The Secret Life of Josephine

by Carolly Erickson

  Soon we reached a point where the coach could go no further. We hired mules at a way-station at the edge of a beautiful green valley and all our baggage was transferred onto the backs of the patient, surefooted beasts. I had never before ridden a mule. I was accustomed to horses, which, I soon discovered, had a very different gait.

  Donovan handed pistols to me and to Clodia.

  “The mountains are full of brigands,” he told me. “Don’t hesitate to use these.”

  I knew how to shoot a pistol. My father had taught me when I was a girl in Martinique, for Les Trois-Ilets where we lived was in an isolated rural area and the only protection we had was what we provided for ourselves, since the militias took days to gather and arm themselves and the nearest soldiers were in Fort-Royal many miles away.

  On the Alpine trails, however, pistols proved to be useless because of the near constant mists and fog and the icy wind at the summits. It was impossible to keep the powder dry and I doubt whether my pistol would have fired, had I used it.

  In any case, the danger in those mountains lay along the paths themselves more than in the menace of marauding thieves. I held my breath as my mule picked its way daintily along a path only inches wide. On one side of the narrow path lay a sheer rock wall, on the other was a sharp drop, thousands of feet down. I could not look, I had to shut my eyes and hold onto the saddle for dear life, letting out a small scream every time my mount stumbled over a loose rock or slipped when the going became wet from the relentless rain-laden winds.

  Though wrapped in blankets, I was frozen. I longed for heat, shelter, a crackling fire. My clothes were soaked and my hair plastered to my face under the sodden fur hat I wore. At night we slept on the bare floors of tiny wayside huts, the hardy muleteers sleeping in the open air. Each morning I awoke sore and stiff, demanding to know how much further it was until we were out of the mountain passes. I cursed Bonaparte for putting me through this hardship and wanted desperately for it to be over. But at the same time I knew that once we reached Italy my days and nights with Donovan would have to end, and I clung to him, taking solace from our closeness as I always did and wishing, at times, that I had gone to Martinique with him instead of marrying Bonaparte.

  On that subject Donovan said little.

  “Whether you are married or not matters nothing to us,” he told me. “What we are together is far stronger than any marriage vow.” It was the truth, and I knew it.

  When at last we came down out of the mountains and, after another week of travel, arrived at the Serbelloni Palace in Milan where Bonaparte had his headquarters, I was in awe. My friends and I admired Greek and Roman designs above all others, and sought to imitate them in our dress and the decor of our houses. Here at the graceful, rose-colored palace was true classical architecture come to life: the simple, noble columns and pediments, the polished marble walls and floors within, the fine bronze statues and paintings, all in a setting of blooming gardens and sparkling fountains.

  Bonaparte was away with his troops, preparing for yet another clash with the Austrians, but I made myself at home in the palace, fawned over by the staff and formally greeted by the local dignitaries and cheering crowds. Bonaparte was a hero to the Milanese: therefore I was a heroine, and they tired me out demanding audiences, holding banquets in my honor and making elaborate formal presentations to me. They gave me lengths of lace and jewels, bolts of silk and antique busts, casks of wine and flavorful pastries and cheeses.

  Donovan found lodgings for himself in the city and began doing business there. I glimpsed him at many of the public events held in my honor, standing at the back of crowds or sitting at distant banquet tables, far away from me yet with his eyes on me, a half smile on his lips.

  Bonaparte rode into the palace courtyard at a gallop one midmorning on his splendid white warhorse, shouting for the grooms and jumping down from the saddle to come looking for me. I was watching for him from a balcony, and went to quiet him as he ran up the marble steps, shouting my name.

  “Josephine! My sweet incomparable Josephine!”

  His embrace was suffocating—and endless. Even after he had kissed me a hundred times and spent hours with me in the old-fashioned canopied bed in his suite of rooms he could not stop grabbing me, feeling my breasts and hugging me to him. The servants and the officers of his entourage were embarrassed, I was embarrassed. Bonaparte was acting like a lovesick schoolboy, not like the conqueror of Italy.

