“Thank you, Desiree,” she said, taking the flowers absentmindedly, placing them down on the hall table without water or a vase.
I looked at her a bit closer, noting how she shifted from one foot to the other. I expected her to be out with it right away, but instead she ushered me into their dining salon with a taut smile. “Are you hungry?” Julie asked over her shoulder, her eyes avoiding mine.
“Oh, yes. I suppose.”
“Good. Dinner is ready.”
We entered the dining room where Joseph awaited us, glass of wine already in hand. But no champagne on the table, nothing that appeared to give the meal a celebratory aspect. “Ah, Desiree. Good of you to come.” He helped us to our seats, and I noted the place settings: it was to be only the three of us, no other members of the Buonaparte family. The old cook entered just then, bearing a large platter of roasted duck with charred orange rinds.
“How are you?” Joseph asked as he received the platter and began to serve the food.
“I am…I am fine,” I answered, accepting his gesture and passing him my plate for a portion of the duck.
“And Maman?” Julie asked.
“She’s the same…she’s fine,” I said, narrowing my eyes toward my sister. “You saw her yesterday, did you not?”
My sister shrugged, smoothing the linen napkin on her lap. Then she glanced toward her husband. “We have news,” he said, propping his elbows on the table, staring straight at me.
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
Joseph took Julie’s hand and announced: “We are moving.”
I lowered my fork to my plate, looking from Joseph to Julie, my appetite for Selene’s duck entirely forgotten. I said nothing. Eventually, Joseph added: “Leaving Marseille.”
But what of their baby news? I cleared my throat. “Going to Paris? To join Napoleone?”
“No,” Joseph said, stroking Julie’s hand in his grip. “We will be moving to the countryside, to a farm near Saint-Julien.”
I knew of Saint-Julien—it was just outside of Marseille, a rural region called “Les Olives” by the locals because of its plentiful olive groves.
“Olives,” Joseph said, as if guessing my thoughts. “It will be the simple life for us—the land, the woman I love, and the family we shall build.” He said it with such conviction. As if it was already done. Perhaps it was. And yet, my sister had not included me in any of her considerations, in any of their conversations.
Joseph must have read the disappointment on my face, or else he was simply a kind man, for he hastened to add: “Of course, you are our sister, Desiree. You are welcome to join us until…well…until my brother makes a decision on his future.”
My mind raced to make sense of it all. “But what about Paris?” I looked to my sister. “I thought that the plan was for you…for all of us…to join him in Paris?”
“Yes, it was. Well, it’s just that we…” Joseph paused, and I saw the meaningful look that passed between my sister and her husband. Only a flicker, a momentary exchange, but clear enough for me to catch it. I felt a stab of envy as I noted the gesture—as I considered all that was said and understood in that simple, intimate glance. My sister was not alone, regardless of the outcome of Joseph’s and Napoleone’s plans. She would not be left alone, but I might be.
Joseph’s voice had a cautious, measured tone when he continued: “We are not certain what Napoleone plans to do at this point. Whether his future will indeed be made in the army, in Paris, or if he will have to…if he will choose to do something else.”
I looked to Julie. She nodded, leaning toward me: “We can’t wait forever, depending on something for which there is no guarantee. Of course, Joseph would have gone to Paris to serve in the new government, if in fact the opportunity had come up. But at a certain point, we must make our own plans, based on what makes sense for us.”
So there it was: the lofty dreams of the Buonaparte brothers had been deflated. Napoleone had hoped to be a great general marching across Europe; his brother had hoped to ride that greatness to a position in our government. But now that Joseph believed that his brightest hopes for the future lay in planting olive trees—what did that mean for the man I was going to marry?
“But as Joseph said,” Julie continued, picking up her fork and knife, turning her gaze to the roasted duck, “you are always welcome in our home, Desi. No matter what happens.”
* * *
I feared how Napoleone would receive the news. That he would see it as I saw it: his brother had lost faith in their bright plans for the future.
