Two Empresses Read online

  I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. Barras often expected more of me than I wished to give. He was not above sharing me with other men, to cement a business deal, or just for the pleasure of watching. He liked to watch and he liked to have me watch when he bedded other women, and sometimes even other men or young boys. My stomach would turn sickly somersaults whenever I was called into his bedchamber to be his audience, surrounded by mirrors so I would not miss anything, always dreading the moment when he would beckon for me to take his place or come and join them on the black satin bed. I tried to pretend to be sophisticated and blasé, to feign enjoyment, but I hated every moment of it. I couldn’t bear what the mirrors were showing me; I never hated my reflection more. Such evenings could never end soon enough to suit me, but they always seemed to go on forever.

  Whenever I tried to decline or showed even a sign of hesitation, Barras’s anger would flare. He would show me the Devil hiding inside the man and remind me just how much I owed to him. He was determined to break down every single one of my inhibitions, to make me just like him. He would see me with women, dwarves, giants, or even Negroes if such was his pleasure, and it was.

  He even ruled my wardrobe. Clothes, he said, did not exist for me unless he said so; I would wear them only when he allowed it. Even my transparent white muslin gowns were judged too modest by Barras and he would have me parade around nude before his guests, wearing nothing but a smile, the jewels he bought me, or a chaplet of roses in my hair.

  There were days when Theresa, Fortunée, and I would all pile into a carriage, naked save for sandals, shady broad-brimmed hats, and parasols to protect our skin from the sun, and drive out into the country to picnic with Barras and his guests. There would be gauzy tents and canopies set up to further protect our complexions, but nothing to preserve our dignity; that was already lost. We would play blindman’s buff and whichever man caught us won our body as his prize; we would never know who was on top of us, inside us, until the blindfold was ripped off at the climactic moment. Other afternoons there were Barras’s famous naked hunts with the gentlemen in dapper riding vestments mounted on horses pursuing us as we ran naked through the trees. When they caught us, we were theirs to do with as they pleased. Some nights we dressed as Vestal Virgins and told bawdy fortunes for Barras’s guests and promptly dropped our veils and white robes to make them come true. Other nights we painted our bodies white and powdered our hair and posed like living statues. When Barras snapped his fingers we would come to life, writhing lewdly, shedding our scanty sheer white draperies as we danced. Then the orgy would begin.

  I was not as uninhibited as Theresa and Fortunée, who would happily walk down the street naked, but I tried. I drank champagne to give me courage because it went straight to my head, quicker than wine. Drunk, I could be free of my inhibitions, free of my conscience, free of me; I could become the woman Barras wanted me to be.

  There were mornings when I would wake up to the warm feel of sunlight on my face and the dew on my back. For one sweet moment I would think I was back in Martinique. Then I would sit up and look around me and find myself naked in Barras’s garden, surrounded by wine bottles and other slumbering bodies, my clothes nowhere in sight. I would fight back the bile that rose in my throat as I remembered the night before when, to please my all-powerful protector, Theresa, Fortunée, and I had come in to supper nude. It had become something of a ritual. We would go around the table, which seemed a mile long, bending over and dipping a breast into each guest’s champagne glass, then offering it to him, or her, to suckle, letting them draw us onto their laps if they wished to fondle, or enjoy like attentions from us. I despised myself and how far I had fallen! I was never lewd before I met Barras!

  While society might have celebrated Barras’s mistress, I loathed and despised her. I was all for fun and free and easy love, but this was a sort of servitude that had nothing to do with love and it certainly was not fun, though everyone else seemed to think it was. I often wondered if I was the only one who was pretending. I had become someone I had never meant to be. But I didn’t know how to break the chains. I would be ruined without Barras. He ruled the republic and society, king in all but name, and I was his uncrowned queen.

