Two Empresses

by Brandy Purdy

  “Our joint destiny has been too extraordinary not to have been decided by Providence,” I said. “Only you must decide my fate. I am too afraid of bringing bad luck to both of us if I, of my own accord, should separate my life from yours.”

  But I knew the end was near. My husband had sent for reinforcements—Hortense and Eugène—to shore me up and soften the blow.

  About a week later I was summoned unexpectedly to Bonaparte’s bedchamber. I found him lying on the bed, clutching his stomach and groaning, ashen faced and deathly ill. He reached out a trembling hand to me.

  “My poor Josephine, I can’t possibly leave you!” he sobbed. “The pain is killing me! Please, remove this heavy burden from my heart!”

  He spoke of France, of political necessity, of being cruelly treated by fate, the violence being done to his heart, calling himself the poor put-upon plaything of destiny, but I didn’t really hear him, and I certainly didn’t believe him. My ears had begun to ring, muffling his anguished cries to mere distant whispers. I felt like I was underwater, sinking fast, drowning. Darkness was encroaching upon my eyes and I couldn’t draw my breath. My heart and head hurt in equal measure. The next thing I knew I was lying on the floor and Bonaparte was crouching over me and rubbing my hands.

  “Josephine! My dear Josephine! You know how I have loved you! To you alone I owe the only moments of happiness I have ever known, but, Josephine, my destiny is not to be controlled by my will. My heart must yield to the nation! I have only one passion, only one mistress—France! I sleep with her; I live for her; I fight for her. She never lets me down; she pours out her blood and her treasures for me. If I need five hundred thousand men she gives them to me without question! Everything I have ever done has been for her, and everything I will ever do will be for her! You must believe me—this isn’t for me; it is for France!”

  “What a liar you are!” I whispered so softly I’m not sure Bonaparte even heard me before I lost consciousness again.

  When I awakened, I was lying on my bed. My children were beside me, and Bonaparte was standing there with tears pouring from his eyes.

  “Nothing will make me go back on it, neither tears nor entreaties,” he said as soon as he saw me open my eyes.

  Hortense answered him with the coolest, calm dignity, with not a sign of a single tear. “You are the master here, Sire, and no one will oppose you. If your happiness requires it, that is enough. My mother will submit to your will and we will all go away, taking the memory of your kindness with us.”

  Bonaparte staggered back as though she had struck him. “What! You are all going to desert me? Don’t you love me anymore? If it were my happiness, I would sacrifice it for you, but it is for the good of France, I tell you! You should pity me rather than condemn me for having to sacrifice my heart!”

  “Sire, we cannot live near you anymore,” Eugène replied. “It is a sacrifice that has to be made and we will make it. We will go away quietly.”

  When Bonaparte started to again protest, Eugène interrupted, “A son’s first loyalty is to his mother, Sire.” Bonaparte could not argue with that.

  * * *

  But I could not slink away like a thief in the night. The divorce must be formally announced to the court. It was a gala evening with everyone crowded into the throne room in their finest clothes and jewels. Many wore an air of satisfaction. Bonaparte’s siblings were like cats who had drunk their fill of sweet cream. I’m sure they felt their triumph was complete; “the old woman,” “that Creole whore,” had been ousted.

  Now that I belonged to myself again, I disdained Bonaparte’s dictates about my wardrobe. I entered the throne room in a simple, flowing white muslin gown, with my hair caught up in a loose coil with a single white rose, and a beautiful pink and gold cashmere shawl draped loosely about my shoulders. I wore only one ornament, the first my husband had given me, the golden medallion inscribed To Destiny!

  Hortense and Eugène were there on either side of me, their shoulders and loving arms ready to support me, as I approached the dais and took my seat, for the last time, in the more delicate, smaller golden throne beside Bonaparte’s.

  The Emperor, resplendent in a gold-embroidered red suit, was the first to speak.

  “God alone knows what this resolve has cost my heart,” he said. “But there is no sacrifice beyond my courage if it is for the good of France. Far from having any complaints, I have only gratitude to express for the tenderness and devotion of my well-beloved wife. She is the jewel that has adorned fifteen years of my life, the memory of which will remain forever engraved upon my heart. I would like her to continue to hold the title of Empress, and, above all, never to doubt my feelings for her; she will always be my best and dearest friend.”

