The Second Empress: A Novel of Napoleon's Court Read online

  “There’s nothing more important to the ancien régime than their etiquette.”

  “Is that what keeps them rich?”

  “No. It’s what keeps them separated from the likes of us.”

  “But you’re Corsican nobility,” I pointed out.

  She laughed sharply. “That’s not good enough for them.”

  So we practiced ballroom curtsies and bows in my father’s salon, pretending the lamps were chandeliers, and that the windows looked out onto vast castle gardens. Every day we met, and I was young enough to believe that we would live like this for the rest of our lives: picnicking on the banks of the Ozama River, reading to each other from Ossian’s poems, Deaths wander, like shadows, over his fiery soul! Do I forget that beam of light, the white-handed daughter of kings? and listening to the birdsong from the mango trees. I was even foolish enough to ignore the sound of gunfire from the hills and, on the terrible nights, the screaming of women.

  Then our fantasy ended when her husband died of the fever.

  “Madame, you shouldn’t be in my chamber,” I warned her. “They’ll talk.” She had never come to my room before, and I wondered how the small wooden armoire and thin cot appeared in her eyes. This wasn’t how my half brother lived, with his heavy teak furniture and long writing desk. But this wasn’t how our workers lived, either.

  She seated herself next to me on the cot. “As if they don’t talk already?”

  It was true. Though I had never touched her, even my half brother assumed we were lovers. He confronted me one morning outside the stables, threatening to kill me and my whore of a mother if I didn’t stop meeting Madame Leclerc. Before he lunged for my throat, I asked him, “Do you really think she’d bed a mulâtre like me?” It was a trick I had seen Pauline use on her husband once at dinner. He didn’t know that Pauline didn’t care about color, or that I would never take a woman without marrying her. After that, he smirked whenever he saw “the stunning Madame Leclerc with the pathetically smitten mulâtre Antoine.”

  Now she buried her head in her hands, and tears slipped through her fingers like rain. “It’s over, Antoine. I’m returning to France.”

  “Forever?”

  “Yes. But you are going to come with me.”

  I pulled away from her. “You can’t command me like one of your servants!”

  “But you love me.” She stood, pressing her chest against mine. “I’m a widow now. It’s what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”

  I searched her face to see if this was true. If it was … “Madame, you are grief-stricken,” I told her.

  “I know what I am! And I am devastated at the thought of returning home without you.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to think with her body against mine. “My father cannot run this plantation without me.”

  “He will hire someone. You’re a mulâtre, Antoine. You don’t belong here. The blacks won’t have you in their army, and if you fight with the French, you’ll be turning your back on your own mother.”

  It was true.

  Pauline caressed my cheek. No woman had ever touched me like this before, and I wondered if this was how she had touched my brother when they were together. “Come with me,” she repeated, but all I could hear was her breath in my ear. “They don’t need you, and I do. We will go to Paris until this war is over. There will be food and peace and nights without gunfire. I’ll hire you to be my chamberlain. In a few years, you’ll be wealthy. You can return to Saint-Domingue and buy any plantation you desire. And who knows? Maybe I’d be ready to return here, too.”

  My heart beat wildly. I could return to my island with the most enchanting woman in the world, my fortunes great enough to buy a farm of my own. “You would return to Saint-Domingue?” I asked her.

  “Why not? But we can’t stay here now. My brother has called me home. Come,” she implored. “Think of it as an adventure.”

  The ship we boarded for France was the Janus. I learned then what kind of adventure it would be: she took two lovers while we were at sea, and after that there were all the men she invited to her chamber in Paris. Then there was her second husband, Camillo Borghese, the short, fat Prince of Guastalla. “But not as fat as his accounts,” she’d joked.

