The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon's Bird of Paradise

by Carolly Erickson

  “I must sign these dispatches,” he said curtly. “You have ten minutes to dress yourself properly.”

  “I would rather throw myself off the roof.”

  “That would please us both, but I doubt if your children would be very happy. Now go away and do as you are told.”

  I hesitated, standing first on one foot, then the other. I was working up my courage to refuse his command.

  He had picked up his pen and, having dipped it in the large crystal inkpot, was wiping it on a cloth. He knew that I was still standing there. He sighed. Without looking at me he lifted the heavy inkpot and hurled it in my direction.

  It struck me in the stomach, making me cry out. Roustan and the two valets, who had witnessed all, made no move to aid me. Black ink flowed down my spotless white muslin gown and onto my new silver slippers. Soon the thick red and gold Turkish carpet under my feet was stained and ruined. Methodically Bonaparte went on signing the papers on his desk, blotting each as he signed it and setting it aside.

  I turned and ran, my slippers squelching under me, my eyes blinded with tears. I ran down the endless corridors, past the long benches where the grooms waited to be called to service, past the apartments where my attendants (ladies in waiting in all but name) were standing in small groups, ready to go in to the ball. Past Hortense’s rooms which were next to mine. Past the servants who guarded my door.

  Wailing like a child, I ran into Euphemia’s open arms.

  43

  AS SOON AS HORTENSE and I entered Foncier’s, and she began walking listlessly from one polished glass case to another, glancing dejectedly at the sparkling rings and pins and necklaces inside, I knew something was very wrong.

  Her engagement had been announced, we had been shopping for her trousseau for weeks and her apartment adjacent to mine in the Tuileries Palace was heaped with boxes of silken petticoats and gossamer-thin morning gowns, veils of English point lace and lengths of Turkish velvet and Indian muslin, magnificent necklaces of coral and pearls, plus all the gloves, stockings, muffs, cloaks, bonnets and soft cashmere shawls any girl could imagine having. Now she was in her favorite jeweler’s, Foncier’s, choosing a pair of earrings to wear at her engagement ball that night, and she looked more down-at-the-mouth than ever.

  I went to her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “What is it, my dearest girl?”

  “Oh, maman—” She turned her head away, trying to hide her tears. I nodded and smiled to Monsieur Foncier, who was watching our every move about the interior of his shop. “How can I be of service, madame?”

  “We will take these earrings,” I said, indicating a beautiful pair of matching yellow diamonds. “Please have them sent to the palace.”

  “Of course madame. And may I add my very best wishes to the bride-to-be.”

  I hurried out of the shop with Hortense in tow. Once we were in our carriage Hortense gave in to her sorrow and wept into her cream linen handkerchief, with its embroidered initial B, for Buonaparte.

  “Oh, maman, I am so miserable! I thought I could make myself accept him, perhaps even be happy with him. But I can’t! I just can’t!”

  I tapped on the roof of the carriage and the driver cracked his whip. With a lurch we were on our way, back to the palace.

  “It’s Andrew, isn’t it,” I said as we passed along the roadway

  She nodded. “He wrote to me. He is in Lyon, with his regiment. He says he will never marry, if he cannot marry me. He wishes me happiness. But I can’t have any happiness without him. I know that now.”

  Several months earlier, Hortense had agreed, with surprising alacrity as I thought, to marry Bonaparte’s brother Louis. Bonaparte had not approved of her sentimental friendship with the fair young Anglo-Frenchman Andrew Falke. Instead he wanted a dynastic marriage for Hortense, one that would ensure that she would have a child, or preferably several children, who would bear the blood of the Bonapartes and of the Beauharnais.

  “Since it is now clear that you and I will never have a child, Hortense must have one for us,” my husband told me bluntly. We, his family, were the country’s First Family. We were not royalty, yet we lived as though we were. We reigned—or rather, he reigned, and we obeyed him, as all his other subjects did. And, as he pointed out, a First Family needed a younger generation to carry on its name and inherit its power.