  I shut my eyes tight against the tears, but they still seeped out. It had all been for nothing. He had conferred upon me the vain and empty title of Empress only to render my fall more remarkable.

  Then it was my turn to speak. Every gloating eye was upon me. I felt naked and alone and my knees trembled as I rose from the gilded throne in which I would never again sit. The paper on which my speech was written rattled in my hand. I could not stop shaking.

  “With the permission of my dear and august husband,” I began, but even my words were trembling, “I declare that, no longer preserving any hope of having children to satisfy the political necessity for an heir, I proudly offer him the greatest proof of my affection and devotion. . . .”

  My courage failed me, tears blinded me, I could no longer see to read the words, and the paper they were written on fluttered from my helpless hands like a wounded white bird.

  Hortense retrieved it, and as Eugène moved to put his arm around my shoulder she began to read, speaking in my stead, her voice clear and steady.

  “‘The Emperor will always be my dearest love. I know how much this act, demanded by politics and the wider interests of the nation, has crushed his heart; but both of us nonetheless glory in the sacrifice that we have made for France.’”

  Hortense turned and curtsied to her stepfather and presented the paper to him as a memento of this sad occasion; he might as well have it since he was the one who had dictated it.

  Quivering with tears, I forced myself to be strong, to stand upright again, alone. My hands shook so badly as I lifted the golden chain from about my neck that I knocked the rose from my hair. I looked down and through the watery haze of my tears I saw its fair, fragile petals scattered about my feet. I cradled the gold medallion in my hands and read one last time the words written there: To Destiny! Then I forced myself to just let go; it was no good holding on. Everything had already slipped through my fingers; this was all for show.

  I curtsied to Bonaparte and surrendered the medallion that had hung faithfully around my neck since our wedding night. I renounced destiny, the fate that had been written in the stars at the hour of our birth, and embraced free will.

  “‘The fault, dear Brutus,’” I whispered tremulously, so softly that Bonaparte alone could hear, “‘is not in our stars, but in ourselves. ’”

  I had learned to quote Shakespeare—Alexandre would have been so proud of me!—but alas, too late, too late!

  Bonaparte formally kissed my cheek and handed me down from the dais.

  I managed to hold myself together long enough to walk out of the throne room supported by Hortense and Eugène, holding my head up high and ignoring Bonaparte’s siblings mocking me as “a feeble old woman,” but the moment the door had closed behind us I gasped, “This is the most dreadful moment of my life!” and fell to the floor in a senseless heap. At first they thought I had actually died of grief.

  * * *

  As I lay in my bed, my hair and gown in disarray, my eyes swollen nearly blind from so many hours spent weeping, I heard my door creak open with the last chime of midnight. Bonaparte came to me. I felt the warmth and weight of his body for the last time over mine and the hot, hungry passion of his kisses. From head to toe, he kissed me everywhere. At da
wn, he left me.

  “Adieu, my dear Josephine; be brave,” he whispered, pressing one last tender kiss upon my brow. “I will always be your friend.”

  CHAPTER 32

  In a softly misting rain, as though Heaven was also weeping for me, I left the Tuileries for the last time and drove to Malmaison. I was so weak from weeping I could hardly stand or see and Hortense and Eugène had to help me into the carriage. Though I had left with the dawn—I didn’t want to see anyone—the French people lined the roads, standing bareheaded in the rain with their hats over their hearts. “Vive Josephine!” . . . “Vive l’imperatrice!” they cried.

  I didn’t deserve their love, but they still loved me. They were on my side. Bonaparte was the one who had shattered the illusion of our great love. They saw me as yet another crushed victim of his accursed ambition.

  I was grateful, and I wanted to do something for them in return. So I entrusted Hortense with a special task: to arrange a raffle, to dispose of all my weighty, cumbersome court finery, all the satin, taffeta, and velvet gowns laden down with gilt embroideries and heavy ermine-trimmed trains, since I would no longer have need of them, and give all the money to the poor.

