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

by Carolly Erickson

  Christian shot one of the men in the chest and Edward and Donovan ran toward the other, falling on him and shouting. There was a scuffle, more shouting, and the Cossack went down under the blows from the butt of Edward’s musket.

  “Gather everything, quickly, before the others return.” We did as Donovan said and had the presence of mind to search the two Cossacks and the saddlebags of their horses. We found no food, but gold coins and half a dozen men’s wedding rings, presumably taken from previous victims. We resumed our way forward, muskets reloaded and ourselves vigilant. I kept my jewelry box near at hand.

  We saw no more Cossacks that day, but we did see horrid sights: our own cold and desperate men, plundering the bodies of their frozen comrades, and even taking food from the arms of the dying. Women, camp followers, abandoned by the roadside, sitting in desolate clusters. Broken drums, discarded breastplates, regimental banners dropped into the snow and never retrieved. Crows feasting on bodies of fallen men and horses. In the distance, at night, we heard the mournful howling of wolves.

  When I peered into the desolate whiteness during our long, hungry days my eyes burned. I blinked again and again but the burning persisted. The buzzing in my ears continued as well, and my poor black stumps of teeth throbbed. I felt a thousand tiny daggers being thrust into my gums, and a thousand more being thrust into my temples, whenever my headaches struck. Euphemia, who had her own aches and torments, rubbed my head and sang to me, but between the cold and my empty belly I was at times so miserable I wanted nothing more than to give up the struggle to live.

  There came a day when we had no food, nothing to give our poor thin horse and the very air seemed made of ice. This is over, I thought. This is the end. We cannot go on.

  My eyelids drooped. I was shivering uncontrollably. I tried to think but my mind was awhirl in confusion. Dizzy, I lay down and sank toward sleep.

  Whether it was a dream or an apparition, or whether I opened my eyes and saw what I thought I saw I will never know. Before me were men in torn blue uniforms, their bleeding feet wrapped in thin cloths, the blood seeping out and staining the cloths red, their faces wrapped in icestiffened beards, their hands empty. They shuffled past me with heads bowed, following one another in an endless procession, defenseless against the blowing snow.

  I saw them, or thought I did, and with a twitch and jerk of my muscles I opened my mouth to scream.

  But then I felt Donovan shaking me, telling me to wake up, and I thought, I don’t want to leave him. I felt his touch, and my eyes opened, and I tried with all my force to stay awake.

  63

  THE SLEIGHS WERE COVERED IN BELLS that jangled noisily. They came swiftly toward us, gliding with ease on their sharp runners over the snow and ice on the road, the horses’ hooves swathed in thick felt to prevent them from slipping.

  We counted three, then four, and finally six sleighs altogether, the last of them to reach us stopping so that those riding in them could hand out baskets and packages to the soldiers. Incredibly, we were given cheese and salt fish, coarse hard bread and brandy and hay for our horse.

  “Provisions from Prince Eugene, by order of His Imperial Highness the Emperor!” shouted the occupants of the sleighs as they handed out their bounty.

  We did our best to shout our joy, though our voices were hoarse, our throats scratched raw.

  “Prince Eugene!” I called out to the man nearest me. “Is he with you?”

  “No, madame, he is in Smolensk.”

  “I am his mother. We are in need of his help.”

  My words were greeted by an astonished silence. Then, all at once, the men in the sleigh jumped down and reached out to me, Donovan, Christian and the others, inviting us all to join them, offering us space to sit and spreading soft warm fur rugs over us and handing us the first fully cooked food we had eaten in many days, our cheese and salt fish and coarse bread given out to others.

  Many of the starving soldiers of the Grande Armee were fed that day as well, though their number had dwindled a great deal and some, too ill to eat, had to be abandoned by the roadside. Eugene had sent as much food as he could from the storehouses at Smolensk, our new companions told us, but the storehouses had been raided by the Russians and much of the food he had expected to find there was gone, along with all the live animals and reserve supplies of materiel.

