The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon's Bird of Paradise Read online

  The

  SECRET LIFE

  of

  JOSEPHINE

  ALSO BY CAROL LY ERICKSON

  HISTORICAL ENTERTAINMENTS

  The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette

  The Last Wife of Henry VIII

  NONFICTION

  The Records of Medieval Europe

  Civilization and Society in the West

  The Medieval Vision

  Bloody Mary

  Great Harry

  The First Elizabeth

  Mistress Anne

  Our Tempestuous Day

  Bonnie Prince Charlie

  To the Scaffold

  Great Catherine

  Her Little Majesty

  Arc of the Arrow

  Josephine

  Alexandra

  Royal Panoply

  Lilibet

  The Girl from Botany Bay

  The

  SECRET LIFE

  of

  JOSEPHINE

  Napoleon’s Bird of Paradise

  CAROLLY ERICKSON

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF JOSEPHINE: NAPOLEON’S BIRD OF PARADISE. Copyright © 2007 by Carolly Erickson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Design by Sara Gubkin

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Erickson, Carolly, 1943

  The secret life of Josephine : Napoleon’s bird of paradise / Carolly Erickson. —

  1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36735-0

  ISBN-10: 0-312-36735-X

  1. Josephine, Empress, consort of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1763-1814—Fiction.

  2. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821—Fiction. 3. France—Kings and rulers—

  Fiction. 4. Empresses—France—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3605.R53S43 2007

  813’.6—dc22

  2007021013

  First Edition: September 2007

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the memory of my dear mother Louise Kiger Bliss

  (1912-2006)

  Malmaison, March 1814

  MY EYES ARE WEAKER NOW, I seem to live in a perpetual twilight. I cannot do needlework any more, the stitches are too small for me to see, so I sit beside the window in the long afternoons, looking out at the red and pink blur of my roses, while Christian—dear man!—reads to me from a box of old love letters I cherish.

  I have great plans, but they have come to a temporary halt, and it is frustrating to me, sitting here, my eyes dimming, tears sometimes coming unbidden to wet my lined cheeks, cheeks that were once plump and pink but now are wrinkled and reddened from the rouge-pot.

  I may not be able to see my reflection very clearly any longer, but I am more careful than ever to maintain my good looks. I have a skilled hairdresser who comes every day to arrange my hair and when she threads bands of silver through the dark dyed strands it looks quite charming and youthful—or so the flatterers from Paris tell me.

  They come in their hundreds, the visitors from Paris, even though the spring is chilly, and my gardens are not yet in full bloom.

  “Is she still beautiful?” I hear them say to one another as they pass below my window. “Or has she shriveled and withered, now that she no longer wears a crown? Now that the former emperor no longer loves her? She must be fifty years old now! She must have lost her looks.”

  They make me smile, the envious Parisians. I was never truly one of

  them, always an outsider, even in the days of my greatest exaltation, when the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself put the crown on my head. They sneered at me, though they always feared me for the power I had over Bonaparte. He ruled them, and I ruled him.

  I can still look beautiful, or so I am told. And I am more of a celebrity now than ever, because I was once Bonaparte’s wife and because I am wealthy and have an infamous past.

  Let the Parisians sneer! I am what most of them will never be. I am— myself. No one owns me. I live as I choose, even if my eyes are growing dim and my throat hurts and my migraines have returned, despite the leeches the doctors put on my neck and arms and feet to draw out the poisons.

  I don’t allow others to watch that, only Euphemia, from whom I have no secrets. The doctors rub my forehead and apply compresses to my sore eyes and wash me and cover me with toilet water to disguise the stinks of age. Not until the doctors have left and I am fresh and sweet-smelling do I allow Christian in, to read to me from my casque of letters preserved from long ago.

  I sit back against my pink satin pillows and close my eyes and listen, the dear words of love still fresh after so long.

  “My rose of Roses, my beautiful Mademoiselle Tascher, the memory of you enchants me,” Christian reads. “I cannot wait to hold you in my arms again. Until we meet once again, I kiss your hands, your eyes, your lips, your everything.”

  My first love note from Scipion du Roure, the officer I fell in love with on a May night in Martinique, when the moon was full. I was fifteen, he was nineteen. He was promised to a woman in France, as I later found out. But that did not matter. Nothing mattered that night but the cool, soft moonlight, and the sound of the waves breaking on the white sand below the veranda where we danced, and the intoxicating scent of jasmine in the air.

