The General's Mistress

by Jo Graham

  Ida St. Elme

  Isabella did better than answering. She sent that she should like to meet me for lunch in the Palais-Royal three days later. I agreed, of course.

  It was March 26, 1800, by the old calendar, the one people still thought in and nobody used. I had lost track of time so thoroughly that I’d imagined it could be no later than early March.

  I had trouble finding anything to wear. Where had most of my clothes gone? And why was everything dirty? I couldn’t remember the last time I had sent anything to a laundress. The only clothes that weren’t worn or filthy were Charles’s.

  I dug out a pair of dove-gray pants, a ruffled shirt with half a handspan of lace on the sleeves, a subdued gray waistcoat, and a dark-blue coat, then put my hair back and looked in the mirror. Not bad. Too thin and too peaked, but not bad. I still looked like Charles. And best to be Charles anyway. None of this had ever happened to Charles. Charles was a man, and he was strong.

  He raised an eyebrow and gave me a half smile. “Wages of sin, my dear,” he said sardonically.

  Isabella grinned when she saw Charles come into the café. “My goodness!” she said. “I had no idea I would be lunching with such a handsome gentleman!” Isabella looked like a cat in cream, sleek and well groomed, with perfectly painted fingernails. Her dress was new and, if not the most expensive material, it was well cut and fashionable. Her dark hair was swept up with a pair of tortoiseshell pins that she hadn’t had last year.

  “Charmed,” I said, bending over her hand and smiling. Charles must pay her due attention. I sat down across from her.

  “Sébastien, is it?” she asked.

  “Something like,” I said. “Charles van Aylde. I have decided to be entirely Charles this year. You’re looking well. New man?”

  Isabella laughed. “Go right to the point, don’t you? Yes, a new man. He’s an artillery colonel, Auguste Thibault. He’s paying my bills now, and staying with me in a nice little third-floor apartment in Grenelle.”

  My heart sank a little. “That sounds nice,” I said. “I take it you’re not planning on touring the provinces this summer, then?”

  “No,” Isabella said. “I’ve got something better. Auguste is a lodge brother of General Lannes, and he’s been assigned to Lannes’s corps of the Army of Italy, under Bonaparte. I’m putting together a troupe to follow along with the baggage train. We’re going to Italy. Want to come as second girl?”

  “Italy?” For a moment I was stunned. Italy. Where I had grown up, had gotten what Cousin Louisa described as an ideal education for an adventuress. Italy. Where I had been happy. I did not need to consult my cards for this, dug out of the trash that Moreau had thrown out and carefully kept in their bag. I knew a good thing when I heard it.

  “Well?” Isabella asked. “Are you interested?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I’m yours whenever you’re ready to go.”

  We left on a gorgeous morning at the beginning of May, a company of six with a wagon and two servants. I didn’t ride in the wagon. Instead, I sold everything left of my finery and things in Paris and bought a horse. He was a fifteen-year-old gelding, a bit slow and short of wind, but he was sound enough. I named him Nestor, and we got along fine.

  I was Charles on the road. Of course, the company and the servants knew that I was their second girl, but none of the fellow travelers met at inns or on the road did. It seemed safer that way, since the leading man and the second man were both rather timid sorts, and the second man was at least sixty and prone to drunkenness. He was a thoroughgoing professional on the stage, but offstage he was insensible most of the time. I didn’t ask what misfortune had put him back on the road at this point in his life. It seemed rude.

  Charles didn’t have a sword, but I talked the second man into loaning me one of his pair of horse pistols. It was safer to be armed, under the circumstances.

  We made slow time across France. The supply columns for the Army of Italy stretched seemingly endlessly, and in the glorious spring weather it seemed that everyone in France must be on the way to Italy. Sutlers, farriers and horse copers, cantinières, and replacement troops all crowded the roads.

  While I had been paying no attention, the Directory had given way to the Consulate, in which a triumvirate of worthy men held executive power rather than the band of Directors. Foremost among them was Bonaparte.

