Two Empresses

by Brandy Purdy

  “We are not strong enough to triumph over Russia, nor are we humble enough to accept defeat at their hands; therefore, peace, not war, is the answer,” the Sultana Valide counseled her son as they sat beside the fishpond beneath the cypress tree in her garden.

  They would encompass Napoleon’s destruction by doing nothing. The peace treaty had nothing to do with France: it was between Turkey and Russia. Sometimes revenge really is sweet.

  It turned out the Tsar barely had to lift a finger. La Grande Armée was no match against the brutal fire and ice of the Russian landscape. Men died of heat, exhaustion, and disease, and, when the winter set in, cold and hunger devastated them, frost bit away their fingers and toes and noses, some even resorted to cannibalism to try to stay alive. In their weakened state, the Frenchmen were easy pickings for the Russian soldiers. Patriotic-minded peasants also did their part. The Frenchmen unfortunate enough to fall into their hands were beaten to death with hammers, while others were thrown alive into cauldrons of boiling water or impaled upon stakes through their anuses. Only ninety-three thousand crept and crawled back to France, most of them maimed and all of them more dead than alive. The balls to celebrate their “victorious” return were known as “wooden leg balls” because so many of the men were missing limbs.

  Many noted that Napoleon’s first campaign since divorcing Josephine was a disaster. Marie Louise could not fill the shoes of “Our Lady of Victories.” La Grande Armée no longer existed.

  When Napoleon learned the astounding truth about the sudden and surprising peace between Turkey and its mortal enemy Russia, he acknowledged the brilliance of the veiled strategist behind it. “The sword is beaten by the mind,” he said with grudging respect.

  Tsar Alexander wasn’t finished with Napoleon; the back of the beast might be broken, but it wasn’t dead yet. He formed an alliance with Prussia and marched on Paris, determined to conquer. And conquer he did. Bonaparte was taken prisoner, forced to abdicate, and exiled to the island of Elba. Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte de Provence, now styled Louis XVIII, returned from exile and the monarchy was restored.

  When Tsar Alexander called on Josephine at Malmaison he was completely captivated by her grace and charm. He visited her every day, often partaking of the château’s famous ice cream, glacé Malmaison, made with the bananas and pineapples Josephine grew in her hothouses to remind her of her island home, and garnished with raisins and rum from the West Indies. Some whispered that the Tsar and the former empress had fallen in love, but there was no truth to the rumors.

  Everyone suddenly remembered Josephine fondly; old friends as well as the courtiers who had snubbed her at the end of her marriage all made their way to her door. The people of France still loved her. In their minds, Bonaparte’s misdeeds never touched Josephine; she was another suffering soul who had been cruelly wronged by him. Soon crowds were flocking to Malmaison to visit the zoo, walk in the gardens, watch the black swans gliding on the lake, smell the roses and view her vast art collection, and see the gracious lady herself.

  Josephine turned no one away. She was society’s brightest star again. Besides the Tsar, the King of Prussia, Prince Maximilian of Bavaria, the Grand Duke of Baden, Prince Leopold of Austria, Grand Duke Constantine, and Prince Tchernicheff were amongst her most frequent visitors. The new King of France sent kind and frequent messages to reassure her that she was safe in the wake of Bonaparte’s fall and he looked forward to meeting her and that she would be most welcome at his court. Even a chance of love, in the person of Prince Frederick of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, came back.

  One night, after dancing together at a ball, Josephine and the Tsar were strolling in the moonlit gardens of Malmaison when she was suddenly taken ill. At first everyone thought it was just a cold, even the doctors didn’t take it seriously, but within days Josephine was deathly ill with a high fever. A red rash covered her body, and her throat was swollen nearly shut so she could scarcely breathe or speak.

