The Last Great Dance on Earth Page 17

  “I don’t understand.” I’m to be crowned? I thought they had met to persuade Bonaparte to divorce me.

  “Because if you are crowned, then Louis’s children will stand above his, Joseph said, because then Louis’s children will be the grandsons of an empress. Bah,” he growled, struggling to get his nightshirt on, his head finally popping through. “Do you know what it takes to make a tyrant out of me?” He threw back the bed-curtain with such violence that one tie tore free. “My family, that’s what it takes. All they have to do is speak, and I become a monster. Sacrebleu! You’re going to be crowned all right, even if it takes two hundred thousand soldiers.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious. I’m always serious.”

  I felt breathless with anxiety. Me—crowned? “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.” A crown would elevate my status. I’d have courtiers aplenty—as well as enemies. “Is it even customary?” I’d never heard of a woman being crowned.

  “Not in the least.”

  “But then why?”

  “To spite them!”

  “Bonaparte, that’s not a good reason,” I said with a teasing smile.

  “You’re right. It is a mistake to jest. However, I am perfectly serious. I will crown you. You married me when I was nobody. I want you beside me.” Taking my hand, pulling me toward the bed.

  “Bonaparte—I’m going to have to consider.”

  “You’d turn down a crown?”

  Easily! “I need to think about it.” And talk to my children. Novembern 11, evening, late.

  “Oh, that’s frightening, Maman.” Hortense (standing, walking) covered her cheeks with her hands.

  “I know!” I didn’t want a crown; I didn’t even want Bonaparte crowned.

  “Papa suggested this?” Eugène asked. “What would it mean, exactly? You’re already Empress. How would being crowned change that?”

  “From what I can make out, I would become more of a symbol of the Empire, so that wherever I went, whatever I did, I would have to be shown the respect due the crown.”

  Hortense rolled her eyes. “They won’t like it.”

  The clan, she meant. “Not in the least.”

  “Because it will strengthen your position,” Eugène observed.

  Strengthen my tie to Bonaparte. “Frankly, that’s the only argument in favour,” I said.

  “And a good one, Maman,” Hortense said.

  [Undated]

  Yes, no, yes, no.

  Yes.

  No.

  Yes?

  Oh, if only I could sleep!

  November 12, 10:20 A.M.

  I went early this morning to Bonaparte’s cabinet. He looked up from his big desk, which was covered with plans and drawings and memoranda regarding the coronation. “I’ve decided to accept your offer,” I told him.

  “What offer?”

  Had he changed his mind? “To be crowned.”

  “Ah!” He stood and came around to me, pulling me into his arms.

  *The Pope was initially reluctant to crown “the murderer of the Duke d’Enghien. “He only agreed after promises of concessions to the Church—though these were never fulfilled.

  *Napoleon had given Eugène the use of Hôtel Villeroy, 78 Rue de Lille. It is now the German embassy.

  In which I am crowned

  November 15, 1804—Saint-Cloud.

  “Mon Dieu, Maman, you should see how crowded Paris has become,” Eugène said, his cloak thrown back. “The population has doubled, I swear, people everywhere! And now, with all the troops that have been ordered in, it’s crazy.”

  He said that already people are desperate to get tickets to the coronation, that one family has paid three hundred francs for a second-floor window just so they can watch the procession. Tickets are even being sold to see the preparations that are being made inside Notre-Dame. Yesterday, one man got knocked senseless by a stone that came loose from all the hammering. “I’ve never seen anything like it, Maman. All the masons in Paris are occupied, even the carpenters. How am I to get the work completed on my house?”

  “Would you like me to ask Messieurs Percier and Fontaine?” I suggested, but immediately regretted it. Our Imperial architects are overwhelmed with the task of transforming Notre-Dame and renovating both the Tuileries and Fontainebleau palaces in anticipation of the Pope’s arrival. “I’ll be meeting with them in …” I glanced at the clock. That late already? “In ten minutes.”

  “No, Maman.” Eugène put up his hands. “They’re too expensive. And besides, I don’t want a Roman temple, or even a Greek one. I just want it to be a comfortable house … with a splendid ballroom,” he added with a grin.

