I lay there in the silence, questioning if there was supposed to be something more between us than simply these quick and curt couplings. I knew nothing else and thus had no way of knowing what to expect. Of course, I would never have dared to ask Julie, for I knew what she would say about my engaging in such behavior before any exchange of formal wedding vows. And so I ignored the itch of longing that throbbed inside me long after our lovemaking was complete; I pushed aside the desire I felt, the wish I had that Napoleone would continue to hold me, continue to love me. To put some tenderness or softness into his caresses. To keep me close even after his own ferocious needs had been so hastily and roughly sated.
* * *
He was scheduled to leave on the next day’s tide. I felt tired and glum as I joined Julie and Joseph to see him off at the crowded port. Julie stood beside me, holding my hand, as the brothers said their farewells in hasty and muttered Italian. I noticed how Joseph stuck a fistful of money into his brother’s pocket when they pulled apart.
When it was my turn to say goodbye, I remembered Napoleone’s emphasis on bravery as a necessary character trait, and I forced myself not to cry. “You’ll write me?” he asked, his voice firm as we embraced one final time.
“Of course,” I promised.
“I won’t become an afterthought? A jilted man put aside as soon as this ship pulls away and some other man comes calling at the Clary mansion?” He stared at me with his burning green eyes, as if appraising me one final time, probing for any flaw or weakness he might have heretofore overlooked.
I weaved my hands through his. “You, Napoleone di Buonaparte, could never be an afterthought.”
The ship sounded its horn in warning, and Joseph helped his brother load his one trunk. Napoleone gave us a final wave before stepping onto the gangplank. As I watched his figure recede, a trim outline against the backdrop of the ship and wide blue sky, I allowed myself tears for the first time.
He couldn’t see my crying at this point, and, besides, hadn’t I been strong, like he’d asked? Well, now that he was gone, it was more than I could bear not to give in to the crush of sadness. I felt a sense of loss, and indeed of being lost, as I watched his shape growing smaller, replaced by a foreground of rolling Mediterranean surf. He had loomed so large over each of my days since he’d entered them, but now, his absence left me feeling unmoored. I wondered—I worried—whether I had perhaps forgotten how to be myself without Napoleone beside me.
* * *
And yet, even in his absence, everything in me and around me had shifted. My life had taken on a new orientation; Napoleone was the fixed pole at the center of the rest of my life, even though he was miles away, in a distant capital that I knew only in my imagination.
Napoleone kept me busy, even after he was gone. He’d left me with a regimen he’d designed, a course of study that involved music, reading, philosophy, and other subjects dear to his own curious mind. Not a particularly avid student in my own youth, I was nevertheless grateful for the distraction at first, relieved that I could apply my energy and focus to something that I knew would make my Napoleone proud. He’d opened a subscription to a musical journal in Paris so that I might practice the most current pieces on my piano. He urged me to practice my singing as well. He left me with a long list of texts I was to study: the writings of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, Marcus Aurelius, and so many others. He urged me to write to him with my opinions on their subject matter.
You must seek always to improve your mind, my dear girl, he wrote in his first letter from the journey, posted while he was still aboard the ship carrying him north. For I plan to be a great man, and so you must be the great woman who stands beside me. Imagine the pride I will feel when my fellow generals remark that my wife is a woman without equal, an enlightened citizeness of our Republic, one who can expound on the preeminent writings of political philosophy and theory.
In truth, I wrote back to him, what I’d rather do than spend hours reading or practicing the piano is to work on my drawing. And I’ve settled on the perfect subject: the Boy General, Napoleone di Buonaparte. I shall attempt to sketch your profile in pencil, with only my memory as guide. This will serve the double purpose of keeping my hands applied to the improvement of my art, while also producing a finished product that will provide much pleasure as I look on it.
A fine idea, he wrote back to me. But I suggest one change to your plan: when the sketch is complete, you must send it to me. I would like to see your artistic skill at work, and I would like to see what sort of likeness you render. Otherwise, I approve heartily of this idea, and am delighted to know that you will be spending hours thinking of my face, and not some other man’s.
I chuckled at this, pleased to read of my lover’s jealousy. And then I saw his postscript:
Only, be sure not to neglect your books, my dear Desiree. I still await your opinions on Rousseau and Jefferson.
As the weeks passed and the autumn air grew milder, I tried my best to make my way through the dense tomes Napoleone had selected for me, but, really, once he’d made it safely to the capital, what I craved were the details of my lover’s daily life in Paris. What were his lodgings like? What did the women wear in the city, now that Marie-Antoinette was no longer there to set the fashion for the nation and indeed for the whole continent? Was dancing permitted once more at balls? Was it really true, as we read in the journals, that it was the new style to wear red strings around one’s neck to imitate the effect of the guillotine?
