Two Empresses Read online

  I watched him walk away from me, biting my lip, yearning to run after him, to catch hold of his hand and beg him to stay and tell me who this Mortimer was, to play the schoolmaster and educate this ignorant little Creole. Caught up in the moment, I imagined that I still loved him. When he turned the corner and was lost forever to my eyes, I ran back into my cell and flung myself down on my straw-stuffed pallet. I cried until the stars came out and the jailer returned to read his abominable list of names. Mine was on it. A wife always meekly follows her husband.

  I became wildly hysterical, spinning round in circles, grasping out at anyone who came near, screaming, begging, and pleading for my life. “No! I don’t want to die! I cannot! I have children! I have to live! I have so much life inside of me yet! I can’t die!”

  Some of my fellow prisoners turned uncomfortably away. Others glared hard at me with eyes scornful and withering. They may take our lives, but they will never take our dignity, was the code they lived and died by and I was breaking it right in front of their eyes, and in the most shameful way.

  Theresa and the Duchesse led me sobbing back to our cell. My knees buckled and they had to drape my arms about their shoulders to support me, my bare toes—my fragile white slippers were long gone—dragging in the slime and grime. They tried to calm and comfort me as best they could, but I would not be soothed. I kept on wailing and weeping.

  “Poor soul,” the Duchesse said, “I fear she has gone mad.”

  When Roblatre and another jailer came in I threw myself at them, grasping at their shirts, easily tearing the filthy, cheap cloth, then clawing at their bare, hairy chests with my nails.

  “I can’t die! I have to live! I am going to be an empress someday, greater than a queen, Euphemia David said!”

  In my frenzied state, I somehow imagined that this revelation would make all the difference in the world, but they just laughed at me.

  “Now I’ve heard everything!” Roblatre said.

  “No, no, I tell you it is true! It is! I will be an empress, greater than any queen, so I cannot die! You will see! Euphemia David said so and she is never wrong!”

  “Well, when you appoint your household, my dear, pray remember me,” the Duchesse d’Aiguillon quipped, “. . . if I am still living.”

  Her mockery angered me; she was one of those born aristocrats who, though she might pity me, also looked down upon me. She just couldn’t understand how fear could get the better of dignity.

  “Laugh if you like, but it is true!” I shouted at her. “Euphemia David said so!”

  “I know of no such person,” the Duchesse yawned.

  By then I was spinning in circles, constantly pleading for my life, denying the sentence, and clinging desperately to Euphemia David’s prophecy as though it was the only thing that could save me. The laughing faces of the jailers, the scowling scornful countenance of the Duchesse, and Theresa’s worried face and concerned arms reaching out for me, all kept passing me by in a whirl. And then I saw another face! One it seemed I had last seen a lifetime ago—Euphemia David was right there in my cell! I saw her! Bloodred tignon on her head, the points sticking up like devil horns stabbing the heavens, gold hoops in her ears, bangles on her wrists, a necklace of gilded snake vertebras and fangs around her throat, a fist-sized skull dipped in gold hanging between her breasts, clad in her regal gown made of fifty madras handkerchiefs in all the colors of the rainbow stitched together with golden thread. Her snake, Li Grande Zombi, draped around her shoulders like a living shawl, reared its great head up to kiss the caramel skin of her still-smooth, eternally ageless cheek. Euphemia David smiled at me. “Fear not!” she said, and reached out and touched my brow.

  My whole body began to quake then, jerking and spinning just like one of the voodoos when the loas entered their bodies, possessing them at their ritual dances. Head to toe, tremors raced and rippled through me, and in my ears I thought I could hear my blood humming. My eyes rolled up, showing their whites, and my bladder shamelessly voided itself onto the already filthy floor. I heard a scream, as though from far away. I think it was Theresa. Maybe it was me? Then everything went black.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes again several days had passed. Theresa was sitting, sobbing, beside my mattress, pressing a wet cloth to my burning brow. A doctor had come and gone. He had given me up for dead and advised my jailers not to bother sending me to the guillotine. The fever would soon finish me off, he said. I had at most a week, maybe two, to live.