  There had always been money to be had from my cast-off gowns. I would wear a dress once, as Bonaparte dictated, then give it to my ladies; usually they sold it. Everyone from governors’ wives to German princesses wanted my gowns. I had once attended a quadrille ball where at least half the women were wearing my discarded dresses. I had even seen them on the backs of actresses when I attended the theater. Whenever I reluctantly traveled to La Plombières to take the waters at Bonaparte’s command the Governor’s wife and daughters usually greeted me wearing my old gowns.

  * * *

  At Malmaison, I kept the lamps turned low; my eyes, weakened by so much weeping, could no longer stand the light. The doctor said my sight was failing, and the terror of going blind made me weep all the more. Like a ghost in my flowing white gowns, I roamed the halls and hothouses and floated aimlessly through the empty rooms, looking for something that could give me solace.

  I kept Bonaparte’s room exactly as it was when he last left it, with clothes scattered across the floor and the history book he had been reading lying open on the table beside the bed. I wouldn’t let the servants touch it, not even to dust it. Sometimes I wrapped myself in an old gray greatcoat he had left behind and curled up in his favorite black Moroccan leather armchair by the fire and wept for hours as my fingers caressed the cuts his penknife had made upon its arms. It was funny to think how I had once deplored this destructive habit of his and wept because he was ruining all my beautiful furniture and now I cherished each mark; I felt each one as a gouge deep upon my heart.

  “You mourn the man you wish he was, not the man he truly is, Mother,” Hortense tried to console me.

  But nothing helped. I was restless and ill. Sometimes I walked for hours in the rain trying to cool my fever. The days dragged by so slow each one seemed to last a lifetime. When Bonaparte sent me a letter gently chastising me because the servants had seen me weeping, I wrote back: Sometimes it seems as if I am dead and all that remains is a sort of faint sensation of knowing that I no longer exist.

  The golden-haired sultana sent me a present, a bangle of gold shaped like a snake swallowing its own tail. It was engraved, in French, with the words: In My End Is My Beginning. I knew it was a heartening message meant to give me hope, telling me that the end of my time as empress, and Bonaparte’s wife, was not the end of my life or an occasion for mourning, but a new beginning to be looked forward to, not feared and dreaded. I don’t think I ever wore it. I put it in a box with all my other bracelets.

  * * *

  My husband—I could never think of him as anything else—had already moved on, rushing forward, leading the charge, to meet his destiny. He had dallied too long and indecisively over the Tsar’s sister, so his second choice “won” by default.

  The Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria was eighteen, a tall and sturdy-boned, big-bosomed blonde with a graceless walk, cold and aloof manner, and the unfortunate inbred plump, protruding lower lip known as the Hapsburg Lip that had been disfiguring the countenances of the Austrian imperial dynasty for decades.

  While she could speak fluently in French, German, Italian, English, Latin, and Spanish, small talk was beyond her; the niceties of polite conversation completely eluded Marie Louise. Her favorite pastimes were painting landscapes, playing the harp, reading serious books, and eating—fourteen different desserts were routinely offered to her at supper.

  She didn’t know how to charm and win people like I had. When little girls welcoming her to France curtsied and presented her with posies Marie Louise merely nodded curtly and passed them into the hands of her nearest attendant. Marie Louise greeted the people who lined up to see her like a general reviewing troops.

  She saw herself as a virgin being sacrificed to the Minotaur, but she had been brought up to do her duty even if that meant following in the footsteps of her great-aunt, who had been married to the sovereign of France, then dethroned, defiled, and beheaded by its people. But Bonaparte didn’t care how she felt or what graces she lacked, or that she regarded him as “The Beast of the Apocalypse”; in his eyes all she was, was a walking womb.

  * * *

  As the court whirled through a series of balls and receptions to welcome her, the public reviled the Austrian archduchess as Marie Antoinette all over again. The common people didn’t forget about me; they still loved me and were loyal to my memory. Bonaparte had to order the newspapers to cease writing about me and issue an edict to take my face off snuffboxes and playing cards. Even when the fountains ran red with free wine to celebrate the Archduchess’s arrival still the people did not cheer her.

