The Second Empress Read Free

service she has done for the Bonapartes, ensuring Empress Joséphine’s disgrace at last, and the downfall of the Beauharnais.
    “Shall I send him in, Your Highness?”
    I return to the mirror, a gilded monstrosity my second husband gave me as a wedding present, and study my reflection. My hair is held by a simple pearl band, and I arrange it around my shoulders like a long black shawl. “No. Let him wait another minute.”
    Since we were children, Napoleon has admired my hair. In Corsica, I would ask him to braid it for me. He would only laugh and call my request a harlot’s trick, adding that no man could resist a woman whose hair he had touched. But then, if you listen to the women at court, I am a harlot.
    I know what the gossips say. That when my first husband took me to the Caribbean, I experimented with every kind of lover: black, white, male, female. I grin, thinking of my life in Saint-Domingue. The lazy nights eating sapodillas with two, sometimes three partners in my bed. And the mornings after when the sun would cast a golden net over the sea … But then my husband died of yellow fever, and it was back to Paris. I was the Widow Leclerc without even a title for my name.
    “Tell him I am ready.”
    Paul bows at the waist and shuts the door.
    My second match, however, changed everything.
    I think of Camillo Borghese, doing whatever it is that he does in Turin. While it’s true that he is the greatest imbecile ever to hold thetitle of prince, my marriage to him was my finest triumph. My brother granted both my sisters the rank of Imperial Highness, but I am the Princess Borghese, with a palazzo in Rome, a vast collection of art, and three hundred thousand francs’ worth of Borghese family jewels. Even my mother could not have envisioned such a match for me.
    I wonder what the old women of Marseilles would think if they could see their “Italian maid” now. I was thirteen when our family fled Corsica and took refuge in their miserable seaside town. Everything we owned was left behind. We had nothing when we arrived, and that is how the French treated our family—as nothings. They believed that because we were born in Corsica, we wouldn’t know French. “There go the Corsicans,” they whispered, and, “What a shame they have nothing. That Paoletta is quite beautiful. She might have made a good marriage.”
    When my sisters and I were sent to be maids in the grand Clary house, the men assumed they had purchased our sexual favors as well. “Corsican girls,” they said, “are only good for one thing.” I never told Napoleon. He was a twenty-four-year-old general with a war at his back. But when he visited us in Marseilles, he knew. Caroline had grown as fat as a pig, and I had stopped eating. “What’s the matter with them?” he asked my mother, and she pretended it was the food. “It’s not like Corsica.” But Napoleon saw my tears, and he knew.
    “You and Caroline will leave that house tomorrow,” he said. “You will both come to Paris. With me.”
    But Paris was a war zone. “It’s too great a risk. We’ll have nothing.”
    “We will never have nothing . We are Bonapartes,” he swore, and something changed in his face. “And we will never be vulnerable again.”
    Today no one would dare whisper that a Corsican comes cheap. I turn to my little greyhound, who is lounging on the chaise across the room. “We are the most powerful family in Europe,” I say, in the voice I reserve only for her. She thumps her tail with enthusiasm, and I continue, “We have thrones from Holland to Naples. And now, when they talk about us, it’s with fear in their voices. ‘Beware the Bonapartes,’ they say. ‘The most powerful siblings on earth.’ ”
    The door opens, and Paul announces grandly, “His Majesty, the Emperor Napoleon.”
    I turn, but slowly, so that my brother may see the full effect of my gown.
    “Thank you, Paul.” He returns to the salon, and I face Napoleon. We are similar in so