CHAPTER 7

When my son was five, Alexandre came to take him away, to start military school. My sweet Eugène was excited; he dreamed of growing up to be a brave soldier just like his father. After I kissed Eugène good-bye, I took to my bed and cried myself blind. I was so afraid that when summer rolled around a cold, icy-hearted little stranger, a miniature Alexandre de Beauharnais, would come back to me, prod my hips and thighs with a toy sword and call me fat, and flaunt his book learning against my ignorance. I had nightmares about the vilest and cruelest insults coming out of that sweet little mouth. Nothing could cheer me.

Red, swollen eyes and sorrow were hardly alluring attributes, and my lovers began making excuses and I saw the easy, comfortable life I had made for myself in Fontainebleau slipping away from me, like water through my fingers, just like all the money I had frittered away on frivolities that didn’t really matter. It was time for another change; it was time to return to Paris.

* * *

I found the city alive with a constant thrum of nervous excitement. The King and Queen were greatly despised. Louis XVI was regarded as a great fat oaf who slept in bed like a log every night while his wife danced till dawn at the Opera Ball and lost fortunes at faro. Marie Antoinette’s lavish spending on clothes, diamonds, her mansion in miniature, the Petit Trianon, her faux rustic farm where the sheep were bathed and wore blue satin ribbons before they were permitted in the royal presence, and the manifold luxuries she lavished upon her special friends—some called them “Sapphic amours”—the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac, as well as her rumored affairs with her brother-in-law, the Comte de Artois, and the dashing Swedish Count Fersen, had made her the nation’s scapegoat for everything that went wrong. If there were shortages of bread or the cost of meat was too dear the finger of blame was pointed squarely at the Queen. When she put aside her ornate court gowns and had her portrait painted in a simple ruffled white muslin frock and straw hat like the ones I had worn in Martinique people said she was trying to ruin the French silk industry. How awful it must have been for her, poor woman; no matter what she did, it was always wrong.

There was much talk of America’s victorious war to free itself from “the yoke of British tyranny.” I must have heard the words freedom, liberty, revolution, equality, and democracy a hundred times a day. But I didn’t pay too much attention. Politics bored me. A casual glance at a newspaper was enough to lull me to sleep. It all seemed to me a vile and potent witches’ brew that stank worse the more it was stirred. I wanted nothing to do with it. I was only interested in myself and my children’s welfare; France, its people and sovereigns alike, must fend for itself.

Alexandre was laggardly paying my allowance again, so I sold some of my jewelry to get by. I rented a house and bought new dresses more suitable for Paris. I began to go out, to public ballrooms, salons, cafés, and theaters, showing myself off, and soon not only did Denis de Rougemont come back to me and start paying my bills again, but I had four more wealthy and distinguished lovers who adored me.

But experience had taught me that I could not depend on them; they would be good to me as long as I was pretty, amusing, and good to them, but in times of illness or sorrow when I was not looking or feeling my best they would forsake me like rats fleeing a burning house. And who could blame them? No man wants a maudlin mistress. If they wanted melancholy, tears, coldness, and boredom they would stay at home with their wives.

Time too was my enemy along with my free-spending ways, my inability to resist any pleasing trinket or trifle that caught my eye. My teeth were terrible, decaying and dingy, and already there were fine lines around my eyes. I was already dyeing my hair with dark coffee because I couldn’t abide the fear of seeing the first strand of silver there. I had put nothing by for the future, to support me in my old age or to help my daughter attract a husband.

I was supposed to be saving for Hortense’s dowry, for which Alexandre, when I could pry the money out of him, was supposed to pay an additional 1,500 livres a year. But I had borrowed from that fund so many times, always with the best of intentions, promising each time to pay it back as soon as I could, with interest like any other loan, but never quite managing to do it until, I’m sorry to say, Hortense’s dowry had dwindled away to nothing. Thank heaven, my daughter was comely and had the sweetest, most docile disposition; she would surely be able to catch a husband on her own merits.

To make matters worse, Alexandre had heard about my new mode of living and was threatening to drag me before a judge, to denounce me as a prostitute, a professional courtesan, to seek the court’s permission to withdraw his support altogether. Why did I need his money, he demanded, when I was enjoying the largesse of so many other men? And why, I could not help but wonder, did it sound so much worse when he said it? He made me sound vile, little better than one of those women who paraded the streets in the Palais Royal baring their breasts to entice custom. I was not so far gone as that!

I was in the midst of my twenties and my looks would not last forever, and there would always be younger and prettier girls to woo my lovers away from me. I had to do better; I just had to! The future and old age were creeping closer every day. No matter how fast I danced I could not evade them forever; they were waiting to tap me on the shoulder sooner or later.

I tried to forget my fears in the merry whirl of the ballroom, champagne, and my lovers’ arms. Shopping alternately eased my nerves, then shattered them when I was confronted with the bills and my own guilt and worries about whether I could persuade my lovers to pay them. Tomorrow, always tomorrow, I promised myself I would start to save, but every day some new temptation beckoned. I could not resist the balm of beautiful things. I had to keep up with the fashions; I had to keep up with the other women who relied on the generosity of men. If I was dowdy and passé my lovers would desert me.

