Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe (6 page)

Nice, 10 Germinal

I haven’t spent a day without loving you; not a night has gone by without my taking you in my arms. I haven’t even taken a cup of tea without cursing the glory and ambition that separate me from the soul of my life. As I attend to business, at the head of the troops, while touring the camps, you alone are in my heart.

And yet you address me formally! How could you write such a letter? And from the 23rd to the 26th, four days passed. What were you doing that you could not write your husband? My spirit is sad; my heart is enslaved; my imagination frightens me.

Forgive me! My spirit is occupied with vast projects, yet my heart is tormented by fears. —B.P.

April 9.

“I can’t tell you what I suffer the moment I take up a quill,” I confessed to the Glories. “My first husband detested my letters, and now Bonaparte.” It seemed to be my fate—my curse.

“He’s angry because you addressed him formally, as
vous?”

“But that’s how a wife is
supposed
to address her husband.” The crown of Madame de Crény’s hat was garlanded with tulips secured by a wide bow of black and white striped satin.

“Unless you’re the baker’s wife.”

“How egalitarian do we have to become?”

“He’s ardent, I suppose,” I said with a disheartened sigh.

Fortunée Hamelin scoffed. “That usually means quick.”

April 10.

I’m nineteen days late.

April 11.

I’m exhausted and have a pain in my side that the motion of a carriage seems to inflame. Troubling conversations at both schools about the children. Too fatigued to explain. For now, fifteen drops of laudanum
^*
and to bed.

April 12, 1:00
P.M.
, still in my flannels.

I feel rested, restored (although that pain persists). What happened—

When we let Hortense down at her school, I was told Madame Campan wished a word with me. I asked Eugène to wait and went inside.

“My purpose in summoning you, Madame Bonaparte,” Madame Campan informed me, “is to discuss the possible establishment of the flux. Now that your daughter has turned thirteen, things will begin to move quickly. It is best to think ahead.”

It took me a moment to understand what she was referring to. “In my family, we called it the flowers,” I said, feeling a bit silly.

“Many do.” The headmistress’s leather chair creaked as she leaned back. “Or the ordinaries. Our dear departed Queen called it the
general.
The general has come, she would say, or the general is late, or early,
depending on his whim.” Her voice betrayed a quaver. The stoic headmistress would invariably weaken recalling her years as lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Antoinette. She cleared her throat. “What I wish to ask you is this: would you like me to send a courier when the time comes? I flatter myself on the importance of my role in the hearts and minds—the souls!—of my charges, but when the general calls to escort a girl into the realm of womanhood, it is her mother who should be at her side.”

“Of … of course,” I stuttered.

Madame Campan smiled and leaned forward. “No doubt you have given thought to the matter of corsets.”

I nodded, but this time the schoolmistress frowned. “I must advise you to refrain from corsetting your daughter. Such a practice might damage her organs. Your daughter is approaching the age of womb disease—one can’t be too careful. Madame Bonaparte, you look concerned. Have I alarmed you?”

At Eugène’s school the pattern was repeated: my presence was requested by Citoyen Muestro, the headmaster. Eugène groaned, which gave me fair warning that the news would not be good—and it wasn’t. Eugène was failing all his subjects, I was informed—all but horsemanship. And furthermore, he’d participated in a prank on the cook, causing a “ghost” to rise up in the henhouse, very nearly giving the man apoplexy. I left the schoolmaster’s office shaken, his threat ringing in my ears: “If your son does not begin to apply himself, we will have to ask you to withdraw him from this institution.”

Eugène thrust out his chin. “I don’t care! I hate school,” he said, putting away the scrapbook he was working on.

“You’re only fourteen, Eugène. You have to go to school.” I made a place for myself on his narrow bed. “You will never get to be an officer if you don’t get an education.”

“What about General Hoche? He’s General-in-Chief and he never went to school.”

Hoche?
It startled me to hear my son speak Lazare’s name. Startled me and weakened me. Eugène had only been twelve when his father had died. Throughout that terrible first year he’d been sullen, moody, angry. It had been angels, surely, who had sent us Lazare Hoche, a man with a heart so generous that he could heal even the most shattered soul—my own, Eugène’s. He’d taken Eugène into his care, into the army as his aide and apprentice, cared for him like a son. But General Lazare Hoche has a wife and a child of his own—and Eugène now has a father.