  Hence the plan to marry Louis Bonaparte to Hortense. Only now Hortense was yielding to the weight of her sorrow.

  “I have only seen Louis once, maman, on the night he proposed to me. But I know that there is something wrong with him. Why does he shut himself away in that chateau far from Paris? Why does he never come to see me or even write me? Why is his skin so dark and puffy and full of sores?”

  “You will see him tonight, at the ball.”

  Louis Bonaparte had become an enigma. Once a handsome boy, outwardly mannerly, who had distinguished himself fighting at his brother’s side in Italy, he had become a fleshy, sensuous man whose large troubled eyes darted here and there unnaturally. I had reason to know what lay beneath his courtly exterior; I remembered how he had fondled me and insulted me at the villa in Italy But I hoped he had outgrown such boyish callowness.

  Louis had not gone to war with Bonaparte in Egypt. Instead, Letizia and Joseph had decided to send him on a long tour of Sweden, Norway, the German lands, and finally Italy. When he returned from his many months abroad, he complained of severe pains in his joints and kept himself away from family gatherings, living like a recluse at the estate Bonaparte bought for him.

  “Do you know what he told me he does, maman?” Hortense asked me. “He writes stories. Stories about women who turn into demons. He says all women are really demons, no matter how sweet they seem to be.”

  “I wasn’t aware Louis was an author.” I wondered whether Fanny knew of his books. So many people scribbled in those days, the bookstalls of Paris were full of slim volumes of stories about ordinary men and women who encountered otherworldly perils and monstrous enemies. There was a craze for the fantastic, not only in books but in paintings and the theater.

  “Aren’t you fond of him at all?”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “Andrew is the only man I have ever loved. I only agreed to marry Louis because I thought the general—I mean the consul—would be kinder to you if I married his brother. I hate the way he treats you.”

  I said nothing, merely patted her hand. The last thing I wanted was to have Hortense know how I suffered under my husband’s increasing unkindness. I write “unkindness,” out of habit; I should write, “cruelty.”

  “And that awful woman! That Bellilotte! A tavern slut! How can you tolerate his bringing her here, to the palace?”

  I shrugged. “He rules here. I am merely part of the decoration.”

  “Maman!”

  “I do my best to tolerate what cannot be helped. Some men,” I went on, unsure of how much I ought to say to Hortense, who had been largely shielded from the sordid aspects of sex, “find low women particularly exciting. Their own highborn wives seem dull by comparison.”

  “I hope Louis is not like that.”

  “You and Louis have only one obligation to each other, and to France. You need to give the nation a baby boy. Two baby boys would be even better.”

  “I understand that.”

  “If it is any consolation to you, I imagine that once you have your sons, Bonaparte would allow you to live apart from Louis.”

  “But not with Andrew!” Once again her tears gushed forth.

  “Andrew will have a family of his own, and for the same reasons. He is heir to a fortune, a title, social position. He is a link between generations of Falkes.”

  We went on in silence, the carriage bouncing and rattling.

  “When I was your age, Hortense, I was in love with Scipion du Roure, as I have often told you. More than anything in the world I wanted to be his wife. And he was in love with me too—in that strong, infatuated way only young people
can know. But both Scipion and I understood, young as we were, that we would have to marry others. Others chosen for us by our elders.”

  “And it turned out badly for you, mother.”

  “Never say that. I have you and Eugene. I am very happy that marrying your father brought you to me. And Scipion is happy too. I have met his wife Julie many times. She is delightful, and we are friends. She has made him an excellent wife.”

  “But he doesn’t really love her, does he? Not the way I love Andrew.”

  “No. And both Scipion and Julie have had other loves. And, of course, now she is very ill. She hasn’t recovered from giving birth to her youngest child. It was a difficult birth, Scipion told me, an incompetent accoucheur.”

  Hortense was quiet. When she spoke her voice was very low.

  “I dread all that, you know. Giving birth. Having babies. So many women die. So many babies die.”