  She drifted in and out of consciousness, in her delirium calling often for Bonaparte. When the doctors told her there was no hope and she must make her peace with God, she summoned up all the strength she had left and ordered her attendants to dress her in a pink silk peignoir and rubies and help her into a chair. She said a tender farewell to her children and received the last rites. She died at noon on May 29, 1814, a month shy of her fifty-first birthday.

  When she lay in state in her black-draped mahogany coffin, more than twenty thousand people filed past to pay their respects. Prince Frederick followed her coffin to its final rest, carrying her heart encased in a silver vessel. He was the last of the sad procession to depart, lingering long weeping over her white marble tomb. Even as they celebrated their liberation from “that devil Bonaparte” all of Paris mourned the incomparable Josephine.

  Exiled in Elba, Napoleon learned of Josephine’s death from a newspaper. He shut himself up in a darkened room and refused all food for several days. A year later, when he escaped, the first thing he did upon landing on French soil was rush to Malmaison and implore anyone who had been there at the time to tell him of Josephine’s final hours. “Did she leave any word for me?” he asked over and over again, unable to accept that the answer was no.

  Bonaparte and the ragtag remains of his army, his last loyal followers, were crushingly defeated at the little Belgian village of Waterloo. For the first time the cry of “Sauve qui peut!”—“Save yourselves!”—was heard as what remained of Bonaparte’s great dream, La Grande Armée, fled before the eight-foot spears of the Prussian lancers.

  Exiled to an even more isolated island, St. Helena, Napoleon spent the last lonely years of his life tormented by headaches and stomach pains, surrounded by images of Josephine, eating off plates with her picture painted upon them, and playing lonely games of solitaire with cards bearing her likeness. “She had her failings,” he was often heard to say, “but at least she would never have abandoned me.”

  One April day when he was confined to his bed, he started up screaming that he had just seen his beloved Josephine. He clutched at his valet’s lapels and wept. “She would not embrace me. She disappeared at the moment I was about to take her in my arms. She is not changed. She is still the same, full of devotion to me. She told me that we were about to see each other again, never more to part.”

  Ten days later, on May 5, 1821 at the age of fifty-one, Napoleon died. His last words were France, La Grande Armée, and Josephine.

  * * *

  Marie Louise had returned to her family in Austria and forgotten all about Napoleon. In August 1814 while taking the waters at the spa of Aix-les-Bains she fell in love with her escort, Count Albrecht von Neipperg. She had no idea that the notorious seducer had been heard to boast “in six weeks I will be her best friend, in six months her lover.” It didn’t even take a month for Marie Louise to fall into his arms. She bore him three children out of wedlock, as she remained officially Napoleon’s wife until his death. The couple eventually married, and when Neipperg succumbed to heart failure in 1829 Marie Louise took a third husband, a Frenchman, the Comte de Bombelles. She died of pleurisy in December 1847.

  * * *

  The child known as the King of Rome, Bonaparte’s long-desired heir, never left a mark on history. He died of tuberculosis in Vienna at the age of twenty-one.

  * * *

  One stormy November night in 1817 twelve oarsmen braved the wild waves, winds, and lashing rain and rowed a golden barge carrying two of the Sultan’s guards across the Golden Horn to the Monastery of Saint Antoine. As the winds howled and the shutters rattled they entered the chapel where the priest, Father Chrysostome, knelt in prayer. They bound and blindfolded him and carried him out to the barge, to make the same desperate journey back to Topkapi Palace. Time was of the essence; it must not be squandered on anything, not even explanations.

  “The black camel of death has knelt outside the harem,” was all they would say in answer to Father Chrysostome’s fearful and anxious questions.
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br />   An ancient stoop-backed Negro in rich robes and a towering yellow turban reminiscent of a tulip had the dubious honor of escorting the first Catholic priest to ever enter the harem to the Sultana Valide’s bedchamber.

  The Sultan known and loved as Mahmoud the Great, clad in his curious mix of modern French and traditional Turkish dress, knelt in anguished tears beside the bed.