  “Have you ever loved any of them?” I asked one night, watching her in the mirror as she brushed her hair—for this is what I am paid to do: watch, and wait, and listen, and advise. Two years had passed since we left Haiti, and when I glanced at my reflection in her husband’s glass, I did not recognize the man who peered back at me. He wore a red velvet coat with gold epaulettes. His hair was cut short, just below the ears. And his name—the name Pauline insisted upon when she burned a path like the sun toward the Tuileries Palace—was Paul Moreau. I had abandoned Antoine somewhere in Haiti; in the mango groves, perhaps, with my mother’s songs. I was named after the Princess Borghese, and as a member of France’s imperial court, I spoke with princes and walked with kings.

  If my family were alive, they would not know the man who chatted daily with the emperor in his study. They would think the well-dressed chamberlain quoting Rousseau, and arguing against slavery in France’s colonies of Saint Lucia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Senegal, was the son of a highly educated diplomat. But then, my family isn’t alive to see me. Like my name, I abandoned them in Haiti.

  Pauline turned to face me, and I could see her thinking about my question. After sharing her days and heart with me, did she love the men she spent her nights with? “Of course not,” she replied. “You know there are only two men in my life.” She paused, waiting for me to ask. When I didn’t, she said, “Napoleon and you.”

  Five years later she is just as wild, and selfish, and dazzling. This morning, she can barely contain her joy because the emperor has done it. He has told his wife, the woman who followed his star even when it was sinking low in the heavens, that their divorce will be announced in fourteen days.

  “My God, Paul, I’m so happy I could weep! No, I’m so happy I could dance. In fact”—she rises from the mirror, and I know from the way her eyes have grown large that she has hit on something she considers great—“tonight I shall host a ball!”

  I do not move from my chair. It is here, on this chaise at the far end of her boudoir, that I spend each morning listening to her plans while Aubree curls onto my lap and falls asleep. “And you think that is wise?”

  But whenever this mood takes her, she is impossible to reason with. “He’s my brother. Why shouldn’t he know that I love him?”

  “Because there are those who still love the empress as well. And she has just lost it all. This palace, her husband, the imperial crown—”

  “Which should never have been hers to begin with!” She turns back to her mirror and brushes her hair frantically. If she continues this habit whenever she’s upset, she’ll be bald by forty. “I am hosting a fête, Paul, and not even you can change my mind.”

  “Your devotion to him is clear,” I say. It is also unhealthy, but I do not add this. She craves his attention. In all of France, there have never been two siblings with such raw ambition. They goad each other on. “And the empress?” I ask. “What will become of her?”

  She walks to the commode and considers her silk robes. “He will banish her,” she guesses, choosing the red. “Then she will know how it feels to lose the man she wants.”

  Although she already has my attention, she drops her chemise to the floor. For all the prostitutes on the Boulevard du Temple, I have never seen another woman’s body but Pauline’s. And she is utterly without shame. After she married her wealthy Italian prince, she gifted him a statue by Antonio Canova, who sculpted her in the nude as the goddess Venus. When the emperor saw it, he flew into a rage, forbidding any future statues. So in the Château de Neuilly, her private residence in Paris, she has modeled the serving bowls on her breasts instead. I have seen her brother eat nuts out of them. “Why should I hide them away?” she told me, enjoying her little joke. “The ancient Egyptians we
re proud to bare them.”

  When she has fastened her robe, she crosses the bedchamber into the salon. “Are you coming? I have a story to tell you about Joséphine.”

  I follow her into my favorite room in the Tuileries. The doors to the balcony have been thrown open, and fresh light illuminates the gilded walls where an artist has painted scenes from the temples of Egypt. Women in white sheaths raise their arms to the sun, and strange gods with the heads of jackals and bulls carry powerful insignias: crooks, flails, a golden key to life—all symbols of rule. I sit across from her on a padded chair while she arranges herself on the divan.

  “I was only fifteen when I met Fréron, but I knew what I wanted. We were set to marry in Martinique until Joséphine …” Tears redden her eyes, and I am shocked. I had no idea she felt so strongly about Fréron, whose name she has mentioned briefly in the past. “Until Joséphine told my brother that Fréron would never be good enough for me.”

  I sit forward. “Then you loved him?”

  “Of course! I was fifteen.”