But rather than despair or anger, Napoleone received the news with approval, an almost giddy enthusiasm. It has always been the simple life that my brother has desired. First he wanted the priesthood. Now he wants his olives. If they will retire to the countryside, then perhaps we should as well, he wrote to me, waxing rhapsodic about a rural life. They will buy an olive grove, then we shall buy a château! I’ll plant you a vineyard and we shall make our own wine. It could be as it was in Corsica—we shall never want for olive oil or grapes. We will have a brood of small Buonapartes to run riot over the entire neighborhood.
I read and reread his words, allowing myself to see the picture he painted. Leaving Marseille, relocating to a farm in the country. It wasn’t the future I had prepared myself for, the future that would take me to Paris. And certainly the life of a rural farmer’s wife would be entirely different from that of an officer’s wife. But Julie would be near, at least. And Napoleone seemed enthusiastic, more enthusiastic than he’d been in months. In a time when so many in our country faced futures far more bleak or hopeless, it wasn’t a bad fate, I told myself. I even began to grow somewhat excited at the thought of seeing my Napoleone out of his uniform and atop a draft horse, clipping past his rows of vines.
But then as soon as I reconciled myself to our new idea, our new plans, he wrote again. This letter also pulsed with a frantic energy, but now my fiancé fixed on yet another target: the Far East. With each passing day, I become more and more convicted in my belief that new lands wait to be discovered and conquered. I long to win glory for all of France. I intend to ask for an assignment to Turkey. The sultan’s armies need modernization, and I might do for them what Lafayette once did for the rabble in the American colonies. Now that would be something—a veritable challenge. Imagine seeing the holy lands of Constantinople. Or India! I could acquire a post in the East India Company’s army and come back rich as a rajah. What say you to that, my Desired One? Can you fancy yourself riding into some jungle camp atop a bejeweled elephant? I imagine that I might look quite dapper in the loose pantaloons. And you in a sari? Why, I simply must see it.
As I completed the latest letter, I burst into tears. I couldn’t even bear to share its contents with Maman; I knew how violently she would protest. And I myself didn’t want to believe that Napoleone could really fancy such a fate for us, so far from France and the people we loved. I had agreed to move to Paris, or to the countryside—but India? And without even asking me before seeking such an assignment?
But I needn’t have worried about that letter, either, for just a few days later, he wrote again: I am working on a book about us, my darling. You are the beautiful Eugenie, a sweet girl of sixteen. I am the faithful soldier turned farmer, Clisson, who is forced to leave his vines in order to return to military service for his country.
I lowered the letter, once more taken aback by his words. My Napoleone, suddenly a novelist? I read on, absorbing the excerpt he had included for my opinion. Clisson, the story’s hero, meets a beautiful young girl in the company of her older sister. Their eyes met. Their hearts fused, and not many days were to pass before they realized that their hearts were made to love each other. They felt as if their souls were one. They overcame all obstacles and were joined forever.
Even as I considered these words, lofty and ebullient as they were, I couldn’
t help but worry that the real man, my Napoleone, was receding. It was all well and good that he could write such soaring lines about our love, about our fate being joined—but when would we in fact be allowed to live as such, as Julie and Joseph were? Why did he always seem as if he were waiting for something to fall into place before he could fit me into the larger picture of his life?
More so than these vague and impassioned words, I longed for what I saw in my sister’s household: morning coffee and casual conversation over the newspapers, an uneventful supper in the evening. The unvarnished moments of life, the moments without ceremony, without lofty exclamation or abstract elegy.
Fortunately, Joseph and Julie seemed entirely willing to welcome me into the unvarnished moments of their married life, since I was not to have any of my own just yet. So I was at Julie’s when we first heard the news of the uprising in Paris.
It was a cool, pleasant fall day in Marseille. Privately, we still referred to it as we had in former times—the month of October—but by the revolutionary calendar, we were to refer to it as Vendémiaire.
