The Secret Life of Josephine

by Carolly Erickson

I was at home in many sorts of company, for my experience of life had been uniquely varied. Thus I was able to listen patiently while an elderly general described his battles against the Turks, laugh at a joke about a choleric gourmand who died from eating too many strawberries, look properly offended (though I was not) when a rumor was spread about a titled nobleman who made love to his own valets and nod knowingly when someone remarked that the King of Denmark was often to be found visiting brothels.

  Hour after hour, I stood, elegantly attired (or so I believed, Bonaparte’s sour views to the contrary), listening politely to gossip, flattery, trivial remarks and the occasional veiled insult—and did not let my serene, benevolent smile fade.

  I dined on pigs’ heads and oysters, roast oxen stuffed with chicken, course after course of delicacies, always aware that my husband was far away, at the other end of the immensely long table, flirting and pawing the women he chose to sit near him.

  I was useful, I was decorous, I knew how to be a good hostess. Many people thought (or so they said) that I looked lovely—at least from a distance. Bonaparte no longer slept in my bedroom, except on very rare occasions, though he did come and scratch at my door when his stomach pains were strong. He no longer wanted me, but to an extent he needed me. Or perhaps he simply had not yet found the courage to discard me.

  “See here,” he said to me one morning after summoning me to his study, “I am being put in an awkward position. I am about to be elevated to the rank of Emperor of the French. At some point in the future I will have to marry a princess, someone of royal blood so that together we can produce a child to rule Europe. I do mean to rule Europe, surely you are aware of that.”

  “Everyone is aware of that, sir.”

  “I cannot yet bring myself to put you aside. God knows why—but I cannot. As long as you are obedient, and keep your distance from me, and accept the fact of our separation and my complete freedom, I am prepared to make you my empress. But it is only temporary. When the right time comes, you must give up your position and accept a divorce. Is that understood?”

  “I do not understand. Why don’t you simply divorce me now”—I could not help weeping as I said these words—”and find an empress later?”

  He reached for me and clutched me to him. “Because I cannot. I cannot. Not yet. Do not force me. Accept this bargain, and let me move on toward my destiny.”

  I crumpled, I wept, but at last I agreed. For however long it lasted, and however distasteful it might prove, I was willing to become Empress of the French.

  45

  OH WHAT A FUSS THEY MADE, those dreadful sisters-in-law of mine! How they tried to destroy my great day, the day of my coronation.

  For weeks beforehand they set siege to Bonaparte, one after the other coming in and haranguing him (I could hear them at it), shouting at him that he must not let his disgraceful, unfaithful wife stand beside him at the sacred ceremony and receive the holy oil from the pope himself!

  Why, it was tantamount to washing away all my sins, or so they said.

  Beautiful Paulette, now haughtier than ever because she had become the wife of an Italian prince (her first husband General Leclercq having died), fat Elisa, who was herself a princess of some little place in Italy and unbearable Caroline, who gave herself airs as the wife of General Murat (who was unfaithful to her) and who refused even to look at me, she was so full of disdain and disgust.

  And also there was Joseph’s wife Julie, from a rather humble family somewhere in the south of France, who was not a nasty person like the others but who was influenced by Joseph to insist on my being excluded from the ceremony.

  It was all so needlessly dramatic, and they were so malevolent to me! The only blessing was that my awful mother-in-law Letizia was not there. She stayed in Rome, away from it all, having told Bonaparte just how angry she was with him for not divorcing me years ago. To Letizia,

  Bonaparte’s political advancement was unimportant. What mattered was that he did not have a real family, with children of his own, and an obedient, subservient wife. A Corsican wife Letizia chose for him.

  At least she stayed out of our way on coronation day, though she did come to Paris soon afterwards and made her usual trouble.

  My coronation gown was beautiful. (A costume designer dressed us all, just as if we were characters in a play.) It was of white satin sparkling all over with gold and silver embroidery and diamonds. Tiny sprigs of lace stood up from the sleeves and neckline, creating a fairylike effect. Over the gown I wore a thick mantle of purple velvet, lined with ermine, that must have weighed a hundred pounds or more. The mantle had a long heavy train and when Paulette and the others were ordered to carry my train they exploded in fury.