  “Eugène, does this mean that you’re giving a ball? Oh, your sister is going to be so pleased. Surely, you’ll need my help. I could—”

  “No, Maman, I want to do it myself!” He turned at the door. “One thing, though. Do you mind if I hire your musicians?”

  “Of course not.” Eugène is an enthusiastic dancer—music-mad, as Hortense says.

  He grinned, twirling his hat on his index finger (or trying to). “I happen to know that one of your ladies-in-waiting is very fond of them.”

  Adèle Duchâtel. I started to say something, to warn my son—but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about Bonaparte and …

  Bonaparte and Adèle.

  “Above all, be blind,” dear Aunt Désirée told me on her deathbed. If only it were easy! I promised Bonaparte that I would no longer object to what he calls his “amusements.” I appear calm and accepting, but inside I feel a whirlwind of emotion: jealousy, fear—anger—but also, curiously, a feeling of peace, for I do know that Bonaparte loves me. Loves me, and what’s more: needs me.

  Last night he woke me as he so often does, wanting me to come walk with him in the moonlight. The gardens were dusted with an early frost, giving the landscape an eerie glow. We walked and talked until the chill set in, then we tiptoed back to the warmth of our bed, whispering like naughty schoolchildren.

  November 17.

  Bonaparte was in a Special Council meeting all afternoon. I wondered what such an important gathering might concern—war? peace?—and was rather disconcerted to discover that it had to do with who is to carry my train during the coronation. Joseph has lodged a formal protest on behalf of the female Bonapartes: they flatly refuse.

  November 18, early evening.

  A compromise has been struck. Caroline, Pauline and Elisa have finally consented to carry my train—or rather (as it must now be worded), to “hold up the mantle,” which is to be viewed as “an attribute of sovereignty.” “But on condition that the princesses’ trains are in turn carried by their chamberlains,” I explained to Jacques-Louis David, who is co-ordinating the procession.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he complained. “You’re going to look like a centipede!”

  November 19.

  “We’ll need the crown jewels for our meeting with the jewellers,” Bonaparte told me at breakfast, and suddenly we were all of us in a flurry. We had to get down the Code to see how it was done. To obtain the jewels, the Emperor (Bonaparte) must instruct the Grand Chamberlain (Talleyrand) to give a written order on behalf of the Treasurer-general (Monsieur Estève) to the Master of the Wardrobe (Clari’s husband) for those pertaining to the Emperor (Bonaparte), and to the Lady of Honour (Chastulé) for those pertaining to the Empress (me). It has taken us all morning to work this out.

  November 20, early afternoon.

  Bonaparte’s mother will not make it to Paris in time for the coronation. She lingered too long visiting her beloved son Lucien in Milan. “Sacrebleu,” Bonaparte said, but softly, with a melancholy air.

  November 21.

  Tomorrow we go to Fontainebleau in anticipation of the Holy Father’s arrival. I doubt that I’ll sleep.

  November 25, Sunday—Fontainebleau.

  Pope Pius VII arrived at noon along with Bonaparte’s Uncle Fesch (now a Cardinal), and all t
he members of a fairly large papal entourage: sixteen cardinals and bishops and well over a hundred clerics (all of them excitable—oh, it’s noisy here).

  Everyone in the château lined up to welcome His Holiness at the door. He stooped coming in, perhaps out of habit, for he is very tall— he towers over Bonaparte. He was dressed entirely in white, shivering in a long cape draped in the manner of a Roman statue. (I’ve ordered his fireplaces stoked hot—I’m concerned that the chill might harm his health, which is not robust and considerably weakened by the strenuous winter journey.) Even his shoes—unfortunately thin for this climate—were white, although muddy from alighting to meet Bonaparte at Croix de Saint-Hérem. He’s grave, dignified, a simple man, more like a man of fifty than the sixty-two years he is, in fact. Perhaps it is his coal-black hair (does he colour it, I wonder?), so striking against his white robes, his peasant’s sheepskin cap, his slender hands and long fingernails. His voice is curious: high and somewhat nasal. He speaks excellent French, but with an Italian accent, pronouncing u as ou. A man of gentle manners—unlike his entourage of rough and noisy priests (spitting everywhere!). He has a pallid complexion, although this may be due to a cup of sour broth he mentioned taking at a posting house this morning.

