The Last Great Dance on Earth (31 page)

Sire, Emperor (Papa),

I am writing to you now with tears in my heart. Your beloved Josephine passed away suddenly. We still cannot comprehend that she is no longer with us. Our distress is made more bearable knowing that she lived a full life, a life full of love. She loved us. She loved you—profoundly.

She got chilled riding in the Montmorency woods and developed a fatal infection in her throat. However, it would seem to have begun earlier, for after your exile, her constitution steadily weakened. Mademoiselle Avrillion tells us that she was subject to episodes of a devouring melancholy—so very unlike her, as you know.

It didn’t
help that she insisted on rising, insisted on entertaining. She was anxious about me and Hortense, how our futures would be decided. We have just now learned that we will not be exiled, that we may keep our properties and the titles that go with them. So perhaps she rests in peace.

But at what a cost! On the return from Saint-Leu, her doctor-in-ordinary advised a small dose of ipecacuanha as a corrective. Although suffering, she seemed better, well enough even to breakfast with guests. That night she tried to join us in a game of prison-bars on the lawn, but had to sit down. After the guests left, she attempted to take her customary stroll through the rose gardens, but became so weak she could not walk and had to be helped back to the château. It was at this point that we began to be alarmed. A few days in retirement revived her once again, but on reading in the news-sheets that little Napoleon’s body was to be exhumed, she
relapsed.
^*
Even so, she persevered in her efforts to persuade the Austrian and Russian rulers on our behalf.

Had I known how ill she was, I would have stopped her, Sire. (Not that she would have listened. Her doctor tells us he begged her to stay in bed.) When I left that afternoon, she seemed to have worsened. Although her doctor assured us that she had no fever and was not in danger, she was having difficulty speaking. I think this was on the Monday, which would make it the twenty-third of May. The next morning she woke with pain in her throat. Dr. Horeau administered a purgative and tried to persuade her to stay in bed. She refused: the Tsar and the Russian Grand Dukes were expected for dinner. She rallied, but partway into the meal was forced to excuse herself. I saw her to her room.

Wednesday she woke covered with a rash. She’d had a terrible night, Mimi told me: pains in her chest, fluxions of the stomach, a shivering fever. The rash did go away in the evening. Even so Hortense insisted that a plaster be applied to her throat.

On Friday the Tsar sent his own doctor, Sir James Wylie—a Scot,
not
an Englishman. All three doctors were concerned: the back of Maman’s throat was dark crimson. That night her fever raged. A blister was applied between her shoulders, and mustard plasters to her feet.

But it was too late, Sire. We were losing the battle. Saturday morning her fever was high and it was hard to feel her pulse. She breathed with difficulty and was in pain, slipping in and out of delirium. In a futile effort to save her, the doctors applied a plaster to her chest. Hortense brought her boys, but Maman became agitated for fear the air in the room would harm them.

Whitsunday, May 29, the doctors told us there was no hope.
^†
We sent for the curate to administer the last rites. He wasn’t home, so Hortense’s tutor, Abbé Bertrand, was summoned. At eleven Maman received the last rites. When Hortense and I appeared in the door, she held out her arms to us, but was unable to speak. Oh, the love in her eyes! Hortense swooned and had to be carried to her chamber.

At that moment Mimi cried out to me in alarm. I rushed to the bed. Maman slumped against me and I knew she was gone. I held her thus for a time, feeling her spirit like a brilliant light all around me.

Mimi told me to go to Hortense—she would put Yeyette to rest, she said, weeping. Hortense was in her room, still insensible. She roused herself, took one look at my eyes and began to weep. “At least you’ll have each other,” Maman had told me several weeks ago. I hadn’t been listening, Sire. She was saying farewell, and I hadn’t been listening.

Soon after, Hortense and I left for Saint-Leu. We are here now. Hortense is still overcome. It will take time.

As you can imagine, the citizens of this nation are overwhelmed with grief at the news that their “Good Empress Josephine” is no longer with them. I was told by old Gontier that the gate could not be opened for the mountain of bouquets piled high there, that the long road from Paris to Malmaison has been thronged with people with tears in their eyes—peasants and aristocrats alike.

She was placed in a double casket. Over twenty thousand people came all the way out to Malmaison to pay their last respects. Astonishing. Even the gate here at Saint-Leu is covered with bouquets and letters of sympathy. Really, Papa, it touches us deeply to see such an outpouring of love.

“Tell him I am waiting,” Maman told Hortense a few days before her death. Fever talk, we thought at the time, but now it all seems so clear. Mimi, who was with her through that last feverish night, says her last words were of you.