  What Moreau thought of this, I could only imagine. But perhaps he had his hands full. One of the first acts of the Consulate had been to restore him to his overall command on the Rhine. He now commanded the largest French army, with more than 120,000 men facing the Austrians. The First Consul, Bonaparte, preferred to take on the supposedly softer wing of the Austrian army in Italy, aided by the men to whom Moreau had referred once to me as a band of undernourished schoolboys and grimy old grumblers.

  Presumably the latter had referred to General Masséna, who was presently holding the city of Genoa against a besieging force twice the size of his. Everyone said that eventually he must surrender. The question was how long they would hold, and whether Bonaparte’s army would reach Italy before they were lost. Everyone wondered. In each inn all across France, men talked of nothing else. Not once did I hear the name Moreau. Victor might have the greater command, I thought, but once again he is not making himself loved.

  Traveling in what was essentially one giant baggage train, with papers signed by General Lannes, we met little trouble.

  As we rumbled along with our wagon, Nestor keeping pace beside it, I felt a stirring. Nestor was strong and solid, and days in the sun and good plain food made me feel myself again. Or at least made me feel Charles. He was less cynical than previously, more willing to be charming, more willing to lean from the saddle and pay elaborate compliments over Isabella’s hand while the Angora cat spat at him. I liked being Charles. He could rise to any occasion, get out of any trouble with a twist of a smile and the right word, a golden trickster who feared nothing. He was the master of his own fate.

  Unwillingly, I felt my spirits lift. How could I not, with the open road in front of me and the glorious sun of spring in the heavens, with all the trees in bloom and the shadow of the Alps growing closer every day? I had not seen those peaks since I had come this way as a child. Snow-covered, they glittered like a promise, closer each day. Soon we were in the foothills. Cloaks came out of our packs.

  We stopped at an inn before we began the ascent. Isabella had us sing for our supper, playing Blue Beard before the fire in the main room. I sang the ghost of his wife, and it was eerie and strange, coming in a dusky alto from what appeared to be a slender young man. It was there we heard that Bonaparte had beaten the Austrians at Marengo.

  The next day we started up the pass. The weather was good and it was June. The army had crossed a month earlier in a howling storm. In the gullies we could see what was left of the carcasses of their foundered mules and horses. Now the rocks were studded with alpine flowers.

  With each step, something lifted. I was young and I was free, like the hawks that soared on the updrafts over the valleys. Once, I thought I saw an eagle.

  What did it matter if I was poor again, and if I had no idea what awaited us in Italy? I had a horse and a pistol at my side, my health and friends. If I had no lover, so much the better. Perhaps I would not need one.

  Or perhaps even now the dice were rolling, the cards turning. That night, encamped on the mountain beside a small fire, I took out my deck and felt them in my hands, cool and smooth as silk. Wordlessly, I laid them out. The Chariot gleamed gold and white, the Emperor’s red cloak billowing soundlessly behind him. The Star gleamed in the heavens. The Sword Queen held her blade before her while the tempest raged about her, grip foremost, like a crusader bending to kiss the cruciform hilt. Six staves entwined, gold and blue.

  Isabella came and sat down opposite me wordlessly, her pink shawl bundled tightly around her shoulders.

  “What is next?” I asked, and turned the card.

  The Emperor
sat enthroned, the orb of the world in his hands.

  “What do your cards say will happen in Italy?” Isabella asked.

  “Battles,” I said. “I didn’t need the cards to say that. Masséna has surrendered Genoa, but Bonaparte and Lannes are on the move. Battles go without saying.”

  “Masséna surrendered?”

  I nodded. “I heard it from a man going the other way, a horse coper going back to get more remounts. He said they got terms and surrendered the city, but took the wounded out and paroled everyone else.”

  “I wonder if Auguste is all right,” she said.

  “I’m sure he is,” I said. “He’s with Lannes, after all.”

  “You can win victories and still die,” Isabella said.

  The next day we saw the carts. We had just begun the descent and they were on the way up, carts drawn by donkeys on the steep path. The little beasts put their heads down, but they kept moving slowly upward.