  We were taken to Smolensk and the journey went quickly, as there were fresh post horses every fifteen miles (how very different from the stretch of road we had traveled in such cold and weariness!) and the sleigh seemed to fly rather than skim and bounce over the frozen ground. Once there, Eugene had us lodged in the palace he was using as his headquarters.

  He embraced me joyfully and I wept on his strong shoulder. We talked for hours, about the campaign, about Bonaparte and his erratic behavior, and his stubbornness in refusing to leave Moscow until it was too late to avoid the snow and ice. I said nothing to Eugene about my own private mission, of course; I let him think that I had come east in search of Donovan. That made sense to him, and I let the matter rest.

  “We have a long journey yet before us,” he said at length, suddenly grim, and looking far older than his thirty-one years. “The army cannot hope to reach France for six weeks at least, and I pray we find the supplies we need in Minsk, as there are none left here.

  ‘I’m sending you and your party southward,” he went on, addressing me, “to Milan, where my family is, by way of Kiev and Budapest. You will have all the provisions you need and, of course, a full military escort. Augusta and the children will be very glad to receive you in Milan, and you can stay as long as you like.”

  “Thank you, dear Eugene. I only wish you could come with us.”

  “My men need me,” was all he would say—and all he needed to say, for I could tell how strong was the bond between my son and the men he led. My pride in him was great, though all I had to do was look at him to feel a pang of guilt. I had helped to destroy that which meant so much to him. He belonged to Bonaparte almost as much as he belonged to me. The fate of the Grande Armee was bound to wound him, and that could not be helped.

  Three weeks later we were in Milan, where the air was balmy—at least it felt balmy to me—and the gardens were still green. I was able to spend Christmas with my grandchildren, and I patronized all the toymakers in Milan, or so it seemed, in buying dolls and toy soldiers, miniature horses on wheels and stuffed dogs and bears, not to mention the trunks of small gowns I ordered for my little namesake Josephine and her sister Eugenie, suits of purple velvet for Eugene’s only son Auguste, and a layette trimmed in gold lace for the baby Amelie, just a few months old.

  The children embraced me and kissed me, they sat on my lap and fed me bonbons, they took my hands and pulled me out into the garden to play blind-manVbluff. I ran across the brittle grass and chased them, and they shrieked with laughter and went to hide in the summer-house. We played tag in the wintry afternoon light, and Augusta, my loving daughter-in-law, chided me gently for tiring myself out.

  For in truth I was panting, and my chest hurt from a cough I could not seem to recover from. I told myself the cough would go away in time, and tried to ignore the look of concern in Augusta’s kind eyes. When Hortense arrived from St.-Leu with her boys the temptation to overstrain myself with the children grew greater. Donovan joined in, teaching the handsome Napoleon-Louis, who was nine years old and very rambunctious, to box and daring me to ride with him and the boy though the January winds were cold and I had to put on my Russian furs to keep warm.

  I was foolish, I admit. But oh how I needed family around me just then, after all that I had been through. They seemed very precious to me, those new Bonapartes with their open faces and small open hands, reaching for grandma. They would not know want, or fear. No revolution would come to darken their lives or threaten them. They would always live amid prosperity and affection, or so I fervently hoped as I hugged them to me, knowing full well that I could not predict their futures, no matter how often I
told their fortunes.

  We lingered in Milan for months, doing our best to ignore the war alarums that reached us from Austria and the German lands. Edward left us to return to his regiment, but Christian stayed, at my request, as I had grown quite dependent on him and we were fond of one another. Donovan and I were closer than we had ever been, walking arm in arm in the afternoons like an old married couple, family life flowing around us like a balm. I taught Josephine and Eugenie to embroider, and in the spring I planted ferns and palms and sugar cane in the gardens of the palace, telling the children about how I had grown up in the midst of high cane fields that always smelled sweet. We played card games and shopped for fine Milanese silks, and I did my best to fill my days with enjoyable pastimes, ignoring the weariness that nagged at me and the dark thoughts that sometimes pushed their way up through even the happiest of hours.

