg. Between those cities are to be a dozen stops, so the important men of Europe can say that they’ve met me.
“Of course, there’s nothing to do in Stuttgart,” Caroline says, as Collette places tortoiseshell combs in my hair. “But in Compiègne …”
The women exchange glances. They don’t know that the servant from Haiti has already told me that my new husband will be waiting in this city.
“Well, Prince Metternich will be joining us there,” Queen Caroline says.
“Prince Metternich will be joining us?” I ask. “I thought he would meet us in Paris.”
Both women look down at me, as if they’ve forgotten I understand French. Caroline shrugs cryptically, and I immediately wonder how well she knows the prince.
Collette steps back to admire her work, and the queen’s spacious room suddenly feels oppressive. The fire is too hot, the bed is too near. And what is that in my hair? I lean closer to the mirror and see that the tortoiseshell cameo depicts Alexander the Great. They’re all obsessed! With conquest and ambition.
“What do you think?” she questions Caroline, and my sister-in-law appraises me with a look.
“It will do.” The queen turns to me, then scowls at Sigi. “Are you ready?”
“You said we would depart at eight o’clock. It’s seven-thirty.” These were her words, not mine.
“Then make your farewells. And find someone to take care of that dog.”
When the two of them leave, I run to my little spaniel. “Maria will take good care of you,” I swear. He hangs his head low to the ground, and I’m certain he can understand what I’m saying. “I’ll have Adam take you back to Vienna,” I say, in a voice full of false enthusiasm. But Sigi whines plaintively, and I think of how my carriage will ride away without him. My hands begin to tremble. We are together every day. I know the sound he makes when he’s hungry, and the bark he uses for getting attention. I know when he’s tired or just lazy. I can tell when he’s anxious because the soldiers in the courtyard have been too loud. I have written Maria a letter instructing her as to his precise care.
We lie on the bed together, on the side Adam occupied until early this morning, and he licks my hand while I cry. By eight o’clock I have not made my farewells to anyone.
When Adam knocks on my door, my eyes are nearly swollen shut.
“Maria.”
“Marie,” I correct him, and I can feel his devastation. He wraps me in his arms, and I don’t care if the foreign servants in the hall can see. “You’ll take care of Sigi on the ride back, won’t you?” I whisper.
“I’ll take care of him until the day we reunite.”
I look up sharply. “I’m a married woman,” I reply, though the sentence fills me with disgust.
“Not in my eyes. And not in the eyes of God.”
I flinch at the truth in his words. The pope still has not condoned Napoleon’s divorce; his marriage to me is without the church’s blessing.
Adam takes my hand and caresses my fingers. “At Dolens I was left for dead,” he begins. “The French didn’t believe my life was worth saving, and their captain wanted to leave me for the thieves and crows.”
My stomach tightens, but I wipe away my tears so I can look into his face.
“No one was with me in those hours before dawn. Just the bodies of rotting men. But I remember a soldier leaning over me the next day. He was French, and when he saw that I was breathing, he knew just enough German to ask, ‘How big is your faith?’ ”
I nod, understanding the point he is trying to make.
“He wanted to know if I believed I’d get better. He didn’t want to convince the captain to take me if I would just be a burden to them and die. I said I believed in Saint Augustine’s dictum. That faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of that faith is to see what we believe. I knew, even as I was lying there in the rain, that my life was not finished. I would be healed. I didn’t know when or how. I didn’t anticipate the French returning for the dead, or that they’d take me to Paris and nurse me back to health. But it happened. And I want you to have that kind of faith, Maria.”
“I will try, Adam. I want to try.”
OUTSIDE SCHLOSS HAGENAU, a long line of fifteen carriages are waiting to begin our journey to France. The horses seem anxious, whinnying and pawing at the ground, but the French women don’t pay them any attention. They’re too busy shivering in the cold. I join them in my new muslin gown, as ill equipped as they are for this weather.
“How do they expect you to travel through Munich and Strasbourg like this?” Adam brushes his hand against my cloak. Caroline sees, and her lips thin into a line. Several of the French wo
men giggle behind their hands.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Adam,” I say, with dignity and a strength I don’t feel. I want to burn his image into my memory. The way his hair is slicked back behind his ears, and how his mustache is thin enough to have been drawn. I want to remember how square his jaw is, and how his black eyes can be brown—or even chestnut—in the light.