  After a brief reception, Talleyrand escorted the Pope to his apartment, where he is resting now. How, I do not know, for the palace resounds with the voices of his entourage, yelling boisterously in Italian. “The Holy Father may be gentle and mannerly, but it is evident that his people are not,” Clari observed primly, taking up her needlework.

  Late evening.

  After his rest, His Holiness met with Bonaparte for about a half-hour. Then Bonaparte conducted him to the Hall of the Great Officers where we had an informal dinner of only six covers: the Holy Father and his secretary, Bonaparte and me, Eugène (who remembered not to break bread before grace) and Louis (who did not). The Pope ate and drank with enthusiasm. He loved the turkey stuffed with truffles and the sauté of lark fillets.

  Before he retired, His Holiness presented me with a ring. It is an amethyst encircled with diamonds, simply cut, simply set, exceptionally clear. And blessed by the Pope. “Thank you,” I said, looking into his benevolent eyes.

  “Daughter,” he said.

  I must gather the courage to speak, make my confession—soon. Tomorrow?

  November 26.

  The Pope was taken aback when I confessed that Bonaparte and I had not been married by the Church. “I was not aware.”

  “Forgive me,” I said. “I have spoken without the Emperor’s knowledge, Your Holiness.” Much less his consent!

  Early afternoon.

  Bonaparte entered my dressing room scowling. “There seems to be a problem,” he said, taking a chair by the side of my toilette table. “We have to be married by the Church, otherwise the coronation is off; the Pope refuses.”

  I feigned an expression of consternation.

  “Zut.” Bonaparte snapped one of my combs in frustration.

  November 27—back in Paris.

  This morning the terrace resounded with the sound of people crying out for the Pope, kneeling to receive his benediction. He brought only a few rosaries and medallions to give out and already they are gone. “I was told that the French are not religious,” he said, his voice plaintive. He blesses whatever objects are brought to him: eyeglasses, inkpots, even a pair of scissors. Both Royalists and Revolutionaries come for his blessing, even Jacques-Louis David, an atheist. The Holy Father has captured our spirits, our hearts.

  November 28, 7:30 P.M.

  “And the oil I’m to anoint you with?” the Pope inquired this afternoon, at our daily meeting working out all the (endless) details. “I understand that there is a flask of holy oil that has been used since Clovis was anointed in 496.” The Holy Father is an amateur historian, and proud of his knowledge.

  Bonaparte frowned, puzzled.

  “It was destroyed, Sire,” Bonaparte’s secretary spoke up. “During the Revolution.”

  “We will begin a new tradition,” Bonaparte said, commanding his secretary to have a suitable flask made.

  I flushed: the ancient flask had been destroyed after my first husband proposed (and I quote, for I remember it well) “that the baubles of tyranny and superstition be burned on the altar of the Fatherland.”

  [Undated]

  Chaos! The hundred and forty Spanish horses purchased for the coronation procession have all been delivered at once.

  November 29—Tuileries, not yet noon.

  We had a tour of the work being done on the cathedral this morning. Amazing. Two of the side altars and the choir screen have been removed and tiers of seats installed on either side of the nave. “Painted cardboard will give it a Greco-Egyptian style,” Jacques-Louis David explained. “Not Roman?” I asked.

  “That, too,” he said, pointing out that the bare stone walls will be entirely covered over with flags, tapestries and velvet hangings.

  “What a stage,” Talma exclaimed, throwing out his hands, his voice echoing in the huge vault.

  4:45 P.M.

  A terrible rehearsal. We’re still tripping all over ourselves.

  “I’m to carry some bit of bone?” Joachim protested on being assigned the relic of Charlemagne. Eugène, after all, is to carry the coronation ring.

  As a result Bonaparte decreed that Joachim will carry my crown, which of course infuriates Caroline.

  9:00 P.M.—shortly after.