  Maybe this was what Euphemia David had meant all along? I wasn’t married to Barras, at least not yet, but he did cover my body with diamonds and ardent kisses. I was his consort—famous, celebrated, talked about, admired, and imitated. When he claimed me as his own I thought all my worries were past, but that happiness, hard won, fast paled when I found out the price I had to pay for it—the degradation and humiliation of being passed around and partnered with those I would never have chosen of my own free will. In private I did shed many, many tears, and yes, I never thought I would say it, but I did miss Martinique. Sometimes I revisited it in my dreams. But there was no going back. That life was gone forever.

  I kept Aimee’s miniature in a drawer now, facedown. I didn’t want her to see what I had become. She would be so ashamed of me.

  CHAPTER 13

  In 1795 Fortune again favored me. I saw a way out. I thought at first it was a step down, but I was very much mistaken.

  Fortune’s answer came in the improbable form of a skinny little Corsican general with the impossible name of Nabuleone Buonaparte. Everyone laughed at him; because of this I felt sorry for him and tried always to be kind to him. I too knew what it was like to be a foreigner—we were both island bred; we had that much in common—and considered too savage and uncouth for sophisticated Paris. He was poor, awkward, crude, and rude, with a total disregard for tact; I’m not certain he even knew what it was. He would tell a woman fishing for compliments that her dress did not make her look fat, she was in fact fat. His brown hair hung down around his gaunt face in long, lank greasy strings, his uniform was shabby and ill fitting, and his boots were badly scuffed. Since he could not, or would not, buy gloves, his fingernails were always dirty. At twenty-six he had clearly never known the touch of a woman of elegance and refinement; no wife worth her salt would ever have let him out of the house looking like that.

  But despite his boorish manners, he was also capable of great kindness. When private citizens were ordered to surrender their arms and Eugène, most reluctantly, turned over his father’s sword, General Buonaparte intervened. He saw how much it meant to my son and graciously allowed him to keep it as a cherished family heirloom. When I thanked him, the General seemed barely capable of speech; he just stood there, staring at me, drinking me in with his eyes, like he had never seen a woman before. It completely unnerved me.

  He had the most intense gray eyes I had ever seen. Those eyes . . . they seemed to be always hungry. They followed me everywhere; they seemed to stare right through my skin and scorch my very soul. It made me uncomfortable just to have him look at me, for the harder he looked, the more I burned. There were times when I found myself blushing and growing flustered like a convent virgin, lowering my eyes and finding some excuse to leave the room, so I could have time to calm and collect myself. That penetrating stare . . . it seemed more intimate than the carnal act itself. Barras seemed to know that the little Corsican was at heart a prude who would not approve of our more bacchanalian gatherings and always invited him on nights when our clothes would stay on and we would behave with some pretense of propriety.

  * * *

  When Barras first introduced the idea, I told him emphatically no—“I can do better!” But the ardent young Corsican had scored a great victory over a royalist uprising aiming to put the exiled Comte de Provence on the throne where his unfortunate brother Louis XVI had so lately sat. Barras thought this Buonaparte could be useful, but it was essential to ensure his enduring gratitude, so, first came full command of the French army; then came the greatest gift of all—me.

  “Take her and marry her,” Barras magnanimously told the hot-blooded little Corsican. Barras didn’t really care about me at all, only how he could use me to further his own interests.

  Buona
parte burned with passion, which he poured out to me in letters that seemed written in fire, blazing across the countless pages he devoted to me. He was so impatient to get the words out that the pen punched through the paper and there were blots everywhere, like a dog shaking water from its coat after a bath. It made me exhausted and my eyes ache just to read them. He had never been in love before. Love, he believed, weakened a man. I was his Delilah and he was Samson shorn at my feet, but still adoring me, entirely in my power, and he didn’t mind at all; he was exactly where he wanted to be. Every time he looked at, or thought of, me he felt “a mad desire to get married.” He was a great believer in Destiny, and with me beside him he was certain he would achieve untold greatness. Something about me told him that I was his lucky charm come to life, in human form, so he must always keep me near. Luck would be his as long as I was.

