“Without truth, Bonaparte—without heart.” “You have the nerve to talk to me of heart?”
My self-control gave way. “You claim to love me, yet you are prepared to divorce me based on the gossip of soldiers! It is you who should explain, Bonaparte.”
“You dare to imply that you are innocent, that you have not—” He hit the arm of his chair with his fist, hard.
I took a breath, held it, held it longer, held it as long as I could stand. “And what about your mistress, Bonaparte—your ‘Cleopatra,’ as the soldiers called her. You told her you would marry her if she were to bear your child.” Blinking, my eyes stinging, trying not to sniff.
“How do you know this?”
“Your brothers and sisters went out of their way to make sure I found out.”
He sat back. It was not the answer he’d expected.
“They’re so intent on destroying me, they don’t care what it might do to you in the process.” Caution, I told myself. One wrong word, and forgiveness would be impossible. “They tell you I do not love you.”
The light of the lantern shimmered in his eyes. I had found his vulnerable spot, I realized sadly. “I do love you,” I said, knowing the truth of those words. I do love this man, this intense, haunted, driven soul. Why, I cannot explain. “And I long for you,” I said—meeting his gaze, holding it. Bonaparte is not easily fooled.
It was almost four in the morning when I blew out the candles. We’d crossed the desert and returned, wounded but walking. We had made our confessions (yes), both of sin and of pain. We’d confessed to weakness, to the power of grief. We’d confessed to the desperation of loneliness. I told him I’d not managed well, that weakened by constant attack, I’d fallen. “Were you unfaithful?” he asked bluntly.
I paused. The time had come to be truthful—but what was the truth? “Not in the sense that you mean.” I touched his hand; it was so cold. “Not carnally.” Not quite. “But almost.” I took a breath. “And you?”
“She got on my nerves.”
It felt good to laugh … and cry. He told me of the despair he’d felt in that country, convinced that I’d betrayed him, convinced that the Angel of Luck was no longer with him. “Without you …”
He made love to me, and then again. “I am with you now,” I said.
* A message relayed from one vantage point to another by means of flags.
* Sauveur means saviour; sauvage means savage.
* On August 22, four ships slipped out of Alexandria harbour. By staying close to the coast, they luckily managed to evade the British for six weeks.
V
Conspirator
We are sowing today in tears and blood.
Liberty will be our harvest.
—Napoleon, to Josephine
In which Eugène is healed
October 20, 1799.
I woke with a start. Fauvelet, Bonaparte’s secretary, was shaking him, trying to rouse him. I stuck my hand out from under the fur coverlet. An enormous fire was raging in the fireplace, yet even so, I could see my breath. “Greetings, Fauvelet.” Groggily. “What time is it?” A sliver of light showed through the drawn curtains. “Is something wrong?”
“No, Madame, the General is always hard to wake—as you know,” he added. By the dim light Fauvelet’s face looked dark, like Eugène’s, like Bonaparte’s. “It is seven. I allowed the General to sleep in this morning, but now his brother Deputy Lucien is here to see him.” A shy smile. “We have been missing you, Madame,” he whispered.
Lucien Bonaparte? I put my hand on my husband’s shoulder. He was like a man dead. Everything he did, he did with profound intensity, I thought—work, love, even sleep.
He stirred, then rolled over and embraced me, his eyes closed shut. He smelled like a baby, sweaty and sweet. “Fauvelet, have I introduced you to my lovely wife?” Talking into my nightcap.
Fauvelet pulled back the drapes and morning light filled the room. I was taken aback by how sallow Bonaparte’s skin was—his face, although darkened by the sun, had a sickly hue. “Your brother is here to see you,” I said, kissing my husband, stilling his roving hands. “Lucien.”
Bonaparte rolled over onto his back. “I know, I sent for him,” he said, stretching and yawning and talking all at once.
Sent for him—when? I started to get up, but Bonaparte put his hand on my shoulder. “Bonaparte!” I did not want to be in the room when Lucien was shown in.
“Remember what I said last night—about the transition to the offensive?”
