Désirée (16 page)

At first the letters danced before my eyes. Now I have become more accustomed to them. Napoleon is the Military
Governor of Paris. The broadside reports that mobs of rioters stormed the Tuileries and wanted to tear the deputies to pieces. In his distress Barras entrusted Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte a former officer, with the command of the National Guard. Whereupon, this general demanded unrestricted powers from the National Convention and was actually granted these powers. He ordered a young cavalry officer named Murat to assemble some cannon, which were placed at the north, west and east sides of the Tuileries. These cannon covered the rue Saint-Roche and the Pont Royal. But the mob pressed forward, until a voice cut through the air: Fire!" A single cannon shot was enough to drive back the crowd. Order has been re-established. The directors, Barras, Larevellière, Letourneur, Rewbell, and Carnot, are grateful to this man who has saved the Republic from further chaos, and appoint him Military Governor of Paris.

I am trying to think all this out. I remember a conversation overheard in the bay of the window at Mme Tallien's: If I were Barras, I'd shoot down the rabble, dear Fouché." . . .
"But he would have to find someone willing to shoot." One cannon shot was enough; Napoleon let it be fired! Napoleon fired off a cannon—into the rabble, the broadside reports. Rabble—probably people living in cellars and unable to pay the high price of bread! Napoleon's mother, too, lives in a cellar. "Your son is a genius, madame." . . . "Yes, unfortunately!"

I was interrupted again and now I'm writing in my own room. While I was thinking about the broadside, I heard Joseph and Julie come into the parlour. The door to the terrace is not quite closed. So they didn't wait until evening to call!

Joseph said, "Napoleon has sent a courier with a long letter for me and a lot of money for our mama. I have sent a messenger to our mama asking her to come here at once. Is that all right, Mme Clary?"

Mama said it was quite all right. She said she would glad to see Mme Letizia, and didn't Julie and Joseph want to speak to me; I was on the terrace and still very weak. Joseph hesitated, and Julie began to cry, and she told Mama that Napoleon had written to Joseph that he was engaged to General de Beauharnais' widow. And they were to tell me that he would always be my best friend. Mama wailed, "The poor, poor child!" Then I heard Mme Letizia, Elisa Paulette come in and they all talked at once, until Joseph began to read something out loud, undoubtedly the letter from the new Military Governor of Paris.

Much later he and Julie came out to the terrace and sat down beside me, and Julie stroked my hand. Joseph was obviously ill at ease and he said that the garden looked rather autumnal already.

"I should like to congratulate you on your brother's appointment," I said, pointing to the letter which he was nervously kneading between his fingers.

"Thank you very much. I regret to say that I have something to tell you, Eugénie, and—both Julie and I are— very upset—"

I interrupted him. "Never mind, Joseph—I know." And when I saw his puzzled face, I added, "The door to the parlour was open and I heard everything you said."

At that moment, in came Mme Letizia. Her eyes flashed. "A widow with two children! Six years older than my boy. How dares Napoleon bring me such a daughter-in-law!"

In my mind I saw Josephine—silver eyelids, childlike curls, supercilious smile. And before me stood Mme Letizia with the red, work-worn hands and the wrinkled neck of a woman who all her life has washed laundry and scolded children. Her rough hands grasped a pile of bank notes. The Military Governor of Paris had already sent his mother part of his salary.

Later I was settled on the sofa in the parlour and listened to the others discussing the great event. Etienne got out his best liqueur and said that he was very proud to be related to General Bonaparte. Mama and Suzanne bent low over their e
mbroidery. "I feel much better now," I said. "Won't you bring me some of the linen I was initialing? I'd like to finish embroidering the monograms for my trousseau."

No one contradicted me. But when I began to stitch a
B, B, a
nd another
B,
there was an embarrassed silence. Suddenly I
realized that a part of my life was over. "From now on," I a
nnounced, "I no longer wish to be called Eugénie My n
ame is Bernardine Eugénie Désirée and I prefer Désirée. P
lease call me Désirée."

They looked at each other anxiously. I think they doubted my sanity.