April 13.

I’ve been all this morning looking through a book Madame Campan has loaned me,
A Treatise on All the Diseases Incident to Women.
It was written by a physician to King Louis XV. Madame Campan told me Queen Marie Antoinette herself consulted it. There is a great deal in it on all manner of complaints. For example, on the subject of the flowers (the morbid flux, the author calls it):

The menstruous Purgation is a Flux of Blood issuing monthly from the Uterus. Galen, in his
Book of Bleeding,
attributes the Origin of the Menses to a Plethora. Does not, says he, Nature herself cause an Evacuation in all Women, by throwing forth every Month the superfluous Blood? I imagine that the Female Sex, inasmuch as they heap up a great quantity of Humours by living continually at Home, and not being used to hard Labour or exposed to the Sun, should receive a Discharge of this Fulness, as a Remedy given by Nature.

1. The first Fact of this morbid Flux is that it has a stated Time wherein it appears, and this ordinarily from the Age of thirteen to sixteen Years.

2. It is known by Experience that the Menses generally cease betwixt forty-five and fifty Years of Age.

So, it is indeed possible that Hortense, having turned thirteen, might soon begin her periodical sickness. The author cautions against exposing girls of this age to spicy foods or to music in an immoral key. If only I knew which musical keys were immoral!

April 15.

A persistent pain in my side and a feverish feeling. And still no sign of the flowers.

April 17.

The pendulum clock had just struck two when I heard a horse cantering down the laneway. I went to the front steps. It was Eugène, dismounting a grey gelding covered in lather. He threw the reins around the stone lion statue and bounded up the steps two at a time. “You’re riding alone?” I asked, embracing him. The road between Paris and Saint-Germain was isolated, known to be dangerous. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” His eyes were red-rimmed. Why? “Has something happened?”

“Maman, it’s about General Hoche,” he said, catching his breath. He pulled a torn sheet out of his vest pocket, a page from
Les Nouvelles.
The newsprint shook in his hand. I squinted to make out the small type:
General Lazare Hoche has been killed in the Vendée.

“Eugène, it can’t be true.” Barras would have notified me immediately. But my son was not convinced. “If you like, I’ll go to the palace,” I assured him. “Director Barras will know for sure.”

It was cold in the Luxembourg Palace in spite of the enormous fires burning, the carpets, the hangings, the drapes of crimson damask. And strangely quiet but for the rhythmic swish of the porters’ brooms, cleaning up after the daily mêlée of petitioners. I followed the footman through the cavernous reception rooms, my thoughts on that scrap of newsprint folded into the palm of my glove.

Four workmen regilding the wainscotting in the Grande Galérie fell silent as I went by. Only five months before the once-elegant palace had been fit only for vermin and bats. Slowly Barras was having it entirely restored. Slowly it was beginning to look like a palace again—and every bit as intimidating. I glanced in a looking glass, adjusting the tilt of my hat. I was calling on the most powerful man in the French Republic, I reminded myself. It was hard to believe. My dear, eccentric friend, Paul
Barras, was now ruler of the land. “Père Barras,” Thérèse and I called him, because of his big-hearted generosity.

“Is Director Barras taking callers?” the footman asked Barras’s elderly doorkeeper, who motioned me in with a flourish.

“Entrez!” I heard something shriek from within.

“Bruno, was that a parrot?”

The doorkeeper grinned, his three front teeth missing. I stepped into the room. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Barras preferred rooms dark, draped in velvet—a gaming-room ambience.

“Pretty lady!”

“Well said!” Barras was stretched out in his favourite chair, a multicoloured bird perched on his white-gloved hand. “Meet Igor, a gift of the Sultan of Turkey—along with a tiger. But I sent the tiger over to the Jardin des Plantes and kept this clever fellow. It’s a little frightening how quickly he learns.”

“Ha, ha, ha.” The parrot imitated Barras’s soft chuckle perfectly.

“Look—Toto’s gone into hiding,” Barras said with a grin. Only the nose of the miniature greyhound could be seen peeking out from under his desk.