  As I listen to Christian read the letters I am carried back to that night, to the music of the violins and flutes and guitars playing the Ronde Sentimentale, while the crickets chirp in the tamarisks and hibiscus. Scipion, blond, beautiful Scipion takes my gloved hand and raises it to his lips . . .

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

 
Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  EPILOGUE BY SCIPION DU ROURE

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  1

  THAT NIGHT, the night I first met Scipion du Roure, all I could think of was the ball and my gown of pale yellow silk and the garland of fragrant white flowering jasmine Euphemia had woven into my hair. I hummed as I dressed, practicing walking in the wide skirt on its stiff wire frame and glancing at my reflection in the pier glass that stood in the middle of my bedroom.

  My eyes were bright, my skin warm and glowing in the candlelight. I remember thinking, I am beautiful. Every man at the ball will want to dance with me.

  I was living with my parents in Martinique on the plantation known as Les Trois-Ilets, the Three Little Islands. The year was 1778. My poor harassed father Joseph Tascher was drinking far too much and going deeper and deeper into debt, and my mother and grandmother were hounding him relentlessly. I tried to ignore their arguing—they argued a lot—and keep my thoughts on the ball to come. But the raised voices were hard to ignore.

  “You must ask your brother for another loan,” my mother was insisting. “Do not wait. Ride to Fort-Royal tonight.”

  “Gladly, my dear,” was my father’s wry response. “Only I know what his answer will be. No more loans. Not until I agree to make him co-owner of Les Trois-Ilets, and name his son as my sole heir.”

  “Your sole heir, indeed,” sniffed my grandmother. “If you were man enough you’d have sons instead of daughters.”

  My grandmother Catherine des Sannois, who was born plain Catherine Brown on a farm in Dundreary, had the fiery temper of her Irish ancestors and never lost a chance to criticize my highborn father.

  “And if my wife did her duty she would give me sons. The fault is hers.”

  “How dare you speak to me in that way when I nearly died giving birth to the last one?” My mother rose from her chair and approached my father accusingly. “And how dare you show such disrespect for poor Catherine, and her in her grave these past two months!” My sister Catherine, who had been frail and sickly most of her life, had finally succumbed to a fever and was buried in the little church on our plantation.

  “I wish to heaven you were in your graves too,” I heard my father mutter as he turned aside. “Then we could all have some peace.”

  “Peace? peace? You talk of peace, when everything you do upsets the rest of us?” My grandmother continued her harangue. “You neglect your daughters. Neither of them is betrothed. You neglect your wife. How many mistresses do you have there in Fort-Royal? Three? Six? And with how many octoroon bastards who look like you? Worst of all you neglect this plantation, which my husband and I gave you, worthless idler that you are, so that your family would not starve. Look at it! Where are the cane fields? Returned to the wild. Where are the slaves? Run away, most of them. What do you have to show for seventeen years of ownership? A fine plantation in ruins! That’s what! And a family on the brink of starvation!”

  Father took out his silver flask and drank from it, his lined face weary and his thin, greying hair coming loose from his untidily tied bag wig. In that moment, while there was a pause in the combat, I came forward to show off my gown.

  I walked slowly past father, mother and Grandma Sannois. I saw a light come into my father’s eyes as he watched me, and knew it for a gleam of admiration. My grandmother nodded. “It’s time she was betrothed,” she said curtly. “Past time.” My mother looked me over critically, from the top of my garlanded head to the gleaming bows on my yellow satin slippers.

  “Watch out for the men,” was all she said.

  THE NARROW, twisting torchlit streets of Fort-Royal shone yellow under the moon as our carriage—really a cart, with a makeshift canvas top tied on to shield us from rain—climbed the hillside toward my uncle’s imposing house above Fort-Royal Bay. My Uncle Robert Tascher was commandant of the harbor, and he and his family lived well. Some five hundred guests, drawn from the best society—the Grands Blancs, as we were known, the Great Whites, or Europeans—were to attend the ball on this night, and I was among those fortunate enough to be invited.

  I was chaperoned by my Aunt Rosette, my father and Uncle Robert’s tremulous, withdrawn spinster sister. She was the perfect companion, all but silent and extremely unprepossessing in her old green gown with the faded crimson rosettes—the same one she wore to every party and ball. She never interfered with my good times. I knew she admired and envied me, for she had never been good-looking and indeed she seemed to fade into the wallpaper in any room she entered.

  The air was humid, and my yellow silk gown was already damp with perspiration when we arrived at the imposing front gate of Uncle Robert’s mansion. The curls my maid Euphemia had arranged across my broad forehead with such care clung wetly to my skin.

