49

MY BELOVED OLDEST GRANDSON CARLO lay on the little bed I prepared for him at Malmaison, a bed fit for a royal child with gilded eagles at its head and foot. Sweat poured from his fair hair down his forehead and into his eyes, and his sweet face was flushed red with fever, yet he smiled at me when I bathed his forehead with a wet cloth and smoothed back his wet hair.

He had been very ill for nearly a week. As soon as I got Hortense’s message from The Hague saying Carlo was ill I ordered the swiftest, lightest carriage from the imperial stables and rushed to Holland to get her and the boy. Her husband Louis had been behaving very oddly, Hortense said, and she needed to get herself and Carlo away from him as soon as possible.

Louis, she told me, had taken to shutting himself in a dark room for days on end to work on his forever unfinished stories, refusing to see a doctor about his own worsening sickness and forbidding any doctor to visit his ailing son. Her contempt for him was evident in her words. She described her husband as a walking pustule, covered in weeping sores, unsteady on his painful legs, his vision growing weak and his temper becoming ever more menacing. Most striking of all, she said, was his complete and unswerving attention to his stories. Nothing else mattered, she told me, not his health or the health of their son, not his

kingdom, certainly not his marriage. All he wanted was to seek solitude, to be left alone to write.

Carlo began coughing, and couldn’t seem to stop. Hortense and I helped him to sit up. We patted his back, spoke soothingly to him, gave him tea with honey to drink—knowing, all the time, that nothing was helping him and that he was getting worse. Each time he coughed he spat up blood, and with it, a thick greenish fluid that stank horribly.

I sent for the physician who had helped me after my terrible fall in Plombieres, Dr. Morel. His manner was comforting, though I remembered very well how ineffectual his methods had been when I was in such agony after my fall. He looked considerably older than he had in Plombieres, stouter and more red in the face.

“Your Royal Highnesses,” he said when he arrived at Malmaison, bowing to each of us in turn, then going immediately to little Carlo’s bedside.

“Has the boy been bled?” he asked, honorifics forgotten in the intensity of his concern for his small patient.

“Yes,” Hortense answered. “I opened a vein myself as soon as he felt hot to the touch. I knew he had fever.”

Hortense showed the physician the recent opening she had made in the crook of Carlo’s scarred little arm.

“This vein has been opened before,” he said, scrutinizing the injury. “Many times before.”

“Carlo has often been ill. His father does not allow any physicians in the palace. So I bleed Carlo myself. It is my belief,” she added, “that Carlo and his brother are often ill because they are near my husband, who grows more and more ill all the time.”

The doctor looked up at Hortense. “What is the nature of his illness?”

Hortense looked over at me, but I had no advice to offer her. No one in the Buonaparte family had ever admitted that Louis had the English disease, but it was obvious to everyone. The stigma attached to that disease was very great, the shame to the family enormous.

“It is the disease no one wishes to name,” Hortense said bravely.

“Ah. I understand. I have treated many patients with this unnamed disease. Tell me, does your husband find it hard to maintain his balance when he walks?”

“Yes.”

‘And does he have a severe rash, with infected blisters?”

“Yes.”

He nodded knowingly. “I suppose his sight is growing dim, and his temper very difficult?”

“Your conjectures are accurate, doctor.”

He put his hand on Carlo’s hot forehead. “How long has he had this fever?”

“About nine days.”

“Is he able to take any nourishment?”

Hortense shook her head, and began to cry quietly.

“Your Royal Highness, if it is any comfort to you, I do not believe your son has his father’s disease. That disease is confined to women of easy virtue and the men who visit them. It is incurable. Your husband will not live to be old.”

“Doctor! Must you be so blunt? You see how upset my daughter is.”

“Your Imperial Majesty, when dealing with disease it is always best to speak the truth. Not to disguise it behind lies, or make it more palatable by using false terms. The truth is the truth.”

I was afraid that the doctor would blurt out the truth about Carlo: that he would not live. I felt certain of it, as certain as if I had told his fortune.