I fell back against the pillows. The transition from the defensive to the offensive is a delicate operation, one of the most delicate in war. “This isn’t war.”
“No?” Bonaparte smiled. I followed his gaze. Lucien was standing in the door looking rumpled and aged, stooped over like a man of eighty, not like the young man of twenty-four that he is.* His gangling arms hung down out of his coat sleeves. He is a talented young man, fiery and ambitious. I would admire him but for one glaring flaw: he wishes me dead.
“Good morning, Lucien,” I said, pulling the comforter under my chin. I wanted to grin—gloat. “How nice to see you.” Overdoing it, I knew.
He peered at me through his thick spectacles, disbelieving. Then he remembered to bow, lower than was called for, an exaggerated show of subservience—a degree of subservience that signified treachery, to my mind. “I’m leaving, Napoleone,” he announced, pronouncing Bonaparte’s name in the Italian way. He looked like a disgruntled spider, all long legs and arms. His brother, to whom he clearly felt himself superior, had had the gall to disregard his advice and forgive his wife.
“No, you’re not.” Bonaparte swung his feet onto the floor. Then, with a mischievous smile, he turned and whacked my bottom. I buried myself under the comforter. If I looked at Lucien, I would burst out laughing, I feared.
At the door, suddenly, carrying a clattering tray, appeared the black-skinned youth I’d encountered the night before. Dressed exotically in bright silks and fur, he looked like a vision out of a storybook. A jewel-encrusted scimitar dangled from a thick silken cord at his waist.
“Roustam!” my husband said, knotting the sash of his winter robe. The youth bowed, put the tray down on the table beside the bed. “This … is … my … wife,” Bonaparte said slowly, pointing at me. “He’s a Mameluke, but a good boy,” he told me. “A great favourite with the ladies, however. I have to keep an eye on him.”
“Good morning, Roustam,” I said, reaching for a mug of steaming chocolate.
“And … this … is … my … brother … but … he … is … furious,” Bonaparte said, tugging on Lucien’s ear.
The black youth bowed and slipped backward through the door, his scarlet silk slippers making a sliding sound on the parquet floor.
“It’s so cold in this country.” Bonaparte threw on one of my cashmere shawls, stomping his feet. He took a tiny cup of coffee, gulped it down. A roll disappeared as quickly, crumbs covering the front of his robe. He poked at the fire with the iron, chewing, then threw on two more logs. “There,” he said, standing back to watch the flames. He pulled one of the little drum stools over beside the fire and sat down.
“The General fancies himself at camp,” I said to the glowering Lucien, attempting to leaven the mood.
Lucien crossed his arms. “Noi dobbiamo parlare, Napoleone.” We must talk.
“So talk.”
“Privatamente.”
“My wife is to be included in all discussions.”
“You are a fool!” This with the voice of a man addressing an inferior. “Your wife has played you false. She defames our good name.”
I was relieved to hear Bonaparte laugh. “Our good name, you say? And our charming sister Pauline with three lovers? And Elisa throwing herself at the feet of poets one month after the death of her child? And Joseph in a mercury treatment again? And you, Lucien, making a fool of yourself over Madame Recamier while your wife languishes in childbed?”
I regarded
Bonaparte with astonishment. He had only been back in Paris a short while and yet had managed to discover everything.
“I did not come with the intention of debating family matters,” Lucien said, his eyes half-closed.
“Correa. You came because I summoned you.”
“Bonaparte, I can—” I put my cup down on the side table.
Bonaparte glared at me as if to say, Don’t move. “And sit down, for God’s sake,” he barked at his brother.
With haughty obedience, Lucien lowered himself onto one of the little stools, his ankles and wrists showing long and bony.
“General? The journals have arrived.” I was relieved to see Fauvelet at the door. “But I could come back at another time.”
“Now, Fauvelet.” Bonaparte motioned to his secretary to take the remaining stool. I sat back against the pillows, resigned. There would be no escape.
Fauvelet ruffled through the stack of journals perched on his knees. “Ah, here’s one you should know about. Director Moulins claims you broke quarantine when you landed, that you’re bringing the plague to the Republic.” His voice was nervous, high.