Did she know how much we loved her? If Maman’s death has taught me anything, Sire, it is that one must speak one’s heart when one can. I love and honour you as my Emperor and commanding general, but above all as my father. Bon courage, as Corsicans say. May God be with you. I know her spirit will be.

Your faithful and devoted son, Eugène

Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba one year later and returned to France, chasing out the Bourbon King Louis XVIII and the Royalists, including Talleyrand and all the others who had betrayed him. (Fouché, who stayed, betrayed Napoleon as well by sending his war plans to England.) This was the period known as the Hundred Days, which ended with Napoleon’s defeat by the British and their allies at the Battle of Waterloo. This time Napoleon was banished to St. Helena, a remote island off the southern tip of Africa. He died six years later at the age of fifty-one—of stomach cancer, some say; of poisoning, others claim. His pleas to his mother and Uncle Fesch to send medical help were dismissed by them as a British ploy. They had been convinced by a mystic that Napoleon was perfectly well. On his deathbed Napoleon is reported to have said, with emotion: “I have just seen my good Josephine. She told me we were going to see each other again and that we would never again be separated. She promised me.”

All the members of the Bonaparte clan were banished from France.

Madame Mère, who retired to Rome with her half-brother Fesch and daughter Pauline, refused to speak to Caroline after Caroline’s betrayal of Napoleon. She died after a fall at the age of eighty-six.

Joseph emigrated to the United States as “Count de Survilliers,” making a considerable amount of money on speculative ventures. He died in Florence at the age of seventy-six.

Lucien returned to France to help Napoleon during the Hundred Days. He was refused permission to join Napoleon on St. Helena, and lived out his life in Italy with his wife and eleven children.

Elisa fled to Italy as “Countess de Campignano.” She died of a fever near Trieste at forty-three.

Pauline also fled to Italy, where she lived from time to time with her mother in Rome, and even, at the end of her life, with her estranged husband Prince Borghèse. Of all the Bonaparte siblings, Pauline was the most loyal to Napoleon in exile, even managing to visit him on Elba in spite of her delicate health. She died in Florence at the age of forty-five, dressed in a ballgown, with a mirror in her hand.

After abdicating the throne of Holland, Louis settled in Italy, leading a quiet life as a gentleman of letters. He wrote a melancholy novel
(Marie,
about a man who is forced to marry a woman he does not love), poetry and various works relating to Holland and the Empire. He died of apoplexy at the age of sixty-six.

Caroline, deposed Queen of Naples, was considered too dangerous to be allowed to live near any members of her family, and died in isolation in Florence as the “Duchess de Lipona,” an anagram for Naples (Napoli). Her husband, Joachim Murat, was executed by a firing squad at the age of forty-eight, clutching portraits of his children. Foolhardy as ever, he had attempted to recover his kingdom of Naples with only thirty men.

Jérôme settled first in Switzerland and then in Italy. He returned to France eventually and lived to see the reign of Napoleon III (Oui-Oui). It is through Jérôme that the Bonaparte name exists today.

The Empress Marie-Louise, object of a deliberate plot on the part of the Austrians to keep her from joining Napoleon, succumbed enthusiastically to the sexual prowess of Count Neipperg, the chamberlain assigned to her for just that purpose. She became indifferent to the fate of her son by Napoleon. The boy—Napoleon II—died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two, without issue. (“My life would have been different,” he reportedly said, “had Josephine been my mother.”) Marie-Louise died in Vienna at the age of fifty-six.

Hortense came to Napoleon’s assistance during the Hundred Days, and consequently was exiled after Waterloo. She settled in Switzerland, where she died at the age of fifty-four. Her eldest surviving son, Napoleon-Louis (Petit), died in battle at the age of twenty-seven. Louis-Napoleon (Oui-Oui) was elected to the presidency of France after the Revolution of 1848, becoming Emperor of the French under the name Napoleon III.

Hortense’s lover, Charles Flahaut—believed to be Talleyrand’s illegitimate son—asked Hortense to marry him, but she refused because Louis was opposed to a divorce, and ultimately Flahaut married another woman. Their illegitimate son, Charles Auguste Demorny, was prominent in the government of Napoleon III, his unacknowledged half-brother.

On condition that Eugène never take up arms again (which prevented him from coming to Napoleon’s aid during the Hundred Days), Eugène was offered the title Duke de Leuchtenberg by Tsar Alexandre. Eugène, Auguste and their children settled in Munich, living happily and quietly. He died of apoplexy at the age of forty-three.

