Two Empresses

by Brandy Purdy

  It was glowing a delicate buttery-yellow gold in the afternoon sun, its gray slate roof touched with the blue of the sky, and I thought it was the most beautiful house in the world. I knew it would give joy to anyone who lived there. I imagined writing to Mama in Martinique and asking her to send me seeds and cuttings of the tropical plants that grew there. I would hire a skilled gardener to play nursemaid and nurture them along in the hothouse I would erect for this purpose. My guests would be amazed to see them. I would become famous again, for my graciousness and hospitality, my rare plants, and my beautiful home, and everyone would wheedle and vie for invitations.

  I was terrified, but I can’t honestly say that I was surprised. I, as Alexandre’s wife, was guilty by association, though I had never socialized or reconciled with him. A legal separation and emotional estrangement were not enough to save me; I had basked in the sun of his fame. Alexandre had been a vicomte and I his vicomtesse, his father was a marquis, and my father had, in his childhood, served as a page to Louis XV at Versailles. It meant nothing that we had cast our titles aside and now called ourselves “Citizen” and “Citizeness.”

  No one cared now that Alexandre had served his country well, in both army and Assembly, or that I, abiding by revolutionary law, which ordained that each child must be instructed in a useful trade, had apprenticed my son to a carpenter and my daughter to a dressmaker and none of us was ever seen without the tricolor prominently displayed upon our person. My pug even wore a tricolor collar. I sent my daughter to her lessons with tricolor ribbons in her hair, and my son wore a sash. I even bathed with red, white, and blue ribbons in my hair and a tricolor rosette always bloomed between my breasts on my sheer white muslin nightgowns. I can truthfully say I was never naked; I always had the tricolor on me. No one could ever take me by surprise and catch me without it. But none of that mattered.

  We were damned by our past pretensions. There would be no mercy for us. It was only a matter of time, of playing that waiting game I had learned so well in Martinique where the drums beat incessantly and the slaves congregated outside with the evilest intentions. I was to join Alexandre at Les Carmes and wait to be called to make my curtsy before Madame Guillotine. In the meantime, I could only hope and pray for a miracle.

  Careful not to wake them, I kissed my children good-bye and left them to the care of their governess, Mademoiselle Lannoy. As I embraced her, I whispered in her ear where my money box was hidden. She wept and pleaded with me to let her wake Hortense and Eugène, so that they might have the consolation of seeing me one last time. I refused, telling her, “I could not bear to see them cry. It would deprive me of all strength.”

  I took Aimee’s portrait from about my neck and pressed it into Mademoiselle Lannoy’s hand as a gift for Hortense, who always delighted in my tales of the two little girls sneaking out to see the voodoo queen who foretold a royal future for each. Time and again Hortense had begged me to tell her that story. She always refused to believe that Aimee was dead, her golden beauty lost to the deep, dark sea, insisting that she was alive and following her own road to a crown just like me. I wished that I could believe that too.

  Fortune whimpered and tried to follow me. I picked him up tenderly, petted him and kissed his little pug nose, then entrusted him too to the safekeeping of Mademoiselle Lannoy.

  As I followed the guards out the front door I hurriedly threw a cloak over my white muslin gown. The bold tricolor sash I wore cinched tightly about my waist and the red, white, and blue rosettes floating in the waves of my free-flowing black hair failed to persuade them that I was a good daughter of the Revolution, loyal and true. I had been foolish to think that dressing the part would save me.

  * * *

  That night I entered Hell, the dwelling place of the desperate and the damned, and became one of them. Three hundred lost souls were crammed into what had once been the abode of Christ’s earthly brides. Rats darted across my path and I shied back and instinctively turned to run, but my stone-faced guards pushed me onward. I gagged repeatedly at the stench of unwashed bodies and human waste. It was so strong and foul that my eyes began to stream. The gray stone walls and the floor beneath my feet were thick with a foul-smelling slime, and in the dim light of the flickering torches—mounted high so no prisoner’s hand could touch them—I bumped into a pail overflowing with piss. The white ruffled hem of my dress was stained yellow and brown before I even entered the prison proper.