Joseph was out, in town running errands and seeking further news, but Julie had received that morning’s journals, and so we read the accounts while sitting in her small salon, a rising sense of dread filling us both. Just a few months prior, the Parisian government had changed hands once again; I knew from the journals, as well as both Napoleone’s letters and Joseph’s remarks, that the new leaders were already drowning in debt and charged with unchecked corruption and incompetence. People across Paris were starving, no closer to having bread than when Marie-Antoinette had allegedly suggested they eat brioche.
From around the nation we heard fresh rumors that Austria saw our weakness and intended to resume its fight against our Republic, gathering troops along our borders with the hopes of putting a Bourbon—a relative of Austria’s rulers—back on the throne. People simply wanted an end to the suffering and the chaos. Food on the table and order in the streets.
The royalists within the capital seized on this moment of unrest, taking arms and marching toward the government headquarters at the Tuileries Palace. Rather than following government orders to keep the peace, members of the National Guard had instead defected in large numbers, joining the crowds of rioters. Paris was once more a war zone. Who, we wondered, would win?
When Joseph finally returned home that afternoon, Julie and I practically pounced on him, hurling questions, demanding more news. The capital was overrun by warring mobs, he told us. The government had shut down, some members barricading themselves inside the Tuileries, others fleeing for the countryside. I knew that Napoleone had had plans to attend the theater this week—he had told me with pride how he had secured a free ticket from a colleague in the army, as he’d never have been able to purchase a ticket of his own. But surely he would cancel those plans, I reasoned with myself. Surely, he would do the sound thing and stay away from the heart of the city. Or would he? Scared for my fiancé, I voiced this fear to Joseph: “He’ll be smart, he’ll avoid the mobs, won’t he?”
Joseph frowned, absentmindedly fiddling with the tricolor cockade on the lapel of his coat. “This is nothing new to my brother.”
“War?” I asked, unsure of his point.
Joseph shook his head. “War, of course. But I mean riots. As a young man, he was stationed in Paris when the rabble first marched on the Tuileries. At that time, Louis and Antoinette were living there, under house arrest after being dragged from Versailles. The mob decided that even the Tuileries was too soft a sentence for their tyrants, so they stormed the palace. Overran the national guardsmen, who wouldn’t raise their guns to fire on their countrymen, not even to protect the royal family. The crowd then marched with sharpened sticks and pitchforks up to the royal apartments, where they barged in on the king and his family.”
I remembered this moment, of course. It had been before I knew Napoleone or Joseph or any of the Buonapartes, but every person in France had read of this stunning chaos in Paris. Never before had a king of France and his wife and children been treated so roughly—it had been one of the low moments before the Terror began in earnest.
Joseph continued: “With cannons pointed at his heirs, Louis was forced to put on the tricolor cockade and the red cap of the revolutionary and march out onto the terrace to wave to the crowds, like a dancing bear performing his steps at a circus. They hissed and jeered, hurled lewd insults at Antoinette.”
I cringed, imagining the indignity. And then I wondered what any of this had to do with Napoleone and his current well-being in Paris.
“My brother saw it all,” Joseph explained. “He was sitting across the street, outside on a terrace at a café. He recounted it to me, and I remember his disgust. Not only with the crowd, but with Louis’s cowering. With the national guardsmen who stood idly by, failing in their sworn duty to protect the crown. My brother is no monarchist, believe me, but he does believe in might. He does believe in the importance of strong authority. He detests weakness, indecision, half measures that allow for chaos and anarchy. Leaders who bow to the rabble. So, my guess is that he is somewhere in Paris right now, advocating for a strong military response.” Joseph paused a moment before adding: “The question is—who in Paris cares what a young man called Napoleone di Buonaparte thinks?”
