The Second Empress (4 page)

I turn to place the shawl on my dressing table, and a sharp pain in my stomach makes me wince. I glance at Napoleon, but he hasn’t noticed. I don’t want him to worry about my health. Although someday, no amount of rouge or shadow will cover my illness. It will show itself in lines on my face and the thinness of my body. “Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be the pharaoh of Egypt?” I ask him. I know Egypt makes him think of Joséphine, since it was there that he discovered her infidelities. But in Egypt, their rulers never die. In a thousand years, Cleopatra will still be young and beautiful. With every golden crown and faience ushabti discovered in Cairo, she will be remembered for eternity.

“Yes,” he quips. “Dead and mummified.”

“I am serious,” I tell him. “There have always been emperors and kings. But there has not been a pharaoh for nearly two thousand years. Imagine if we could reign together.”

He smiles.

“Why not? The ancient Egyptian kings anointed their sisters as wives. There would be no greater couple in the world.”

“And how would I do this?” he asks. “Or perhaps you don’t remember that the Egyptians rebelled?”

“You would reconquer them. If you could defeat the Austrians, you could defeat the mamelukes. How difficult could it be?”

“Not very.”

I take his arm, and we head toward my salon. “Think of it,” I say. And for the rest of the evening, his eyes follow me. Though I am sure he will be happy with the Italian I’ve found for his pleasure, I know I am the one who fascinates him.

C
HAPTER
3

PAUL MOREAU, CHAMBERLAIN

Tuileries Palace, Paris

“
Of Napoleon’s three sisters, Elisa, Caroline, and Pauline, the latter, famous for her allurements, was the one of whom he was fondest
.”

—JOSEPH FOUCHÉ, DUC D’OTRANTE, NAPOLEON’S MINISTER OF GENERAL POLICE

O
NLY TWO THINGS ARE HONEST IN
P
AULINE
B
ORGHESE’S
world: her mirror and me.

When she arrived with her first husband in Haiti, I was the only person on my father’s plantation to warn her of the clap. The aristocratic
grands blancs
and
gens de couleur
were all too afraid to speak the truth to the dazzling wife of General Leclerc. I was only seventeen, but if she continued to bed men like my promiscuous half brother, even I could see how it would end: in cramping, then bleeding, and finally fever. So I told her who I was—the son of Antoine Moreau and his African mistress—and I described for her the risks that she was taking.

She stood still at first, frozen as a carving made from juniper wood. Then she smiled. “You’re jealous of your brother, aren’t you? Bitter that while he’s French, you’re just a mulatto, so I would never ask you.”

Then she waited for my reaction. But I’d seen her try to bait men this way before. “Does this mean Madame has already forgotten Simon?” I asked. An
homme de couleur
, he’d been her lover for two months and was much darker than me.

Her cheeks blazed, and I wondered if I’d gone too far.

“What did you say your name is?”

“Antoine.”

She stepped closer to me. So close that I could smell the scent of jasmine on her skin. “And what is it you do on this plantation?” she asked.

“I’m my father’s chamberlain.”

“At fifteen?”

“Seventeen,” I told her. “But I was overseeing the plantation last year as well.”

She studied my face, and I wondered what she made of my mother’s high cheekbones and my father’s strong jaw. No one in Haiti mistook me for French. But few believed my mother was African, either. My curls are too loose, my eyes too light. “Does your father know you speak so frankly to his guests?”

“I should hope so. He schooled me.”

For the first time during our interactions, she smiled.

And for the rest of her days in Haiti, Madame Leclerc strolled the fields with me, watching the sheaves of wheat turn from winter’s green to summer’s gold. This is how we came to know each other, and she understood, long before I did, that neither of us belonged. The great Haitian warrior Toussaint had just started a revolution, boldly telling the French that he was declaring an end to slavery on our island. But we were the wealthiest colony in the world—growing indigo, cotton, tobacco, sugar, coffee, even sisal for the benefit of France—and Napoleon was enraged. This was truly the reason Pauline and I met: her brother had sent General Leclerc to subdue Saint-Domingue by any means.

When Pauline arrived, black did not trust white, white did not
trust black—and no one trusted a
mulâtre
. I was a
mulâtre
. If Pauline’s brother succeeded, my mother would be returned to slavery. My half brother was fighting for Napoleon while my mother was secretly helping Toussaint. When I asked my father which side he was on, he said, “Freedom, son. From France and from enslavement.” Before my birth, he had owned more than two dozen slaves. But he told me that after he looked into my eyes, he freed every one. So I would always be free, but to whom would I belong? Increasingly, it seemed, I belonged with Pauline.

She understood what it was to live in a county torn apart by war, and the chaos it wrought on families. “You never speak with your half brother,” she once remarked.

I looked down at my shoes. It wasn’t that she had bedded him. It was that she had once thought a man who was as handsome as a prince and as ignorant as a peasant was preferable company to me. What did they discuss? French politics? French conquest? “No,” I told her. “We have little to say.”

“Because of the war?”

“For many reasons.”

But if I wanted to remain close to Pauline, I had to accept the other men. They might possess her body for a night, but I was the one who shared her heart. In those long summer nights, I taught her how to eat sugarcane and make fried plantains. In return, she taught me how to dress like a Parisian and dance.

“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.