  There they were, the aristocratic enemies of France, damned because of who they were or who they knew, sitting on piles of straw, weak and wretched, in filthy flea-ridden, stinking dishabille but determined to die with their dignity intact. Every eye turned to look at me, acknowledging and accepting me with almost imperceptible nods as one of them. Rats and black beetles scuttled amongst them, burrowing into the straw or the folds of the women’s skirts, but they had become accustomed and, for the most part, ignored them; precious few, I saw, had the spirit to resent and squash or slap away such vermin.

  Some of the women were fully dressed; they sat with their backs as straight as though an iron rod had been inserted down their spines, hands folded primly in their laps, eyes staring straight ahead. Others wore only soiled and grimy shifts or flimsy nightgowns, feet bare or in stained satin mules, some trimmed with fur or wisps of feathers. Some wore their hair high and proudly pinned; others let it fall down in snarls and greasy hanks. Some, surrendering to the inevitable, had cropped their hair to save themselves the indignity of submitting to the executioner’s shears and to make the lice easier to manage. There were men in full military dress who retained their proud, erect carriage, white-wigged courtiers in satin breeches who had remained steadfast in their devotion to their sovereigns, and others less formal in their shirtsleeves. Some lounged hopeless and empty eyed with their backs slumped against the slime-seeping walls, feet bare, clad only in breeches with their shirts open and untucked, faces unshaven, and their heads wrapped in handkerchiefs to try to keep out the lice. Amongst this last pathetic lot, I found Alexandre.

  Wordlessly, he held out his hand to me. It was the first time we had touched since our bodies merged to make Hortense. I was surprisingly grateful and sank down next to him, forgetting for one foolish moment the slime-slick wall behind me, wincing as my back instantly absorbed its cold, rank wetness. Before I had lived one full day in prison my white dress would be dark with filth. I shivered, the guards had taken my cloak, and Alexandre put his arm around me. Neither of us spoke a single word. It was funny, in a peculiar, sad way, I thought. Words had always been so important to Alexandre; he had used them to display his superiority and to criticize, scorn, admonish, belittle me and blacken my name, and his stirring speeches had made him the darling of the Revolution, but now there were no words between us. We had no need of them.

  I leaned into him, more grateful for a man’s touch than I had ever been. I needed him, and he apparently, at long last, needed, or at least wanted, me. In the darkest hours of the night, when the lights had burned down low, I felt his body roll onto mine. All around me, others did the same. Life was slipping fast through our fingers and we were all desperate and determined to grasp and wring each drop of passion and pleasure remaining out of it.

  We coupled with the frenzy of animals, grunting shamelessly and clawing at each other’s hair and backs as we rutted, not caring if our nakedness was exposed or who saw us. It was the best way we knew to remind ourselves that we were still alive and were still capable of feeling more than desolation and fear. And there was always a chance that as a result of these loveless acts of love a few ladies, maybe even me, might obtain a precious reprieve—pregnancy guaranteed a stay of execution, though women had been known to go directly from childbed to guillotine with their wombs still open and bleeding. But a whole life could change overnight, so think what might happen in nine months—the Revolution might end and our world be set right again. We were all playing, and praying, for time.

  Though I let Alexandre spend his seed
into my body every chance he could, I was past my girlish infatuation with him. I had grown up and knew he was not the man for me, though I had been happy to catch a ride on his coattails when it led to fame and adoration for me. Our reconciliation, though it seemed like a sweet dream that had finally come true, and provided some consolations in the dark days we spent in Les Carmes, would never have survived the harsh sunlight of real life. If we had been set free to walk out of that prison hand in hand Alexandre would be criticizing me and I would be crying before we even made it home to our children.