“Bah! We were forty-seven days at sea, for God’s sake, and not one man ill. Is that not sufficient proof?” (I listened to this rebuttal with some relief, I confess.) “And?”
“This one regards Citoyen Bernadotte.” Fauvelet cleared his throat.
“Ah, yes, my charming new relative.”*
“He sent a letter to the Directors suggesting that you be court-martialled.”
“That sounds like something a relation would do.” Bonaparte smiled, but I couldn’t tell whether he was amused or not. “Like something a coward would do.”
“He’s going around calling you ‘The Deserter,’“ Lucien informed Bonaparte with unseemly relish. “For abandoning your post.”
“Basta! I left this country at peace and I return to find it at war. I left it crowned with victories, and I return to find it defeated, impoverished and in great misery. And who, I would ask the good Bernadotte—our once-upon-a-very-short-time Minister of War—who is to blame? That’s my question to him.” Bonaparte hit the mantel with his fist. “Anything else?”
Fauvelet and I exchanged glances. Bonaparte was back.
October 22, early evening.
Each day, more soldiers return, bronzed and bearing gifts. Paris is aglow with celebration, abuzz with stories. Wives and daughters parade scarves of exotic silks, fathers and sons proudly wear bejewelled scimitars. Our meals have suddenly become hot with spice. We’ve been invaded by the East—seduced.
October 23.
It’s only four in the afternoon and already my little house is bursting with soldiers. “My Egyptians,” Bonaparte calls them. Hortense, home from school, powders her nose and studies her reflection in the looking glass before descending the stairs.
Loud and boisterous, the soldiers celebrate their return “to civilization,” consuming with great gusto, as if they had been starved. (They were.)
Fearless Murat, swarthy, jewelled and plumed, struts from room to room displaying his battle scars to every servant, the wounds still fresh, barely healed, two holes, one in each cheek. “But not my tongue,” he says, sticking it out for examination. The pistol shot went in one cheek beside his ear and exited the other, “without even breaking a tooth,” he told me, pulling his thick lips with his fingers.
“You were lucky,” I said, stepping back.
“And Junot?” I asked Fauvelet, trying to sound offhand. “Did he not return with Bonaparte?” A number had yet to return, including Tallien (much to Thérèse’s relief).*
“Andoche Junot, I regret to say, had to be left behind in the desert”— a sly smile—”with Othello,” he whispered, “the child he had by an Abyssinian slave.”
With liquor the men begin to talk—uneasily at first—of the killing heat, the flies, the dysentery. Stories of an ocean of sand, and of thirst. Stories of soldiers blinded by fever. Stories of the Black Plague.
It is the whispered stories that I listen for, and hear—stories of a sea of white turbans, barbaric tortures, French soldiers left in the desert to die of thirst, murdering one another for a cup of water.
“How horrifying!”
“It was different there, Maman,” Eugène said, his cheek quivering.
Close to midnight, a cold evening
“So, the domestic spat is resolved? All is well?” Barras greeted me with a bone-crushing embrace. “You’ll not join me for a cup of chocolate? My cook has made the most glorious Brussels biscuits. I must say, Eugène looks like a strapping young man. But a bit uneasy? I don’t know how to put it, but I see it sometimes in young soldiers.” He made a face. “Has he said anything to you? The conventional wisdom is that it’s best not to dwell on their experiences, but I’m not so sure. Sometimes it helps to talk. Call me an old woman! But tell me, how is my protégé? I hardly ever see Bonaparte.”
“He’s working on a paper for the Institut National.”
“Ah, yes, something about a stone, I’ve been told.* How charming. The military man returneth and taketh up the mantle of an academic hermit. A wise posture. One I myself would have recommended, had I been consulted.”
“It’s not a posture.” Although Bonaparte had indeed decided that he should remain out of the public eye to weaken rumours of ambition. And to consider his next move. At the beginning of a campaign, to advance or not to advance must be carefully considered. “Won’t you come see us?” I asked. Something in Barras’s voice suggested that he’d been offended. As well, I was concerned. The Directors had been treating Bonaparte with a conspicuous lack of respect. Jealousy, I suspected. And perhaps fear.