Rome, three days after Christmas in the Year V
(Here in Italy they still use the pre-Revolutionary calendar: December 27, 1797)

They have left me alone with the dying man.

His name is Jean-Pierre Duphot and he is a general on Napoleon's staff. He came to Rome today to ask me to marry him. Two hours ago a bullet struck him in the stomach. We laid him down on the sofa in Joseph's study. The doctor said he could not help him.

Duphot is unconscious. He breathes in gulps, a thin thread of blood oozes from the corners of his mouth, and I have put some cloths around his chin. His eyes are half-open, but they see nothing. I can hear low voices in the next room— Joseph, Julie, the doctor and two secretaries of the Embassy. Julie and Joseph left the room because they were afraid of seeing a man die. The doctor followed them. This doctor is Italian and considers it more important to get to know His Excellency, the Ambassador of the French Republic in Rome, whose brother conquered Italy, than to watch over the death of an
insignificant member of the General Staff. I don't know
why, but I have a feeling that Duphot will regain consciousness; though I also feel that he is already far away. I have got out my diary and have begun to write in it again after all these years. Now I don't feel quite so alone. My pen scratches, and the rattling gasps are no longer the only sound in this terrible, huge room.

I have not seen Napoleone—only his mother still calls him that; the whole world talks of Napoleon Bonaparte and of practically nothing else—since that moment in Paris, My family still knows nothing of that encounter. He married Josephine the following spring. Tallien and Director Barras were their witnesses, and Napoleon immediately paid the widow Beauharnais' dressmakers' bills. He left for Italy two days after the wedding; he was entrusted by the Government with the supreme command! He won six battles within fourteen days.

The breathing of the dying man has changed. It is quieter. And his eyes are wide open. I have called his name, but he cannot hear me.

Yes, in two weeks Napoleon won six battles; and then the Austrians evacuated northern Italy. I often think of our evening conversations by the garden hedge. Napoleon actually has founded new states. He called his first Lombardy, and his latest is the Cisalpine Republic. He chose Milan as the capital of Lombardy and selected fifty Italians to govern this State in the name of France. Overnight the words "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" were inscribed on all public buildings. The people of Milan were forced to surrender a large sum of money, three hundred carriage horses, and their most beautiful art treasures. Napoleon sent everything to Paris. First, however, he deducted the pay for his troops from the Italian money; ordinarily the Directorate remained in debt to the Southern Army! Barras and his associates in Paris didn't know what was happening to them: money in the national treasury; Italy's most beautiful horses drawing their carriages; and valuable works of art in their drawing rooms. Napoleon parti
cularly recommended one picture to the Parisians' attention; it
is called
La Gioconda
and is the work of a certain Leonardo da Vinci. A lady, apparently named Mona, is smiling with cl
osed lips. Her smile reminds one of Josephine's. Perhaps she had bad teeth, like the widow Beauharnais. . . .

Finally something has happened which no one would have thought possible. The French Republic broke with the Ch
urch of Rome and for years Roman Catholic priests have fled to sanctuary beyond our borders. Now the Pope himself has suggested a peace treaty with France and has approached Napoleon, victor in Italy.

This delighted Etienne, who spent days telling everyone who came to his shop how years ago Napoleon had spoken to him of his Italian plans. And Etienne always says that he is not only Napoleon's brother-in-law, but his best friend as well.

I've been sitting with Duphot a long time, and I've even held up his head. But it doesn't help! His breathing is no easier, he struggles for air. I wiped some of the bloody foam from his mouth. His face is like wax. I called in the doctor. "Internal bleeding," he explained in broken French, and immediately returned to Joseph and Julie. I'm sure they were discussing tomorrow's ball.