  “Please, my love, let me go. Let me breathe!” Gently I pulled away from him, releasing myself from his clutching hands. His face fell, then turned petulant, then surly. He threw up his hands and stalked off, only to return to my side, contrite and affectionate, half an hour later.

  “Josephine, mi dolce amor, I could not stay away. If only you knew how I have suffered, all these months, without you.”

  He looked so pitiful that I almost laughed.

  “You really are amusing, my little Punchinello,” I said, making light of his exaggerated words.

  “You mock me, yet my sufferings are very real.”

  “As were mine, in going over those fearsome Alps.”

  He scoffed. “What are the Alps? A children’s mule-ride. A saddleromp. While I have gone for months with no sleep, leading my men into deadly battle, worried to death about their lack of coats and boots and musketballs and gun-carts. Working through the night on papers and dispatches. Visiting the bedsides of the dying. Calming disputes, preventing my men from looting, raping. Can you imagine what pain it gives me to have to shoot my own men, men who love me and who have followed me faithfully for months, because they are looting?

  “These were men I myself stole for, stripping boots and jackets off dead Austrian officers. Taking chickens and geese from farmyards so that they could fill their starving bellies. These were men I loved!”

  I wiped his tears and did what I could to comfort him. How could I not offer comfort and solace to a man who wore a large portrait of me on a chain around his neck, and showed it off proudly to his major-generals?

  He gave a ball at the palace to celebrate my arrival and I dressed carefully as I knew I would be the center of attention. In Paris I was a leader of fashion and I wanted to be in that position in Milan as well. I wore a gown designed by Leroy still one of the most sought-after dressmakers in Paris. The gown was of a fine Indian muslin, so fine that my flesh-colored tights could be seen through its soft loose folds and also my lack of a chemise. My muslin tunic had no sleeves; my arms were bare and I wore no gloves. Instead of jewelry I had garlands of flowers around my head and neck. I was Juno, Ceres, Helen of Troy brought to life.

  A loud collective gasp greeted me when I entered the ballroom—yet it was not, as I had expected, a gasp of wonder. It was a gasp of shock.

  Women stared at my legs, men at my near-naked bosom. A few of the older matrons pointedly left the ballroom, and did not return. Others covered their faces with their fans and retreated to the opposite end of the room from where I made my entrance. Following the gasp there was an awkward, prolonged silence.

  Then Bonaparte signaled the orchestra to play, and they began the “Minuet Milanaise” while I took my place beside him on a raised dais covered in burgundy velvet.

  I sensed that something was terribly wrong but could not imagine what. I was always admired. Why did I see no admiration in the faces of those highborn Italians gathered at the Serbelloni Palace? Was I too plump? Or a trifle too thin? (The Italian ladies were very generously built.) Were they envious, too overcome by the classical loveliness of my gown to react?

  The answer came in the Milanese newspapers the following day. Reading them, Bonaparte was outraged.

  “General Bonaparte gave a ball for his bride, the former Rose Beauharnais, courtesan in all but name and a living inspiration to lechery,” he read aloud as we ate our midday meal.

  “This Rose Beauharnais, who now calls herself Josephine Bonaparte, revealed far too much of herself for decency when she arrived at the ball wearing
a transparent nightgown in the antique style with flowery garlands like those of a bacchante. Bare arms and hands made her nakedness complete.”

  Bonaparte got up from the table and began walking rapidly around the enormous dining room, still reading.

  “We urge all decent ladies to avoid occasions where this immoral woman will be present, and to keep their daughters from following her extremely undesirable example.”

  He looked up from his reading and threw the paper into the fire. “How dare they!” he cried. “How dare they criticize my wife!”

  “How dare they criticize Leroy,” I said wryly, adding, “when they are so dowdy themselves?”

  “This newspaper will be silenced,” Bonaparte announced. “The editor will be thrown in jail.”

  But it was not enough to stifle the newspapers. The clergy of Milan condemned me from their pulpits, calling me a strumpet and a whore, a tool of the devil and a demon sent to corrupt the morals of all Godfearing Italians.