  “We must get Euphemia to make you a fetish. I wore a powerful fetish on the night you were born.”

  “I think a good midwife will make more of a difference.”

  “You will have both. And don’t forget. I was a midwife once. I helped to bring little Coco into the world.”

  “Coco, whose mother died.”

  What could one say? Hortense was right. Poor Selene had died, of exhaustion and fear and pain. I had been able to save one of Selene’s twins, but not the mother.

  Suddenly a terrible image flashed through my own tired, overstressed mind, an image of Hortense dying as Selene had died, following the birth of a child. What if her life were to be sacrificed for the sake of the dynasty my husband hoped to found? The thought angered me—yet made me feel guilty as well. If I had been able to have Bonaparte’s child, then Hortense would not need to marry Louis Bonaparte. Perhaps she could have married her beloved Andrew, though Bonaparte would surely have tried to prevent that.

  My thoughts were going in too many directions. I felt dizzy, and reached for the velvet rope that hung from the window, to steady myself. I forced myself to focus on the present moment, the swaying carriage, the shouting in the street outside our windows, and Hortense’s taut, pale little face, the face of a girl about to do something she dreaded, for my sake.

  44

  IF HORTENSE THOUGHT that by marrying Bonaparte’s brother Louis she would be sparing me mistreatment at the hands of my angry resentful husband, she was wrong.

  In fact, his punishing behavior toward me increased in the months following Hortense’s marriage.

  “Where do you think you’re going, little fool?” he would call out to me across a crowded assembly room, when he saw that I was leaving the gathering early. “You’ll stay till the end of the evening, like everyone else.”

  “Don’t bother telling her anything,” he would say with a laugh to anyone who tried to talk to me seriously. “She wouldn’t understand. You know the old saying, ‘Not much between the ears.’“

  He made cruel references to my being an old hag, to my being sterile, even to my relationship to Barras, which was long over. When we were alone he called me slut and whore and told me again and again how everyone at his court wanted him to get a new wife, a young and pretty one.

  “And I’m searching. Oh yes, I’m searching. I can feel it. I’m going into heat,” he would say, and then he would send for Bellilotte or some lewd actress or coarse woman from a brothel and shut himself in our bedroom with her for the rest of the night.

  That was only the beginning. After each of these encounters he would force me to listen while he described every detail of the woman’s body the size and form of the cleft between her thighs, the shape of her breasts, the curve of her hips, the smoothness or roughness of her skin, even the pimples on her private parts. Then he would tell me, sparing no detail, what course their lovemaking took, what noises she made, how he gave her pleasure and what she did to him in return.

  “See!” he would exclaim, throwing aside his jacket and shirt, “here is where she bit me with her sharp little teeth when she was in ecstasy. Ah, she was a rare one!”

  I held my ears but he pulled my hands roughly away, and sometimes bound them behind my back while he shouted about the pleasures he took, pleasures of every variety, some quite disgusting.

  I begged him to stop, but he went on and on, goading me until I stood up to him and spat out ugly accusations and insults.

  “It’s a wonder, given all your prowess with these delicious women, that there aren’t dozens of little Bonapartes running around. Tell me, how do you account for that?”

  It infuriated him to be reminded that he had never—so far as he knew—impregnated a woman. Had he had a bastard child he would have boasted of it night and day.

  “Could it be that the great Bonaparte is incapable of fathering a child? That it is not I who am at fault, but you?”

  Whenever I said this Bonaparte shouted and swore and, quite often, lifted up chairs and tables, heavy metal candelabra and delicate firescreens and flung them against the walls. When this happened I fled, and he shouted after me that he would divorce me.

  But then, late at night, when I had barricaded myself into Euphemia’s room (I always went there for safety, for Euphemia kept a big sharp cane knife under her mattress), I would hear a scratching at the door. I knew that sound. I would open the door and see my husband standing there, looking pale and dejected, a blanket wrapped around him.