He bows formally. “Bis wir uns wiedersehen, meine Liebe.”
Standing next to a group of French courtiers, he is the only one who looks like a man. He is taller and broader than any of them, with bigger hands and a wider chest. Yet he is cradling a tiny dog in his arms. Sigi.
I climb into the carriage I will share with Queen Caroline and Collette, her lady-in-waiting, then push back the curtains to look at Adam and Sigi for as long as I can.
“Enough,” Caroline snaps as she enters the carriage. She shouts through the window at the cocher, “Move!” before Collette has fully seated herself.
“What about Paul?” Collette exclaims.
“He is riding behind us.”
The sound of a whip cracks the air, and I inhale the scent of Austria one last time; the cedar wood from the chimneys, the Leberkäs baking somewhere in the château. I watch from my window until Adam and Sigi are small on the horizon.
“Well, that wasn’t so terrible,” Caroline says to Collette. Her lady-in-waiting is nearly the same age as I am and a great deal prettier. “At least the beds were good.”
Collette stifles a yawn. “How long until we get there?”
“Munich?” Caroline laughs. “You had might as well sleep.”
Collette rolls her eyes. Someone has twisted her blond hair into a bun, so that her large pearl earrings can be shown to good effect. And though we both have fair coloring, if I were to wear her puce gown, it would wash out my complexion. She should always be painted in purples and reds.
Both women go to sleep. No one asks if I would like a small pillow or one of the four blankets Collette has hogged for herself. I’m a parcel to be collected and delivered to Compiègne.
So as not to think of what I’ve left behind, I stare out the window at the passing villages. What will France be like? Warmer, for certain. And busier. My father told me that the Tuileries Palace has so many courtiers, they can’t all dine at once, and that as soon as I arrive, I’m to be given two hundred servants of my own: footmen and pages and ladies-in-waiting whom I shall have to make use of somehow. I have no idea what Joséphine did with them all, or why this emperor thinks I wish to be equally extravagant. Though, truly, I would like Collette to give me one of her four blankets. I am an empress now, so I could certainly take one without her stopping me. But I am also a Hapsburg, and I would rather freeze than take something by force.
We pass through a village nestled against a backdrop of foothills and fields, and I wish I had thought to bring my charcoal and paper. I’d sketch the lonely chimneys piercing the sky, smudging the horizon with their trails of black smoke. When we reach the bustling city of Salzburg, I know exactly how I’d draw the gardens of Mirabell Palace, with their neat rows of boxwood. I am hoping we’ll be breaking for lunch nearby, but the horses keep going, rain starts falling, and Caroline never stirs. Nor does Collette, who snores. And for the rest of the day it is like this. We enter city after city where we might stretch or eat, but the carriages never stop.
When we finally reach Munich at nine in the evening, nothing can improve my mood, not even the torchlit views of Nymphenburg Palace, with its glittering lakes and long canal. I am grateful for the thousands of people who’ve turned out to see me, but I can barely make out their faces through the darkness and rain. Even if I could, what would it matter? They’re here for a story, to tell their children that one morning a royal coach pulled up to the Nymphenburg Palace and the wife of the Emperor Napoleon got out. She was dressed like no other woman in the world, with more diamonds in her tiara than the empress of Russia. And her dress! Well, only a queen could afford such ermine.
Once inside the palace, I have no idea how many courtiers introduce themselves to me. I have not eaten, I have not rested, and by the end of the night, I’m so tired, I don’t even have the energy to weep. But as we retire to our rooms and Collette helps me undress, I wonder if this is Napoleon’s plan. To wear me down so that by the time we reach Compiègne, I no longer care that he has married me without anyone’s genuine permission—not mine, or my father’s, or even God’s.
“Would Your Majesty care for some music?” Collette asks. Her dimpled face looks innocent and sweet, but I know the truth. Caroline has sent her to my rooms to spy.
“No, thank you,” I say.
But she lingers at the door, even after I am dressed in my nightshift. “Perhaps you would care for some milk then? Or tea?”
