The Game of Hope

by Sandra Gulland

  “As First Consul now, Bonaparte has even more to do, so he has put me in charge of the List,” Mother added with a weary sigh.

  I looked up. “The List?” The list of aristocrats who fled France during the Revolution, and who would never be allowed to return. “You’re in charge of it?”

  She nodded. “So of course, the first person I removed from the List was François,” she said with a smile.

  My Uncle François, Ém’s father. “He’s alive?” Ém had never been sure.

  “Yes! And living near the Black Forest.”

  “And now he’s off the List?”

  “Free to come home.” She beamed.

  “Has Ém been told?”

  “Not yet. I promised I wouldn’t—”

  “This will make her so happy!” Mouse had been worried about Ém’s lack of spirit.

  “All of us,” Maman said. “Antoine left this morning to find him, escort him back. He specifically requested that Ém not be informed. He thinks she will be heartbroken if he fails. He loves her so much,” she said with a sad smile, “yet she’ll likely not notice he’s gone.”

  Worse, she’ll be glad of it, I thought.

  * * *

  —

  18 Pluviôse, An 8

  The Institute

  My angel,

  Come this décadi, if your mother allows. We will be giving a concert. I have sent an invitation to our darling Citoyenne Caroline Murat and her husband as well.

  I regret that I won’t be able to see the big procession celebrating the First Consul’s move into the Palace, but I look forward to calling once you are settled. It’s a palace I know rather well.

  Farewell, my angel. I’m yours for life.

  Maîtresse Campan

  * * *

  —

  Maman and I spent a full day in Montagne-du-Bon-Air that décadi. First we went to see Grandpapa, who had turned eighty-six. (Eighty-six!) “I will die an unhappy man,” he said, looking at the portraits of his sons: my father and my uncle François. My mother and I exchanged a hopeful smile.

  After, we went to the Institute, which I had been missing so very much. Mouse was delirious to see me. Even Ém seemed happy, in her muted way. She told me that she was relieved that Antoine was no longer in Paris, no longer coming out to the school to visit. (If only she knew, I thought.)

  And then Caroline—Citoyenne Murat—arrived. The Fearsome Foursome!

  The concert, however, was a disaster. I was expected to perform!

  “I can’t do that,” I told Maîtresse. I was fearless in theatrical performances, yet just the thought of performing music in public made me so anxious I got ill.

  “I’ve already announced it,” she said, looking over the crowd. “We’re counting on you.” She gave my hand a squeeze. “I’m counting on you.”

  I made several mistakes, of course. I was thankful Citoyen Jadin wasn’t there.

  As soon as the concert was over, I sported on the green with my dear Fearsomes, which made me feel better. We snuck off to a private spot in the shrubbery. I’d decided to bravely reveal to Ém and Mouse my hopeless affection for Christophe. It wasn’t right that only Caroline knew.

  “I have a confession to make,” I began.

  That immediately got their attention.

  “This is absolute foolishness on my part.” I shrugged up my shoulders. “But I can’t help it. I . . .” Love? I was too shy to say it. “I am infatuated with . . .” I swallowed. “Colonel Duroc.”

  Mouse exchanged a knowing glance with Ém.

  They knew? “Caroline! You told?”

  “I didn’t!” Caroline protested.

  Ém laughed. “You talk in your sleep.”

  Before I could respond, Caroline began scolding Ém for her stubborn chastity. “You owe it to God to swive your husband,” she said.

  I hid my face in my hands. “Citoyenne Murat, please!”

  “It’s in the Bible!”

  And then we heard a giggle in the shrubbery: Aïe, Eliza?

  She was gone before we could catch her.

  A SURPRISE

  On the day of our move into the Tuileries, Maman, Caroline, Ém and I sat in the window of one of the pavilions to watch the enormous procession celebrating the General’s—rather, the First Consul’s—move into the former royal palace. We tried to be composed and dignified, but soon we were waving and cheering like everyone else.

  The carriage of the General and the two other Consuls was drawn by six white horses and escorted by Eugène at the head of his mounted guards. He looked splendid on lively Pegasus. Caroline threw a rose to her husband as his regiment went by. He kissed it and pressed it to his heart. (So romantic.)

  After the Council of State, the senators and the cavalry had gone by, Caroline, Ém and I excused ourselves to go to the room for ladies.

  “One moment, dear heart,” Maman said, holding me back.

  “I have to go,” I whispered.

  A military band had stopped below us. Maman put her gloved hand over mine. “Bonaparte wanted you to hear this,” she said.

  That puzzled me. “Why?”

  An orderly ran out with a stool for the conductor. This was curious behavior for a marching band.

  “I don’t know, but he insisted,” Maman said.

  The conductor stepped onto the stool, raised his baton, and the band began to play.

  “Can’t we go now?” Caroline asked impatiently.

  I raised my finger: wait a moment. The tune was familiar. I knew it well, yet couldn’t place it.

  And then it came to me: it was the composition I had written, the one I had composed when I was so worried about Eugène in far-away Egypt.

