“Three hundred and ten,” Louis said.
“The greatest fleet in history since the Crusades,” Eugène said in an awed whisper.
10:30
A.M.
In the market the talk is only of the fleet, where it may be heading. “There is even a booth for placing bets,” Eugène said.
“I bet a sou there on Portugal,” Mimi said, looking up from her mending.
“Oh?”
“And then there was a rush of bets on Portugal. Everyone thought I knew.”
“Which is the favoured destination?” Bonaparte asked, looking up from the volume of poetry he was reading, his beloved Ossian. (“
A tale of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years!
”)
“The Crimea,” Mimi said.
Eugène and Louis snickered, imagining that they knew the true destination.
May 12.
Bonaparte has been in a flurry of activity, organizing provisions, going over the lists, the ships, the artillery. Going over the maps. Now, he is ready, and impatient. He waits on the wind.
Evening.
A wind has risen, but not in the right direction. Bonaparte watches the sky. Hourly, from the widow’s walk, he scans the horizon with a spyglass, searching for signs of the enemy.
May 14.
This morning, bringing my cup of hot chocolate himself, Bonaparte informed me I would not be going.
A breeze billowed the curtains, filling the room with the rancid smell of the harbour. “Going where?” I asked, confused, pulling the covering sheet over me. I was naked, my sleeping gown tangled somewhere in the sheets. Since reaching Toulon Bonaparte had become even more ardent than usual. Being back in active command had brought out a vigorous energy in him.
He sat down on the bed. I moved over to make room for him. He put his hand on my shoulder, as if to console me, and it was then that I knew what he was going to say. “Bonaparte, no.
Please
don’t leave me behind.” I felt tears pressing. Stupid tears.
“It’s too dangerous—the English are out there. They’ll likely attack.”
It was silent in the room but for the ticking of a clock. “You never told me that.”
He took my hand, kissed it. “When we get to Egypt, I’ll send a ship back for you.
La Pomone,
if you like.”
I pressed my head against his shoulder. “It frightens me to be separated from you, Bonaparte.”
“What is there to be afraid of?”
His family,
I thought.
May 15.
I sit idle as everyone scurries about, preparing for the “crusade.” They are filled with excitement, and I, with a feeling of sadness…and dread.
May 18.
The flags are blowing to the east. Eugène came running up the stairs to my suite. “We’re leaving at dawn,” he cried out breathlessly, his cheeks rosy.
May 19.
All night I could not sleep. At the first hint of light, the first crow of a cock, I slipped out of bed, went to the window. The masts in the harbour were bobbing in the breeze. The weather vane pointed east.
“Where’s Fauvelet?” Bonaparte jumped out of bed, fully alert. I helped him into his uniform. He had been shaved the night before, in anticipation of the morning. A knock, three knocks. “There he is.”
“General, they’re—”
Bonaparte bolted out the door, buttoning his long linen trousers.
I sat down at my toilette table and regarded myself in the glass. The morning light was cruel, the worry lines clear.
Another knock. Fauvelet again, apologetic. “Twenty minutes, Madame.”
Twenty! Mimi performed a small miracle, transforming me from an anxious woman who had had no sleep into the elegant wife of General Bonaparte.
Eugène burst in and struck a heroic pose. “Ready?”
There was a call from the first floor. “Coming!” He leapt down the stairs, his hat flying off behind him.
As we came out into the morning sun, a great cry went up. People were waving flags, dressed in a colourful assortment of feast-day clothes. A cluster of people surrounded a man with a board hanging from his shoulders that proclaimed, “Final bets here.” The locations were listed along with the odds. I dared not look for fear my expression might give the true destination away.
Portugal,
I kept telling myself. They are sailing to Portugal. The crowd cheered, began singing “Chant du départ.”
The moment I’d been dreading came. I took Eugène’s hands, examined his face, his soft eyes, the freckles across his nose, thinking: I will always remember him thus,
if…
“How does one tell a soldier to be careful?” I asked, choking up.
“Maman.” Squirming, uncomfortable in front of Louis and all his shipmates.
