Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe, Page 3

  My daughter greeted me with reserve, stiffening as I embraced her. “My hat, Maman,” she said, pulling off her crêpe bonnet, leaving on the white lace cap underneath. I knew by her manner, her averted eyes, that she was angry with me.

  “I jumped the grey mare.” Eugène smelled of soap and perspiration. I pushed a curl out of his eyes. At fourteen, he would soon disdain his mother’s touch, I knew.

  “But what’s this about jumping carts?” I reproached him.

  My new maid came to the door. She looked comely in my cast-off gown of peach chintz. “You rang, Madame Bonaparte?”

  Bonaparte. Hortense and Eugène exchanged glances. I motioned to Lisette to come forward in order to introduce her. She curtsied to them both. A flush coloured my son’s cheeks. Hortense dipped her head, but it was clear her thoughts were elsewhere, her eyes darting about the room—looking for evidence, I realized, of Bonaparte.

  “Thank you, Lisette. If you could bring us some hot chocolate? And the comfits.” Hortense has a weakness for sweets.

  “Maman, it was safe. The mare can jump five feet easily,” Eugène said, falling into the down armchair, his legs sprawling.

  Hortense lowered herself onto the chair with the horsehair seat, her shoulders back, her posture faultless (for once). I took a seat by the harp. “I understand that Madame Campan has talked to you both about my marriage to General Bonaparte,” I said—too bluntly, I thought. Not the way I’d rehearsed this speech in my mind!

  “Four days ago,” Hortense answered, enunciating precisely.

  “Yes, she told us. We know all about it,” Eugène said, squirming.

  “I want you to know that General Bonaparte cares deeply about both of you.” I felt I’d handled things poorly, that I’d let them down. I wanted to reassure them.

  “Maman?”

  I sat forward eagerly. “Yes, Eugène?”

  “Can I go to the Luxembourg Palace this morning, before we leave for Fontainebleau? Director Barras told me I could ride his horses any time I wanted.”

  I sat back, stupefied. Horses? Was that all my son could think of? How confusing this situation was! “No, Eugène,” I said, making an effort to sound calm. “I have another plan. Today is Palm Sunday. I was thinking we would go to mass together.”

  Hortense looked surprised. (And pleased, I observed with relief.)

  “Church?” Eugène groaned, sliding down into the depths of his chair.

  “We’ll walk,” I insisted, standing.

  I was surprised by the number of people standing in front of Église Saint-Pierre, enjoying the spring sun before going inside. Not only was it a Décadi* and a Sunday (a rare concurrence), but Palm Sunday as well. For once everyone could enjoy a feast-day together—Catholics and Atheists, Royalists and Republicans alike. I put my arms around my children as we climbed the steps. If there could be peace in the nation, then surely there could be peace in my little family.

  Fontainebleau.

  We weren’t able to leave for Fontainebleau until shortly after two, so it was quite late by the time we pulled into the courtyard of the Beauharnais home in Fontainebleau. “I expected you earlier, Rose,” Aunt Désirée said, patting at her powdered hair, which was dressed in fat sausage rolls. Her immaculate house smelled of beeswax and turpentine.

  “We got off to a late start,” I explained, keeping an eye on the children to make sure they took off their muddy boots before walking on the carpet. “We went to church.” I knew that this explanation would please.

  “Is Grandpapa awake?” Hortense asked.

  “Go! Go, my pets! He’s been waiting for you both.” The children raced up the stairs, pushing and pulling at each other. I did not attempt to quiet them; I was relieved to hear them laughing.

  “I’ve been most anxious for your arrival, Rose,” my aunt said, gesturing to me to take a seat. “I have excellent news.” She perched on the edge of the green brocade sofa, nervously jiggling an enormous ring of iron keys.

  “Oh?” A sick feeling passed through me. I’d come with news myself, and I feared my aunt would not consider it in the least bit excellent. “My husband died!” she said, crossing herself.

  “Monsieur Renaudin?” I had no reason to regret the man’s passing. He and my aunt had separated before I’d even been born. Stories of the evil Monsieur Renaudin had excited my imagination as a child—stories of the man who had tried to poison my aunt, and who had (it was later discovered) been imprisoned for trying to poison his own father.

