The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.

by Sandra Gulland

  “Robe. ”

  “Pierre,” Jeanne-Victoire said, for the stone. “Robespierre. She’s saying ‘Robespierre.’”

  The woman drew her hand across her throat and began to dance wildly.

  Jeanne-Victoire turned to me. “Robespierre is dead.” She looked uneasy—frightened. “You are saved!”

  Remember what I said! the old woman said.

  V

  La Merveilleuse

  In which I walk among the living & the dead

  July 28, 1794, evening.

  Mirth without bounds. It bubbles forth from the cracks in the stones. With a crackle and a boom, our cell lights up like the day—more firecrackers follow, one upon the other.

  The light from my candle throws shadows against the walls. The spirits of this place, this time, are freed. They dance in the shimmering heat. I tie my bundle of cut hair into a knot and toss it between my hands. So close it came. My head.

  Grief speaks the refrain. For those who missed the lucky stroke by one single passing of the sun and moon. Grief … for Lazare, the old puppeteers, the others, too numerous to list. Grief … for Alexandre.

  And fear, too, for the bars still close behind us, the guillotine still stands.

  Wednesday, August 6.

  Today two men came through the gates. Deputies. We, the faint, the tattered, gathered like cattle, watching silently. Outside, on the cobblestones, the mob—drunken, gay, dressed in musty ball gowns, tattered silks splattered with mud.

  We were herded into the chapel. One of the deputies mounted the pulpit, a sheet of paper in his hand.

  Aimée put her arm around me. “Are you all right?”

  I laughed; others turned to stare. I laughed without cause. I was one of those.

  The deputy cleared his throat. “We have come in the name of liberty.”

  A man cried out. Has not all that has passed and is passing still been done in the name of liberty? We knew liberty—liberty meant death.

  The deputy continued. “What I have here is a list—”

  We trembled. We knew lists. The movements of this ritual were well known to us.

  “—a preliminary account, we must assure you, of those whom the new members of the Committee of Public Safety deem innocently accused. The following citizens are free to leave. …”

  “Do you understand?” Aimée whispered.

  “I am not a child,” I told her. They thought me mad.

  “Citoyenne Rose Beauharnais.”

  I looked around, frightened. My name had been called.

  Aimée clasped my hands. I looked into her weeping eyes. Faces turned to me, friends encircled me. My knees gave way.

  I woke on top of a plank table. Someone was stroking my forehead with a damp cloth. I heard a cough, then the words, “She can hear me.”

  I opened my eyes.

  Aimée’s eyes reassured me. I looked around at the others.

  “Don’t you understand, Rose?” Aimée said. “You may go home. You are free.”

  I listened to her words with fear in my heart. Free? What did that mean? “Will you come with me?” I asked.

  “Soon,” she assured me, smoothing rouge over my cheeks. She handed me a basket—my linens, my comb, a handkerchief enclosing my bundle of hair, my tattered cards. “Quick, before they have a change of heart,” she hissed.

  “I can’t leave you here.”

  “Don’t cry! Your children need you.”

  My children.

  My friends all crowded around me, helping me to the gate. The mob out on the street was cheering. Four men in the uniform of the National Guard were trying to hold them back. Would they set upon me, tear me limb from limb?

  Trembling, clasping my basket, I was pushed out onto the street. Thebig metal gate closed shut behind me. I looked back. The faces of my friends were wet with tears.

  “Where would you be going, Citoyenne?” a woman called out from behind me. Her breath smelled of liquor. She was wearing a court hat, a purple creation covered over with dirty silk flowers and tattered ribbons.

  “To the river?” I could not recall.

  Rue Saint-Dominique was wider than I remembered, an empty thoroughfare. On the big wood doors a paper had been posted. Sealed, by order of the law; enter on penalty of death. Death. I turned away, panic filling me. Where were my children? Where were Hortense and Eugène?

  I stumbled down Rue du Belle Chasse. The dogs in the lumberyard growled at me. At Port-de-la-Grenoüillere, I held my hand to my eyes. Light glittered off the river. Across, on the other side, a crowd was gathering in Place de la Révolution, around the guillotine. Still?