I kissed him quickly, before he could escape. “I’ll be joining you.”
Soon.
Bonaparte met me on the railing. I held my handkerchief to my nose. Everyone was watching us, I knew.
“Stay in Toulon until it’s clear that we have made it,” he said.
“There’s a chance you might turn back?”
He stroked a lock of hair out of my eyes. “If we’re forced to.”
By the English. “Oh, Bonaparte, I hate this.” I pressed my cheek against the rough wool of his jacket—that same frayed jacket he’d worn in Italy.
“If you need anything, ask Joseph,” he said, his voice thick. “I’ve told him to give you forty thousand a year.”
“But I will be joining you in a few months.” Why this talk of a year?
“You’ll go to Plombières for the treatment?”
I nodded. The treatment for infertile women.
“When it’s safe, I’ll send
La Pomone
for you.” He kissed me lightly on the cheek. “And then we’ll get on with our project.”
“General Bonaparte?”
“One moment, Fauvelet.” A gust of wind blew hair in my eyes. I held onto my hat. Bonaparte put his hand on my shoulder. “If I should—”
“No, Bonaparte!” The angels watched over him; I had to believe that.
He stopped, his eyes glistening. I pressed my face into his neck.
Please:
“Take care.”
I was escorted to a balcony of the Marine Intendancy building, where a number of women were sitting, officers’ wives. They shifted so that I might have the best chair. The paymaster came out, carrying a tray of spyglasses. “Oh,” we all exclaimed in unison. And then laughed.
I took a spyglass, searched the decks of
L’Orient.
“I see your husband,” I told Madame Marmont, a young bride of only sixteen. But no Eugène, no Bonaparte. “By the helm.” I showed her how to adjust the glass, so that the focus might be clear.
She put her glass down, blinded by tears. “It’s hopeless.”
Gunshot! The crowd on the shore began singing
La Marseillaise,
and we all began to sing along. I pressed my glass to my eyes. Finally I spotted Bonaparte in a cluster of men at the helm. I recognized him by his hat. My heart surged with pride to see him. I searched the faces for Louis and Eugène.
“I put my money on Sicily,” one of the women said.
“I’m sure it’s Africa,” Madame Marmont said. “Else why would they take so much water?”
“Even I don’t know,” I lied.
As the ships weighed anchor, the cannons in the fort were fired and a military band on the shore broke into a brassy hymn. The warships and the fort exchanged salutes. The smell of gunpowder filled the air.
“They’re raising the sails!” The wind pulled
L’Orient
forward. A cheer went up on the shore.
“Oh,” I cried out. For the huge ship had listed sharply.
“Something’s wrong.” Madame Marmont jumped to her feet.
“It’s dragging bottom!”
“It will right itself,” I assured them—Madame
Bonaparte
assured them. But inwardly I was trembling.
“It’s righting now.”
Yes.
The huge ship bobbed on the water like a toy. The crowd cheered. Wind filled its gigantic sails, pulled it forward. A lone trumpeter blasted out a note. I waved my soggy handkerchief, but I could no longer see through my tears.
“…women are politics.”
—
Talleyrand
June 14, 1798—Plombières-les-Bains.
A harrowing voyage, but I’m here at last in the charming mountain spa of Plombières-les-Bains—slate grey houses crammed into a narrow valley as if they had tumbled into a crevice and were too weary to rise. A beautiful setting, cliffs rising to the sky, thick forests all around, the air bracing and clean. But such a small village! (I walked its length in seventeen minutes.) And so much more isolated than I’d expected.
June 15.
I met this morning with Dr. Martinet, the water doctor. He is a short man with a trim build and a businesslike air. He wore thick spectacles and a white canvas coat. His hair, which is thinning, was unpowdered, braided at the back into one very long tail, looped and caught up with a white cord. All along one wall of his study were framed testimonials.
“Letters from happy patients,” he said with a sweep of his hand. He had moist lips (as if he had been licking them), and moist eyes too, I noticed, as one might expect in a water doctor. “I like to begin by pointing out that our program enjoys a high rate of success.” He closed his eyes when he talked. “It is important that the patient begin with this knowledge, for faith—or rather the obedience that faith makes possible—is essential to its successful completion.” He opened his eyes.