  “And so the Marquis has asked for my hand in marriage.” Aunt Désirée made this announcement with a girlish flutter of her eyelids.

  “That’s wonderful!” I said, repressing a smile. The Marquis was over eighty years old—my aunt, a quarter century younger—and I doubted that marriage was much on his mind. “And I take it you’ve consented?” My religious, proper and socially sensitive aunt had suffered, I knew, from living with the Marquis all these years without the Church’s blessing.

  “But Father Renard insists we wait a year—out of respect. I’m terrified the Marquis will die before he makes an honest woman of me,” she said, picking up the loose sofa pillows one by one, as if looking for something. She found a coin under one of the pillows and, frowning, put it back. (A test of her servants, I realized.) “So I told Father Renard I’d donate a new candelabra to the church and he finally agreed to six months. I know where I can get a used one for a fraction of what I’d pay in Paris. A good washing down with vinegar will make it like new.” The cushions back in place, she pulled a tangle of crumpled handkerchiefs from the depths of her bosom and set to work smoothing them out one at a time on her lap. “And so, Rose, tell me: how are you?”

  “Fine! I have news as well.” The words came out louder than I’d intended, and far bolder than I felt.

  “Has your cow calved, dear?” She put a pastel green handkerchief aside and stuffed the remaining ones back into the crevice of her ample bosom.

  “No,” I said, taken aback. “At least, not yet. No, I’ve …” My heart was pounding against my ribs! “I’ve married, Aunt Désirée,” I said finally.

  Aunt Désirée was holding the green handkerchief to the light, examining it for stains. “Did you say married, Rose?” she asked, turning toward me.

  I nodded, disquieted by her calm manner.

  “Why … that’s wonderful,” she said, crossing herself, “but to whom?” “To a military man by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. He’s—” “What type of name is that?” my aunt demanded, frowning suspiciously.

  “It’s a Corsican name, Aunt Désirée, and—”

  “You married a Corsican?” She reached for a brass bell and rang it vigorously. “But Rose, Corsicans are … they’re barbarians, they live like Gypsies. They steal, murder, lie—they have no morals whatsoever! And they don’t speak a proper language, you can’t understand a thing they say.”

  Fortunately, a parlour maid in a frilled cap appeared just then at the door. “Salts!” my aunt commanded.

  “We’re out of salts, Madame,” the maid stuttered, wiping her palms on her white bibbed apron. “But we do have hysteric water, Madame.”* Aunt Désirée snorted with impatience.

  “Aunt Désirée, he’s not like that at all,” I said, as soon as the maid disappeared. “His family is old nobility, and he was educated at the best military schools in France. He’s very fond of me, and especially fond of the children,” I added with feeling.

  “Monied nobility, Rose?” With a squinty-eyed look.

  “He has a good position as a commanding general,” I said, avoiding her question. Not only did Bonaparte have no money, but our marriage contract stipulated that we contribute equally to all our household expenses. “He will be able to help Eugène in his military career.” This was my trump card. I was depending on it.

  “They made a Corsican a general?” Aunt Désirée demanded, attempting to fan herself with the limp green handkerchief. “A general of what?”

  “Monsieur Bonaparte is
General-in-Chief of the Army of Italy,” I said, using “monsieur” in a shameless attempt to appease.

  “I’ve never heard of an Army of Italy. Is it French even?”

  “Yes, of course!” I exclaimed—although everything I’d learned about the Army of Italy had led me to believe that it could hardly be called an army at all, more a ragtag collection of drifters and petty criminals, hungry and without uniforms, much less muskets. “He left to take command two days after the ceremony.” The wedding seemed like a dream to me now, like something that might not have happened.

  “A church ceremony, Rose?” she asked, pulling and twisting the green handkerchief, worrying it.

  “No,” I admitted. Bonaparte was anti-Church, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

  I heard a sniff. Oh dear! Was she weeping? Dismayed, I reached out to comfort her, but she turned on me like a hawk. “Rose, how could you?” she wept, dabbing her cheeks. “How could you have married a man with such a horrible name!”