  I turned toward Princess Amalia’s, toward the Hôtel de Salm. Daily the children had gone there to visit, I knew.

  The gates to the courtyard were bolted. I shook the bell rope. The chambermaid came running. She peered through the metal bars.

  “Citoyenne Beauharnais,” I said. I did not say: the widow Beauharnais.

  A short man appeared between the portico columns. His yellow satin waistcoat glittered with gems. “What is it!” A peasant, by his accent. He was holding a thick horse whip.

  “I wish to speak to Citoyenne Amalia Hohenzollern.” A feeling of weakness came over me. I grasped the metal bars for support.

  “The princess? She and her kind have run across the Rhine, along with all the other vermin.”

  Princess Amalia … in Germany? “Her brother, Citoyen Frédéric, is he—”

  The maid made a quick motion of one finger across her throat.

  Frédéric—guillotined? Mon Dieu.

  The man commanded the woman to get back to her chores. I grabbed her sleeve through the bars. “Where are my children!” I demanded. “Where are Hortense and Eugène?”

  “Their great-aunt came—”

  The man cracked his whip.

  “Citoyenne Renaudin?”

  “No—the short one,” she hissed, running.

  Fanny? Was it possible?

  It was Jacques, Fanny’s man-of-all-work, who opened the big wooden doors to the courtyard. He suffered a moment of confusion before he realized who I was. I took his leathery hands in mine. My heart was beating wildly. “My children—are they here?”

  I followed him into the house. Fortuné came scurrying into the foyer. I scooped him up in my arms; he was a mass of wiggling, his little tongue licking my cheek.

  Lannoy appeared at the upstairs landing, Agathe not far behind. “Who is it, Jacques?” Lannoy asked. She regarded me with haughty disapproval.

  “Citoyenne Rose!”

  “Madame?” Lannoy looked down at me with an expression of disbelief.

  I heard a familiar voice behind me. I turned. It was an old woman, her face heavily made-up.

  Fanny. I put one arm around her shoulders, touched her cheek with my lips, her dry, papery skin. “Thank God you survived,” I said, fighting back tears. How long had it been, the nightmare we had endured? Was it possible it was over?

  “Mon Dieu, child, you’re so thin.” She stood back to look at me.

  “I’ve been ill. The children—”

  “They’re here.” Fanny put her fingers around my wrist. “There’s hardly anything to you. And your hair …!” She smiled, in spite of herself.

  “Aunt Désirée? The Marquis? Are they …?”

  Let them be alive, I prayed.

  Then: Be merciful, let them pass. Please do not ask them to endure the pain of Alexandre’s death. …

  “They are back in their house now—in Fontainebleau. Before they were in hiding. Charlotte put them up in her basement.”

  “The cook?” I tried to imagine Aunt Désirée and the Marquis in Charlotte’s brusque care. “Do they … have they been told?” I held on to the bannister to steady myself. Did Fanny even know?

  “About Alexandre?” Fanny whispered.

  I nodded. Yes.

  I heard a girl singing, the sound of a harpsichord. “Hortense?” I went to the door of the music room. Hortense was si
tting at the instrument, her back to me. Eugène and Émilie were seated close by. Eugène turned to look at me. His expression said, “Who is this woman?”

  Hortense stopped playing. She turned and stared.

  I stopped, confused. “Do you not know me?” I let Fortuné down. He stayed by my feet, whimpering to be taken up again. “Fortuné knows who I am.”

  “Maman?” Eugène’s voice cracked.

  “It is not,” Hortense said.

  “They do not believe it is me,” I told Fanny. I managed a smile.

  “Mon Dieu, it’s no wonder—you look like a stray cat!” She ordered the children to approach.

  Eugène came up to me bravely, permitting an embrace, followed by Émilie, who burst into tears. Hortense refused, standing behind Eugène. She watched me, her big blue eyes not revealing any emotion. Her father’s eyes.

  Fanny chided her goddaughter. “Your prayers have been answered and look how you behave.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m—”

  A sick feeling swept through me, violently this time. I doubled over. Fanny called out to Jacques, who helped me to a bench. “Would you take a dish of broth?” Fanny asked.

  I shook my head. I felt too ill. “I need to wash,” I said. I took a breath, sat up. The pain had passed. The children—alarmed, no doubt—were standing in a silent clump by the harpsichord, watching. “I’m all right,” I told them.

  “Fill the copper tub,” Fanny told Jacques. “Make it hot.”

  “There is little wood,” he protested.

  “Do what you can.”

  Lannoy helped me up to Fanny’s bedchamber. Then she helped me undress, making little clucking noises of dismay. Tears filled her eyes.

  “I couldn’t wash,” I told her, embarrassed by my filth, my bones. “There was no water.”

  She helped me into the big laundry tub, which Fanny had made fragrant and healing with herbs. After, Fanny brought me a shift, pretty with lace.

  I protested. “I am infested.”

  Fanny shrugged. “So are we all.” She led me to a stool.

  Slowly, she combed the nits out of my hair, talking—of hiding in an attic in Valenciennes, of returning to Paris to try to get her daughter Marie out of prison (without success), of her own imprisonment in Port-Royal, of Michel de Cubières’s heroic rescue.

  I listened without hearing. In front of me was a looking glass, framed in ormolu. The woman I saw was a stranger to me. Her gaunt face was lined, aged, without colour. Her teeth were black, her eyes sunken—furtive, fearful eyes.

  It was no wonder the children did not know me. This woman was not their mother.

  Who, then, was she?

  I did not want to know.

  As I write this, now, it is almost five in the afternoon. I’m sitting at the writing desk in Fanny’s guest room. I’ve slept, performed a modest toilette, put on one of Fanny’s gowns—it hangs loosely from my shoulders.

  Outside, on the Rue de Tournon, I hear a bell—a ragpicker’s wagon. The sound brings back memories, memories which seem more real to me than this room I inhabit, memories of the Carmes, of the prisoners—my dearest friends—who at this very moment are lying on their straw pallets listening for the sound of the guard’s footsteps, listening for the peal of his bell announcing supper.

  Strangely, I long to be with them. Here, outside the prison walls, I do not know my place. I am of this world, but not of this world. I am like a zombie, risen from the dead.

  Later that day.

  I rise, dress, eat—go through the simple routines of my day. It is not real; I am performing a part in a play. Yet it is through these simple acts—tying a sash, fastening a button, reading out a sentence in a reader—that Hortense and Eugène begin to know me again. How I long to take them in my arms, touch them, but even now I must refrain. I must not alarm them.

  August 8.

  I am stronger today, ready for realities. “Tell me,” I told Fanny.

  “It is too soon,” she said.

  “Nothing can wound me.” Indeed, I feel I am already dead. I do not tell her this.

  She went to her desk and pulled out a blue silk kerchief, folded. There was something inside.

  I opened it—hair, long and wavy, chestnut in colour. “Alexandre’s,” she said. I looked up at her.

  “I asked the gaoler for it.”

  “You … you were there?” I felt a prickly feeling in my hands. “You saw?” Did I want to ask? Did I want to know?

  “I did not think Alexandre should die alone.”

  I pressed my face to my knees, fighting back tears. How I revered this woman, her feisty, quirky, stubborn strength.

  “Rose! Are you ill?”

  I sat up, took a breath. “Forgive me, I was overcome.”

  “You would have done the same,” she said.

  Was it true? “He knew you were there, I am sure.”

  “There’s more.” Fanny handed me a pamphlet.

  I turned it over in my hands. Alexandre’s name was on it. “What is it?” I asked. “Alexandre wrote this?” I noticed my name. “It’s written to me?” I scanned the text:

  I am the victim….

  The brotherly fondness I have for you …

  Cherish my memory….

  The words shifted and moved before my eyes. “Where did you get this?” I turned the printed sheet over in my hand. One sou, it said, in the lower right-hand corner. “Did you pay for it?”

  “I got it by the Luxembourg gates. A young man in a toga was selling them. He had a basketful.” She paused. “Apparently it’s Alexandre’s last statement—to you.”

