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Overview
Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, born a Creole on the island of Martinique in the French West Indies, became one of the best known and most envied women who ever lived. Sent to France to make an advantageous marriage to a young aristocrat, her naivete and lack of education left her ill prepared to deal with the sophisticated - if decadent - world of pre-Revolutionary Paris. Treated cruelly by her shallow young husband, her life had become a nightmare during the Terror, in which she was imprisoned and almost lost her life. It was during this period that she honed the skills of manipulation and seduction that would lead her from the dungeons of the terror into the beds of the post-Revolutionary powerbrokers, including the Corsican corporal who would conquer Europe.
As the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, conqueror of Europe and the wonder of his age, Josephine was assumed to be a worthy consort for her astounding husband, a woman as beautiful, wise and altogether remarkable as he was charismatic, brilliant, and invincible in battle. When in 1804 she knelt before Napoleon in Notre Dame and he placed the imperial crown on her head, making her Empress of France, her extraordinary destiny seemed to be fulfilled. The unknown woman from Martinique became the highest ranking woman in the land, as far above the average Frenchwoman as Napoleon himself was above the humblest soldier in his armies.
Yet the truth behind the glorious symbolism in Notre Dame was much darker. For the eight-year marriage between Josephine and Napoleon had long been corroded by infidelity and abuse, and for years Josephine had dreaded that her husband would divorce her. Far from the love match previous biographers have described, Erickson's Napoleon and Josephine were the ultimate pragmatists, drawn together by political necessity while their emotions were engaged elsewhere.
Carolly Erickson, the critically acclaimed biographer of the Tudor monarchs, as well as of Marie Antoinette and Queen Victoria, using her trademark ability to penetrate and explain the psychological make-up of her subjects, paints a fascinating portrait of an immensely complex and ultimately tragic woman.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429904018 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2000 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 913 KB |
About the Author
A Ph.D. in medieval history from Columbia University led Carolly Erickson to six years as a college professor, then to a career as a full-time writer. She lives in Hawaii.
Distinguished historian Carolly Erickson is the author of Rival to the Queen, The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots, The First Elizabeth, The Hidden Life of Josephine, The Last Wife of Henry VIII, and many other prize-winning works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Tsarina’s Daughter won the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction. She lives in Hawaii.
Read an Excerpt
Josephine
A Life of the Empress
By Carolly Erickson
St. Martins Press
Copyright © 1998 Carolly EricksonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-0401-8
CHAPTER 1
Into the Wind-House
There was a stillness in the heavy, humid air and smoke from the cooking fires rose slowly straight upward into the cloudy sky a long way before drifting off sharply to the north. The trade winds had ceased. No comforting puff of air stirred the thick leaves of the breadfruit trees, and in the cane fields, where a hundred near-naked slaves bent to the work of harvest, slashing at the cane stalks with long sharp knives, the heat by mid-morning was like an oven.
It was the thirteenth of August, 1766, a month into the hivernage, the season of storms and rain. On the craggy, mountainous island of Martinique in the western Antilles, clouds were piling up and an eerie darkness was gathering. In the slave quarters there were whispers that a bad storm was coming, for the Carib chiefs had announced that the skies were ominous and everyone knew that on the night before, at sunset, a blood-red light had been glimpsed at the horizon in place of the usual emerald green — a portent of death.
"It is the ioüallou," the slaves told one another and their Creole masters repeated the warning in their own tongue. 'It is the ouracan."
Out in the wide bay of Fort-Royal, the clear turquoise water had turned opaque, and by noon the ocean was choppy with whitecaps and an angry surf crashed noisily on the beach. Ships riding at anchor at the harbor mouth began to dance crazily in the swell, and nearer the shore, fishermen hurried to bring their boats ashore, dragging them up far from the beach and tying them to the wide stalks of palm trees with thick ropes.
By early afternoon a leaden twilight had descended, and a harsh wind off the ocean had begun to whistle through the cane fields. Cows bellowed and pawed the earth restlessly, chickens deserted their coops to seek refuge amid the rocks on the mountainside. Seabirds flocked together and flew toward the center of the island, away from the coast, and the brackish streams were full of fish swimming up from the ocean, seeking protection from the churning waters.