  Bonaparte, who had no particular regard for priests, shrugged off these attacks when they were reported to him, as he had shrugged off the gossip that reached him from Paris about me and Barras, saying he would send a message to the pope who would make certain they were stopped. Apparently the pope had less power—or less inclination to silence his clergy—than Bonaparte supposed, for the priests’ condemnation of me went on throughout my stay in Italy, until I began to feel like an interloper.

  It did not matter how many balls or banquets were held in my honor, or how many tributes were paid to the heroine of the hour. I was still shunned by the pious, and looked at with suspicion by everyone else. I saw the condemnation in the eyes of the women, the dread (combined, to be sure, with lechery) in the eyes of the men. I knew that I had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. What I didn’t realize was that a far harsher and more wounding judgment was yet to come.

  31

  THE FOLLOWING SUMMER Bonaparte rented a villa near Milan and it was there, one afternoon, that I met my Corsican mother-in-law Letizia for the first time.

  She came striding across the broad green lawn toward me, a frightening figure all in black, walking with vigor and speed though she had a slight limp and leaned on a wooden cane with an ebony handle. She looked like something out of a children’s picture book, a witch or demon, for the black widow’s cap she wore with its long black veil erased her humanity and made her appear to be a vengeful spirit emerging from the depths of hell.

  I was lounging in a garden chair, a light silk wrap around my shoulders, drowsing in the warm sun amid blooming carnations and forsythia, lilacs and rose bushes. I heard her loud, strident voice from some distance away.

  “Where is that woman! That shameful woman my Nabulio thinks he married! Where is she?”

  I sat up and pulled my silken wrap more tightly around me as she approached.

  “Is it you?” she demanded as she came closer. “Are you the one?” “Good afternoon, Madame Buonaparte,” I said, extending my hand, being careful to pronounce her name in the Italian fashion rather than using the French form Bonaparte now preferred.

  “Stand up, woman! You’re in the presence of your elder!” she commanded, throwing back her veil to reveal a thin, sharp-featured face with blazing black eyes, thick dark eyebrows and a mouth like Bonaparte’s, small and firmly set. Her complexion, unimproved by rouge, was yellowish and lined, though she was by no means elderly; her energy and vigor belied her forty-nine years.

  She did not take my hand.

  “You are a bad woman! You try to trick my Nabulio! You say, ‘I have baby’ You trick him!”

  She shook her fist at me, a veined and knotted fist that protruded from the tight-fitting sleeve of her black gown.

  “But you wait! You are wrong! You will see. You are wrong!”

  She did not wait for me to respond, but turned and stalked off the way she had come, poking her cane into the carefully manicured lawn as if she meant to wound it.

  That evening at supper the entire Buonaparte family gathered, each family member in turn greeted happily by my husband and then presented to me.

  “You have already met mama,” Nabulio said, wagging his finger at Letizia playfully. “Mama told me that she said angry things to you. That’s all over now. I want you to love each other, care for each other. Mama, you will be the grandmother of our children and grandmamas are always loving, not angry.”

  At Bonaparte’s further urging Letizia held out her hand to me, and I grasped it. Her skin was rough and very dry, the nails neglected. She did not grasp my hand in return, nor did she smile. Instead she gave the barest dignified nod.

  “My brother Joseph,” Bonaparte said, indicating a tall, handsome man of about thirty, who gave me a curt bow but, like his mother, did not smile. I looked questioningly at Bonaparte, who understood at once why.

  “He’s an attorney,” Bonaparte said with a grin. “He never smiles.”

  “He does, however, look after your best interests,” Joseph retorted. “And he has noted some irregularities in your wife’s business activities— and business partners.” Joseph raised one dark eyebrow quizzically.

  “Say what you mean, Giuseppe.”

  “I will speak plainly—when we are alone.”

  I felt a chill. What irregularities? And what did Joseph Buonaparte know about Donovan and me?