  Once inside, I drank thirstily from the cup of rum punch a tall African servant handed to me, and asked for another. I sat down by an open window and let the music of the orchestra, the murmur of voices, the susurration of the bright swaying gowns and the welcome play of the wind off the bay wash over me.

  I did not sit there long. Soon a young man came up to me and asked me to dance, and then another and another. I danced every dance, I remember, and as the evening wore on I began to feel dizzy when I turned and twirled in the steps of the quadrille and minuet. I was glad when there came a lull in the music and some of the guests began to leave.

  Then, before I knew it, a man in a smart uniform was bending down toward me, and extending his hand. I looked up, and saw his fine grey eyes fixed on me, a mischievous smile on his full lips.

  “Lieutenant Scipion du Roure, mademoiselle. Will you do me the honor of dancing with me?”

  I floated, I walked on air, I melted into his arms—and all too soon our dance was at an end.

  “Come for a walk with me,” he whispered as he kissed my gloved hand in parting. “Meet me by the mango tree in half an hour.” There was a huge old mango beside the veranda of Uncle Robert’s mansion. I had no doubt that was the tree he meant. I felt a tingle of anticipation, for it never occurred to me not to meet him.

  “Watch out for the men,” my mother had cautioned me, but in that moment I forgot her warning. My only thought was, how will I slip away? My Aunt Rosette, my self-effacing chaperone, had been watching me dance all evening long while eating from a plate of vanilla custards. As I went up to her I saw that she had eaten too many, and looked ill. As I approached she hastily put her plate down and wiped her mouth with the back of one ungloved hand.

  “You look tired, Aunt Rosette. I’m sure Uncle Robert could find you somewhere to lie down.”

  She gave me a sharp look. “You know I cannot leave as long as you are here. You cannot be abandoned without a relative to watch over you.”

  “But I won’t be abandoned. Aunt Louise is here.” As hostess of the ball my aunt was, of course, present in the large room, though hundreds of guests milled about between her and me.

  A look of pain crossed Aunt Rosette’s face, and she put her hand over her stomach.

  “You need some oil of wintergreen, Aunt Rosette—and now, without delay.” I reached for her free hand and she let me lead her down a corridor to where a clutch of servants stood, out of sight of the dancers in the ballroom, watching the festivities through a partially open door. Among the servants I recognized Denise, the housekeeper.

  Over Aunt Rosette’s increasingly feeble protests Denise and I persuaded her to rest in a darkened room and to drink an infusion of oil of wintergreen. Leaving her in Denise’s care I hurried back to the ballroom and out along the veranda toward the garden. The huge mass of the great mango tree, heavy with green fruit, its wide branches gleaming in the silvery moonlight, stood out from the tall palms and flowering tamarisks around it. At the foot of the tree stood Scipion du Roure in his smart blue naval un
iform, leaning nonchalantly against the trunk, arms folded. He smiled as he watched me approach. As I came up to him he held out his hand.

  “There you are, my lovely Bird of Paradise.”

  I stripped off my gloves and took his outstretched hand. His smile was languid, seductive—though I did not know those words at the age of fifteen. I knew only that I was excited to be meeting him, and that our meeting was all the more exciting to me because it was forbidden. For us to be alone together in the dark garden, with only the sleepy birds and croaking frogs for company, was outside the rules of conduct for Grands Blancs. I liked breaking the rules. And I liked the name he called me. Bird of Paradise.

  We walked hand in hand along a stonework path that led to the shore of the wide bay. As a child I had walked that path many times before, with my cousins, on our way to the beach to swim. But we had always gone in the daytime, never at night. I had never before seen the silver path made by the moon’s reflection in the waters of the broad bay, or felt the balm of the cool night air on my fevered cheeks. And I had never before inhaled such a powerful scent from the night-blooming jasmine that lined the path on either side, a scent that put the fragrance of my own jasmine garland to shame.

  In response to my eager questions Scipion told me that he was nineteen years old, and a lieutenant aboard the frigate Intrepid. He had served for three years and had been wounded twice. My eyes widened as he described a skirmish between his ship and the British vessel Orkney only a few miles from where we stood, how his vessel had come alongside the Orkney and he and his men had boarded her, swords in hand. He lifted his hair up to show me his right ear, which bore a long red scar.

  “English musket fire,” he said. “I was lucky. It only grazed my ear. It could have taken my head off.”

  “But we are not at war with the British. I heard my father tell our steward that we are not.”

  Scipion looked grim. “We will be, before long. That’s why they spy on us from their lookout posts on St. Lucia. They know it is only a matter of time before war comes.”