* * *

The scalding witches’ brew of politics soon boiled over and flowed through the streets of Paris. A furious mob marched upon the ancient prison known as the Bastille, determined to tear it down brick by brick and liberate the prisoners inside from regal tyranny. The mob killed the guards and beheaded the prison governor, mounted his head upon a pike, and marched it through the streets. People cheered and sang like it was a victory parade. Soon the King and Queen were prisoners of their own people and everyone was talking endlessly of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” and sporting tricolor ribbons and rosettes of red, white, and blue.

Almost overnight everyone was leaving their hair unpowdered and wearing clothes with smart, simple lines borrowing heavily from dapper, tailored British riding habiliments—redingotes, greatcoats often with double or even triple shoulder capes, double-breasted frock coats, neat square-cut waistcoats, and black leather riding boots with tan tops. Tall beaver hats took the place of tricorns, steel buckles replaced silver and gold, and linen neck cloths, often tied in front with a simple knot or bow, ousted the frothy lace frills of yesteryear. Tricolor sashes and steel buttons embossed with patriotic sentiments or symbols were all the rage, and polished pieces of charred stones from the ruins of the Bastille were preferred over precious gems. And no one dared be seen in public without the red, white, and blue revolutionary rosette blooming on their lapel or hat.

Gentlemen renounced their aristocratic pastel satin knee breeches and replaced them with thigh- and calf-hugging pantaloons of soft, skin-tight cashmere, doeskin, or nankeen, often in buff or sulfur colors. Panniers and the sweet simplicity of shepherdess frocks in pastel colors fell by the wayside as women rushed to adopt the new patriotic fashions, donning tailored, mannish jackets and waistcoats worn with naturally flowing skirts, sometimes with a slight bustle at the back, and tall black beaver hats over long curls as towering tresses fell down all over Paris. Ladies who were accustomed to waiting upon the Queen donned white muslin “mobcaps” like their housemaids wore and wrapped muslin fichus about their shoulders, crossing them in front over their breasts.

The poor proudly hailed themselves as sans coulottes (without breeches, the emblem of the aristocracy) and covered their limbs in loose striped trousers with ragged hems reminiscent of those that sailors wore and put on red carmagnole jackets, tricolor sashes, and red felt Phrygian “liberty caps,” always with a tricolor cockade pinned to the side, and thrust their feet into clunky clogs or striped stockings and English-style riding boots.

All Paris was awash in red, white, and blue to the point of drowning, and I was right there in the thick of it, swimming along as best I could. I was a follower, not a leader, going along, as I always did, with every new fad and fancy, singing and dancing to the song of freedom in the streets and trying to ignore how ugly and dangerous my world had suddenly become with all the ominous rumblings about hanging all aristocrats from lampposts, lifting up and exalting the lowborn, punishing all those born to wealth and privilege, and killing the worst offenders of all—the King and Queen.

* * *

I soon had more cause for sorrow. My little cousin Aimee—funny how I always thought of her as the little girl of eight she had been when I left Martinique, though she was by now a woman of eighteen—had been summoned home by her anxious parents. They were frightened by the revolutionary fervor sweeping Paris, and when it only grew stronger, rather than passing away like many another fad, they booked her passage on the very next ship.

She never reached Martinique. Months passed with no word of her, and then reports came suggesting the worst possible fate, worse even than a watery grave; the ship she had been traveling on, Lazarus, had been attacked by pirates. No ransom demands were ever made as was customary with wealthy captives; Aimee’s parents would have beggared themselves to buy her freedom and bring her back home. Murder, most likely preceded by violent rape, had surely been poor Aimee’s fate.

Whenever I was alone, in moments of quiet, when no lover came to share my bed, I wept long into the night, lamenting my cruel selfishness. What must she have thought of me and the way I had abandoned our friendship? I never visited her, not once. I kept making excuses, and then I simply stopped writing at all when I ran out of them. Surely gossip must have reached her even in the convent, and I was too ashamed to face her, too afraid to see the condemnation, or even worse the pity, in her eyes. She must have thought I didn’t care.

Euphemia David had been so wrong about everything! Neither of us would wear a crown except the glory of tresses that God had grown upon our heads. Visions of Aimee’s violated and bloody corpse sinking down into the depths of the sea, her long golden hair tangling in green seaweed, haunted my dreams. I wanted to pretend that she had not died at all but sailed away to some exotic distant land where she would indeed wear an empress’s jeweled crown, but I knew I was only trying to salve my guilt with childish dreams. Pirates were merciless brutes; once they laid their hands on her pure white flesh Aimee was doomed. Sometimes I had visions, both waking and sleeping, of Aimee, at turns proud and defiant with her head held high, regal as a queen, or cowering with fright, like a child, the back of her skirt soaked with the piss of sheer terror, walking the plank, then, falling, falling, into the deep blue sea from which there was no coming back, no rescue, no mercy, only death, by drowning or sharks’ teeth.

In the end, my own fears of the unrest in the city, and grief over my lost and neglected Aimee, drove me to book my own passage on a ship bound for Martinique. I packed my clothes and jewels, sold the furniture, my gilt-edged Sèvres porcelain painted with yellow roses, silver plate, and Venetian glasses, charmed 6,000 livres out of Denis de Rougemont, wrote my darling Eugène a tender farewell, picked up Fortune, and took Hortense’s hand, and, with my maid, Rosette, in tow, we boarded a vessel with the grandiose name of Sultan.