My sorrow at this prospect was great, yet nowhere near as great as Hortense’s. Carlo was her favorite, her firstborn. I thought how terrible would be my pain if I lost Eugene. My dear Eugene, who had only recently married and presented me with a grandchild and namesake, little Josephine. I wore a lock of her baby hair near my heart.

But I was wrong about what Dr. Morel would say. After examining Carlo thoroughly, he drew a small packet from his bag and gave it to Hortense, telling her to mix the contents with watered wine and pour it slowly, drop by drop, into Carlo’s mouth.

“It has a sweet taste, he will not reject it. But do not give it to him too quickly, or his stomach may not absorb it all.

“I will return in the morning,” he said and then, with a bow, left us.

We stayed by Carlo’s bed, now sitting together watching over him, now resting on sofas. Euphemia and Coco joined us, and kept vigil while we rested.

Coco had grown into a lovely girl, with skin only slightly darker than Euphemia’s. She was maturing swiftly, her limbs lengthening, her face losing its childish plumpness. Though I had told her who her parents were she did not know the story in any detail, how my father’s liaison with Selene had upset the household in Martinique and how Selene had died during the slave rebellion. I told her only that our father had loved Selene and that she had been a beautiful woman. There seemed no need to add how disruptive Selene’s sultriness had been, or how manipulative she herself had been. Coco was not like her mother in that way, she was a more thoughtful, unselfish girl and it was like her to be concerned about Carlo, the cousin she loved.

Dr. Morel returned in the morning as promised. He examined Carlo while Hortense and I sat nearby, waiting anxiously for his conclusions, watching his every move, scanning his face in an effort to read his grave expression.

When he finished he came and joined us. He looked resigned, and Hortense gripped my hand apprehensively.

“Dear ladies, I am going to speak to you now, not as physicians usually speak to royal persons, but as someone who has a high enough regard for you both to give you my honest views.

“The boy is gravely ill.” Hortense stifled a sob. “There are efforts we can make, if you choose, with leeches and cupping and further bleeding, but if this boy were my son or grandson I would treat him with kindness and simply let him sleep his way quietly out of this world.”

Tears spilled from my eyes as he went on. “I do not honestly believe that he can be brought back to health, only that he can be made to live a few more tortured days, in pain, his mind increasingly disordered. In the end it will not even comfort him that you are near. We will pray that God grants him health. But I recommend that we do nothing further ourselves to prolong his weak life.”

Hortense released my hand and ran from the room.

“I am going to leave these opiates with you,” the doctor said, taking several packets from his bag. “They will help him sleep. You know where to reach me if you should need my help again.”

I managed to mumble my thanks as the doctor left but my heart was leaden with sorrow. I went to find Hortense and attempted to comfort her.

It is hard for me now to remember all that happened in the next few days. I know that I made an effort to eat, and bathe, and to reply when the servants came to me for their daily instructions. I thought of sending for Louis but Hortense insisted that he would not come. With the help of

Christian I managed to compose a dignified bulletin to appear in the court circular, announcing that Louis-Napoleon-Charles, grandson and namesake of the emperor, was in failing health. A swift rider was sent east to Warsaw, where Bonaparte was holding court, to inform him of the impending tragedy. But I knew that the message would not reach him in time.

In the end there was nothing we could do but sit by Carlo’s bedside, watching as his life ebbed. We sang to him, lullabies and children’s songs, and Euphemia repeated prayers in the Ibo tongue. Coco diligently gave Carlo the soothing drug Dr. Morel had left with us, and felt his forehead from time to time, and changed his linen. I admired her devotion, and could not help noticing that she began coughing and that beads of perspiration were forming on her forehead and running down her cheeks.

By the time Carlo’s funeral was held, Coco was burning with fever, and once again I summoned Dr. Morel.

In those cruel days I suffered twice, once when my dear grandson was taken from me and again when Coco, the child I had brought into the world so many years before, followed him to the grave. Carlo was taken back to his father’s kingdom for burial, but Coco, my half-sister, who had never had a real name or a real home other than with me, I buried in the chapel at Malmaison, beneath a small stone monument that read simply “Beloved Child of the Islands.”