  Bonaparte glared at his brother, but said nothing further. At length he resumed his introductions.

  “Unfortunately my brother Lucien is not here. He disgraced himself rather badly, and cannot be included in the family circle just now.”

  “He married a whore,” Letizia said. “We hate whores.”

  Bonaparte presented me to a fat, dumpy girl with small, malevolentlooking eyes. She glowered at me, then curtseyed awkwardly, her weight making her clumsy.

  “Elisa,” Bonaparte said, then hurried on to a good-looking young man, attractively pale and slim, with a touching vulnerability in his expression.

  “Louis. Our intellectual. Our artist.”

  “Oh,” I responded as Louis, with surprising grace, took my outstretched hand and kissed it. At last, I thought. A civilized Buonaparte.

  “And this is our Paulette,” Bonaparte announced with pride, presenting a beautiful girl of about seventeen, who dropped a deep curtsey and then, when her brother’s back was turned, stuck out her tongue at me and whispered “We hate whores.”

  Yet you look like one, I thought, observing the girl’s deep decolletage, tastelessly extravagant gown and cheap sparkling necklace. She was saucy, brazen and challenging in the way she stood, breasts outthrust, a hand on one wide hip.

  “What was that?” Bonaparte turned again toward Paulette, who had resumed her pleasant demeanor.

  “Nothing, brother.”

  “My two gems,” he was saying. “My beloved Josephine and my precious Paulette. Are they not lovely?” He waited for sounds of agreement from his family, but hearing none, went on.

  “I want you two to be the best of friends. Paulette has many admirers and needs the guidance of an experienced older woman of the world.”

  “And as we all know, this Josephine of yours has belonged to the whole world.”

  Bonaparte came close to slapping his sister for her insulting remark, but stopped himself.

  “Control your tongue, Paulette,” he said in a menacing undertone. “I will have order in my family.”

  “You are not on the battlefield now, brother,” put in the fat sister Elisa. “We are not your soldiers, to be ordered around.”

  “That’s enough Elisa.” It was Letizia’s reprimand that silenced the girl.

  There were two more siblings to be introduced, a girl of about fifteen and a boy a few years younger—Hortense’s age, I thought.

  “My dearest Josephine, may I present my sister Caroline and my brother Jerome.”

  Caroline curtseyed and Jerome bowed. Both looked at me with much curiosity.

  “Is it true, Madame Josephine, that
you come from a place where dead people walk at night?” It was Jerome’s high, solemn voice. “So they say. I have never seen one.” “I hope I never do.”

  “Gesu!” cried Letizia and crossed herself rapidly.

  Bonaparte bent down and put his arm around his youngest brother. “Jerome, you must never speak of spirits in front of our mother. You know better.”

  “Our mother sees her dead babies,” Caroline guilelessly whispered to me. “She had five dead babies. She sees them in her dreams.”

  “Shall we dine?” Bonaparte’s hearty invitation put an end to the disturbing talk of ghosts. The meal was lavish, twelve courses and a delicious succession of local wines. The hired chef catered expertly to Bonaparte’s palate, remembering to include an entree of the small squids that were his favorite and for dessert, fresh cherries to be dipped in chocolate or brandy.

  It was an exceedingly tense and uncomfortable meal, despite the abundance and excellence of the food, and after it ended Bonaparte and Joseph were closeted in isolation for more than two hours in the room Bonaparte had chosen for his study When at last he emerged, and sought me out, he was pale. I thought, has he discovered that Donovan and I are lovers? Will he divorce me?

  “What do you know of the Bodin Company?” he asked me.

  “Only the name. My partner Monsieur de Gautier has mentioned it.”

  “My brother tells me that this Bodin Company has been defrauding my regiments, providing lame, sick horses instead of sound mounts to the cavalry and spoiled flour to the regimental bakers and inferior ramrods for the cavalry pistols, so brittle they crack and break the first time they are used. I was told they sell us port wine that is nothing but cheap red wine mixed with sawdust plus a few almonds and raisins for flavoring.”