  “Don’t cry for me, dear friend,” I whispered through my parched and cracked lips. “I shall not die. You will see.... I shall live to be an empress. Euphemia David said . . .”

  Theresa leapt up, determined to act now. Tears pouring from her eyes, she fumbled the loose stone from the wall and took the bejeweled Spanish dagger, a family heirloom, from the hiding place she had fashioned. Wiping away her tears, she made her way across the little room to the table where our meager supply of paper—another favor from Roblatre—was kept. She dipped our only quill into the last of our ink and scribbled one bold sentence addressed to her lover Tallien: I die in despair at ever having belonged to a coward like you!

  From over her shoulder, she drew the whip-long black braid of her hair and began sawing at the top of it with the dagger, ignoring me when I begged her to please stop. Theresa had the most beautiful hair, raven black glinting with deep wine-red lights. There was no reason for her to sacrifice it; her name had yet to appear on the list of the damned and she had sworn not to let the lice get the better of her no matter how much they made her scalp itch. She wrapped the note around the dagger and twisted her braid around it. With the last gold piece in her possession and the promise of her body “later tonight,” she persuaded Roblatre to deliver her message.

  It had the desired effect. When Robespierre stood up to address the National Convention, which had replaced the Assembly as the governing body of France, Tallien shot up like an arrow, waving Theresa’s long whip-like black braid in one hand and her jeweled dagger in the other, and roared: “Down with the dictator!”

  It was the signal everyone had been waiting for. The deputies turned upon Robespierre en masse. Like mad dogs hungry for blood, they chased him through the streets, to the Hôtel de Ville. When they stormed the building, the terrified tyrant tried to kill himself, but his hand was shaking so badly he managed only to shatter his jaw. He only had one shot in his pistol, so he could not try again. He was dragged away to prison in agonizing pain with a bandage tied around his head to keep his jaw from detaching completely. The next morning he kept a fatal rendezvous with Madame Guillotine. The Revolution was over.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tallien was the hero of the hour and Theresa the heroine. When the prison doors were thrown wide he was there waiting for her, eyes filled with love and arms open, but she didn’t run into them. She left him waiting where he stood; it was as though she didn’t even see him.

  “It’s good to be free, to walk in the sun again!” she sighed, ruffling her short-cropped hair and tilting her face up to the sun like a woman welcoming a kiss from her lover.

  “Do you love him?” I asked her, discreetly tilting my head toward Tallien.

  It occurred to me then that I had never heard her speak of him in terms of affection, let alone passion, except that which he felt for her. When she talked of Tallien, it was always of his usefulness, as though he were a human coatrack or umbrella stand, not a virile flesh-and-blood man.

  “He serves a purpose . . . for now.” Theresa shrugged, smiling as she was suddenly lifted up high onto the shoulders of two strong men and the people surged around her, offering flowers and praising her as “our Lady of Liberty,” the one who had brought about Robespierre’s downfall. “She slew the dragon with love! Her love caused her knight to spring into action and save her!”

  Laughing, blowing kisses, and waving, she was carried through the streets of Paris, with her legs bare and her breasts spilling out of her tattered and grimy
bloodred peignoir. She was the one who was famous now.

  But Theresa didn’t forget about me. She welcomed me into her world. And what a world it was! Though the killings had stopped, Paris was still the same city of desperate want, where the prices of the bare necessities were constantly rising and people fought tooth and nail over a loaf of bread. But there were still men with money. Paris was full of bankers, profiteers, moneylenders, black-market speculators, army suppliers, contractors, and the rising stars of the new government, and they were willing to pay a charming woman’s way.

  Those of us who had lived beneath the shadow of the guillotine threw ourselves into a bacchanalian celebration of life. Life was motion, death was stillness, so the party never seemed to stop. As long as we could find a way to have fine clothes to wear, a decent roof over our heads, and a bed to sleep and make love in, we didn’t care if we still had to eat stale bread. Life was so precious to us now we could hardly bear to waste even a few precious hours of it sleeping.

