The Second Empress (3 page)

He crosses his arms over his chest, scrutinizing the painting. Then he looks up at me. “You have talent.”

His sudden interest makes me uncomfortable. “Not much. Not like Maria.”

“How long have you been painting?”

“Three years.”

“And how many languages do you speak?”

“What is this about?” My father steps back into the room.

“Nothing.” Prince Metternich is quick to add, “Just idle curiosity.” But when he looks back at me, I feel compelled to answer.

“Six.”

He smiles widely. “As accomplished as any Hapsburg archduchess should be.”

C
HAPTER
2

PAULINE BONAPARTE, PRINCESS BORGHESE

Fontainebleau Palace, south of Paris November 1809

I
STAND IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR BEFORE HE COMES IN
, and as usual, I am shocked to see just how beautiful I am. I don’t mean beautiful in the way that Joséphine is beautiful. All that woman has are her great cow’s eyes and a head of thick curls. I mean
exquisitely
beautiful, like one of Bartolini’s marble statues. At twenty-nine, you would think I would already be losing my looks. But my waist is long and slender, and because I only gave birth once, my breasts are still high and taut. I turn, so that I can admire the effect of my Grecian gown from behind. In the candlelight, it is perfectly transparent.

“Paul!” I shout, and my chamberlain appears. He is my staunchest ally, my fiercest guard. I named him after myself when I discovered him in Saint-Domingue seven years ago. Of course, now that our colonists have their independence, they are calling their island Haiti. But for the French, it will always be Saint-Domingue. “Is he here?” I ask him.

“In the hall, Your Highness.”

“What does he look like?”

Paul tells me the truth. “Unhappy.”

So Joséphine has arrived, and they have spoken. I am certain she
threw herself at his feet, begging his forgiveness. And my brother no doubt felt sympathy for her. But this time he will not feel pity. This is not some affair with a young lieutenant—this is an unforgivable lie. For fourteen years she has convinced him that he cannot father a child. That it’s been
his
failure, not hers, that he would never have an heir. And then came Walewska. Pretty, blond, married Walewska, who eventually gave up her husband to bed my brother, and now everything has changed. My God, I could kiss her! In fact, I shall send her a diamond brooch. She should know what kind of service she has done for the Bonapartes, ensuring Empress Joséphine’s disgrace at last, and the downfall of the Beauharnais.

“Shall I send him in, Your Highness?”

I return to the mirror, a gilded monstrosity my second husband gave me as a wedding present, and study my reflection. My hair is held by a simple pearl band, and I arrange it around my shoulders like a long black shawl. “No. Let him wait another minute.”

Since we were children, Napoleon has admired my hair. In Corsica, I would ask him to braid it for me. He would only laugh and call my request a harlot’s trick, adding that no man could resist a woman whose hair he had touched. But then, if you listen to the women at court, I
am
a harlot.

I know what the gossips say. That when my first husband took me to the Caribbean, I experimented with every kind of lover: black, white, male, female. I grin, thinking of my life in Saint-Domingue. The lazy nights eating sapodillas with two, sometimes three partners in my bed. And the mornings after when the sun would cast a golden net over the sea … But then my husband died of yellow fever, and it was back to Paris. I was the Widow Leclerc without even a title for my name.

“Tell him I am ready.”

Paul bows at the waist and shuts the door.

My second match, however, changed everything.

I think of Camillo Borghese, doing whatever it is that he does in Turin. While it’s true that he is the greatest imbecile ever to hold the
title of prince, my marriage to him was my finest triumph. My brother granted both my sisters the rank of Imperial Highness, but I am the
Princess
Borghese, with a palazzo in Rome, a vast collection of art, and three hundred thousand francs’ worth of Borghese family jewels. Even my mother could not have envisioned such a match for me.

I wonder what the old women of Marseilles would think if they could see their “Italian maid” now. I was thirteen when our family fled Corsica and took refuge in their miserable seaside town. Everything we owned was left behind. We had nothing when we arrived, and that is how the French treated our family—as nothings. They believed that because we were born in Corsica, we wouldn’t know French. “There go the Corsicans,” they whispered, and, “What a shame they have nothing. That Paoletta is quite beautiful. She might have made a good marriage.”

When my sisters and I were sent to be maids in the grand Clary house, the men assumed they had purchased our sexual favors as well. “Corsican girls,” they said, “are only good for one thing.” I never told Napoleon. He was a twenty-four-year-old general with a war at his back. But when he visited us in Marseilles, he knew. Caroline had grown as fat as a pig, and I had stopped eating. “What’s the matter with them?” he asked my mother, and she pretended it was the food. “It’s not like Corsica.” But Napoleon saw my tears, and he knew.

“You and Caroline will leave that house tomorrow,” he said. “You will both come to Paris. With me.”

But Paris was a war zone. “It’s too great a risk. We’ll have nothing.”

“We will never have
nothing
. We are Bonapartes,” he swore, and something changed in his face. “And we will never be vulnerable again.”

Today no one would dare whisper that a Corsican comes cheap. I turn to my little greyhound, who is lounging on the chaise across the room. “We are the most powerful family in Europe,” I say, in the voice I reserve only for her. She thumps her tail with enthusiasm, and I continue, “We have thrones from Holland to Naples. And now, when they talk about us, it’s with fear in their voices. ‘Beware the Bonapartes,’ they say. ‘The most powerful siblings on earth.’ ”

The door opens, and Paul announces grandly, “His Majesty, the Emperor Napoleon.”