  I’m writing this now in Aunt Désirée’s guest room in Fontainebleau. I talked to her at length, trying to calm her. I finally persuaded her to take a glass of hysteric water and lie down. (I had a glass as well.) I regret the way I’ve handled things, but at the same time, in coming to Bonaparte’s defence, in trying to persuade my aunt of the wisdom of what I’ve done, I began to convince myself. Bonaparte had the words “To Destiny” engraved on the inside of my betrothal ring, for he believes in fate, believes that we are fated. Are we? I wonder. I can only hope that somehow, someday, fate will prove that I have done the right thing. For my family’s sake, I dearly hope so.

  March 21—Paris. Almost noon.

  I received my first letter from Bonaparte this morning. So soon! It took me a long time to make out the words, and there are still parts I can’t read. Bonaparte’s handwriting is as impassioned as his words, which are ardent and tender.

  The letter was addressed to Citoyenne Bonaparte in care of Citoyenne Beauharnais, as if Citoyenne Bonaparte were a guest in my house, someone separate from me—which is how I feel yet.

  March 25, sunny, a beautiful day.

  A good (and productive) visit with Thérèse, followed by an amusing few hours with my delightfully eccentric friends.

  Thérèse arrived early in her elegant little barouche which she drove herself (practising, she explained, to enter the races that would be starting up again in the Bois de Boulogne). “And so how is Madame Bonaparte this fine afternoon?” was the first thing she said. The exotic scent of neroli oil filled my antechamber. She bent her knees to make it easier for Lisette to take her fur-lined cape.

  “You’re wearing a wig?” I asked, regarding my friend with astonishment. Under a jaunty hat adorned with a heron feather was a mass of blonde ringlets.

  “Only twenty francs.” She turned her head from side to side to make the curls bounce. “So I bought twenty-seven—and all of them blonde.” She pulled both her hat and her wig off, and dug her nails into her scalp. Her own black hair was tightly braided and coiled. “You haven’t answered my question,” she said, holding up a finger.

  “Madame Bonaparte is just fine, thank you. I already got a letter from my husband, in fact,” I told her. “But there are parts I can’t make out.” I pulled the letter out of a desk cubby and showed it to her, pointing out the indecipherable passage.

  “Mon Dieu, I see what you mean. What a mess,” she said, squinting. “I think it’s ‘perpetual.’ ‘You are the perpetual object of my thoughts.’ He signs himself B.P.?”

  “For Buona Parte … I think.”

  “Oh la la,” she said, reading on. “He’s madly in love with you.” “That’s just the way Corsicans are,” I said (flushing), taking the letter back.

  “No doubt,” Thérèse said with a teasing look. “And your children?” she asked, helping herself to an aniseed-zested licorice comfit. “What do they think of their new papa?”

  I made a face. “Hortense burst into tears.”

  “Because you married?”

  “Just because she saw me with Bonaparte!”

  “If you like, I could have a word with your daughter.”

  “Madame Campan already did,” I quickly assured her. My oh-so-proper daughter disapproved of my friend Thérèse, separated from her husband. And Barras. And any number of others, for that matter, including her own godmother!*

  “Speaking of your daughter, I had a brilliant idea. What about Director Reubell’s eldest son?”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “As a husband—for Hortense.”

  “But she’s not yet even thirteen, Thérèse. And since when have you become a matchmaker?”

  “Since I suggested you to the Corsican. Seriously,” she said, “the Reubells may be a merchant family, but they’re wealthy. And, of course, Reubell being a Director … that counts for something, I suppose? They’d likely be willing. Hortense has a noble bloodline, after all.”

  “Director Reubell is a radical Jacobin,” I said, checking to see whether we had everything we needed: quills, ink, a folio of paper, the files. “An aristocratic genealogy wouldn’t make any difference to him one way or—”

  Thérèse laughed. “You’re joking?”

  “Well, in any case she’s going to need a dowry.”

  “How much do you have?”