  Euphemia watched me closely, and read the changes in my expression and mood.

  “Is it your ears again, or your teeth?” she said, handing me a goblet of orangeflower water, my sovereign remedy.

  I had to smile. I could not keep anything from her.

  “Both,” I said. My ears buzzed dreadfully at times, as though all the cannon from the Russian battlefields were going off inside my head. And when that happened, my poor stumps of teeth felt the vibration from the buzz in my ears and began to ache.

  “If only we were back home I would get some nightingales’ tongues and crush them into a powder and feed them to you in a mango root on the night of the full moon. Then you would get better.”

  “And what of your sore knees, Euphemia? What would you do for them?”

  “Walk more. Sit in the sun. Visit the quimboiseurs in the marketplace.”

  Neither of us spoke Orgulon’s name, but we often alluded to him, and remembered him.

  One clear evening, just at dusk, I took the children out into the garden to show them the night sky. I wanted them to see Orgulon’s comet, the great light he had sent to guide me and protect me. But when I looked up into the vastness of the darkening sky I saw only the faint glow of sunset light, and the first bright stars. The great comet had faded, and was no more.

  64

  THE MILANESE WERE GETTING RESTLESS; our enclave of peace and security was about to be taken away.

  We were living in Eugene’s palace, and Eugene was Viceroy of Italy, the representative of French power, of Bonaparte’s power. But Bonaparte’s power was crumbling. One by one the realms he had conquered were breaking free, and the Milanese too wanted their freedom.

  I knew the signs of rebellion all too well: the bells clanging furiously at all hours of the night, the angry crowds massing in the streets, the additional guards being brought in to protect the palace. Austrian troops were threatening to invade from the north and would soon be swarming into the lands Eugene governed—though Eugene himself was absent. He was still far away, somewhere in the German territories or in France, we didn’t know for sure. Wherever he was, he was at Bonaparte’s side, as always, leading the French troops into battle, and ultimately losing, for it was clear that Bonaparte’s regime was very nearly at an end.

  Soon we would have to leave Milan, but where were we to go? I sent Hortense and her boys back to St.-Leu, and Augusta and her children went south, to a villa near Naples, out of the way of the rioting and fighting.

  A messenger arrived at the palace, Prince Tchernichev, sent to me by

  Tsar Alexander. Christian ushered him into the room where I was waiting for him and left us together.

  The prince wore the white uniform and green-plumed hat of an officer in the imperial guard. A tall, regal man with silver-blond hair, he had the air of one who had spent all his life in beautifully appointed drawing rooms, his every wish gratified by respectful servants. He spoke French with the practiced ease all Russian aristocrats seemed to command. I received him seated on a sofa, dressed in many yards of pale pink silk, artfully arranged, my dyed hair in a youthful upswept style, my mouth closed to hide my painful stumps of teeth.

  The prince came up to me, bowed, and kissed my hand.

  “Your Imperial Highness, I have been sent by my tsar on a matter of the utmost urgency”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “The armies of Tsar Alexander have overrun the Confederation of the Rhine and will soon invade France. Our Austrian allies will be in Milan within a few days. You must leave at once. Once the Milanese are liberated, they will not spare the palace—or anyone in it.”

  Try as I might to remain poised, I felt a shiver of fear at these words. I remembered only too well the massacres in Paris during the Revolution, the bloodstained walls of the Tuileries Palace when Bonaparte and I moved in.

  “His Imperial Majesty the tsar has asked me to offer you, in his name and at his invitation, the Goncharow Palace in St. Petersburg. You may stay there as long as you like, as his guest. A full staff of servants and all needed furnishings will be supplied, and His Imperial Majesty will be offering you a substantial pension.”

  He bowed once again, and I allowed his words to hang in the air, unanswered. We needed a refuge—but to return to Russia! I could not imagine it.

  “His Majesty is very kind, and very generous. I will consider his offer.”