  Sultana Valide Nakshidil was dying. That long-ago night spent out on the rooftops of Topkapi Palace in the pouring rain had fatally weakened her constitution; she had ever since been prey to coughs and fevers. A fatal consumption of the lungs was about to claim her life.

  The Sultan rose and, with great dignity despite the intensity of his sorrow, welcomed the priest and led him to the bed.

  “My mother, you wished to die in the Catholic religion; let that wish now be fulfilled,” the Sultan said as he bent over the bed, stroked back the still golden hair and kissed her burning brow.

  Father Chrysostome, the first man in many a year, besides the Sultan, to see Nakshidil’s still beautiful face unveiled, heard her confession, granted her absolution, and administered last rites. He remained with her, praying until the end, stunned by the truth that had been revealed at last. Aimee Dubucq de Rivery had not died at the hands of pirates; she had lived. Josephine was not the only empress from Martinique; there had been two of them.

  As the Sultan knelt beside the bed, clasping Nakshidil’s hand tight against his heart, tears raining from his eyes, she reached out her other hand and touched his face. “Euphemia David was right,” she said with a last, lingering look of love. “It was worth it. Because of what I leave behind—you, my son!” And with those words, she died.

  She was laid to rest in a splendid tomb on the summit of the fourth hill of Constantinople. Sultan Mahmoud himself, a scribe renowned for the great beauty of his calligraphy, inscribed her epitaph:

  MAY HER BEAUTY NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.

  MAY HER FAME AND GLORY FOREVER BE UNVEILED.

  NAKSHIDIL, EMBROIDERED UPON THE HEART, HER NAME.

  SULTANA VALIDE SHE WAS WHEN THIS CROWN OF EARTH

  WAS PLACED UPON HER HEAD.

  THROUGH THESE WORDS I INSCRIBE

  AGAIN I LIVE THROUGH THE AGONY

  AND SORROW OF HER DEATH

  IN COUNTLESS TEARS THE BLOOD OF MY HEART

  FLOWS FROM MY EYES.

  By the time of his death in 1839 Mahmoud had entirely reformed the system of government, taxation, and education, established a national newspaper and free worship, and abolished the slave trade in Turkey. No more young boys were castrated to serve as eunuchs and no more women were abducted or sold into the Sultan’s harem; they entered only of their own free will, though during his reign the imperial harem was largely neglected. Mahmoud fell in love with a sweet and humble Armenian girl, who served as a bath attendant, and fathered six children with her.

  For the first time the harem women were granted greater freedoms, including more frequent picnics, pleasure trips, and shopping excursions outside the palace walls and lessons from a real French dancing master, and they were no longer required to sever all ties with friends and family. Mahmoud never stood in the way of those who wished to leave and marry; he gave them gifts and wished them lasting love and lifelong joy. His lone act of violence against women was to have Senieperver, Mustafa’s scheming mother, sewn into a weighted sack and thrown in the Bosphorus the same day her son died. It was the only certain way to stop her from seeking vengeance for Mustafa’s murder.

  Mahmoud honored his cousin Selim’s memory by maintaining the Nizam-Djedid, a fully modern army for Turkey, and took a serious interest in scientific advances. He instituted a system of quarantine that saved hundreds of lives whenever plague swept through the city and established a medical school where dissection was allowed in the interests of serving mankind through science, despite the Koran’s proscription on opening dead bodies even if the deceased was a thief who had stolen and swallowed the most precious pearl.

  He also popularized eating with silverware instead of the fingertips, introduced the waltz to Constantinople, and built a modern theater and opera house. He preferred to wear a fez instead of a turban and in his own wardrobe combined modern Western with traditional Turkish dress. Instead of kneeling on the floor, men were encouraged to remain standing and bow at the waist before the Sultan; Mahmoud thought it more dignified.