The Government in Paris was worried long before the agreement with the Vatican was concluded; for Napoleon by himself wrote and signed, quite independently, all the treaties with the various parts of Italy he had liberated. He never inquired whether the Government in Paris agreed. This goes beyond the powers of a supreme commander, the directors grumbled; this has nothing to do with the conduct of the war
; this is foreign policy of the greatest significance. . . . But Napoleon ignored these objections and did not trouble to answer the Government's communications. He simply continued
to send money to Paris. Occasionally he asked for more troops, but he specified exactly from which sector these troops were to be taken; showing how familiar he is not only with
his own Southern Front but with conditions on all the
other French fronts as well. When it was suggested in Paris that a diplomatic adviser be assigned to Napoleon, and that embassies should be accredited to the new Italian States, he finally wrote to the Government. He listed several names; these were the gentlemen to be chosen as ambassadors of the Republic and sent to him. At the head of the list his brother Joseph.

So Joseph and Julie came to Italy; first to Parma, then as French Ambassador to Genoa, and finally to Rome. Moreover, they did not come directly from Marseilles but from Paris. As soon as Napoleon was appointed Military Governor of Paris, he wrote Joseph that he would have far greater opportunities in the capital than in Marseilles. Whatever happens, Napoleon always finds a post for his brother Joseph. He began as a modest secretary in the Town Hall in Marseilles. In Paris, Napoleon introduced Joseph to Barras and other politicians and also to army contractors, and the nouveaux riches speculating in houses. Joseph began to prosper. He bought some of the property confiscated from the aristocrats when it was sold at low prices by the Government, and then resold these houses at far higher prices. Etienne explained to us that, because of the housing shortage, speculations of this kind were very profitable. Within a short time Joseph could afford to buy a small house for himself and Julie in the rue du Rocher.

When the Italian victories were reported—Millesimo, Castiglione, Arcola, Rivolt—Joseph became a very important man in Paris. He was the elder brother of Bonaparte, whom the foreign press called "the strong man of France" and our own papers praised as "the liberator of the Italian people" and whose thin face can be seen in shop windows, on coffeecups, flower vases or snuffboxes. On one side is Napoleon's face and on the other the French flag. . . .

No one was surprised when the French Government at once acceded to the request of their most successful general and Joseph became an ambassador. Joseph and Julie moved into their first Italian marble palace, and Julie was very unhappy and wrote desperate letters asking me to come and
stay with her. So Mama let me go. Since then I have been wandering with her and Joseph from one palace to another; I live in horrible high rooms, with black and white tile floors; and I sit in pillared halls in which various weird bronze fountains spout water from all likely, and sometimes quite unlikely, openings. Our present palace is called Palazzo Corsini. We are surrounded by the clanking of spurs and the rattling of swords because the staff of Joseph's embassy consists chiefly of officers.

Tomorrow evening Joseph is giving the largest ball yet arranged by the Embassy; he wants Julie and himself to be presented to the three hundred and fifty most prominent Roman citizens. Julie hasn't been able to sleep for a week; she is very pale and has circles under her eyes. Julie is one of those women who go all to pieces if they're having four guests for dinner. Here we always have at least fifteen, and any moment Joseph is apt to arrange a reception for a few hundred people. Although a small army of lackeys, cooks and chambermaids buzz around us, Julie feels personally responsible for the whole circus and clings to me sobbing and moaning that things will "go badly." She inherited this unfortunate attitude from Mama and even talks like her.

Duphot has moved again. I had hoped that he would regain consciousness; for a moment he looked at me quite clearly, but then his half-open eyes no longer focused; he struggled for breath, spat blood, and sank down more deeply into the pillow. Jean-Pierre Duphot, I'd give a great deal to be able to help you. But there is nothing I can do. . . .

In spite of battles and victories and peace treaties and newly formed States, Napoleon finds time to take care of his family. From the beginning, couriers from Italy arrived in Marseilles with letters and money for Mme Letizia. She "moved to a more respectable flat, and the irrepressible Jérôme was sent to a good school. Caroline went to the same fashionable boarding school in Paris as Hortense Beauharnais, Napoleon's stepdaughter. The Bonapartes have really risen in
the world! Napoleon was furious because his mother allowed Elisa to marry a certain Felix Bacciochi. "Why this sudden marriage?" he wrote, "and why on earth to this worthless music student, Bacciochi?"