  “I urge you, before deciding, to keep in mind what you would face should you decide to leave Milan for France. In France there is nothing but chaos and want. All the banks are failing. People are desperate to leave. There are food shortages, riots, lawlessness on every side. The new king, when he comes to power, will not command the loyalty of his subjects without the support of Russian soldiers. For some time to come, France will be a Russian country!”

  “I believe Emperor Napoleon has not yet been dethroned.”

  “He soon will be. When that day comes, you do not want to be in France, but in Russia.”

  I thanked the prince and went up to my suite of rooms, and out onto the stone terrace that overlooked the lake. I thought of my old house at Malmaison, and wondered who was caring for the lake there, and what had happened to my black swans and my lovely blue water lilies. My eyes filled with tears, and I realized that I was grieving, not only for the swans and the water lilies and my beautiful home, but for all the days and nights that I had spent there, sometimes in hope, often in dread.

  No more, no more! I cried out inside. Give me peace now, peace and safety and hope. But where is it to be found? Where is the one place on earth that I can retreat to, where the world cannot find me and force me to live, not as I choose, but as others dictate?

  I went to find Donovan. He was packing his trunk, preparing for a journey. For a moment I felt fear: was he leaving me again, on one of his secret errands? But his smile and quick kiss reassured me.

  “What did the Russian have to say?”

  “He offered me a palace in St. Petersburg, with servants and a pension.” “And what did you say?”

  “I said I would consider it—but I was only being polite. I could never go back to Russia. Not after all that happened there. I nearly lost you there.”

  He stopped what he was doing and took both my hands in his, looking into my eyes.

  “Yeyette, why don’t we go back to Martinique? We can put all this behind us, all this turmoil, all our sad memories. I want to leave behind all that is dark and doomed. I still own my plantation there, Bonne Fortune. Before I left I put Jules-sans-nez in charge, with a good crew of freed slaves. I told him that if he could sell enough cane at a high enough price to make a profit, I would give him half the land. Let’s go and see if he’s succeeded.”

  I felt a glow at his words. Martinique! My old home! I grinned. “Euphemia would be delighted,” I said.

  “And you, my love? Would it delight you, my empress?” I fell into his arms, overjoyed and relieved. “Yes, yes,” I said again and again, my voice so choked that I coughed, and for a time, could not stop coughing, so that Euphemia had to give me the strong syrup that made me sleepy.

  I went to my room t
o lie down, asking Donovan to convey my regrets to Prince Tchernichev and his imperial master and to say that I felt I must decline their generous offer. He sat on the bed beside me.

  “It is settled then,” Donovan said, suddenly brisk in his tone. “We’ll leave tomorrow for Genoa. I know I can find an English ship captain there who will take us to Lisbon, and from Lisbon we can probably go on to Bristol, and from there to Martinique.”

  “Donovan,” I said sleepily, “before we go, I would like to visit Malmaison one last time.”

  “Are you sure? It is so far out of our way.”

  “I want to see my black swans again,” I told him, my voice trailing off as I drowsed.

  “Very well, if you must. I will write to Clodia, and tell her to get the house ready for us.” His words roused me.

  “Clodia! My scheming, talebearing little maid from years ago?”

  “The same. I sent her to Martinique to get her out of the way, as she was causing so much trouble for us. I made her my housekeeper at Bonne Fortune. She has been quite happy there. She married and has a family of her own now.”

  “And all this time I thought you had her killed!”

  Donovan shook his head in wonderment. “What you must think of me! How could you imagine that?”

  “She disappeared. When Bonaparte made people disappear, it always meant they were dead. I got used to expecting that. Forgive me.”

  “It was my fault. I should have told you.”

  I wanted, at that moment, to remark that life is full of mysteries, but I was too tired. I let my eyelids droop and heard the soft tread of Donovan s boots on the tile floor as he quietly left the room.

  65

  WE HAVE COME BACK TO MALMAISON, and I am to meet the king in twelve days.

  Twelve days in which to have my new pink crepe gown made, and learn the etiquette of the new court, and find better medicine for this terrible cough which goes on and on and gives me sharp pains in my chest and throat.