“Is that an invitation from you, or from the General?”
“From us both, of course.”
“Of course,” Barras said, lowering himself into a chair, his hand on the small of his back. Toto leapt onto his lap. “Have you heard what Director Sieyès said, when he learned that Bonaparte was back?”
“Sieyès was dining with Lucien Bonaparte, was he not?”
“Yes, those two are cosy, I’ve noticed. When Sieyès was given the news of Bonaparte’s return, he is said to have exclaimed, ‘The Republic is saved.’ Curious, don’t you think? I’ve been wondering about that, wondering what exactly he meant.”
“Sieyès said that? Are you sure?” Director Sieyès is said to detest Bonaparte—and the feeling is mutual, certainly. I leaned forward in my chair, my eye on the door. “Do you think there is any truth to the rumour that Director Sieyès is plotting?”
“A conspiracy? Every man of politics in Paris is plotting something.” Barras carefully lifted Toto back down onto the carpet and tugged the dog’s tail playfully. “Rousseau warned that if one were foolish enough to found a Republic, one must be careful not to fill it with malcontents. Malcontents! The French Republic is a nation of malcontents. I’ve been telling you for years—we’re doomed.”
October 24:
“Bonaparte, there is something I have to ask you.” I’d been reading to him from Carthon, his favourite poem by Ossian. Who comes from the land of strangers, with his thousands around him? His face is settled from war. “It’s about Eugène.”
Bonaparte looked at me, his eyes glazed, as if in a reverie.
“What happened in Egypt? I mean, what happened to Eugène. I’ve asked him, but he won’t talk.” It was more than that. At any inquiry, my openhearted son closed down, his voice became guarded, he looked away, his cheek muscle quivering.
“He fought in battles, he killed men, he was injured.” Bonaparte shrugged. “He returned victorious. What more is there?”
Afternoon.
I discovered Mimi in the larder, sitting in the dark on the stone-flagged floor. “Are you all right?” I asked, alarmed.
“I overheard the soldiers talking. I found out what happened to Eugène.”
I slid down on the floor beside her. “Oh?” Pheasants ripe with maggots were hanging above the slate sh
elves.
She examined the palm of her left hand, tracing the lines with her fingers. “I don’t want to tell you.”
I put my hand on her arm. Her skin was smooth and cool. “Please?”
She took a breath: Eugène and another aide, the two youngest, had captured a town of Turks.
“An entire town?”
The men had surrendered, pleading for their lives. Proudly, my son and his companion returned with their prisoners. But Bonaparte could not feed his own men, much less all these Turks. So the prisoners—thousands of them—were driven into the sea to drown. The next day Eugène’s partner shot himself.
“Oh no,” I whispered.
“There is more,” Mimi cautioned me. Eugène was commanded to cross the desert. “He was to deliver a parcel to the Pasha—a warning.” I leaned my head back against the wall, closed my eyes. Mimi’s voice in the dark closet was low, musical. “A sack of heads.”
Sickened, I imagined the shimmering heat, the stench. I imagined the flies, the ghosts. “But that can’t be!” Bonaparte would not do such a barbaric thing—and he certainly wouldn’t have commanded a boy to do it for him.
Bonaparte was tied up in meetings. I lay down, trying to decide what to do. Finally I got up and went out to the stable, where I found Eugène helping the coachman with a harness. He looked at me expectantly.
“May I talk with you for a moment?” I led us to the bench under the lime tree in the garden. “I’ve learned what happened with your prisoners—and the warning you had to deliver, to the Pasha.” He turned away, biting his cheeks. “I wish you had told me!”
“I couldn’t, Maman.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t have understood! You would have wanted to talk to the General about it.” He looked at me directly, as if to challenge me. “You would have held it against him.”
“Oh, Eugène …” But what could I say? He was right.
“Maman, please, promise me,” he said, blinking back tears. “The General did what he had to do; we all did. You must not say a thing to him about it.”
Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe Page 28