  * * *

  Once I had been joyously reunited with Eugène, Hortense, and Fortune and we were all settled comfortably in our new little house, I began to go out every night with Theresa and her friends.

  The Bals des Victimes were all the rage. Men and women with shorn hair, and thin red satin ribbons tied around their necks in remembrance of those who had died, and as a reminder of how close they had themselves come to death, danced and made love all night. Former prisons, including Les Carmes, were cleaned up and turned into macabre public ballrooms with bloodred walls, decorated with red glass globes on the lamps, crystal skulls, tables patterned like tombstones, and chair backs shaped like coffins and guillotines. Dances were even held in the cemetery of Saint-Sulpice, where people danced and brazenly made love on top of the tombstones, and an open-air dance floor had been erected amidst the ruins of the Bastille. The guillotine was immortalized in jewelry and dances with jerky, bobbing motions mimicking severed heads falling, and chemise and prison smock–style dresses in the pure white of innocence or garish bloodred were the height of fashion. Loose clothing and dim lighting made it so easy for us to spontaneously surrender to our great lust for life. The Revolution had taught us that life could change forever in an instant. We took that lesson to heart and vowed that we would live only in and for that instant and not think, or plan, for the future.

  * * *

  Theresa was the one who set the fashions now and I, having always found it easier to be a follower rather than a leader, went along with her. She found her inspiration in ancient Greece and Rome and began draping her splendid body in clinging, diaphanous gowns gathered by a ribbon or belt just beneath her breasts and flowing down, following every line and curve of her figure, to sweep the floor behind her in the slightest train. They were easy to whip off at the slightest provocation. Gone were the days of needing a maid to both don and doff one’s garments; one could be stark naked in seconds. Stays and petticoats were abolished, we wore nothing beneath our clothes, and Roman sandals with long ribbon straps winding about the ankles, sometimes all the way up to the knees, replaced shoes and stockings. Sometimes the dresses had no sleeves, just little straps clasped together with cameos; other times they had tiny puffed or caped sleeves. Flesh was no longer concealed but celebrated, dresses had to be sheer, and sometimes the boldest ladies wore their décolleté so low their breasts were left entirely bare, or gowns inspired by Roman togas fastened over a single shoulder, leaving one breast completely exposed. Skirts were sometimes split all the way up to the thigh.

  We wore so little now that Theresa once won a bet that every stitch she had on, including her jewelry and sandals, did not weigh more than two gold pieces. She ordered servants to fetch the scales and then she stripped and won the wager. I had to laugh now every time I recalled my face-flaming shame when Aunt Edmée had dressed me in a pink lace negligee on my wedding night. Now I thought nothing of going out in a white gown so transparent that my nipples glowed through like embers—rouging them was second nature to me now—and the “little black forest” was fully on show. I shamelessly advertised everything I had to offer every time I went out my front door.

  True to her word, Theresa hid the rat bites on her toes under jeweled rings; she became known as the lady with rings on her toes. We layered our bodies with bracelets, necklaces, and brooches inspired by ancient treasures. Sometimes we wore no jewels at all, only flowers. Rather than let it grow out again, we kept our hair short cropped in the popular coiffure à la Victime. Sometimes, just for the fun of it, we wore wigs, usually in wild, vibrant shades of orange, blue, purple, pink, yellow, or green, as well as more natural hues of blond, brunette, black, silver, and red. Between us, Theresa and I owned a collection of sixty, which we happily shared.

  We had such fun seeing how outlandish we could be. One day we went out wearing big, curly powder-blue wigs to match the short spencer jackets we wore over our white muslin dresses that were slit up to the thigh to reveal our blue-and-white-striped stockings and black leather high-heeled shoes with huge silver buckles. Another day we went out sporting green wigs to match the green coins embroidered all over our yellow dresses and stockings. We adopted every fad and fancy from long nut-colored gloves to spraying our already sheer gowns with rosewater to make them even more clinging and transparent.

  We often went out with our mutual friend Fortunée Hamelin and were collectively known as “The Three Graces.” Fortunée was a Creole like me. She had survived the Revolution with her long black curls still down to the small of her back and often crowned them with a bloodred, banana-yellow, or turquoise tignon with little black kiss curls framing her face and gold hoops in her ears. It called to mind the old island saying “La costume est une lutte”—the art of dress is a contest. We had such fun seeing who could best the other.