  “Dear heart, isn’t that something I’ve heard you play?” Maman asked.

  It was mine. I couldn’t believe it. “That’s my composition.”

  “What do you mean, your composition?”

  “I wrote it, Maman.”

  She frowned, puzzled.

  “What was that all about?” Caroline asked when I joined her and Ém.

  “The band played something I composed.” I wondered how they had come by the score.

  “You mean that melody we just heard?” Caroline asked.

  “You wrote it?” Ém asked.

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “I didn’t know girls could do that,” Caroline said.

  * * *

  —

  After the festivities were over, and Caroline and Ém had left, Maman and I awaited the General in the Palace. We sat in the yellow drawing room, huddled by a smoking chimney, watched over by guards we didn’t know. I kept thinking back to that moment of hearing my musical composition. It had sounded splendid, but who had given the band my score? The General? But how did he know about it? For that matter, who had arranged it so that it could be played by all the instruments in a band? My mother, obviously, knew nothing.

  Maman suggested we move to her dressing room, which was warmer. We weren’t there long before the General burst in.

  “How did it go?” he demanded of Maman in his usual abrupt fashion. I was sitting off to one side. “What did your daughter think?”

  Maman turned to smile at me. That’s when the General realized I was there. “Oh!” he said.

  I stood, my cheeks burning. “I was honored,” I said.

  “Were you surprised?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re a good composer, Hortense,” he said, tugging my ear (gently for once).

  I wanted to ask how the band had got hold of my score, but lost courage. Overcome, I excused myself.

  I am a composer, he said.

  * * *

  —

  I woke the next morning in the Palace of Kings. The Palace of Kings was now my home. It took me a mo
ment to make sense of it.

  My room was enormous, and so very cold I could see my breath. I climbed down off the high bed and found my fur slippers and wrap. A fire was burning—a maid must have quietly come and gone—but the big wooden shutters hadn’t been opened. I unlatched one and folded it back, surprised how bright it was, mid-morning. My room overlooked the wintry public gardens.

  I sat down at a little writing table, inlaid with an intricate pattern in mother-of-pearl. Had it belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette? The desk was the only real piece of furniture in my room, other than a bed so high I needed bedsteps to get on and off it. I didn’t like to think of those who might have slept in that bed. I didn’t like to think of their fates.

  I intended to spend that first day organizing my belongings. I had a small room off my bedchamber for drawing and painting. A piano—an actual piano—had been installed in another small chamber I decided to call my music room.

  I sat down on the piano stool and ran my fingers over the keys. I’d only shown my score to Citoyen Jadin, so how could my composition have been played in public like that? Had he shown it to the General?

  After finishing coffee and a roll, I found the General in the courtyard with a horse and groom. Roustam and an aide, both on horseback, waited by the open gates.

  “Your music teacher showed it to me,” the General said when I asked him.

  As I’d suspected.

  “He thought it might be a good piece for a public event,” he added, mounting his fidgety white stallion and taking up the reins.

  Jadin had said that?

  “And perhaps an anthem, although I’m not so sure about that.” He took a riding crop from the groom, spurred his horse and cantered off, followed by Roustam and the aide.

  “Hortense, there you are,” Mimi called down from an open window. “Citoyen Jadin is here to give you a lesson. He’s waiting for you in the music room.”

  * * *

  —

  Jadin was sitting in a chair by a roaring fire. “Good day, Citoyen Jadin,” I said, taking the piano stool.

  “Good day.” He looked weary, older than his years.

  “I beg your forgiveness for being tardy.” I was being purposefully formal and aloof. The more I thought about it, the more I didn’t like that something I had created, something private and precious to me, had been taken out of my hands, displayed to the world without me knowing. “I was unaware I had a lesson scheduled.”

  “I know, but time is pressing,” he said, going through his sheaf of scores. “How was the procession?”

  “Good.” With a cheerless voice. “Although I was rather surprised, let’s say, when the military band played my composition.”

  “They played it?” He pulled out his gray handkerchief and coughed into it, a sickening rattle.

  “You showed my composition to the General,” I burst out.

  “I should think you would have been pleased,” he said evenly.

  Of course I was pleased, but annoyed, as well. “You should have asked me first.” Or, at least, told me.

  “You would have said no.”

  True, but—

  “It’s time you stopped hiding your talent, Citoyenne Beauharnais,” he said with a scolding tone.

  “I don’t have talent,” I countered peevishly.

  He smiled wanly. “Have you been composing, as you promised?”

  “No.” Not looking at him. I was acting like a child, I knew.

  “Citoyenne, you are one of my most promising students.”

  I looked at him. He was being serious.

  “You play beautifully, expressively and with energy, and apparently you can also compose.” He paused, pressing his hands to his chest. “So yes, you do have talent, but you must apply yourself. I won’t always be here to encourage you. You must find that resolve from within yourself. You do have it, you know you do. Continue what you were doing, copying out the compositions you love, creating compositions of your own.” He wrapped his wool scarf around his neck. “But more significantly, you must have confidence in your work, and, most of all, confidence in yourself. It’s not right to hide your creations from the world.”