“I am not going to disappear. Or run away. I know my duty.”
Her cheeks burn scarlet, and we stare at each other in the open doorway. Then she turns on her heels and goes to leave.
“Wait,” I call after her, and quickly, she turns back. “What city is it tomorrow?” I ask.
“Stuttgart.” She sighs. “There’s to be another reception at a castle,” she says, “and every nobleman in Württemberg will likely be there. More bad food and old men.”
So that’s why she looks so miserable every night. Not because the journey is long or rough, or because she misses her home, but because the French have finer food and men. “Thank you, Collette. I will see you tomorrow.”
She hesitates. “Your Majesty?”
“Yes?”
She twists the ends of her cashmere shawl in her hands. “Did you wish to marry the Emperor Bonaparte?”
Now it’s my turn to flush. I think of my family back home in Vienna, and of Adam and Sigi, whom I may never see again. “No.”
She nods, as if she understands. But she has never had to make a difficult choice, this girl. I doubt she’s even wondered where the money comes from for her gowns, or why men go to war in foreign lands. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.
I blink rapidly. “Me, too.”
“How will you ever be happy?” she asks.
“I have my painting,” I say. “And someday there’ll be children.” She looks at me as if she’s never heard of such sacrifice. But a hundred queens have done this before me, and it will have to be enough.
“If there’s anything I can do—”
“Sigi,” I say at once. “My dog.”
“I would—I truly would,” she says. “It’s the queen—she doesn’t like pets.”
Callous, miserable woman. I look up so that my tears won’t start fresh, and I try to think of something—anything—to keep me from weeping. “Tell me about Metternich,” I say.
I can see Collette now wishes she’d never come. “The prince?”
I nod slowly. “They are lovers, aren’t they?”
Immediately, Collette steps toward the door. “You didn’t hear that from me,” she whispers. Then slowly, she nods her head. “But yes, it’s true.”
“Is he the one who arranged my marriage to Bonaparte?”
“I—I can’t say, Your Majesty.”
“But if you had to guess.”
Her silence is all I need to know.
THE NEXT MORNING we are all up at five, dressed and ready to depart by six.
I wear my new French gown, a white silk dress embroidered with silver bluebells, but my thoughts are Austrian. I dreamed of Adam last night. I think of the look on his face as my carriage pulled away from Braunau, and my heart begins to ache. I wish I could have frozen that moment in time, like a Louise Moillon painting of fruit where nothing moves and nothing ever changes.
“How long will it take before we reach Stuttgart?” Caroline asks the driver, but frankly I don’t care. And even when we reach Ludwigsburg Palace and the grand reception being held in my honor, I feel indifferent. Cake? Why not? Lebkuchen? If I must. Would Her Majesty prefer the waltz or the contra dance? “Whichever is shortest,” I say irritably.
“What Her Majesty meant to say, Your Highness, is that a shorter dance now will mean more time for others later.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Caroline glares at me. “But it’s what you meant.” She holds my gaze so that it’s understood I’m not to say another word.
I don’t, and for the rest our journey to Compiègne, we are silent with each other.
Then, on the twenty-seventh of March, after the carriages have crossed the borders of France, Caroline turns to me. “Mio Dio, this is it!”
I sit up in my seat and look out the window of our royal calèche. The city of Compiègne is spread before us like a colorful blanket. Markets and churches jostle for space in the city square, and everywhere there are people—in the cafés, on the streets, in the open-shuttered windows. My heart gives a small leap as I wonder if I will ever be able to capture a scene like this on paper.
“Beautiful.” Collette sighs, and I know she is looking at the handsomely dressed women in their embroidered muslin gowns. “Do they know we are coming?” Collette asks, but Caroline only points.
Somewhere in the distance a group is chanting, and as the carriages draw closer, I can make out their words. “VIVE L’IMPÉRATRICE! VIVE L’IMPÉRATRICE!” Despite the rain, the people of France have come out to greet their empress.
“Be ready for anything,” Caroline says, still unaware that Paul has prepared me. “Sit straight, put your hands in your lap, and—”
The carriage jerks to a stop. She exchanges a look with Collette, and I can guess what it means. Napoleon has spotted the royal calèche and intends to meet me before we reach the château.