  “But he wasn’t a soldier,” I point out. Nearly all of Pauline’s affairs have been with men in French uniforms.

  “No.” She closes her eyes. “I almost tied my fortunes to a lowly deputy. Can you imagine? I would have lived in poverty, clinging to the hope that the government might increase his salary one day! But Joséphine was not to know that,” she adds heatedly.

  “So she saved you from penury,” I reply, and the look she gives me is thunderous.

  “I was a sensitive girl! He was going to save me. You don’t know—”

  But I do. I know exactly how it is with Pauline Borghese, the princess of Guastalla who was raised in poverty on the little Italian island of Corsica and vowed with her brother to conquer the world. I wish I had known her then, before the world gave her so much pain and grief. She wipes away real tears with the back of her hand, and this rare show of tenderness presses at my heart. Then, as if on cue, Aubree arrives, curling herself on the divan next to her mistress. There is nothing in the world the princess loves as this dog. She is tiny, weighing only ten pounds, but her eyes are filled with a world of expectation and play. “Tell me what you’ve heard about the divorce,” Pauline says, tracing the delicate, folded ears of her Italian greyhound. Tell me something cheerful is what she means.

  “I heard the empress fainted when he told her the news, and that the emperor had to carry her up to her chamber because she was too weak to walk.”

  “What an actress!” she exclaims. “I’ve never asked to be carried by the emperor, and I’m the one who’s always in pain. Do you remember how terrible it was last week?”

  “Your Highness couldn’t move from the divan for two days.”

  “And did I ask my brother to come and carry me? Did I stand up and pretend to faint at his feet?”

  “No, you are far more subtle than that.”

  She stares at me, but my face betrays nothing.

  “I told him to have Hortense tell her,” she continues. “He could have spared himself the theatrics. What else? I know my brother confides in you. Have you heard anything about how she’s to be treated?” She sits up on her divan, forcing Aubree to readjust her position.

  It would be easier for us both if I lied, but I will not. “The emperor has offered her a kingdom in Italy, including”—I exhale—“the city of Rome.”

  There is a tense moment of silence, and even Aubree knows what is coming; the little greyhound buries her nose in her paws.

  “Rome,” Pauline repeats, as if she can’t believe it. “How can he offer her the greatest jewel in Italy without any thought for me?” And then she cries, “I am the Princess Borghese, and Rome should be mine!”

  I spread my hands, as if it’s a mystery. But the truth is, her brother feels guilty. He has cast off a wife he still loves for a woman who will be able to give him sons. It is cruel. Especially since he has already gotten a child on his Polish mistress and might easily make the young boy his heir and keep his wife.

  “And what did she tell him?” the princess demands.

  What any woman of dignity would have said. “That love cannot be bought and sold,” I reply. “The empress refused the offer.”

  She sinks back on the divan. “Thank God.”

  A knock on the door sends Aubree rushing across the salon. She is practically dancing in anticipation, twisting her charcoal-colored body back and forth. “Look at her!” The princess laughs. “Calm down, mon chou, it’s only a visitor.”

  I cross the salon to open the double doors, but when Aubree sees who it is, she hurries back to the divan. “Her Majesty Queen Caroline,” I announce without enthusiasm.

  The youngest of the Bonaparte sisters pushes past me, and I am in full agreement with the dog. I cannot imagine a less likely woman for the queen of Naples. She is short and ungainly, with eyes that are forever darting about and the complexion of someone stricken with fever.

  “I have news.” She seats herself across from her sister and arranges her velvet cap so that the feathers are tilting jauntily to the side. The emperor may have made her shifty husband, Joachim Murat, the king of Naples, but he can never buy either one of them style. She is a dim star to Pauline’s sun, and there are a hundred petty jealousies between the sisters.

  “I know,” Pauline says smugly. “Paul’s already told me. He’s going to divorce her!”

  But Caroline, who should look dismayed that I’ve gotten to this news first, keeps smiling.

  “What?” Pauline presses. “Is there something else? Is he officially announcing it?”