Though the overseer had not yet given the order to stop work the field hands paused in their labors and sniffed the air. It reeked of sulphur. They looked up, and saw, threaded among the thick dark clouds, fine streaks of silver lightning. Then the first large drops of rain began to fall, spattering on the red earth with a sound so loud it made talk impossible.
In the plantation of Trois-Ilets on the lower slopes of Morne Ganthéaume, Joseph Tascher decided that it would be unwise to wait any longer. He had to get his family to safety. His wife Rose-Claire was in no condition to undergo hardship of any kind. For several weeks she had been in bed expecting to deliver her third child — a child Joseph fervently hoped would be a son. The black midwives were in attendance, prepared to deliver the child if the doctor from Fort-Royal was unable to arrive at the plantation in time, and both the baby's grandmothers, the aristocratic Françoise Tascher and the iron-willed Irishwoman Catherine Brown, who on her marriage had become Catherine des Sannois, had made the trip to Trois-Ilets in order to be in attendance when Joseph's heir was born.
Joseph ordered a cart brought from the stable and helped his anxious wife into it, along with his daughters Yeyette and Catherine, aged three and not quite two, who clutched their slave nursemaids in fear, and his mother and mother-in-law, and the six-year-old boy Alexandre who had been living with the family since his birth. Into the cart went a few belongings, the women's jewelry and the few heirlooms they had thought to snatch hurriedly on their way out. Joseph took one last look around, then ordered the driver to go as quickly as possible to the wind-house.
Every plantation in Martinique had a wind-house, an all but impregnable structure with stone walls six feet thick and no windows, built deep into the hillside where no storm, no matter how fierce, could penetrate. Massive wooden doors, made from hardwood cut in the rain forest higher up on the slopes, opened into a dark, cavernous room that could hold several dozen people and supplies of food and water. In this refuge, secure behind the stout wooden doors, they would wait out the storm.
In the high watchtower at the edge of the cane fields, the bell began to ring, sounding the alarm. Work ceased, and the field hands rushed at once to their huts, gathered their children and a few provisions, and made their way to the sugar mill. The other buildings on the plantation were dilapidated and neglected, but the stone-walled sugar mill, built several generations earlier in more prosperous times, was still sturdy. It would stand up to the ioüallou.
More cartloads were sent to the wind-house, full of candles and lanterns, baskets of salted fish and cassavas and loaves made from manioc flour, large red earthenware vessels full of fresh water and molasses beer. The midwives brought their knives and cords and charms made of dried palm leaves, blessed by the healers, to ward off zombies.
By early evening the plantation was in total darkness, and the rain was falling in sheets, swelling the streams and flooding the fields. Hour by hour the wind grew in force and violence, churning the bay into high waves and surging breakers. In the shelter where the Tascher family and their house slaves were waiting out the storm, the thick wooden doors began to bulge outward and tug against the ropes that restrained them. Joseph and the other men took turns pulling on the ropes with all their force, fighting the terrible outward sucking of the wind.
So loud was its roaring that they could barely distinguish the sounds of destruction outside — the crashing of the huge trees as they fell to earth, the flying apart of the two-story plantation house, the mowing down of the cane fields and plantation gardens. The wind had become a great scythe, sweeping across the land, cutting down everything in its path, while rain lashed at the devastated earth and washed the debris into the swollen rivers.
Joseph, nearly at the end of his strength, listened to the thunderous noise of the wind and despaired. Everything he owned was being carried off. and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He had no money, he was deeply in debt and his health had been poor ever since the previous year when he had nearly died of a malignant fever. He was only thirty-six, but felt much older, worn down by the weight of his failure, and by the continuing nagging disappointment of his unhappy domestic life.
He had been struggling fitfully since his marriage five years earlier to make the plantation a success. Trois-Ilets, its buildings and its hundred and fifty African slaves had been a wedding present from Rose-Claire's parents; Joseph had an obligation to make it profitable. But well-intentioned though he was, he was ineffectual; he lacked the energy and capability to manage a large estate. Neither manly nor masterful, as his younger brother Robert was, Joseph could not seem to find the discipline or the skill to increase the plantation's output of sugar. He was reasonably intelligent, but pleasure-loving and easily distracted. He preferred spending time at Fort-Royal to meeting with his overseer Blacque or listening to the complaints of his unhappy wife, whose task it was, in his absence, to run the plantation.
