The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte Read Free Page B

English china teapot, formed in the classical style with a fluted barrel decorated with gilt edges and painted garlands. Betsy rose. “May I help you, Mother?”
    Dorcas smiled and nodded at the cup she was filling. “Take this to your uncle.”
    Betsy carried the cup and saucer carefully as she made her way around the younger children playing on the floor. Then she stood before the sofa.
    Uncle Smith and Betsy’s father were deep in conversation, so Betsy waited before interrupting them. Standing there, she noticed how differently the two men dressed. Her father was wearing a dark brown broadcloth tailcoat cut in the new short-waisted fashion with matching breeches, a tan waistcoat, and white stockings, but instead of shoes, he wore comfortable red leather mules. His dark, unpowdered queue was pulled back plainly. Her uncle Samuel Smith—a Revolutionary War officer now serving in Congress—wore a powdered hairstyle with a top puff and side curls. His old-fashioned long blue frock coat had embossed brass buttons, his waistcoat was embroidered, and silver buckles ornamented his shoes.
    Uncle Smith said, “I do not think the newspapers have caught wind of the Treaty of Greenville. I just received word of it this morning.”
    “I suppose more people than ever will be packing up for Ohio now that the war with the Indians is won.”
    “I hope they will. We need to end British influence in the Northwest Territory. I do not trust their intentions.” Uncle Smith stretched out his legs and spotted Betsy. “Why, there is my pretty niece.”
    “Your tea, Uncle,” she said, handing him the cup and saucer.
    “And what have you been memorizing lately, child?”
    “Parts of Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts.”
    “Be damned if you are. Your aunt Margaret tried to make me read that when we were courting, but it was too long and does not even rhyme.”
    Betsy laughed at the thought of such a blunt man trying to plow through the meandering poem. “Procrastination is the thief of time,” she intoned, quoting the most famous line.
    “Impertinent chit,” he burst out but then joined her gleeful laughter.
    Glancing at her father, Betsy saw that he did not share their amusement. “I will get your tea, sir,” she said before he could rebuke her for teasing her elders.
    As she walked away, she heard Uncle Smith say something that made her slow her steps to listen. “You might consider putting Betsy in school. Have you heard of Madame Lacomb? She is an émigré who has opened a boarding school for girls right here on South Street. My sister, Mrs. Hollin, has enrolled her daughters. I believe the Caton girls will attend as well.”
    “The Catons?” Betsy’s father asked. He sounded impressed that the Frenchwoman’s students included the granddaughters of Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the only man in Maryland wealthier than he was. “Then I shall look into it.”
    TO BETSY’S DELIGHT, her father did enroll her in school. Madame Lacomb and her husband had been low-ranking nobles who fled to Saint-Domingue during the French Revolution. Monsieur Lacomb died not long afterward, and Madame Lacomb came to Baltimore with other refugees from the slave revolt of 1793. She moved into a small, blue wooden house that was as much a survivor of a different era as she was—it had been built in the 1750s and remained standing as more imposing brick townhomes replaced the wooden houses around it. It had two bedrooms upstairs and a parlor and a kitchen on the ground floor. Madame Lacomb had furnished the parlor as a classroom with straight-backed wooden chairs and a few plain tables. Under her tutelage, Betsy studied French, history, geography, composition, drawing, fine needlework—and dancing once a week, taught by a French émigré named Moreau whom Monsieur Lacomb had known in Paris.
    One Friday afternoon in late autumn, after Monsieur Moreau had spent an hour berating the girls for their clumsiness