“I had a parrot in Martinico.” A vile creature. Cautiously, with one eye on the bird, I kissed my friend’s cheek. Barras was wearing a Florentine purple taffeta jacket I’d not seen before. It was pulled in at the waist; he looked as if he might burst. Yes, a corset was likely, I thought. And it was true, I decided: he
had
died his hair black.

Barras eased himself up and nudged the bird onto the perch of a cage set in the window alcove, disentangling a claw from his lace cuffs.

“Damn the Royalists,” the bird shrieked.

Barras threw a gold-fringed velvet cover over the cage. “Brandy?” he offered, pouring himself a tumbler. I declined, taking the chair he indicated with a wave of his glass. He sat down across from me, crossing his legs at the ankle. Toto made a mad dash across the room and bounded onto his master’s lap. “And to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?” he asked, stroking the dog’s head. “I rather expected you at my salon this evening. You’ll return tonight? The Sultan will be here and I wish to give the impression of a harem.” A roguish grin.

I pulled the article from inside my glove, unfolded it and handed it to him. “Eugène saw a report in
Les Nouvelles
that concerned him.” My voice was not as calm as I had hoped.

Barras patted the pockets of his waistcoat, withdrew a gold-rimmed lorgnon and pushed it into his eye socket. “Lazare … killed?” He let out a laugh.

I felt a tingling sensation in my chest. “So, it’s not true?” I said, sitting forward. Eugène would be anxiously awaiting my return.

“Certainly not. Wishful thinking on the part of some Royalist, no doubt. You can’t believe journalists. Haven’t I taught you anything? Lazare is unkillable—you know that.”

He put Toto down and accompanied me to the door, leaning on my shoulder. “But one question, my dear, before you go.” Smiling his charmingly crooked grin. “Why such a fret over Lazare Hoche?” Tweaking my chin. “Madame
Bonaparte.”

^*
Josephine’s first husband had been convicted (falsely) of conspiring to get out of prison. He was executed, and his property confiscated.

^*
Laudanum: a solution containing opium, used widely in the eighteenth century for pain, particularly for “women’s complaints.”

In which I learn the Facts of Life

April 20, 1796.

I’ve been to see a doctor about the cessation of my monthly illness. “You’ve recently married, Madame?” he asked.

“My husband is in Italy now.”

“He left—?”

“Twenty-one Ventôse.”

Then he asked a number of questions. Are my breasts knotty? (No!) Have I experienced a feeling of fearfulness? Anxiety? (Yes, yes.) Do I suffer from toothache? (All my adult life.) Do I desire to eat loathsome and unwholesome foods such as carrots, raw turnips, roast pig? (I confessed I loved carrots.) Do I fear dying? Do I have forebodings and gloom? Am I overtaken by a fear of undefined evil? Do I suffer from heartburn?

“Excellent, you will carry to term,” he said, apparently satisfied with my answers.

“Do you mean, Dr. Cuce, that I am with child?” “I confirm it.” “But Dr. Cucé—”

“No need to be fearful, Madame,” he said, polishing his spectacles with the corner of his jacket. “Although it is not advisable for a woman to procreate after the age of thirty, you need not be concerned about consequences of a fatal nature. You have, as you informed me, already produced two children by your first husband, a procedure that has effectively opened up the channels.”

“Dr. Cuce, it’s just that I do not feel that I am …” My breasts are in no way tender and my belly is not distended. “And what of the pain I am suffering? What of the fever?”

“The pain is …?” He poked his manicured finger in my side.

“Sometimes quite bad,” I said, “and at other times only an ache.” At that moment, a steady, throbbing, painful ache.

“A minor inflammation of the stomach.” He wrote out a recipe for a purging diet-drink and an herbal tea to soak my feet in.

Twenty livres—on account.

Thérèse kissed me on both cheeks and on my forehead, as if bestowing a blessing. “That’s wonderful news! Bonaparte is so efficient.”

“I just wished I believed it. I’m not in the least bit tender, and this pain is so …” Worrisome.

“Did you take the hartshorn, nutmeg and cinnamon powder I sent you? Did you boil it in springwater, as I told you?”