I turn, but slowly, so that my brother may see the full effect of my gown.

“Thank you, Paul.” He returns to the salon, and I face Napoleon. We are similar in so many ways. We have both inherited the dark looks of our mother’s Italian family, the Ramolinos, and like them, we are both hot-blooded and passionate. When he told me as a child that someday all of Europe would know his name, I believed him. “So you told her.” I smile.

Aubree runs to greet him, and he pets her mechanically. “How could I?” He stalks to my favorite chair and sits. “She was hysterical and weeping.”

“You
didn’t
tell her you are seeking a divorce?” My voice sends Aubree scampering from the room.

“She loves me—”

“Half of Europe loves you! She is a
liar
.” I cross the chamber to stand in front of him. “Think of the ways she has deceived you,” I say quickly. “First her age, then her bills, now her fertility!”
My God
, I think,
she is six years older than you! A grandmother already. How could you spend fourteen years believing you were the one at fault
?

His eyes narrow. “It’s true. She has always deceived me.”

“She has undermined your manhood.” I close my eyes briefly, and then play my best card. “Look at what she told the Russian ambassador.”

His face becomes still. “
What
?”

I step back. “You didn’t hear?”

“What did she tell him?” He rises from his chair.

I give him my most pitying look, then close my eyes briefly. “At one of her soirées, she told the Russians that you might be impotent.” My brother is enraged. He rushes across the room, and I hurry to stand in front of the door before he can leave and confront her. “It’s already done!”

“Step aside!” he shouts.

“There’s nothing you can do! Be calm.” I reach out and caress his face. “No one of importance believes these rumors. And with Marie Walewska carrying your child, who will give her words credit?” I take his arm and guide him to the chaise by the window. “Shall I open it? Do you need fresh air?”

“No. It’s bad for your health.” But he can’t stop thinking about the Russians. “
Impotent
!” he seethes. “If I went to her bed and refused to take her, it was because I had just returned from a visit with Marie!”

My sisters would be scandalized by this, but there is nothing Napoleon and I keep from each other. I sit on the edge of the chaise and lean forward. “And so she spread this rumor … this
vile
gossip. She has always been devious.” He can’t possibly forget the bills she hid from him after they married. How he had to sell his stable—his precious horses—to pay for her extravagances, which still continue. He may be richer than the pope, but I will never forgive her for using him this way. And I will
never
forget what she has done to me …

“I am right in wanting to divorce her.”

“Yes.”

“I … I will tell her tomorrow.”

But I know what he is thinking. He has an unnatural attachment to this woman. If these were different times, I would wonder if she had cast some sort of spell on him. “Perhaps you can have Hortense break the news,” I say casually, as if this thought has just occurred. This way Joséphine can weep, but she can’t change his mind. Then I change the subject entirely, as if we are agreed. “I have arranged a soirée for you tonight.”

“So I hear.”

By now, the guests must have arrived in my salon, filling the room with their laughter and perfume. “And I invited someone special for you.”

“Another Greek?”

“No, an Italian. Blond and very discreet. Not like Beauharnaille.” This is my favorite pun on Joséphine’s name. It means “old hag.” “Shall
we?” I stand, and with the candlelight at my back, I know that I must appear entirely nude.

He recoils. “You’re not leaving like that.”

“No?”

“It is indecent!”

I look down. “I could put on different slippers.”

“Your gown is transparent!”

“This is what they wore in ancient Egypt,” I protest. His conquest of Egypt put all of France in the thrall of the pharaohs. The soldiers returned from the Battle of the Pyramids with unimaginable wonders: painted sarcophagi, alabaster jars, small figurines carved from bright blue stone. In my château in Neuilly, my collection of Egyptian artifacts fills nearly three rooms. And every birthday, as a gift, Napoleon gives me something new. Last year it was a statue of the Egyptian god Anubis. The year before that, it was a queen’s gold and lapis crown. Someday, when I become too sick to host my brother’s
fêtes
, I will dress myself in Egyptian linen and cover my wrists and chest with gold. Then I will die an honorable death, like Cleopatra. She didn’t wait for Augustus Caesar to kill her. She was the master of her body.

“You take this love of the ancients too far.” He stands, though he cannot help but look. “Find something else.”

I lift the gown over my head and let it drop onto the chaise. Then I cross the chamber and stand naked before my wardrobe.

“The gauze dress with silver embroidery,” he says, coming to stand behind me.

“I wore that yesterday.”

“The new one.”

My brother knows everything that is purchased within his palaces, from the food for the kitchens to the dresses bought by court women. In this last matter, he takes a particular interest. We are to outshine every court in Europe, he says, and if that means every lady-in-waiting must buy four hundred dresses a year, then so be it. And if a woman should be foolish enough to appear at a gala in a dress she has worn to
some previous
fête
, she will never be invited again. I adore my brother for understanding this. I hold out the gauze dress, and Napoleon nods.

He watches me dress, and when I reach for a shawl, he shakes his head. “It’s a shame to cover such shoulders.”