  Barras ultimately told me that I might as well take General Bonaparte—he had by then, thank goodness, adopted the French style of his name, Napoleon Bonaparte, making it a more manageable mouthful—for if I didn’t, he was done with me. There would be no more favors, no more money. Barras would single-handedly turn society against me. I would be a pariah, shunned and snubbed every time I dared show my face in public. He had raised me and he could also knock me down and ruin me. If Barras turned against me, I knew I could never survive, so I did what I must.

  * * *

  That cold December night, as the snow fell outside my window, I let Bonaparte in to warm me. In the candlelight that is the kindest friend of all to an aging woman, I waited for him in a soft pink negligee made so it would look as though my body were covered entirely in rose petals. Pink, besides being pretty and sweet, is also a kind color; it generously lends its rosy hue to a woman’s skin. I had also dressed my bed in it and filled the room with crystal vases of hothouse pink roses.

  He was so impatient he didn’t even take off his boots. They sullied the pink satin quilt as he fell on top of me and ripped handfuls of faux pink petals off my body in his haste to bare it. There was no time to waste fumbling with vexing ribbons and frustrating fastenings. The act itself was over in five minutes. He was entirely without finesse, like a starving dog attacking a roast chicken. He spent his lust and then he slept, like a child, with his head upon my breast.

  He was like no other man I had ever experienced before. Though his eyes and his kisses burned and devoured me and his hands groped and explored all of me, he made me feel like a cold marble goddess, not a flesh-and-blood woman.

  He said he loved me, so many times, as though repetition would teach me to believe, but it was not true. Bonaparte never loved me; he worshipped me. When he looked at me he saw only his ideal of me, not the flawed, flesh-and-blood woman I really was. The bed where I lay, or the chair where I sat, was like a venerated altar to him before which he must kneel. He told me he wanted to kiss the hem of my gown, my feet, my hands, my lips, my breasts, and “much, much lower down.”

  Each time I would smile, soft, gentle, and aloof. I humored and indulged him and let him do as he liked. But when he touched me, I had to look down to reassure myself that I had not actually turned to marble; it always surprised me to see my skin yield softly to his touch. And when I caressed him, I was only going through the motions, repeating by rote what experience had taught me about giving pleasure to a man, trading favors for favors. Alexandre was wrong; I wasn’t a complete failure at amateur theatricals. My audience was never disappointed; in the theater of the bedchamber I could hold my own against any professional.

  When Bonaparte awoke with the dawn, he caressed my sleeping face and kissed me awake. First my brow, each of my eyelids in turn, the tip of my nose, and last, most lingeringly, my lips, turning my waking yawn into a passionate, soul-devouring kiss.

  “Rose,” he said, then repeated it with a distinct air of disdain, wrinkling his nose as though it stank like a sewer. “Rose is far too common a name for a woman like you! From this moment on you shall be Josephine—my Josephine!”

  PART 2

  AIMEE

  CHAPTER 14

  I felt like my life was ending when I was sent away to the convent far across the sea in France. I never wanted to leave Martinique, it was my home and I loved it, and I had never known, or wanted to know, anything else. I was never one of those little girls who dreamed of going to France and being a lady-in-waiting to the Queen or marrying a prince amidst the gilded splendor of Versailles. But I was only nine years old, too young to know what was truly best for me, or to have earned a say in my future.

  The day before my ship sailed was a Sunday. I sat on Papa’s knee, the full skirts of the white satin and lace dress I had worn to Mass overflowing his lap, and Mama caressed my golden hair as I wept. They reminded me that I was their “precious girl” and they had given me my name—Aimee—because it described me best, I was their “dearly loved” daughter. I had come to them late in life, when their hair was already turning gray, and though God had seen fit to send me a little sister three years later, that did not mitigate the miraculous blessing my birth had been in any way.

  “You are our precious pearl,” Papa said as Mama fastened a delicate cross of white pearls set in gold filigree about my throat, “and we only want the best for you, even if it means you must leave us.”