  He was hailed by all as just and fair, a man who led by example. When a judge sentenced a malefactor, guilty of some petty crime, to suffer five hundred lashes and the man died before the hundredth one had been delivered, Mahmoud invited the judge to dine with him at Topkapi Palace. A banquet of five hundred sweet cakes was laid before the judge and Mahmoud ordered him to eat every single one. When the judge became horribly ill after only fifty cakes, Mahmoud observed, “If a mere fifty cakes, a thing much pleasanter than the lash of a whip, cannot be endured, how can anyone be expected to survive five hundred?”

  He made it a point to always live his life by the words of wisdom his mother had taught him from early childhood: Think of what you ought to do so that you need never reproach yourself for what you ought to have done.

  His reign also saw the destruction of the Janissaries. When he stood upon the steps of the Mosque of Sultan Achmet, with a modern pistol on one side of his belt and the jeweled dagger of his father on the other, and raised the sacred green banner of the Prophet and called upon his people to ride with him against the Janissaries they were with him every step of the way. The Janissaries were slaughtered out of existence, never to rise again.

  Mahmoud truly was a sultan who was gentle with his women, ferocious and victorious in battle, humble in the mosque, and superb on the throne. Every promise was fulfilled.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  TWO EMPRESSES

  Brandy Purdy

  About This Guide

  The suggested questions are included

  to enhance your group’s

  reading of Brandy Purdy’s

  Two Empresses.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Discuss the personalities of Rose/Josephine and Aimee/ Nakshidil. How are they alike? How are they different? What are their greatest assets and greatest flaws? Which do you like better and why? Which woman do you think had the happier life and why?

  2. How do you explain Euphemia David’s uncanny prediction that both girls would grow up to be empresses? Did she possess genuine psychic powers or was she merely a clever charlatan who made a lucky guess? Napoleon and Josephine are both big believers in destiny; Aimee is more skeptical. What do you believe? Is one’s fate preordained or can our actions alter it?

  3. Rose marries twice and has many lovers. Discuss the various men in her life. Which ones made her happiest and why? Were any of the relationships founded on true love or were they all just casual dalliances and symbiotic or parasitic relationships with each person using the other for their own reasons? Aimee was the beloved of three sultans—Abdul Hamid, Selim, and her adopted son, Mahmoud. Discuss each of these relationships. Who do you think was her greatest love? Do you think she was a woman of passion or practicality or did she manage to successfully combine both qualities?

  4. Everything seems to slip through Rose’s fingers; she can’t hold on to anything or anyone for long. She is impulsive, addicted to shopping, and never puts anything by for the future despite her worries about losing her looks and the onset of old age. She readily admits this is a serious problem but never does anything to change it. What advice would you have given her?

  5. Rose never goes to visit Aimee in the convent; she always makes excuses. Do you believe her reasons for not going were justified? Would the life of either woman have been any different if they had rekindled their childhood friendship?

  6. Aimee’s fate is regarded as worse than death. Do you agree? Do you think she was right to maintain her silence and never try to contact her family? Do you think it would have only caused her parents greater pain to know she w
as alive in the Sultan’s harem?

  7. Discuss the role fame plays in the story. Does it ever bring any of the characters true and lasting happiness? How is the reality of fame different from the dream of fame? Is fame a good or a bad thing or does it depend on how a person uses their fame?

  8. Both women have their names changed by the men in their lives. Rose becomes Josephine and Aimee becomes Nakshidil. How does each woman’s life and character change when she is given a new name? Did Rose truly lose herself in Josephine? Does Aimee’s life truly begin when she is presumed dead by the world? Is her new life as Nakshidil a better or worse one than Aimee’s would have been if it had followed the traditional path?

  9. Did Napoleon really love Rose or only his ideal of Josephine? Theirs is regarded by many as one of history’s great love stories. What do you think of the truth about the two personalities behind the romantic façade? How were they good for each other? How were they bad? Were they right to marry? Why or why not? Josephine never reveals to Napoleon her doubts about her fertility; was she right to have kept this a secret from him? What would you have done in her position?