I sat forward on my chair. The possibility that there might in fact be a cure encouraged me. I had come with prayers in my heart, but little hope, I confess. “I intend to be a model patient, Dr. Martinet.”
He leaned back in his cracked leather chair, his hands gripping a board onto which papers had been clipped. “The program is not for those lacking in courage. It requires some degree of both physical and mental strength to successfully complete. But”—he held up an index finger—“nature rewards those who endure. Now, Madame Bonaparte, if you will begin by telling me your history.” He peered at me over his spectacles. His eyebrows are thick, bushy (in contrast to his thinning hair), giving him a somewhat diabolical look.
This is what I told him:
I first conceived at the age of sixteen, after only a few months of marriage, but miscarried. My son, Eugène, was then conceived and brought to term. Less than two years later I conceived a daughter. It was a difficult pregnancy and she was born several weeks early.
“But otherwise normal?”
“I had difficulty producing milk.” I cleared my throat. “And then—” Did he need to know that Alexandre and I had separated? “Years later my husband died…and two years after his death I married General Bonaparte. That was just over two years ago.”
“And you have conceived by this union, but miscarried?”
“My doctor thought it might have been a mole.”
“Interesting! And then did the flux resume?”
“For a time it was sporadic.”
“And the last one was…?”
I wasn’t sure exactly. I’d been in Milan. “Over a year ago.” Although possibly a year and a half.
“Did you take anything to re-establish the flow?”
I pushed forward the list of herbals (linden blossom, wormwood, coltsfoot) that a doctor in Milan had prescribed, the tea of aloe, gentian root and jalappa. “I also consulted a midwife, who gave me uterus powder.” I declined to tell him about the Gypsy I’d gone to in Italy—the one
with a well-picked savin bush in her vegetable garden—and the rue tea Mimi had persuaded me to try.
*
“But no results?”
“The powder made me ill.”
“And your relationship with the General is…?” He licked his upper lip.
I nodded, flushed.
Dr. Martinet tapped his pencil on the desk. “Madame Bonaparte, during the Terror you were held, were you not?”
Imprisoned, he meant. “Yes, I was in the Carmes for four months.”
The doctor leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “I must tell you, I have had a significant number of patients who were likewise ‘held’ during the Terror—women who likewise seem to be suffering from an inexplicable infertility.”
I felt a tightening in my chest. “It’s true that the flux became unpredictable during that time.”
“The effect of shock on the female constitution is proven to be disruptive. If nourishment is lacking, the air oppressive, exercise restricted—any one of these factors is known to affect a woman’s capacity to be that which Nature intended her to be, a mother.”
“Are you saying that the cessation of my periodic sickness may have been caused by my being in prison?”
“I am suggesting that it may be a very strong possibility. According to my observations, a number of women who have been detained in this way have suffered a cessation of the flow and have plunged, regardless of age, into a condition curiously resembling that of a woman long past the age of reproduction. They have difficulty sleeping, experience an overwhelming anxiety, melancholia—insanity in some cases. And, needless to say, all of them are barren.”
“Dr. Martinet, do you mean
menopause
?”
From a book Dr. Martinet loaned me:
First, one grows stout at the back of the neck, where two prominences form at the lowest cervical vertebrae.
The breasts become flat and hard, less spongy.
The legs and arms dry up, resembling those of a man.
The abdomen enlarges to the extent that the woman may appear to be pregnant.
A beard often manifests itself.
I am at the desk in my sparely furnished room overlooking the main street of Plombières. It is warm. I’ve opened the double doors wide onto the balcony. I can hear the sounds of horses, carriages, people talking, walking. Somewhere, someone is playing a violin beautifully.
I am shaken, I confess, by my conversation with Dr. Martinet. It had never occurred to me that I might be past the age of fertility. I think of old women, stooped and withered, whiskered and dour, and despair overwhelms me.