  Wasn’t it shameful enough, Elisa told the grand chamberlain who was in charge of arranging the ceremony, that they had to walk behind me, they who were all respectable faithful wives, having to defer to a royal slut who everyone knew used to dance naked in all the drawing rooms of Paris. (Stories of my wild behavior during the days of the Directory were becoming more and more exaggerated with each passing year.)

  They could not be expected to debase themselves by actually bearing my train, my sisters-in-law said. No, they would not, and that was that.

  The chamberlain told the Master of Ceremonies, the Comte de Segur, who told Bonaparte, who got angry and shouted at his sisters and Julie. They gave in, and from then on held up my train in a vengeful way, maliciously tugging at it and pulling me off balance. They took out their anger on me at every opportunity, stepping on my feet, Paulette actually shoving me, at the rehearsals, glaring at me venomously and calling me “old hag.” They could hardly have been more childish, or more hateful. Bonaparte was particularly annoyed because just then, about a week before the coronation, he had acquired a new mistress and was spending his nights in her company.

  I knew the signs: he yawned all day long, rushed through all his paperwork and wore twice as much Dumarsay cologne as usual. His apartments reeked of musk, I could not cross the threshold of his study without choking and coughing.

  But this was not just any affair: he had seduced Eugene’s beautiful blond fiancee, Elizabeth de Vaudey leaving Eugene brokenhearted and dishonored.

  I tried to tell Eugene that this was a blow directed at me, not at Eugene, that Bonaparte often did what he could to hurt me through hurting my children, knowing how much I loved them. But Eugene was inconsolable— and disillusioned, for he had always been loyal to Bonaparte and he knew, as indeed we all did, that Bonaparte loved him like a son.

  It was a cold, cold day, coronation day, the trees heavy with thick white frost and a light snow falling outside Notre Dame, where a carefully chosen crowd waited, shivering, for the immense orchestra to play and the grand ceremony to begin. It was the first week of December, the chestnut vendors were warming their hands over their stoves outside the cathedral and there was a rim of ice at the edges of the Seine.

  When we got down from our carriage and went inside the entire congregation stood and began to clap, music swelling toward the vast ceiling of the ancient church. I smelled incense, woodsmoke and the heavy scent of Julie’s smelling salts (she had been feeling faint) as I took the arm of the handsome young valet appointed to escort me and began to walk down the center aisle, my slippers sinking deeply into the new purple carpeting.

  I walked with difficulty, clinging to my escort’s arm for support, for the unseen four women behind me, holding up my train, were constantly pulling me back. They had been instructed to walk in unison, but of course they did not; Elisa’s clumsy tread was out of step with Julie’s light brisk lope and Paulette, her attention on herself, went along at a pace all her own, as she had at the rehearsals, enjoying the attention her beauty attracted and dismissive of the task she had been assigned.

  My husband was very regal in his suit of heavy white satin embroidered in gold and with a long gold fringe. He wore a wreath of laurel leaves that gave him an antique air, and when he moved he glittered wit
h a thousand jewels. He looked sleepy, I thought, and kept yawning conspicuously throughout the high mass. I picked out Elizabeth de Vaudey among the onlookers, and Eugene—seated some distance from Elizabeth, looking somber—and Hortense, swathed in black wool against the extreme cold. She was about to give birth to her second child, indeed I wondered whether, with all the excitement and heightened solemnity of the coronation, she might go into labor right there in the church.

  Louis was not beside her. His mysterious illness had worsened, and I was told (for I did not see him, no one but Hortense did, and his physicians, and one other) that his skin had erupted into a mass of ugly stinking boils, even the skin inside his nose. He walked like a drunken man, I heard, he had no control of his balance and had to use two canes to get from his bedroom to his sitting room. It was said that his physicians treated him with arsenic and bismuth—the traditional medicines for what we called the “English disease,” the terrible sickness French soldiers catch from English whores.