  No one sets such a jewel in base metal or trusts it to the hands of an untried or inferior craftsman, Papa explained, so I must go to Paris for the finishing touch, to the Convent of the Dames de la Visitation.

  Papa was known as “a man of iron with a heart of gold,” and there was no saying no to him. So I stopped wasting precious time weeping and went out to say good-bye to my island home.

  I drew the sugar that infused the very air deep into my lungs, trying to hold on to it, determined to carry it away with me, to Paris. My fingers lovingly caressed the bright pink, orange, and yellow hibiscus blossoms and the peculiar orchids that were at once purple and pink, which I had often heard people say had “a lascivious shape,” whatever that meant. My hands lingered long over the dear familiar palm fronds that had provided me with shade my whole life long. Marianne, my da, as we called our Negro nurses, had taught me to weave fans from dried palms when I was three years old. I had heard the only palm trees they had in Paris grew in silver tubs and were kept in hothouses until they were required to decorate a ballroom. And what of breadfruit, bananas, mangoes, frangipani, passion fruits, papayas, and pineapple? Would I ever taste the fruits of my childhood again?

  A noisy flock of red, blue, green, and gold parrots exploded like fireworks from the trees. As I watched them fly away tears ran down my face and I turned and gazed back at my home, La Trinité, the three-story plantation house so glaring white in the tropical sun it hurt my eyes just to look at it. I was certain its image would be seared upon my eyes forever, a memory I would always carry with me wherever I went.

  My grandfather Pierre Dubucq de Rivery was a hotheaded young man exiled from France after he killed a nobleman, the Chevalier de Piancourt, in a duel over a fickle and faithless mistress who could not decide between the two of them. With the King’s men hot on Pierre’s heels and his horse layered in sweat and foaming at the mouth, close to falling down dead beneath him, he made a mad dash for the harbor. A ship was just pulling away, the gap between dock and deck ever widening. He had no idea where it was going, but he urged his mount to make one last valiant effort and leap across the dark water onto that deck. A purse of gold persuaded the Captain to look the other way.

  The ship was bound for Martinique. Since it was prison or the West Indies for Pierre Dubucq de Rivery he wisely chose the latter. He built a grand white plantation house, La Trinité, overlooking the turquoise waters of the Harbor Robert and erected the first sugar mill. White gold—sugar—made him a very wealthy man. But not content with one fortune, he soon made another by cultivating cocoa from the trees that grew wild upon the island. It was made into a popular drink called “chocolate” that first the French, then the whole world, fell in
love with.

  I never knew my grandfather, he died long before I was born, but he left a message for me. “Tell your daughter,” he used to say to Papa, “that every time someone drinks a cup of chocolate they are adding a coin to her dower chest.”

  I was known as “the black and white heiress”; chocolate and sugar would ensure my future. “Good times or bad,” Papa said, “people always crave sweets.”

  * * *

  As I prepared for bed that night, I lingered by my window for a long time gazing out at the papayas and purple bougainvillea, breathing in the jasmine, roses, and honeysuckle. I had the most terrible, frightening feeling that I would never see this place again.

  Mama came in and waved aside my da, to braid my hair herself for what might be the last time. It would be years before I returned to Martinique and she was no longer a young woman; neither disease nor accidents respect youth or age, so it was quite possible we might never meet in this world again. I was to stay at the convent until I was eighteen, though privately I couldn’t imagine what the nuns had to teach me that would take me nine years to learn. Surely the social graces were not so complex? I was to be given a lady’s education, not a soldier’s or a statesman’s; philosophy and mathematics would occupy little, if any, of my time.

  Mama tried to comfort me by talking of Rose. She was married now, in Paris, the wife of the Vicomte de Beauharnais, a man so handsome he was rumored to have inspired the hero of a scandalous novel that I was far too young to read, which made me want to read it all the more. Les Liaisons Dangereuses—the title alone sounded fascinating!