  * * *

  One of the jailers, Roblatre, a crude, stubble-headed, vulgar man who was constantly scratching and fondling his crotch, singled me out as a special favorite of his. He led me out into the corridor one day, backed me up against the cold, oozing wall, making me shiver with cold and loathing, leaving grimy handprints on my once white skirt as he hoisted it to my hips. As rats and beetles swarmed around our feet, he told me that a privileged few were given cells with mattresses to sleep upon. He could get me into one if I was nice to him. It would be less crowded, with only two other ladies to share it with me. I knew a good bargain when I heard one, so I smiled and reached down and caressed his cock and guided it between my thighs, gasping with feigned delight as he thrust deep inside of me. Afterward, we shared a bottle of red wine that hadn’t yet gone sour and a loaf of nearly decent black bread. It was a definite improvement over the usual prison rations—half a bottle of sour red wine and a hunk of black bread hard as stone once a day.

  If Roblatre’s lust could keep me alive, I would encourage it every chance I got and give him every proof of just how grateful I was. Anything to stay alive!

  * * *

  My new accommodations were indeed much nicer. The barred window actually overlooked a garden where roses bloomed. “Fertilized by the blood of those massacred last September,” one of my new cellmates, the proud Duchesse d’Aiguillon, informed me, pointing past the roses to a wall still stained with blood.

  The Duchesse had been a good friend of Marie Antoinette’s cherished favorite, the gentle Princesse de Lamballe, who had suffered great indignities at the hands of an angry mob that ghastly September day. Mercifully, she was half-dead, after being stripped naked and brutally raped by at least a dozen men, “peasants eager for the chance to despoil a princess,” when her head had been stricken off, to be paraded on a pike through the streets to the Tuileries, it being their intent to hold it up to the window for the imprisoned queen to kiss. But first, they had stopped along the way at a hairdresser’s establishment and ordered the terrified man to dress the dead woman’s long golden hair, so Marie Antoinette would be sure to recognize the woman long wrongly regarded as her Sapphic lover.

  My other cellmate would both change and save my life, though I didn’t know it at the time. Theresa Cabarrus was the most beautiful, fascinating woman I ever saw. A Spanish girl, only twenty years old, the widow of an elderly marquis, which accounted for her being in prison, she was guilty by association, just like me. Her satin-sleek black hair hung down her back like a cloak, grazing the backs of her knees, and her eyes were the color of fine brandy wine. She had the face of an angel, the lush, voluptuous body of a grand courtesan, and the morals of a common alley cat. She was the mistress of Jean Tallien, a journalist raised to power by the Revolution, a clever man who always managed to be on the winning side. She was still wearing the sheer red peignoir, and nothing else, from their last tryst. She had been seized in the night, just like me. They waited to take her until after her lover was gone.

  We were two of a kind and became fast friends. Whenever I despaired, Theresa urged me not to.

  “Tallien will save us. He will not lose this body to the grave,” she would say, flinging the diaphanous red folds open wide and shamelessly revealing the object of his desire. Thanks to the attentions of Roblatre and several other guards, she was still voluptuous, despite the near-starvation diet of prison rations.

  Theresa took great delight in her body and loved to show it and share it with everyone; she would gladly give herself to any man, or woman, who desired her, and if there was no one she would pleasure herself. Many nights when we all gathered, huddling fearfully in the common room to hear the dreaded list read out, the names of those destined to die on the morrow, everyone wondering if this night would be their last, Theresa would throw off her peignoir as soon as the jailer finished reading and dance in the nude, performing the gypsy and Spanish dances she had learned in her youth.

  “This is all I have, and I will give it gladly, if it can bring even a moment’s joy back into their lives and make them forget the fear of death hovering always over our heads,” she said.

  Her spirit was unbreakable. Even when the rats gnawed at her toes one night while she was sleeping, Theresa didn’t shed a tear as I tore strips from my petticoat to bind the bleeding wounds. She just shrugged. “I shall cover the scars with jeweled rings and start a new fashion. A day will come when everyone will know me by the rings on my toes.”