  “I’m only sixteen, Citoyen Jadin.”

  “I was nine when my first composition was published.”

  “It’s different for a girl.”

  Never call attention to yourself.

  Display modest reserve.

  Avoid the public eye.

  “You’re a creative person, Citoyenne, and creativity is by its nature generous.” He coughed again, more violently.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, alarmed.

  “I’m fine,” he said, once he could speak. “Play.” He handed me a score, which trembled in his hand. “We don’t have much time.”

  VIII

  ROMANTIC FANTASIES

  2 Ventôse – 6 Ventôse, An 8

  (21 February – 25 February, 1800)

  THE MOON CARD: ROMANTIC FANTASIES

  A MYSTERY

  Maman was uneasy in the Palace, because of its cold grandeur, its lack of a private garden, its history—but also because of its “ghost.” She kept hearing a woman singing, and she insisted that the sound came from her dressing room, not from the public gardens, where women of ill repute plied their trade. One morning Mimi found the cupboard doors in the dressing room open, which was troubling because she always kept them closed. And then, on the floor one morning, she found an embroidered headscarf with the Queen’s initials on it.

  “Her calling card,” Mimi said, refusing to touch it. She burned sage leaves in Maman’s bedchamber and dressing room, “to drive her away.”

  Her: the ghost of the dead Queen.

  I resolved to look for clues, to figure out who could be playing this cruel trick on us. I would have suspected Caroline, but she was never around, too busy playing “poop-noddy” with her husband.

  * * *

  —

  “There’s my angel,” Maîtresse said, sitting with Maman in the yellow reception room in front of the roaring fire. She’d come to help advise Maman on Palace protocol and staffing.

  “What do you make of our new home? It’s rather grand.” Too grand.

  “I’m having a hard time getting used to it,” Maman admitted, making room for me beside her on the settee. “I hate to think of all that happened in these rooms.”

  “Indeed! I was very nearly murdered on those stairs,” Maîtresse said, gesturing to the gallery that led to the winding marble staircase. “During the September Massacres of 1792.”

  “Goodness,” Maman said, crossing herself, something she’d taken to doing of late.

  “The King and Queen and their children had been taken away, but then the hordes broke in and hacked down all the guards in the most brutal way. Hundreds of them! I had to climb over the dead and the dying to escape. I was on the stairs when a man seized me. I fell to my knees, knowing how painful his blow was going to be, but someone yelled from below saying not to kill women, and the brute threw me down with a curse. Less than five months later, the King was beheaded. The poor Queen. How she suffered! Her children taken from her, she knew her time was coming.”

  “I keep thinking I see her,” Maman said.

  “The Queen?”

  “I’ve never had to live with a ghost before, and I don’t really care for it,” Maman added with a grimace.

  Maîtresse laughed, as if Maman were joking.

  “Do you recognize this?” Maman asked, showing Maîtresse the embroidered headscarf. “Mimi found it on the floor of my dressing room.”

  “It’s the Queen’s,” Maîtresse said, examining the embroidery. “It smells of Parfum de Trianon, a scent that was created for her.”

  “And all the closet doors had been left open,” Maman said.

  “No sign of a
robbery?” Maîtresse asked.

  “No! And Maman keeps hearing a woman singing,” I offered.

  “The public gardens can be noisy,” Maîtresse said.

  “I wondered about that too,” I said, “but we keep the windows and shutters closed because of the cold. And why would the dressing room doors be open like that? And why the headscarf?”

  “There is always a rational explanation,” Maîtresse said. “A clever prankster, no doubt?”

  “No doubt,” I echoed doubtfully.

  * * *

  —

  “Do you remember Citoyenne Lenormand?” Maman asked me after Maîtresse had left.

  “The fortune-teller? She came to your dinner party.” Her failed dinner party, the one in honor of the General’s mother, the one the Clan refused to attend. “She showed us the Game of Hope.” Her prediction for me had not come true.

  “I’d like to consult her about this haunting business, but I dare not invite her here.”

  Indeed. Visitors had to be approved, and the General was strict. I could imagine what he’d say about the eccentric fortune-teller.

  “Mimi would go with me, but she’s busy with new staff. I know you have a lesson with Jadin scheduled, but could you—?”

  “He cancelled.” With no explanation. Was he angry at me? The last time I saw him I had lashed out at him for showing my score to the General.

  “Perfect. I thought I would drop by Lenormand’s place. We’ll go in one of the plain carriages so people won’t think it’s Bonaparte.”

  That was wise, I thought. Every time we went out in an official carriage, crowds of people gathered, gawking.

  * * *

  —

  Citoyenne Lenormand’s house was on the other side of the river on Rue de Tournon, not far from the Petit Luxembourg and where my great-aunt Fanny used to live. Her salon was not at all what I expected. It was more like a bookshop, with stacks of books everywhere—stacks of books with strange titles: