The Josephine B. Trilogy

by Sandra Gulland

  “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  Eugène was withdrawn this afternoon—he remained silent throughout supper.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 his 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.

  There are others in the field, four diggers, a pile of lime, a cart nearby. Bodies. Heads.

  “Still?” Still more to bury?

  “The mountain meets the earth.” The driver laughs at his joke. He nods toward an old woman in a spotted muslin dress, sitting in the dirt. “She’s always here,” he says. He twirls a finger at his temple, meaning: crazy.

  Unlike the rest of us, I think with irony.

  I scan the broken earth, the weeds. So this is where Alexandre lies. And the others—Lazare? Frédéric? The dear old puppeteers? It comforts me to think of them all together.

  I head out across the field. I do not have a plan. At the centre I pick up three stones. One for Hortense, one for Eugène, one for myself. I feel the smooth surfaces. Tokens.

  Is that all there is? Is it true, what the Jacobins say—that death is eternal sleep, no more, no less.

  The soothsayer said: You will be unhappily married. You will be widowed.

  I watch as two birds fly through the air—a pair. I wait for some sense of meaning. But there are no answers, only this…this awful emptiness.

  In which ghosts come to life

  August 10, 1794.

  The dawn was breaking when I set out, accompanied by Jacques. The beggars on the Rue de Vaugirard were still asleep. In front of the Luxembourg a grocer was whipping a donkey in an effort to make the old creature move. We made our way around the quarrelsome pair.

  It was a short walk to the Carmes, I knew, but one which bridged two worlds. There are degrees of courage, and I was unsure if I had the will to enter those prison gates again. I was thankful Jacques was with me.

  A guard I didn’t recognize opened the gate. Jacques knocked on the heavy plank door to the turnkey’s office. I heard someone coughing inside. Within, by the light of one tallow candle, the turnkey was hunched over a journal, scowling. A very pregnant Lucie was slumped sleepily on a chair, bursting her seams. Aimée was sitting in the far corner. I was struck by the animal look in her eyes.

  She burst into a crazy laugh, which in turn gave way to a rattling cough that stole her very breath. “Am I so very frightful?” she gasped, when she could breathe again.

  Jacques took her basket, her meagre possessions. “Ready?”

  “What about Jean-Henri?” I asked.

  “Croisoeuil?” The turnkey leafed through his papers. “No.” Lucie shrugged.

  Out on the street an old man came up to us. “Welcome.” He handed Lucie a flower.

  “How does he know?” She watched the man hobble away.

  I took Aimée’s hand. I could feel the bones. “We are staying at my Aunt Fanny’s on Rue de Tournon,” I told her. “It’s a short walk from here. Are you strong enough?”

  “We’re not going to Rue Saint-Dominique?”

  “It’s been sealed.”

  “I can’t go home?” I saw something crumble within her.

  “Come,” I said.

  Evening.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked Aimée as I helped her to bed. She seemed strange to me yet.

  “I pretend,” she said.

  I sat down on the bed beside her. It seemed a curious thing to say.

  “You’re pretending, too. Only you’ve convinced yourself,” she said.

  Tears came to my eyes. She was right. I did pretend. I did not speak of the horror I have known. “It’s different out here, Aimée. We’re different.”

  “The craziness, you mean.”

  “More than that.” I pulled the covering sheet over her, kissed her forehead. “Sleep.” I closed the drapes, blew out the candle on the mantle.

  “You didn’t say what it was, Rose,” she said, in the dark.

  I sto
od for a moment. What was it? “Shame,” I said. In the dark, one word. Shame that we broke down, grovelled, begged. Shame for crying out, weeping, beating our heads against the stones. Shame for losing hope, faith, for being willing to forsake everything, anything, in barter for life. Shame for knowing fear, its sickening grip.

  The shame of the survivor.

  “Yes,” Aimée whispered. “That too.”

  August 11.

  This morning I met with Citoyen Dunnkirk, my banker, attempting to put my finances in order. The news is not good. Martinico has threatened to go over to the English rather than submit to the revolutionary government in France. Citoyen Dunnkirk has reason to believe that Mother has opened her home to the English forces, offered support to the enemy.

  “To the English?” I thought of Father, of a life spent in battle against “les Goddams.” Had Mother offered English officers my father’s bed? I was thankful he was dead.

  “I assure you that this information will be held in strict confidence. I am aware of the dishonour this could cause you, the suspicion—”

  “She is well?” I interrupted. “The plantation—is it…?”

  “I don’t know if you are aware that your father left a substantial debt—one hundred thousand livres.” Citoyen Dunnkirk sneezed into an ugly green kerchief.

  “Why was I not—”

  “We just found out ourselves. Your mother—a resourceful woman, by all accounts—made an arrangement with her creditors whereby the debt would be paid off over a period of time. Fortunately, the crop was good this year, in spite of the civic turmoil. So good, in fact, she was able to pay off the debt and is reported to have hosted a celebration party for everyone in the village.”

  “Mother?” Surely he was talking about another woman.

  “Quite sure, Citoyenne. In fact, we are given to believe that your mother is comfortable, perhaps even well-off. She should have no difficulty providing you with the interest on your holdings—if she can get it to you, that is. Due to the war, any correspondence will prove difficult, of course.”

  “I can’t write to her?”

  “You could try,” he shrugged. “Is she aware of your…situation?”

  “She knows nothing.” Nothing of prison, nothing of Alexandre’s death.

  We reviewed my accounts. I have a sizeable (and growing) debt to Citoyen Dunnkirk, who so kindly advanced funds for the care of the children while Alexandre and I were in prison. “I will repay you,” I assured him—but how? “I have gems hidden in my rooms on Rue Saint-Dominique. I can sell them, when…”

  When…When the seals were removed. When would that be?

  “It will take time,” Citoyen Dunnkirk warned, sneezing again. “The wheels of bureaucracy have always moved slowly—and now…” He threw up his hands.

  “What about La Ferté?” I asked. Alexandre had invested all of his inheritance in his country estate.

  “Your husband’s properties have been sequestered. Items of any value have been sold by the government at auction.”

  “Sold?” There was a painting of Alexandre as a child—I had wanted it for Hortense and Eugène. “And when might that sequester be lifted?”

  Citoyen Dunnkirk looked at me uncomfortably. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, Citoyenne, but the law gives the government full possession of the property of the condemned. Even if the sequester were to be lifted today, the estate would not accrue to you or your children.”

  Slowly I grasped the situation. According to law, Alexandre died a criminal. The children have been robbed of their inheritance. They face their future with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a blackened name.

  I returned to Rue de Tournon shortly before noon. There were a number of people gathered on the street. A woman with a hurdy-gurdy was standing in front of the door to Fanny’s hôtel.

  “Something is happening,” I told Fanny, putting my handbasket down in the foyer. Crowds frightened me.

  “They’re releasing prisoners at the Luxembourg today.” Fanny was holding a stack of books in one arm. “And making a spectacle of it—speeches, a parade apparently.”

  “Where are the children?” I asked.

  “Up at the corner.”

  I sighed. Watching prisoners being released had become a form of entertainment. “Lucie as well?”

  “She consented to go, in spite of the fact that the dress I provided was not judged suitably flattering.”

  “Neither prison nor pregnancy have dampened that child’s vanity,” I said. “And Aimée?”

  Fanny nodded toward the double doors leading out onto the balcony. “She only just got up. Were you able to get coach tickets to Fontainebleau?”

  “I’ll try again in the morning.” Two times already I’d tried to get a pass.

  I stepped outside onto the balcony. Aimée was leaning out over the edge, her hair hanging down loose and long. I thought to say something to her, to caution her against immodesty, but held my tongue. What did it matter, any more?

  I put my arm around her shoulders, kissed her forehead. She’d slept for over twenty hours, the sleep of the dead, but even so, she looked exhausted.

  “Good,” she said, answering a question I had not voiced. She put her hand to her mouth to still a cough.

  I looked out over the throng. A woman with a child at her breast was wearing a dress made from a flag. Four young men dressed in togas were making their way slowly down the street carrying a banner proclaiming “la nation.” Everyone cheered as they passed.

