The Second Empress (40 page)

C
HAPTER
33

PAUL MOREAU

Paris February 1815

W
OULD YOU LIKE TO SELL THE TRUNKS AS WELL, MONSIEUR
?”

I look at the empty boxes and smile. “Everything.”

The owner glances up at me in surprise. “You don’t look like a man who’s fallen on hard times.”

No, but then I dressed this morning with care. A red velvet coat with black breeches and boots. A black hat with a white ostrich plume on the side. “I have been very fortunate these last few years, monsieur. I am hoping the hard times are long behind me.”

He smiles as if he understands, then hands me the price he’s willing to pay for all of my possessions. There is enormous freedom in selling it all. It’s a liberating feeling, which after all these months arranging my departure, is as heady as wine. Besides, what would I do in Haiti with a mahogany walking stick? Or a box made from mother-of-pearl?

“Acceptable?” he asks, and I look down at the price.

“Acceptable,” I say, and it is done. I am free.

I wander the streets of Paris for one last evening, passing through the Boulevard du Temple with its countless shops and dimly lit cafés. Tomorrow my coach will leave for Le Havre, and from there a ship will take me to Haiti. I wonder if anyone here will remember my name in twenty years, or whether I’ll simply be remembered as the Princess
Borghese’s black chamberlain. If I could choose, I would have them speak of me as the courtier who returned from the riches of Paris to the riches of his father’s land. I can employ two hundred workers when I return. And now that I am thirty, I feel old enough to inspire a nation.

I make my way to the Café Procope and listen to the men argue politics. Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—some of the greatest thinkers in history have sat in these chairs. I raise my hand to the woman to order coffee when a sound like shrieking echoes outside. The patrons freeze in Café Procope, and then we rush to the door. Men are running through the streets. “What’s happening?” I shout, and a newsboy answers.

“He’s escaped! Napoleon. And he’s marching with an army into Paris!”

There are shouts from behind me, and the café’s owner closes his doors. I run to my room in the Hôtel de Crillon, and as word spreads, the city descends into chaos. Women and children are begging for coaches, screaming at drivers to stop, while men are locking up their homes and their shops. “It isn’t true,” a woman tells her friend, but when a cannon sounds in the distance, no one is in doubt.

“He’s making his way to the Crillon,” people are saying. When I reach the Place de la Concorde, I see that it’s true. Thousands of Parisians have filled the square, and I push through the crowds to see for myself.

He is standing on the balcony, dressed in his familiar black and gray. He raises his hat above his head, and the people around me cheer wildly for this man who, eight months before, was shouted down in the streets. Then someone steps beside him into the light. I catch my breath. She has never been more beautiful. She is dressed in white silk, with pearls in her dark hair and diamonds at her throat. She takes his hand, and she is absolutely radiant.

“I have returned,” Napoleon shouts, “for the people of France, and I am here to serve the greatest empire in the world!”

The sound in the courtyard is deafening. The lamps cast a golden sheen on the emperor, and from below, he appears like a gilded statue.

“From this day forward, no man shall live in tyranny. As emperor,” he begins, and I hold my breath, “I abolish the slave trade to make all men free.”

All around me, there is wild celebration, and tears blur my vision as I realize what he’s done. After thirteen years, he listened.

“Furthermore,” he continues, and the masses grow silent, “whether it is under my rule or that of my son, there shall never be tyranny in France again!”

Fireworks burst with perfect timing in the air, and from inside the Crillon music begins to play. He holds Pauline’s hand above his head in triumph, and I realize what he’s doing. It’s a show. There’s a different stage with different lines, but he’s freed the slaves not on any great principle of his, but because freedom is a suitable theme for this act.

I turn from the spectacle and make my way across the Place de la Concorde.

With a single word, I could be back in the Tuileries Palace, watching over Pauline as I have these thirteen years. I could be eating at the finest banquets and dancing beneath the glittering chandeliers in Fontainebleau. But whatever happens for the Bonapartes in France, I will not be here to see it.