Of seven children, six grew to maturity. Each married into royalty:

Josephine married the Crown Prince of Sweden (son of General Bernadotte and Eugénie-Désirée Clary—Joseph and Julie’s nephew), becoming Queen of Sweden.

Eugénie married Prince Frederick Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a German prince.

Augustus married Queen Maria II of Portugal (but died shortly after). Amélie married the Emperor of Brazil.

Théodelinde married Guillaume de Württemberg, a German count. Maximilian married Grand Duchess Maria, daughter of the Tsar of Russia.

Through Eugène, Josephine’s progeny live on in most of the royal houses of the world today.

With the exception of the letter of March 12, 1810 (to which information has been added), Napoleon’s letters throughout are edited versions of those he actually wrote to Josephine. The police reports (pages 245–46) are likewise authentic, as are Hortense and Émilie’s account of the journey to Plombières (pages 48–49), Napoleon’s instructions to Eugène on how to rule Italy (pages 196–97), and Josephine’s letter to Napoleon (page 318). The translations are my own, with help from Bernard Turle.

The illustration on page 62 of minuet notation is from
The Art of Dancing
by Kellom Tomlinson, published in 1735. The illustration on page 146 showing how to bow is from
Chironomia; or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery
by Gilbert Austin, originally published in 1806. The map on page 312 is based, with permission, on a map by Hyperhistory Online.

Anyone who ventures into the Napoleonic Empire is quickly overwhelmed by the vast number of books that have been published on all aspects of the period. After over a decade of immersion in this moment in history, I still feel I have only scratched the surface. My bibliography now lists almost four hundred titles; I will note only a few.

Researching this novel, I was highly entertained—”diverted” is a suitably eighteenth-century word—by the many memoirs of the period: those of Mademoiselle Avrillion, Fauvelet Bourrienne, Las Cases, Constant, Madame Ducrest, Baron Fain, Fouché, Madame Junot, Méneval, Madame Rémusat, and especially Hortense. In all cases it was necessary to judge the veracity and objectivity of the author (who was, in many cases, a ghost writer), making the search for “truth” rather like trying to find one’s way through the hall of mirrors at a fun fair.

For information about Josephine, my mainstays have continued to be:
Impératrice Joséphine, Correspondance, 1782–1814,
compiled and edited by Maurice Catinat, Bernard Chevallier and Christophe Pincemaille (Paris: Histoire Payot, 1996) and
L’impératrice Joséphine
by Bernard Chevallier and Christophe Pincemaille (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1988) as well as Ernest John Knapton’s
Empress Josephine
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963). An award-winning biography was published as I was in the final stages of this work: Françoise Wagener’s
L’Impératrice Joséphine (1763–1814)
(Paris: Flammarion, 1999).

It is difficult to select one particular book about Napoleon: there are so many. Although decidedly pro-Napoleon, Vincent Cronin’s
Napoleon
(London: Collins, 1971) remains one of the best, in my opinion. At the very least it is highly readable and captures the spirit of the time. Frank McLynn’s
Napoleon: A Biography
(London: Pimlico, 1998) is a recent and balanced account I consulted frequently.

Other books of note: Joan Bear’s
Caroline Murat
(London: Collins, 1972); Jean-Paul Bertaud’s
Bonaparte et le duc d’Enghien; le duel des deux Frances
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1972); Hubert Cole’s
The Betrayers: Joachim and Caroline Murat
(London: Eyre Methuen, 1972) and
Fouché: The Unprincipled Patriot
(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971); Emile Dard’s
Napoleon and Talleyrand
(London: Philip Allan & Co., Ltd., 1937); Walter Geer’s
Napoleon and His Family: The Story of a Corsican Clan
(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1928); Carola Oman’s
Napoleon’s Viceroy: Eugène de Beauharnais
(New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1966); Jean Tulard’s
Fouché
(Paris: Fayard, 1998) and
Murat
(Paris: Fayard, 1999).

Three books in particular provided a wealth of wonderful detail: Bernard Chevallier’s award-winning
L’art de vivre au temps de Joséphine
(Paris: Flammarion, 1998); Maurice Guerrini’s
Napoleon and Paris: Thirty Years of History
(New York: Walker and Company, 1967); Frederic Masson’s
Joséphine, Empress and Queen,
(Paris and London: Goupil & Co., 1899).

I am often asked to recommend a non-fiction book on the subject of Josephine and Napoleon. Evangeline Bruce’s
Napoleon and Josephine: The Improbable Marriage
(New York: Scribner, 1995) is excellent—a highly readable and generally accurate account of both personal and political worlds.

In closing, a word of caution: this subject is addictive.