  I was amazed that he was able to father children, given his condition. He kept Hortense completely away from me at their palace in Holland (Bonaparte had made Louis King of Holland) and did not even let her write me letters, so I knew very little of her life with him. Euphemia did manage to find out, however, through Hortense’s serving women, that Louis had told Hortense immediately after the marriage ceremony that he was in love with another woman and that this woman, a commoner, was living at the palace and was allowed into his presence frequently.

  I had much to be sad about on that coronation day, though I did my best to rise above it and also to ignore the freezing cold in the great cathedral. I noticed that Bonaparte was very pale throughout the three hours or so we were in church and wondered whether his stomach was hurting him, as it often did on solemn occasions. In his impatience he prodded the cardinal who stood at the pope’s right hand with his scepter, making the old man move faster as he prepared the holy oil for our anointing.

  We knelt and the oil was poured on our heads and hands. The two ornate pearl and diamond crowns laid before the high altar were blessed and then, in a sudden departure from the rehearsed order of the ceremony, Bonaparte got up and lifted the larger of the two crowns and, very slowly and with the greatest drama, lowered the crown onto his own head.

  The meaning of the gesture was not lost on the observers, or on the participants in the ceremony. Pope Pius VII had come all the way from Rome to place the crown on Bonaparte’s head, just as, a thousand years earlier, the pope had come from Rome to crown the great Charlemagne. Now Bonaparte was telling the world that he had no need of the Holy Father—that he was emperor in his own right and by his own power, not by the grace of God and the church.

  It was a very daring gesture, and a sacrilegious one. I felt ashamed, though by this point I was so very tired that all my feelings were dulled. I watched as Bonaparte picked up the smaller crown, my crown, and placed that too on his own head, then took it off and put it on me, over my diamond diadem, taking it on and off several times and adjusting it as if he were a milliner bringing a new hat to the palace for me to try.

  More sacrilege, I thought.

  Finally the climax of the ceremony arrived. Bonaparte and I began the long climb up the several dozen steps to where two golden thrones awaited us on a high dais at one end of the church. Here was where I needed my train-bearers, for the steps were steep and the ermine-lined velvet mantle felt like lead. A hush fell as we began our ascent—a symbolic ascent to power, to a transcendent height above the ranks of ordinary mortals. There were no sounds but the shuffling of feet and the occasional cough from the frozen congregation.

  The reek of Julie’s smelling salts was strong in my nostrils as I began the climb, but it soon grew faint, and as it did so, I felt the mantle grow heavy. I glanced back—and saw that none of my sisters-in-law was holding my train. They stood motionless at the foot of the wooden staircase, staring straight ahead of them. They did not lift a hand to help me. No one did.

  Bonaparte, his own train-bearers lifting his heavy purple mantle, had already begun to climb toward his throne and was too far above me for me to call out to him.

  I saw then with a terrible clarity that I was utterly and completely alone, and that unless I took off the heavy mantle I would be unable to ascend to my throne.

  Then, all at once, I felt the heavy weight taken from my shoulders and I heard a voice say, “Follow your husband, madam. I am right behind you.” Where had I heard that voice before? Confused but grateful, I took a step up, and then another, and realized with such relief that I almost felt weak at the knees that someone had come to my rescue.

  It was not until I reached the top of the dais and took my place beside Bonaparte on my golden throne that I saw who my rescuer was. It was Christian de Reverard, the candle-lighter from the ballroom at the Tuileries, in his most elegant livery of blue and gold. He smiled at me and bent to adjust my mantle so that it draped around my feet, and I smiled back.

  Then with a burst of trumpets and a thunder of kettledrums the orchestra began to play an anthem of triumph, and the crowd in the cathedral shouted “Vivat imperator in aeternam! May the Emperor live forever!”

  Standing to receive the acclaim, I held on to the side of the chair as wave after wave of sound passed over and around me, echoes reverberating throughout the vast room, a baptism of sound for the beginning of my husband’s imperial reign. He was now Napoleon I, and I, Rose Tascher of Martinique, was Empress Josephine, blushing, smiling, dizzy on my great height, and weeping from sheer relief.

