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.
Buonaparte 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!”