  Now her sister plays coy. “I don’t know. Perhaps His Highness can tell you.” Her eyes cut toward me. “He seems to know everything.”

  Pauline shrugs. “If you can’t say—”

  “He’s drawn up a list of names!” she blurts. “All foreign princesses. And not a single one’s French.”

  Pauline’s voice rises. “For marriage?”

  Caroline, satisfied with this reaction, nods sagely. “Including Maria Lucia of Austria and Anna Paulowna, the Russian czar’s sister.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Pauline says flatly.

  “Then I suppose Maman didn’t show it to me. Perhaps I was dreaming—”

  “He would never marry an Austrian!” Pauline exclaims. “The last Hapsburg queen of France lost her head.”

  “That was sixteen years ago. Who even remembers Marie-Antoinette now?”

  All of Haiti, I think. She is the reason that Toussaint declared an end to slavery on behalf of every personne de couleur. If not for her, there would never have been a revolution. And if not for the Revolution, with its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Toussaint would never have been inspired to declare Haiti free from slavery and oppression. It took thirteen years and a hundred thousand lives before the French were removed from Haiti, but four times this number were slaughtered after Marie-Antoinette lost her head. So surely they will not want another Austrian for their throne?

  “Then again,” Caroline adds lightly, “it could be the Russian. Or any number of minor princesses.” She is torturing Pauline.

  “He will not remarry yet,” Pauline counters, but she seems uncertain. She is twenty-nine to Caroline’s twenty-seven, but she might as well have been the younger sibling. I study her in the morning light: the graceful curve of her neck, the deep chestnut of her hair, the new lines etched by worry between her brows. I remember the afternoons we shared together in Haiti, the air heavy with orange blossoms and the scent of summer rain. Now that world is gone, lost in the savagery of war that took my family along with my home. But the island remains. My mother’s songs remain. And someday Pauline must see that all this is futile, must realize that life was simpler and sweeter when it was the two of us in my country.

  “And the announcement?” she asks, bringing me back to the present. “Has Maman said—”

  “The fifteenth.” Caroline adds meaningfully, “Of December. He won’t decide on a new w
ife before then.”

  Their eyes meet, and they are like a pair of jackals working together for the success of the hunt.

  CHAPTER 4

  MARIA LUCIA, ARCHDUCHESS OF AUSTRIA

  Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna December 1809

  AS SOON AS THE SUMMONS COMES FROM MY FATHER, I know. In eighteen years, my presence has never been requested in my father’s Council Chamber without my brother. I put on my muff for the walk across the palace, then call Sigi from his cozy bed near the fire. If I am to face the news that the Ogre of France, or der Menschenfresser as the Austrians call him, wishes for my hand in marriage, then I will do it with a friend at my side.

  I scoop up my little spaniel, and he rides in the crook of my arm as I make my way through the icy halls. Every winter my father spends a fortune to warm the palace, but it is never enough. The guards can see their breath on the air, and the courtiers’ wives, despite their vanity, are wearing thick cloaks and wide fur hats. “Your Royal Highness.” The men bow to me as I pass, but I don’t see the one I am looking for. When I reach the Blue Salon, where my father holds his council, I pause before the doors. I want to glimpse Adam Neipperg’s face, to see the conviction in his eyes as he tells me—as he certainly will—that I have nothing to fear from this meeting, that my father will never marry me to an ogre, not for all the money in the world. But he is nowhere to be found. So I stand before my father’s Council Chamber, and the guards wait for my nod. When I give it, the doors are thrown open.

  “Archduchess Maria Lucia of Austria,” they announce.

  I step forward and halt immediately. Everyone is inside, including Adam Neipperg and my stepmother, Maria Ludovika. Maria passes me a warning look as I approach the table, and suddenly the room is silent. My father indicates a chair across from him.

  “Maria,” he begins, but can’t seem to find words to continue. I bury my fingers in Sigi’s fur and wait for my father to say it. Clearly, the French emperor has asked for my hand, and now Austria must begin the tricky dance of turning him down without grave offense. He looks to Prince Metternich, who clears his throat.