  * * *

  In Theresa and through Theresa I found love. She introduced me to a handsome young soldier who kept to his own solitary cell. He was rich and important enough to be able to procure fresh linens and fine wines and meals that, though truly only simple fare, seemed sumptuous to my famished eyes and rumbling belly.

  His name was Lazare Hoche; he was a disgraced general, guilty of some offense against the Revolution that he seemed not to be overly concerned about. He stayed in his cell, biding his time, reading books, sipping wine, and writing letters to his little child bride, Adelaide, whose portrait, worn in a golden locket around his neck, he cherished. Theirs was one of those rare marriages based truly on love and I hated her every time he spoke her name or something in his cell reminded me of her existence.

  He reminded me of a much younger and more dashing incarnation of my first benefactor, the banker Denis de Rougemont. Lazare was handsome beyond words with a head of the waviest dark hair I had ever seen, blue eyes that seemed at times tinged with gray or jade green, and a dazzling, slightly crooked, smile that made my heart melt.

  I fell in love the first time I saw him. And he was bored, and perhaps smitten, enough to take me into his bed, filthy and bedraggled as I was. He seemed happy to share himself, and his cell, with me, and even his bathwater and dressing gown. He made me feel strong. I felt safe in his arms. He made me believe that even in the shadow of the guillotine love and life were still possible. I began to dream that perhaps someday, if we were still alive when the Revolution was over, we might be together. My mind conveniently glossed over Adelaide. She was just a child after all and could hardly hold his attention for long. She wouldn’t know how; she didn’t have the talents of a woman like me, adept in the arts of pleasure. Besides, they had only been married a week before Lazare was arrested, hardly long enough to form a lasting connection. I was certain he was just being sentimental. But then he was taken away from me, after only twenty-six blissful days. His name was on the list one night and I thought I would surely die of grief. But I did not.

  Not too long after that Alexandre’s name appeared on the list of the damned. I was holding tight to his hand, both of us quaking with fear and holding our breaths, as his name was read out. His face went deathly white beneath his prison beard. He staggered like a man who had just been shot. I took his hand and led him, like a bewildered child, back to my cell. The Duchesse and Theresa understood and left us to ourselves and found somewhere else to sleep that night. Neither of us spoke a single word.

  For the first, and last, time in our marriage we touched each other with tenderness and he cared enough to want to please me. The time for the crazed wild animal ruttings had passed; now it was all about comfort and peace and saying good-bye. We made love all night.

  Afterward, as the dawn and the scent of roses were softly stealing through the iron-barred window, I took the Duchesse’s scissors from their hiding place and cut Alexandre’s greasy blond hair to the nape
of his neck. Better I, who might have loved him if he had been kind to the little Creole savage I used to be, than the executioner. When I was done, I silently handed the scissors to Alexandre. I turned my back and tried not to cry as he cut off my long black hair. We knew that time had run out for both of us. Once a husband’s name was read his wife’s would inevitably soon follow. It might be a day, or a week, a fortnight at most, but soon I too would be mounting the thirteen steps of the scaffold to bow before Madame Guillotine.

  Alexandre’s head was resting on my breast when they came for him. It was time for him to join the other condemned in the cart. He stood and dressed and then, for the first time, spoke to me.

  “‘Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel

  There is a point, to which when men aspire,

  They tumble headlong down; that point I touch’d,

  And seeing there was no place to mount up higher,

  Why should I grieve at my declining fall?

  Farewell, fair queen, weep not for Mortimer,

  That scorns the world, and as a traveler

  Goes to discover countries yet unknown.’ ”

  It was obviously a literary quotation, though I knew not the source. I forced a smile, tears raining from my eyes, as Alexandre bowed over my hand and kissed it, gallant as a courtier bidding his queen adieu. I reached out, one last time, with a trembling hand to touch his hair and stroke his neck where, all too soon, the blade would fall.