Napoleone chided me gently when I asked about these details rather than discussing politics or music or philosophy in my letters. Frivolity is destructive, and complacency is corrosive, and neither must ever be tolerated, my heart. And yet he begrudgingly answered my queries, indulging my requests for gossip with the matter-of-fact accounting of his soldier’s attention to detail: Everyone is determined to make up for their sufferings, to make light of the hell which they have just narrowly escaped. He told me about a ball he had recently attended with several other officers, one of the infamous Bal des Victimes, a Victims’ Ball. It is à la mode to have been imprisoned, only barely saved from death, to have lost a loved one to the guillotine. The women wear the red ribbons around their throats indeed. They crop their hair into the coiffure à la victime, the victim’s hairstyle—shorn short, like the damned whose locks were clipped on their way to death.
I read these details with a mixture of horror and curiosity. The Terror of recent years still seemed so fresh, so recent, a caged beast that might yet rise up and strike at any moment, but there in Paris, they made merry in the wake of it.
Napoleone, from his letters, seemed both disapproving and daunted. Paris is one large flea market. The wealthy compete to see who lost more, he wrote. So, in that way, my poverty is fashionable, I suppose. And yet, the women who run the social calendars of this city don’t truly have nothing, as they preside over their salons, seduce their wealthy lovers, host their fêtes in their grand drawing rooms surrounded by silk and champagne.
Napoleone wrote to me of autumn and then winter, his words foreign as he described the shifting of the leaves, the first blanketing of snow. I don’t even wear gloves, as they are an extravagance for which I cannot pay. You, my Desired One, my summertime love, serve as a warm and pleasant refuge for my thoughts as I shiver here under a thin coat which I cannot afford to replace. For me, a girl from the south, where the trees always remained in full leaf and the birds sang year-round, I could only imagine myself beside him, holding fast to his arm as we shivered, walking the quays of the Seine and watching the floes of ice that bobbed atop its surface. I wanted so badly to be there with him, to see what he was seeing, even if it was so terribly cold. I was ready to begin my life beside Napoleone, to leave my childhood in the south and embrace the adventures with which he’d filled my mind.
As the months strung together, I was slow to make progress on my pencil sketc
h. I’d begin each morning, only to spend several hours of frustrated work that usually ended in my tearing up the parchment and vowing to start anew the next day. The truth was, the longer we spent apart, the harder I was finding it to sit and conjure the finer details of Napoleone’s profile. Nothing that I put on paper came close to recalling the image of the man who inhabited my memory. Watercolors of the sea and gardens proved far easier, and I found myself gratefully distracted by those projects, though I did not dare send them to my exigent lover.
He asked me about my progress, wondered when he would see my completed drawing, but I demurred, telling him it was not yet ready. He pestered me, also, about my music and quizzed me about my philosophy reading. But he did not speak of his military career or what his plans were for advancement. Did not mention when he would send for me. I did not learn until the spring that he had led a failed mission to try to recapture his island home of Corsica from the English. Joseph had known, but Napoleone had sworn him to secrecy, for fear that I would worry too much. I learned of it only once he was safely back in the capital, failed in his attempt, writing to me once more from his dingy rented room at the Hôtel de la Liberté.
* * *
“My poor brother.” Joseph spoke to Julie and me on a rainy afternoon in Marseille. I was at their home, as I so often was those days, eager to escape Maman’s headaches and my own restless melancholy. My sister was not yet pregnant, a fact that I knew upset her, but she and Joseph had a nice, gentle manner of speaking to each other, and Joseph, attentive husband that he was, remained solicitous of my sister’s happiness above all else. He had made it clear that he saw me as a sister, a member of their family and one who was always welcome in the Buonaparte home.
But on this day, I could see as we sat down to luncheon that Joseph’s mood was heavy. “It’s Napoleone,” my sister explained, serving me a slice of cold ham. “Joseph has had a letter from Paris this morning.”
“And?” I asked, looking to Joseph, feeling the hastening of my own heartbeat. I hadn’t had a letter that morning.
“He’s miserable.” Joseph sighed. He told me about Napoleone’s recent loss to the British naval forces off Corsica. “He’s disgraced. He lost several ships and had to abandon the mission. The Brits chased him across the Mediterranean. He returned to Paris humiliated and without any hopes for advancement.”
“What has happened since he’s returned to Paris?” I asked. Could a man be sent to the guillotine these days for failure to win a military campaign? Certainly we’d heard of it happening often enough in recent years—officers executed for any number of reasons, even in victory, and oftentimes without a trial.
“They haven’t arrested him for it,” Joseph said, assuaging my fears. “But they’ve reassigned him. To the Army of the West, under General Hoche.”
I knew about the west, the area of France called the Vendée; Napoleone had told me about the pockets of resistance there. Royalist factions in and around Brittany were holding out hope of overthrowing the Republic and reestablishing the monarchy.
“Napoleone rejected the assignment,” Joseph added.
“But…why?” I’d never known my fiancé to turn down a military assignment.
“He has no desire to move to some remote outpost on the Atlantic, where the only action he shall face will be to fire on Frenchmen. And so now”—Joseph shrugged—“he’s without a place, even in his beloved army.”
I hadn’t known any of this; Joseph was giving me an unvarnished account so unlike what Napoleone ordinarily confided in me. He wrote to me that my letters were the brightest moments of his day, that I made up a full half of every aspiration he held for the future. But he’d never admitted to me any sort of pessimism about his place in the army.