* * *
I barely slept that night for fear that my Napoleone had in fact decided to go to the theater and, in doing so, had put himself in harm’s way near the Tuileries Palace. I waited until dawn began to seep through the windows before rising from bed, dressing myself in the thin scrim of early light, and shuffling glumly down to breakfast.
Cook was just starting the fire, and soon the pleasant aromas of baking bread and coffee wafted from the kitchen into our breakfast room. I accepted coffee gratefully. Mother did not rise to join me that morning, so I sat alone with my impatient nerves.
Even if he wrote immediately, Napoleone’s letter would not reach me for days. So, with no better way to pass the excruciating hours, I decided to walk to my sister’s townhome. Outside, the crowds were already gathered in the square, my fellow citizens eager for news. The pace of guillotine executions had slowed in recent months, and I hadn’t heard of one occurring that day, so I thought it safe to pause a moment. “Excuse me?” I sought out a young woman who held a babe in her arms. “What news from the capital, citizeness?”
She looked at me a moment, shifting her bundle before speaking with the slow, nasal drawl of the uneducated class. “Remember that young officer who lived here just a little bit ago? That Corsican fellow who’d fought at Toulon—the one with the odd name?”
My voice was faint as I offered: “General Buonaparte?”
She nodded. “Aye, that’s the one.”
“Of course,” I said, feeling the blood drain from my face. “What about him?” The baby whimpered and the woman began to bounce, momentarily distracted. “Please,” I begged, “what news of him?”
She looked back to me. “Seems he’s made himself a right hero. Saved the Republic from a whole lot of rioters.”
I steadied myself by placing a hand on her shoulder, and she looked at me askance, shifting her baby away from me. I removed my hand. “Pardon,” I said, glancing around listlessly for a newspaper. “Excuse me…may I?” I asked an elderly man nearby. He handed me the paper in his hands, and I blinked at the words. There, in massive letters across the top:
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE SAVES THE NATION!
I noted the change in his name, the disappearance of letters, giving it a French rather than Italian look, but it could only be my fiancé. I read on, the sound of the crowded square receding to a distant hum as my eyes devoured the words. I read how he had stepped forward in the midst of the army’s paralysis and put forth a strong plan to crush the coup. How he’d hastily led a force of men to seize the cannons from nearby forts, bringing them into the capital. How he’d arranged hi
s troops like an army preparing to mow down the enemy.
The picture formed in my mind as I read on. My Napoleone, uniformed, leading men on a frantic mission to seize the arms from around the city. Napoleone, atop a horse, ordering his men into neat lines, the center of Paris suddenly a battlefield he was determined to hold. Napoleone, green eyes aflame, ordering his troops to fire on the approaching mob.
All around me the noise grew, pulling me from my reverie. It was surreal, looking up from the paper and beholding the crowd. A group of men had hoisted the tricolor over the square, and now a small cluster of students stood cheering, fists raised in the air as they cried out, “Vive Général Bonaparte! Sauveur de la République!”
Napoleone had just recently told me that he did not wish to go to Brest to put down the royalist uprisings there, that he did not wish to fire on his fellow countrymen. Now, however, he had fired ruthlessly on French men and women, and he was being heralded as a national savior for doing so. What, I wondered, must he think of all of this?
Chapter 9
Marseille
Winter 1796
“PROMOTED? WHEN?” I ASKED, KISSING my sister’s cheeks in greeting as I welcomed her and her husband out of the rain and into the drawing room of our family home.
“It’s quite big news, in fact.” Joseph slipped out of his damp cloak, handing it to the servant. “He’s been credited with averting a civil war, and he’s been appointed Commander of the Army of the Interior.”
“Oh?” I tried very hard to bring a smile to my face, even as I wondered why my fiancé had not written to me of this news himself.
Joseph continued, warming his hands near the fireplace: “He’s replacing General Paul Barras, a powerful man who seems to have taken Napoleone under his wing. Perhaps Barras shall be the friend—the patron—for whom my brother has been hoping.”
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