  Is there to be no end to it? Now Jacques-Louis David is beside himself. The master of ceremonies assigned him to a seat in the stands at the coronation and he very nearly had a fit, threatening a duel. He’d been promised a box so that he could set up his impedimenta, work on his drawings undisturbed. I was called upon to settle the matter: yes, he absolutely did require a box directly above and in front of the altar in order to set up his easels and make sketches, and no, a duel would absolutely not be permitted.

  A duel! I confess I almost laughed at the thought of this ardent Revolutionary settling a rather minor conflict in such an aristocratic manner. We are all going mad.

  November 30—only two more days.

  This morning, first thing, Bonaparte came to me at my toilette, hiding something behind his back. “What are you up to now, Bonaparte?” I asked, for he had that playful look.

  “I want you to try something on.” He brought a glittering ornament out from behind his back and twirled it in the air as if it were a trinket. He caught it neatly and held it out with one hand, holding it by the gold cross perched on top.

  My crown! “Bonaparte, isn’t it heavy?”

  “Exceedingly. Take it!”

  “I’ve never seen anything quite so beautiful,” I said, a lump rising in my throat. Or so frightening.

  “Try it on.” He reminded me of an eager boy.

  The crown sat snug on my head. The jeweller had devised a padded velvet band around the inside, but even so, I felt a head pain threatening. “It’s perfect,” I said.

  December 1—only one more day.

  It is one-thirty, a cold winter afternoon. I’m in my dressing room, awaiting my entourage. We will have one last rehearsal in preparation for tomorrow. Outside in the courtyard I hear César yelling. Thirty carriages to make ready, a hundred and forty horses to groom. No wonder he is raving.

  The fervour, frankly, is unnerving. Two of my ladies are planning to rise at two in the morning just to have their hair dressed. It seems that everyone in Paris is going mad with last-minute preparations. Three orchestras—four hundred and fifty musicians in all—have been rehearsing. Scribes have been busy copying out over seventeen thousand pages of music for the choir of four hundred. And every tailor in Paris, it seems, is sleepless from making uniforms for how many soldiers? Eighty thousand, I think Bonaparte said, just to guard the route.

  I’m not frantic, but nervous, yes: tomorrow I will be crowned Empress in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. In all this, I keep forgetting that Bonaparte and I are to be mar
ried tonight.

  1:20 A.M.

  At midnight, between salvos of cannon and thunder, Bonaparte and I were married before God by his jolly uncle, Cardinal Fesch, in front of a makeshift altar set up in Bonaparte’s cabinet. It was done quickly, without fuss, much like our first, civil, ceremony.

  “I am your wife, forever and ever,” I told Bonaparte. A truth. He clasped my hands and pressed them to his chest.

  December 2 (or rather December 3).

  It is almost two in the morning. Bonaparte sleeps. It is snowing lightly again. I am wrapped in a fur, sitting at the little escritoire by the fire—embers now. My crown is set carelessly on my toilette table, next to my diamond tiara. I start for a moment, considering the danger, the temptation to thieves, and then remind myself that Roustam is asleep outside our door, recall the great number of guards who watch over us as we rest: Bonaparte and me, man and wife, Emperor and Empress.

  It has been a very long day. I was woken by gun salutes at six this morning, followed by a deafening tumult of bells. “Well, Your Majesty?” Mimi said with a grin, handing me a cup of hot chocolate. “This is your big day. Too bad your mother couldn’t be here to see it.” She laughed. “Your mother in her mended socks.”

  My mother, who is convinced I’ve married an ogre. I felt Bonaparte’s side of the bed. He’d risen? Already?

  “The Emperor is in his cabinet,” Mimi said, clearing a spot for a plate of rolls.

  “He’s working?” I don’t know why I was surprised.

  “You know what I was thinking of, Yeyette? Remember the fortune the obeah woman told you back home on Martinico? You were only thirteen.”

  “Fourteen,” I said, biting into the hot roll. How could I forget? You will be Queen. And then I recalled the words: But not for very long. Did the voodoo priestess really say that? I couldn’t remember. It all seemed a dream to me: a bad dream.