  Goodbye, dear friend. …

  Console yourself for the sake of our children. …

  I was having difficulty breathing. I stood and went to the window. How like Alexandre to arrange to have his last words published, I thought. “Rose, he was thinking of the family honour, of the children.” “I understand,” I said. Two women were helping a drunken man walk down the street. “He’d fallen in love with Madame Custine—General Custine’s daughter-in-law.”

  “Delphine Custine? That silly blonde thing?” Fanny scoffed. “That couldn’t have been pleasant for you.”

  I lowered myself onto the little upholstered stool in front of the fireplace. “I can’t recall,” I said.

  6:00 p.m.

  Eugène was withdrawn this afternoon—he remained silent throughout supper. “It’s nothing!” he insisted.

  I followed him to his room. “Something is weighing on you.” I sat down next to his table of military figurines.

  He shrugged, repositioning four cannon, kneeling to assess the angles.

  “Eugène, please, talk to me. It’s something to do with your father, isn’t it?” No response. “Did anything happen at the workshop this morning? Did Citoyen Quinette say something?” Citoyen Quinette is an excellent cabinetmaker, but known for his temper.

  Eugène shook his head.

  “Who then? The other lads who work there?”

  He would not look at me.

  “Did they say something to you?”

  I reached to touch his shoulder. Abruptly, he twisted away. “They call me the son of a traitor!” He hid his face in his hands.

  “Do you believe them, Eugène?”

  “He lost Mainz! He never attacked—instead, he ran!”

  “Is that what they say?”

  He nodded, tears bursting from him. He wiped them away, embarrassed by his weakness.

  “And what do you tell them?”

  “What can I say!”

  I studied my son’s face. His father—a man he revered, a man who had stood for all that was noble and good—had been put in prison, tried, found guilty, condemned to death. “I will tell you, then,” I said, taking a breath. “In war, as in love, it is always complex. You are old enough to begin to understand.” I told him of the condition of his father’s troops—farmboys without training, without food. I told him of the enemy—professionals outnumbering h
is father’s troops ten to one. I told him of Alexandre’s reluctance to lead his men to slaughter.

  “To many, to be a hero, one must bask in the blood of others. To many, your father should have led his men to death, risked their lives for the sake of glory. But to me, it proved your father’s courage—his courage to risk condemnation, arrest, death even, in order to stand by what he knew to be right. Is this not heroic?”

  Eugène looked at me with a steady expression.

  “You are the son of a good man, Eugène, a man who loved you very much, a man who loved his country. A man who lived—and died—for what he believed in. A hero. You must never forget that. Your father’s memory will be cleared—I promised him that—but it must begin in your own heart.”

  And in my own.

  August 9.

  I don the clothes of the widow Beauharnais. The dull black suits my soul, reflects the death I feel within. Even my children cannot wake me from this slumber. Stiff white gauze tickles my throat. A veil of taffeta covers my boyish curls. I am a ghost. I am a survivor.

  I set out for the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. “Place du Trône renversé,” I tell the driver.

  He puts me down at a corner. I instruct him to wait. I walk the edges. This is where my husband died.

  It is a cloudy, hot day. Everywhere children are playing. Did they skip around the guillotine? Did they sing?

  I dodge horses, carriages—make my way to the centre. There, despite the curses of the carters, the threat of their whips, I stand. Is this the spot? I am only a moment, waiting. Only a moment, long enough to know that he is not there.

  I return to the carriage, instruct my driver once again. This time we head out to the country, outside the city walls. I have been told the way; in any case, my driver seems to know.

  He regards my dark robes, my short-cropped hair. “I go often, myself,” he tells me. He is wearing a tall hat with yellow tassels. “My son is there. My wife went once, but no more.” He needs to talk.

  At last, we stop. It is only a farmer’s field. It has been dug, mounded, turned. But for that, one would not guess its use.

  “The King and Queen are here,” the driver tells me. He is proud of this. “It is said they share a pit with Robespierre.” He takes down the step. I accept the offer of his rough hand. He wants to be helpful. He has been too much alone in this place.