C
HAPTER
34

MARIA LUCIA, DUCHESS OF PARMA

Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna

“
I wanted to rule the world and in order to do this I needed unlimited power … I needed world dictatorship
.”

—NAPOLEON

T
HERE IS SHOUTING IN THE HALL, AND ALTHOUGH
I
CAN’T
tell one voice from another, I am certain the men are my father’s generals.

“What is it?” I sit up in our bed, and immediately Adam is dressing. He opens the door, and although we can never be married unless Napoleon dies, none of the soldiers are shocked to see him. All of Austria knows what he is to me, and what he’s become to Franz.

“There is news from France,” says General Leiberich.

“King Louis XVIII?” Adam asks. I hurry to find my robe, and when I reach the door, I hear, “There is no longer a king of France, lieutenant. Napoleon has taken the Tuileries Palace.”

It isn’t possible. It is unthinkable
. “There must be some mistake,” I say.

“He waited until the Allied ships were gone,” he explains. “Then
he disembarked at Cannes and collected soldiers as he went. He has an army of more than six thousand men.”

Adam wraps his arms around my shoulders. “You’re going with Franz to hide outside Vienna.” Boots echo in the hall, and my father appears with Franz in his arms. I reach out and take my son in my arms, smoothing back the hair from his forehead as he cries. “Shhh …”

“Your Majesty is welcome to join us in council,” General Leiberich tells me.

I look to my father. “Shall I return him to the nursery?”

“I want him with me so the men remember what they’re fighting for.”

Adam waits for me to dress, and I think of Henry Fuseli’s
The Nightmare
. How the woman is asleep on her bed, her arms flung above her head so that her long neck is exposed. In the grips of her nightmare, she is helpless, while above her an incubus lies in wait.
He will come for me. I know he will
.

Adam holds up my coat, and I slip my arms into the winter fur. When I turn to face him, he takes me by the shoulders. “He will never find you, Maria Lucia. I promise.”

“He doesn’t have to, Adam. He only has to imprison my father. Do you think I could remain in hiding if that happened? And he will come for us first,” I warn. “I have his son—”

“Listen to me!” There is something in his voice that is utterly compelling. “The Allies will rise up and defeat Napoleon. His army is weak. We will crush him.”

I nod, and he takes my arm. We walk the dimly lit halls to my father’s Council Chamber. Six years ago I was called to this room for a similar purpose: to talk about a man who would decide my fate. Now, as I take a seat between Maria and Adam, I wonder if anything has changed. I look around the chamber, and once again every person of importance has been assembled except Ferdinand. In the crown prince’s place is Metternich, and we purposefully avoid each other’s gaze.

“By now,” my father begins solemnly, “there is no one in this room
who doesn’t know that the emperor of Elba has escaped. What we propose is to form a Seventh Coalition against the man who now claims the crown of France.”

Everyone begins talking at once, and my father holds up his hands for silence.

“On March first, Napoleon landed at Cannes with more than eight hundred men. These were soldiers he trained during his nine-month vacation on the island of Elba, which the British saw fit to give him while writing the Treaty of Fontainebleau.”

General Leiberich stands. “We warned the Allies, telling them that an island off the coast of Italy would never be safe.”

“But our voices were outnumbered,” my father adds, “which is why he escaped. He began at Grenoble, where few soldiers put up any resistance. But when he reached Laffray, he came across a battalion of the Fifth Regiment of the Line. Apparently the men were ready to shoot, but Napoleon opened his coat and stepped toward them, shouting, ‘Let him that has the heart kill his own emperor!’ Despite the king’s instructions to cage him like a wild beast and bring him to Paris, there was no further resistance throughout France, and in Lyons they paraded him through the streets.”

The men in the chamber shake their heads, but this is the Bonaparte gift—theatrics, showmanship—and I have come to believe that it is as necessary to a ruler as his army or treasury.