  I rode down on Nestor, moving in reverse along the column, looking for the easiest place to get our wagon down.

  Some of the men in the carts were sitting up, joking and calling out. Isabella appeared, walking beside the wagon in case of a runaway, and her beauty seemed to make a great hit. She returned their calls gaily, blowing kisses and promising them tickets someday.

  I stopped to wait for her. “Carts,” I said.

  A donkey cart toiled slowly up beside me and halted. Isabella was standing beside the cart just ahead, letting a gallant with one arm kiss her hand, her shawl stirring in the fresh breeze. I looked down.

  A young man was lying in the bottom of the cart, a cloak half thrown around him. His long black hair was matted with sweat and had escaped from its queue to lie across his shoulders. His skin was the faded, sick color of olive skin pinched by the starvation of a siege, then bled white from a wound. I stopped. I dismounted without hardly being aware of it.

  Lying in a cart like this, a cloak half across him, long black hair . . .

  His head moved a little from side to side in some fever dream, and I let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding.

  “The wounded from Genoa,” Isabella said, coming up beside me.

  He had fine, strong lines to his face, a face I should have known, so like was it to some other. No doubt his eyes would be dark, if he opened them.

  The column started moving again, the patient donkeys plodding forward.

  Isabella reached for my hand. “Come on, Charles,” she said. “Let’s lead Nestor and give him a little rest going down.”

  I nodded. The cart moved past. What was I to do? Follow it for no reason at all? Because something in the face of a stranger filled me with a sorrow I could not name?

  We reached Milan a few days behind our troops, some of whom had returned to the city following the twin victories of Marengo and Montebello. The Austrians had been soundly defeated and were in full retreat.

  Isabella had us ready to perform inside of a day. We opened in the camp with The Comical Romance and moved on to Alexander in Asia, a special double program—three francs for both shows.

  The audience was beyond enthusiastic. When I let down my hair and opened my shirt to show Sébastienne’s camisole, the men cheered and roared with such enthusiasm one would have thought that I was Venus rising from the waves. And that was the camp show. We were to have the finest theater in Milan the next night to perform for the officers.

  Isabella ran about madly, producer and leading lady at the same time. “We need a prologue,” she said. “Something appropriate and martial. Something flattering but not sycophantic. If I write it, can you learn it by tonight?”

  “If it’s not long,” I said. “Twenty or thirty lines I can do. Fifty and I’ll flub.”

  It was nearly fifty. And it sounded like it had been written on the fly, which of course it had.

  I was to wear a filmy white dress meant to resemble classical drapery, and to represent “the Spirit of Triumph, or Fama Who Rests Her Hands Upon Laurel’d Heads.” I was to carry a laurel wreath, which took most of the day to locate. Isabella could not be convinced that such wreaths were not for sale on every street corner in Italy, regardless of ancient Roman triumphs. Fortunately, the Italian I had spoken as a child came back to me, and I managed to find someone to sell me enough leafy branches to make into a circlet. Then I had to learn my lines.

  “Fama volat,” I began. When I stood at last onstage in Milan’s Opera House, looking up at the tiered boxes in scarlet and gold, a frisson ran through me. I could not make out any faces. The lights in my face were too bright. But here and there I could see the telltale glitter of braid, of diamonds, of bright decorations. I thought the Consular box must be to the right, so I addressed myself there:

  “Fama volat. So slaves spoke to Caesar, reminding him

  In his glory that Time itself does not stand still

  That the procession of years renders glory itself faded.

  But still there is that which remains

  Virtue and manhood, courage and destiny

  Triumphant over the centuries themselves

  That men might know and emulate Caesar.”

  A stillness came over the theater.

  “Thus spoke the Sibyl of Cumae

  And thus spoke Caesar’s slaves

  That all glory is fleeting

  But virtue and love endure.”

  The glitter in the dark. Someone had moved, but how I could not see. I looked out into imagined eyes, but all I could see were the lights.

  “Fortune’s Darling, know

  that Time himself cannot tarnish

  the wreath that rests upon your brow

  though Fame pass and laurel wither.