  “This seems like a dream to me,” I said. Now and again a wind carried a faint scent of honeysuckle.

  Aimée laughed. That awful prison laugh, Fanny called it.

  A carriage pulled by a team of old bays turned onto Rue de Tournon. Two open carriages followed. A tall, young man bedecked with red, white and blue ribbons was standing in the last one. The woman in the flag dress began yelling joyously, holding up her baby as if for a blessing.

  “Isn’t that Tallien?” I asked. Tallien’s signature had been on my release form. A stunning young woman sat beside him, scantily dressed in a white toga, a sash with the words “la liberté” draped across one shoulder. Her curly black hair was cut short, like a boy’s. “And Thérèse Cabarrus!”

  For days the children had been telling me the story: how a beautiful young woman had sent Deputy Tallien a note from prison, hidden along with a dagger in a cabbage, how for love of her he had brandished her little dagger in the Assembly, challenged the tyrant Robespierre, ended the Terror.

  “Your friends—the new King and Queen,” Fanny said, joining us. “That could be useful.”

  I picked a blossom from a potted rosebush and attempted to toss it into the carriage. I missed and tried again, calling out this time. Thérèse glanced up. She tried to say something to Tallien, but it was too noisy on the street, the crowd too demanding.

  Shortly after there was a pounding at the gate. Jacques returned with a message. “A boy,” he said. “He said to tell you that the lady with Deputy Tallien invites you to see her.”

  “Thérèse? Did he give an address?”

  “Nine Rue Georges, Chaussée d’Antin. Tomorrow afternoon at three.”

  “You will see about Marie?” Fanny demanded, grasping my arm.

  August 12.

  A thin boy, only a little older than Eugène, answered the door.* I followed him into a room full of potted flowering bushes. “She will be with you,” the boy stuttered, and disappeared.

  I heard a woman singing—her voice was lyrical, slightly melancholy; it had a haunting quality. Thérèse Cabarrus stepped into the room. She was dressed in a loose white tunic drapped in the Roman style. Her short, jet-black curls framed her face, her tresses shorn, short and boyish, like my own…but for the same reason? I wondered. It did not seem possible. The grey pallor that marked the victims of the Terror, the shadow that enveloped our souls seemed not to have touched her. Was it possible she had even been in prison?

  “You do
not bear scars,” I said, after exchanging civilités. It was bad form to refer to the horrors of the past, but I felt somehow compelled.

  She slipped a foot out of a white silk slipper. “See these?” She touched three spots on her toes. “From rats.”

  I put my hand to my throat. I had seen what rats could do.

  “May I confide in you?” Her touch on my hand was light, caressing. “When I was taken to La Petite-Force, I was held in a room by eight guards. I was told to remove my clothes.” She recounted her tale without emotion. “I knew the danger I was in. The turnkey, a little man with a repulsive face, claimed authority. He ordered the men away. But then he demanded his due.”

  I looked at her—her clear white skin, her young flushed cheeks. She looked a child, an infinitely vulnerable but voluptuous urchin.

  “I used to believe in love,” she went on, “but no longer. Perhaps that is my scar.” She examined my eyes with surprise. “You weep? For me?”

  “Yet love makes great deeds possible,” I said. “I am told you refused on threat of death to sign a statement that would have compromised Deputy Tallien.”

  “I am cast in the role of a heroine. I enjoy the part, I confess. The lines, the costume, the applause have a certain charm—don’t you think?” She smiled, fanning herself. “Forgive me for indulging in theatrics. It is a weakness of mine. But I promise I will always be honest with you. It was not love that inspired my loyalty. It was simply that death ceased to frighten.” She closed her fan with a snap. “And that, my friend, is true freedom.”

  I heard the sound of a man’s voice in the entryway, footsteps. Tallien entered. Close behind him was Deputy Barras, his long sword trailing.

  “Rose!” Tallien exclaimed with a boyish grin. He embraced me.

  “How good to see you,” I said, unexpectedly moved.

  “You recall Deputy Barras?” Tallien asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “The two of you came to my salon on Rue Saint-Dominique, several years ago.”