  “I’m ill,” was all he had to say. I always let him in, clutching his stomach. He lay with his head in my lap and I rubbed his chest and belly while he groaned, eyes closed, and complained, “No doctors! No medicine! No doctors! No medicine!”

  I gave him oil of wintergreen to drink and eventually, after much rubbing of his stomach, I felt his tight muscles relax.

  Where is your fat Bellilotte now, I wanted to ask. Where are all your other pert little tavern maids and dirty serving girls? I’m the one you come to for consolation when you really need it. But then, I’m also the one you slap and strike and shout at.

  We went on this way, with Bonaparte behaving quite cruelly to me yet, in his weakest moments, clinging to me, while Hortense prepared to give birth to her first child.

  Ugly gossip said that it was Bonaparte’s child that Hortense was carrying, and not Louis’s. I lived under this humiliating cloud (though knowing very well the gossip was untrue) throughout the long months of her pregnancy, until at last, in the late fall of 1802, she gave birth to my grandson Napoleon-Louis-Charles.

  The tiny, red-faced baby boy squirming in his gilded crib was the heir to the Bonaparte succession. The hope of France, as my husband called him. He kissed Hortense and gave her a jeweled necklace with diamonds as large as pigeon’s eggs, a necklace that had once belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette.

  At the baptism, I was not given a prominent place. I stood at the back of the massed dignitaries, behind all the Buonaparte relations, behind the court officials and the marshals of the army and admirals in their gold braid and shining medals. I was expendable.

  I was expendable as far as the succession went—but I still had my uses.

  In a hundred ways, each day, I played my role as the First Consul’s wife with skill and grace—or so I was often told. When members of the vast palace staff came to me with questions (how many guests would be attending the supper in the Gallery of Diana? Should the ice blue Sevres china be used, or the burgundy with violet rims? Ought the fountain to flow with claret wine or another variety? Would the First Consul be requiring cherries beside his bed as usual, or should another fruit be substituted, since cherries often upset his stomach?), I invariably answered them in as practical a way as I could, using mostly common sense.

  Not only were there questions from the chamberlain and cooks to be answered, but I had to decide delicate issues of precedence (who was to walk into the dining room, and in what order) and dress (I decided on black coats and trousers for the men in preference to blue coats and scarlet vests at some point, I can’t remember exactly when). I ha
d to decide on the nature of the many repairs the palace needed, and to order the painting of walls defaced by revolutionary graffiti. Some of the hundreds of rooms had to be simply locked up, and ignored; they bore the stains and ugly scars of revolutionary violence, and it would have been far too costly to repair them all.

  Bonaparte expected me to bring back the elegance and manners of the old court, and so I taught the younger ladies to curtsey in the low, floor-sweeping manner used before the Revolution. I brought back the old dances, the felt-topped tables in the Salon des Jeux, even the low chairs called voyeuses, designed for spectators to straddle while observing the games of piquet and backgammon we played in that salon. Everything was as authentic as I could make it, given my usual laziness (yes, I admit it) and my limited knowledge of the old court. I had heard that Queen Marie Antoinette had gossamer-thin silken hangings in her boudoir, and so I ordered some just like them to adorn the walls. When one of the older chambermaids discovered, in a chest in the attic, a beautiful, much used quilt of velvet and taffeta and declared that this quilt had once covered the queen’s immense canopied bed, I had it carefully cleaned and put on my bed, though when I pointed it out to Bonaparte he called it an old rag and laughed at me for using it.

  There is one thing I have always been very good at; I remember people’s names. At our many soirees, teas and receptions I was able to introduce people of varied backgrounds to one another (for we had a wide variety of people at the consular court) without stumbling over their names or titles, and I often found myself at the center of a very miscellaneous cluster of people—for example, a venerable duchess from prerevolutionary days, an aging debauchee from Paul Barras’s circle, a brilliant young military officer with skintight breeches and a gleaming sword, and a titled Englishwoman of the kind Bonaparte called “cold and hideous,” who recalled visiting Voltaire at his estate at Ferney and admiring the long, swanlike necks of his chambermaids.