  * * *

  I became reacquainted with General Hoche at one of the Victims’ Balls. He hadn’t died after all; the Revolution deemed him too valuable, so he had merely to bide his time in another prison until it ended. Upon seeing each other, we were so overcome by passion that we fell into each other’s arms and made love leaning against the bloodred wall as the dancers swirled past us. But it was only the one time; he was adamant that he still loved his wife and would never leave her, even when I wept and told him that the new government was godless and a divorce was now very easy to obtain and it was a true, complete, and entire separation of the marital bond, leaving both partners free to remarry, unlike the years stuck in limbo I had endured with Alexandre. Theresa had in fact married Tallien because “the lock in wedlock is now so easy to pick; I’ll divorce him when I get bored or someone better comes along.” But Lazare didn’t care, he didn’t want a divorce, and he wasn’t interested in maintaining me as his mistress.

  I tried so hard, but I couldn’t make him understand. All I wanted was for someone to take care of me, to keep me safe and never let harm touch me again. I wanted to laugh at fear from the safety of my lover’s arms. Why couldn’t Lazare Hoche be that man?

  CHAPTER 12

  I drifted with the tide, taking lovers for pleasure and profit, to supply my needs, and feed my children. But, in moments of quiet, when I was being completely honest with myself, I often lamented that there was no real love in my life except that which my children gave me. The faces of the men were always shifting, blurring, changing, as they came and went in and out my bedroom door; there was never one steady, solid masculine presence in my life. As much as I embraced my freedom, I sometimes found myself longing for a husband—someone rich, good, and kind, who would truly love me and keep me safe, someone I could still be myself with and not lose myself in. Truth be known, I think it was security as represented by a husband that I was truly longing for, more than any actual man.

  Though I readily embraced the new philosophy of living only for the moment, there were times when I could not help but think of the future. The lines I saw on my face when I sat down at my dressing table with it scrubbed clean, ready for a fresh
application of powder and paint, made me think about it.

  I was now running with a pack of girls nearer my daughter’s age than my own. I was thirty, a full ten years older than Theresa, and some of the reigning beauties of the day were as young as seventeen. I was living my life at an exhausting pace, a dizzying whirl that stilled only in slumber, falling into bed at dawn and rolling out of it at noon to breakfast and a stinging douche calculated to keep my womb empty, spending the afternoon shopping and socializing in sidewalk cafés over cups of coffee or chocolate, and getting ready to start all over again, to dance and love through another reckless night. This way of life, I knew, could not go on forever; there is only so much candlelight, cosmetics, charm, and bedchamber talents can do. Time was running out for me and it was foolish to deny it.

  * * *

  I thought my worries were over when Theresa introduced me to Paul Barras, the new man in power, the most formidable of the five directors of France’s latest form of government—The Directory. He was forty, tall, dark, and handsome, and very rich, but he was also dishonest, debauched, and diabolical. I soon found out not only was I playing with fire; I was also sleeping with the Devil on his black satin bed in a chamber of mirrors, the better to show him my every weakness, failing, and flaw.

  But when one makes a bargain with the Devil one had best keep it. Both my children were completing their educations in the finest schools. Eugène was intent upon a military career and Hortense was the darling of Madame Campan’s school, delighting all with her sweet temperament and talent for music and painting. I had a house of my own on the rue Chantereine and was regarded as the lady of Barras’s own town and country abodes where I reigned as hostess over every gathering. I had clothes and jewels, the most exquisite décor and rosewood furniture upholstered in sky-blue and rose silk, Etruscan urns filled with fresh flowers every day, crystal chandeliers, silver plate and crystal goblets for my table, servants, a personal maid, a carriage and coachman, and finely bred horses, everything I could possibly want. All my bills were paid without a murmur or even a lift of an eyebrow. Barras never called me a spendthrift or accused me of being lavish; he merely paid my bills without comment. It was heavenly!