And yet, even in his notes to me, I had detected a sort of restlessness, a lurking melancholy, a sense of unease, even if only veiled or obliquely hinted at. I knew that he struggled without enough money. I knew that he felt very much an outsider, excluded not only from the new administration, but from the festive aspects of Parisian society as well. But Joseph now painted a picture that was far less hopeful, even than Napoleone’s bluntest notes to me.
“He has no hope for promotion if he goes to Brest and takes up a position under Hoche fighting the royalists. There’s no glory in crushing your own countrymen. Plus, Hoche is young, about the same age as Napoleone. He’s not dying or retiring any time soon. What can my brother hope to gain from his patronage?”
“So then, what does he plan on doing?” Julie asked. I knew that her own life plans were on hold while Joseph awaited his brother’s next move. They, like me, had intended to go to Paris—they had put their hopes in Napoleone’s plans to gain a position for himself in the new regime and send for us. But now, it all appeared so uncertain.
“For the first time in his life, I don’t know that my brother has a plan,” Joseph said, sighing, looking forlornly from his wife to his luncheon plate. “Currently, there are more than one hundred generals ahead of him in seniority. His hopes for elevation look unlikely. He’s doomed to be standing still for a good long while, and there’s nothing Napoleone loathes more than standing still.”
Julie looked to me. “Well…what does he say to you about it?”
I shifted in my seat, glancing over at the clock on the nearby mantel when it chimed the new hour. “He…he has said nothing to me, just yet, about these recent developments.” In truth, I had no idea when, if ever, he would confess these same troubles to me that he confided to his brother.
“He doesn’t want you there while he’s so miserable, Desiree,” Joseph said. “He can barely afford to feed himself, let alone a wife. And, of course, with a wife, there’s always the possibility of ever more mouths to feed, bodies to keep warm.” Joseph drifted off, turning back to his plate. I knew that his intention was to bolster my spirits, to explain his brother’s behavior, even though his words were having the opposite effect.
Julie’s face was pale now, too, the topic of children in a marriage surely bringing to mind her own longing for a baby. I took her hand and gave it a silent squeeze.
Joseph went on: “He feels he has to be in Paris, to be near the seat of power, if he has any hope of grabbing an opportunity…if and when it might present itself. But he’s penniless. They’re not paying him a sou while he’s not employed in an actual mission. He’s got no salary, and yet he’s supporting Mamma and our sisters, paying for our younger brother’s training at the military academy out of his own scanty savings. He is hungry, wandering the streets of Paris without a friend. His lodgings are cramped, barely enough for him, and certainly not spacious enough for a wife. But do not believe he has forgotten you. If not for your love, Desiree, he might find himself in front of a passing carriage. He tells me as much, not infrequently.”
My brother-in-law’s words offered some small consolation, but I wished that Joseph—that Napoleone—would see that my attachment ran deeper than such material concerns. All I wanted was to join him, to be his comfort. I did not care that his boarding room was cramped, that his pockets were empty. But how could I tell him that without offending his pride? He wished to make something of himself, and he wished for me to believe in him while he did so.
And yet, it seemed that our hopes hinged on so many unknowns, on an opportunity that we prayed would someday present itself. Our future remained as blank and indecipherable as the pencil portrait I was trying—and failing—to sketch. I longed to go to Paris with Julie and Joseph, to begin the adventure for which Napoleone and I had planned. To start my life as a bride, with a home and a family of my own. But Napoleone was not yet ready to start that life with me.
I did not like feeling so stuck, so entirely helpless. I knew no other way to help my lover, so I prayed each night. Alone, in the dark, I called upon God and his Virgin Mother, even though the Church had been outlawed from our Republic and praying to Jesus or the Virgin Mot
her was illegal. I prayed, even though I had never been a particularly pious girl. Please, dear God, please give my Napoleone the opportunity he seeks, so that he may distinguish himself. So that, in his greatness, he might finally send for me and welcome me to Paris, where I might fully become his wife.
Hands clasped, I begged God to grant Napoleone some opportunity for greatness. I could never have guessed how resoundingly these silent entreaties of my heart would be answered.
Chapter 8
Marseille
Spring 1795
I KNEW THAT MY SISTER HAD news when she and Joseph invited me to a private dinner in their home. My usual habit was to simply stroll through their door, no matter the time of day, so for them to appoint a specific time on a specific date—surely they had something to tell me. I guessed that my sister was finally expecting a baby.
And yet, Julie’s demeanor when I arrived to her home was not one of joy or excitement. I had dressed well for the evening, anticipating their happy news and an impromptu celebration. Perhaps Letizia and other members of the Buonaparte family might even be there, since a baby would mean joyous news for them as well. I longed for Napoleone but reveled in the idea that my sister’s child would unite us even closer, being half his blood and half mine—just as our own children would someday be.
“Julie!” I hugged her when she received me in their small front foyer. The home smelled wonderful, aromatic with Selene’s cooking, and I guessed it might be roasted duck. “Here.” I handed her the bouquet I had clipped from our backyard, fragrant clusters of jasmine and honeysuckle.
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