  They no longer loved Bonaparte or saw him as their savior. Before he had been a man of the people who had risen up to save them; now he saw himself as a god, above all men. He had made himself an emperor, greater than any king, and conquered half the world, carved it into pieces, and parceled it out for his lazy and inept siblings to rule. He set aside the wife he had called his good-luck charm, and scorned his common blood and sought to ennoble it with children born from a royal womb, to found a dynasty greater even than the Hapsburgs and Bourbons. Sometimes as Bonaparte rode past in his carriage surrounded by guards, a bold voice would cry out from the crowd, “You threw away your luck with Josephine!” He had also thrown away their love, just like I had his. Neither of us realized how much that love mattered until it was too late.

  I didn’t even know her, but I hated Marie Louise. Every time I heard her name it felt like a slap in the face to me. Hortense was ordered to carry her train at the wedding, and my few remaining ladies-in-waiting eventually deserted me; my melancholy was not to their taste, and they preferred to return to court to serve the new empress instead. Who could blame them? They wanted life and light, not to sit in the dark and oppressive sorrow with me. She was young and robust and still had life in her, whereas I was little better than a walking corpse. She waltzed every night in the Emperor’s arms; Bonaparte had actually taken lessons so as not to disappoint her. But all I ever did was weep and lay out the tarot cards and squint down at them through my tears and troubled eyes, hoping to find some better fate, or even just a glimmer of hope again.

  No one came to visit me, not even old friends from the past like Barras, Theresa, Fortunée, and Hippolyte, and though I was just minutes from Paris, I lived as if I were a thousand leagues from it. Sometimes I wished I had had the courage to cast caution to the wind and marry Prince Frederick when he had asked me to. His love might really have lasted. I might have been happier as a princess than I ever was as an empress.

  * * *

  Bonaparte chose to embrace the comparisons everyone was making between his bride and Marie Antoinette. When she arrived on French soil, just like the aunt she never knew, he had Marie Louise stripped of every Austrian stitch and dressed anew in all things French; even the
pug dog she had brought with her was taken away and replaced with a new fluffy white French bitch. He decided to make their wedding ceremony an exact replica of the one that had united Louis and Marie Antoinette in 1770. He pored over the archives and picked the memories of ancient aristocrats who had attended the lavish ceremony in the royal chapel at Versailles and put seamstresses to work replicating Marie Antoinette’s splendid gown of shimmering white satin sparkling with diamonds and edged in ermine.

  After the ceremony, an opulent ball was held in the palace of the Austrian Prince Schwarzenberg, one of the guiding hands behind the marriage. So many attended that the ballroom overflowed and the guests spilled out into the gardens to dance amongst the flowers. A slight breeze stirred the long white gauze curtains and they caught upon the candles. The palace was quickly engulfed in flames. Bonaparte and his bride escaped, but dozens died or were crippled or disfigured for the rest of their lives. Bonaparte saw it as a bad omen. It made him wonder if he had indeed divorced luck along with Josephine. But it was too late to change anything; all he could do was go forward wearing a brave face.

  * * *

  Before a year had passed, Marie Louise was pregnant. “I have married a womb!” Bonaparte enthused. He saw her pregnancy as a vindication, proof that the divorce, however unpopular it might have been with the French people, was absolutely the right thing to do. He declared that his son would have the title of King of Rome and ordered a splendid suite made ready at the Tuileries replete with heavy silver furniture and hundreds of liveried attendants to see to his son’s every need. Bonaparte was confident that it would be a boy; he didn’t even entertain the possibility of a girl.

  * * *

  I was alone at Malmaison, sitting by the fire in Bonaparte’s bedroom, with his old gray greatcoat wrapped around my thin white gown, the night of March 20, 1811 when the church bells began to ring, announcing the birth of the imperial child. I sat tense and alert as I counted the cannon fire, my nails breaking as they dug into the marks Bonaparte’s penknife had gouged into the arms of his favorite chair. Ancient royal custom decreed the guns would sound twenty-one times for a daughter and one hundred for a son. When I heard the twenty-second shot I knew Bonaparte at long last had a son, an heir born of his fierce ambition and his bride’s royal blood.