  As Achilles or Alexander

  your name shall endure.”

  I sank to my knees gracefully, my dress puddling around me in soft folds.

  “Take then this wreath

  this tribute of my hands

  Caesar, I lay this at your feet.”

  I extended the wreath I had made and laid it on the stage, my head bent in submission, sweetly and sensually, as Victor had taught me, holding the pose kneeling in the silence.

  One clap began it, then the applause was thunderous. Fame knelt before the First Consul, her blond hair spread across her shoulders and her hands stretched in surrender, and her eyes were full of tears.

  I barely had time to get backstage and change for Sébastien. I had no idea what people were saying. So it was a surprise to come off at the interval to find a solemn aide-de-camp in the dressing room.

  Isabella had come in too, and he looked from one of us to the other. “Which of you ladies is Madame St. Elme? The Prologue?”

  I exchanged a look with Isabella. I hoped her poetry hadn’t been badly received. I stepped forward. “I am Madame St. Elme,” I said evenly.

  “The First Consul would like to see you after the performance,” he said. “He would like you to join him for a private supper.”

  I heard the hiss of Isabella’s indrawn breath.

  My voice was entirely steady. “Please tell the First Consul that I would be delighted.”

  The First Consul

  I hardly recalled the second half of the performance. I tried to keep my eyes from straying to where I thought the Consular box must be, despite the fact I could see nothing. Afterward, I ran back to my dressing room to change. Isabella came in hot on my heels. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Isabella, this should be you.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said, grabbing my best dress and tossing it over my head. “Can you see me explaining to the First Consul that I can’t take supper with him because I prefer an artillery colonel?”

  I stuck my head out the top of the dress. “Do you really?”

  Isabella started doing up my buttons. “I do. Auguste isn’t so much to look at, but . . . I’d hate to lose him. And I can’t expect him not to yield me to the First Consul, if I had his eye. Or not to feel like I’d set my cap for better and been disap
pointed if I didn’t keep it.”

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I seemed awfully pale in white satin. I wished I still had the lovely blue dress I’d had when I was with Moreau. “I’m not sure I want the First Consul either,” I said. “I haven’t had a lover since . . .”

  Since I’d ended the child, I thought. No man had touched me. And being Charles had not exactly encouraged male admirers.

  Isabella knew what I meant. She began to do up my hair with quick, deft fingers. “It’s not as though you’d decided on a life of celibacy.”

  “No,” I said slowly. The way she was putting it up was all classical simplicity, better with no time for curlpapers. “But I hadn’t expected to go back to it when . . .”

  “The stakes were so high?” Isabella raised an eyebrow at me over my shoulder in the mirror.

  I nodded. “Too high.”

  “Who knows when you might catch his eye again? And if you refuse or say you’re ill . . .” She spread her hands.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not just me. It’s the company. We all need this job, and we could all use the patronage. And I need the money. As much as is forthcoming. It’s just that . . .”

  “What?”

  I picked up my lip brush and wetted it with paint. “Moreau detested him. He said Bonaparte was an ambitious, boorish social climber with no graces, that he stormed women as though they were cities under siege. I really don’t want that right now. And while I hope I can do it if I need to, I don’t know if I can make it look good. Isabella, I really don’t!”

  There was a knock on the door. Isabella’s eyes met mine. “You’ll be fine,” she said, and squeezed my hand.

  The splendidly dressed aide was at the door. “Madame St. Elme? The First Consul has sent a carriage. Would you accompany me?”

  Once I would have thrilled at this. I would have played out all my schoolgirl fantasies of being Madame de Pompadour or a daring spy hurrying away to a secret rendezvous with the king. Now I wished I had different shoes. And that the rainstorm that was coming would not break before I got inside, and that it would not reduce my hair to draggles. I wished I could go have dinner with the company and go to bed alone. Looking out the window at the lowering clouds over Milan, I shook myself. I must get into a better frame of mind. I must get in control. And Charles was no use to me. This was beyond his ken.