  46

  THERE WAS A LEGLESS MAN who waited for the emperor outside the palace door nearly every day wearing a tattered regimental jacket and torn stained trousers. He was shabby woefully dirty lost and obviously greatly in want.

  Bonaparte had become accustomed to seeing him, and looked for him each day, disturbed when he was not there.

  “Here, old father, have a drink on me,” Bonaparte would say to the man, handing him a coin or two. Or, “Here, father, get yourself warm. Find yourself a room.”

  I always smiled at the man, for the sight of him tugged at me as it evidently did at Bonaparte, and when he saw my smile he usually nodded and touched his dirty black hat out of respect.

  He was there outside the main entrance to the Tuileries, he was there in Milan, when Bonaparte had himself crowned King of Italy, and again in Mainz after the wars started again and the newly formed Grande Armee won victories over the Austrians. He was outside the walls of Vienna when Bonaparte’s carriage passed by and in Paris again for the celebrating of Bonaparte’s great victory over the Prussians at Jena.

  Some days I did not see him, for in those earliest months after I was crowned empress I was often confined to my bed with the terrible headaches that seemed to get worse with each passing year. Traveling made my headaches more severe, and Bonaparte insisted that we travel constantly together, saying he did not trust me to be faithful if he left me on my own at my beloved home of Malmaison.

  My physicians dosed me with calomel and tried to raise blisters on the back of my neck to relieve my pain. But they could not remove the true cause of my headaches: the fear I felt. Fear of Bonaparte’s towering anger. Fear of poison. (Letizia came back from Rome with an Italian apothecary in tow, and everybody knew that apothecaries were renowned for their deadly poisons.) Fear that Joseph would once again try to arrange my death. And fear that the day was coming closer when Bonaparte would tell me I had to agree to a divorce—and with it, to want and loss.

  Meanwhile there was the legless man, our shadow, the very embodiment of want and loss, for he was evidently penniless and could not move. There he was each day, and each day Bonaparte greeted him kindly and I smiled at him, and then we moved on.

  Until one day he was not there.

  Bonaparte noticed his absence, raised his eyebrows and then walked on past the usual crowd of waiting onlookers and stepped into his carriage. I followed—now that Bonaparte was emperor, I was re
quired to walk some twenty paces behind him—and looked in vain for the legless man.

  I found myself brooding on his absence, and wishing I had an explanation for it. I sent Christian—who following my coronation had become a sort of general factotum for me, always at my side to help me when others failed to—to the palace gates to look for the shabby veteran, to see whether he was waiting there and to give him a coin. But Christian came back shaking his head, and I went to bed feeling oddly worried and dejected.

  For two days I continued to worry and fret, hoping that the poor man had come to no harm. On the third day, in the evening, as I sat alone at my embroidery frame near the windows in my small boudoir, I heard a voice from outside say, “Yeyette.”

  I turned toward the sound.

  I knew that voice—knew it almost better than my own.

  He leaned back against the stone wall just beyond my window, his arms folded, his gaze intense even across the distance that separated us. By the light of the torch fixed into the wall I could see that he was wearing the same tattered regimental jacket and torn stained trousers that I had seen on him every day and he held the same dirty black hat in his hands, but his legs were sound and his face was no longer the pitiable face of an old veteran but the face of love. “Donovan!”

  I opened the windows and ran out onto the terrace, heedless of the cold, forgetting, in my delight, to look for the spies Bonaparte paid to keep watch on me. In an instant I was in his arms, my mouth on his, that tasted of wine and spices. I felt my body fold into his as it always had, his strong arms around me, his dear, warm, unshaven cheek against mine.

  “Donovan, has it been you, all this time?”

  He laughed. “Of course!”

  “And you are not really hurt?”

  “Not a scratch. Although I did get trampled once or twice by all the people waiting to see you and your famous husband.”

  “Quick! Before we are seen!” I pulled him inside my boudoir and shut the windows, closing the velvet curtains. I led him into the first of the three small rooms adjacent to mine that Hortense had lived in before her marriage to Louis, rooms still kept for her use though Louis never allowed her to come to the palace any more. We sat in the darkened sitting room, holding each other, talking softly.