  “Five.”

  “Five thousand? That’s all?”

  Five thousand in debts was more like it.

  “But what about the Island property?”

  I shrugged. “With Martinico in British hands, I don’t stand to inherit a sou.”

  Thérèse pinched her cheeks together, considering. “Mind you, anyone can make a million these days. Why don’t you get into military supplies? If the Revolutionaries can do it, anybody can.” She looked at me. “You find that amusing?”

  “Making the small deal now and then is one thing; supplying the military is on another scale altogether.”

  “The concept is the same—all you need is nerve. I noticed that you beat those two bankers at billiards the other night—the wealthiest men in the French Republic and you humbled them. That’s nerve, if you ask me.”

  I smiled. Well

  “And look at your Masonic connections, your government connections, your financial connections.” “Those are social connections.”

  “I think you’re underrating yourself. You’re in an ideal position to make a small fortune, if not a large one. And face it, a fortune is not such a terrible thing. The Revolutionaries are raking it in as fast as they can. They figure it’s time for a feast after such a long famine, and you have to admit, they’ve got a point. Barras says anyone who doesn’t get into military supplies is a fool. It’s fast money, it’s big money, and there’s virtually no gamble involved.”

  “So long as one has the contacts and the money to invest.”

  “Really, Rose—Josephine! Sorry!—I doubt very much that that would be a problem. After all, you have dear Père Barras, don’t you? King of the Profiteers.”

  I raised my eyebrows. King of the Rotten was what most people called him. “Very well, Mama Tallita, I’ll consider.” I opened the file marked “Active” and looked at the clock. “We have only one hour.”

  A review of our projects proved discouraging. We have yet to succeed in getting Citoyen Merode erased, even though he was put on the List* due to his cousin’s emigration. We have succeeded, at last, in getting Citoyenne Daco and her son released from prison, but Citoyens Mercier and Pacout remain. Citoyen Pinson, sadly, died. We’ll see what we can do to help his widow and five children. In addition to our charities, eleven men and women have approached us for help getting their names taken off the List, getting jobs, getting released from jail. In light of the growing number of requests we decided to meet every week, before the ladies gather to play cards.

  “Speaking of whom,” I said, hearing a carriage pull into the courtyard.

  “Ah, it’s the Glories.” Glories? “You haven’t heard t
hat? That’s what Barras calls us,” Thérèse explained. “Because we dress for the glory of the Lord.”

  Glories indeed!** Before I could tell Lisette to please show them in, they’d entered, filling the dining room with their exotic scents, their fluttering fans and bobbing plumes, their silken ruffles swirling with all the erotic sensuality of a harem.

  “Ah, it appears we’ve interrupted a charity meeting,” tiny Madame de Crény said, the ends of an enormous red and yellow striped bow flopping down into her eyes like rabbit ears.

  “We were just finishing,” I said, gathering up the papers.

  “Is it true you married the Corsican?” Minerva asked, trying to keep her pug dog from sniffing at my pug dog, who was growling menacingly.

  I gave Thérèse an accusing look. “I didn’t tell them,” she protested. “I’m innocent.”

  “Hardly!” Fortunée Hamelin was half-naked in spite of the chill spring day; her gown of India gauze shot with silver revealed more than it concealed. (She boasted that her entire ensemble could fit into her embroidered pocket of Irish linen.)

  “You must not blame Thérèse,” Madame de Crény said, following me into the drawing room where the game table had been set up. “Director Barras is the guilty party.”

  “As usual.” Fortunée propped her mule-heeled slippers on a footstool, displaying to advantage what are generally considered well-turned ankles. (She was wearing drawers!*)

  “He has no willpower, the poor dear,” Minerva lisped softly.

  “And to think he’s running this country.”

  “He is running this country.” Madame de Crény perched on a chair, swinging her feet.

  “Do you think he is dyeing his hair?”

  “It must be that opera singer I’ve seen at his receptions.”

  “More likely it’s her younger brother.” (Laughter.)

  “And he’s wearing a corset.”

  “Just when we ladies have taken ours off.”

  “That’s liberation.”