Life was so much easier at Fort-Royal, the chief town of the island and the center of its social life. There he could sleep until noon, meet with his friends in the evenings to dine and play cards, visit his beautiful mulatto mistresses and pretend that he was a man of substance and breeding instead of a near-bankrupt and the son of a disreputable father. In recent years he had been spending less and less time at Trois-Ilets, letting his responsibilities go. Times were hard, what with the British blockade making it all but impossible to sell what sugar the estate produced; it hardly seemed worthwhile to keep trying. And the longer Joseph stayed away, the more run down Trois-Ilets became, the buildings falling into disrepair, the fields only partially cultivated, the slaves dwindling in numbers as their absent master failed to provide for them.
Now, of course, none of that mattered. The hurricane was sweeping everything away. Everything but his family, that is. He still had his daughters, and the son he and his wife were expecting. At least the family name would be carried on, even if there was only a ruined plantation and a thick sheaf of debts to go with it.
There was a boy attached to the family already, of course. Little Alexandre, who had lived with them for all of his six years, was a sort of surrogate son. A tall, dark-haired, good- looking child, well-spoken and good at his lessons, Alexandre had been born in Martinique and given to the Tascher family to raise — a temporary arrangement, it was understood, but one that did not seem likely to end soon. Alexandre was the son of François de Beauharnais, former governor of the Windward Isles, who now lived in Paris with his married mistress, Joseph's sister Edmee. Alexandre's mother, who was in poor health, also lived in France but apart from her husband, and apparently did not mind living apart from her son as well. So little Alexandre continued to be raised as a Creole, along with the Tascher children Yeyette and Catherine, spending time with grandmother Tascher and grandmother de Sannois as well as at Trois-Ilets, never having known his parents. In every respect but that of blood kinship, he was one of the family.
Throughout the night the storm continued, save for an hour of unnatural calm — the eye of the hurricane — when the wind dropped suddenly and all was still. For that brief interval the victims of the storm, crowded together in the wind-house, tried in vain to rest. But the respite was brief. Soon the assaulting gusts returned, and so greatly did their force build that for a time it seemed as if the mountains themselves would be shaken into the ocean. Once again the doors of the wind-house bulged outward, and the weary occupants, exhausted from their long vigil, said their prayers and clutched each other in fear.
Not until dawn did the ceaseless roaring and shrieking of the wind begin to die down, and it was mid-morning before Joseph Tascher cautiously opened the thick wooden doors and peered out at the blasted landscape.
A pale sun shone down on a sea of mud that had been the plantation of Trois-Ilets.
No trees were left standing. The two-story plantation house, with its wide veranda and its straggle of outbuildings, had vanished, along with the rose garden and the wide courtyard with its fine avenue of tamarisks. The bell tower had gone, the rows of slave huts had been demolished, and in the fields stretching away from where the plantation house had been, no stalk of cane was left upright.
The quiet was unnerving. There were no birds to sing, no frogs to croak, none of the everyday animal and human sounds that were the familiar backdrop to plantation life. Even the hum of insects had been stilled, for the clouds of mosquitoes, which had been unable to escape the cruel wind, had perished in their millions.
One building still stood. The refinery appeared to be untouched by the storm, and when Joseph and his family left the wind-house and made their way to it, they found within its spacious interior, amid the machinery and rows of barrels and freshly cut cane stalks, most of the field hands and their families.
Over the following weeks the slow, dispiriting work of restoration began. Debris was sorted and cleared away, fallen trees were chopped into timber to build new sheds and huts and carts and a new bell tower. Dead cattle were buried, along with a number of slaves, for as always happened following a severe storm, there was an outbreak of fever and many did not survive it.
Gradually news reached Trois-Ilets from other plantations, and from Joseph's brother Robert in Fort-Royal. The devastation had been island wide. Fort-Royal itself had been badly damaged, and many smaller settlements had all but disappeared. Out in the bay, hundreds of ships had sunk, with a very high loss of life. It had been, everyone agreed, the worst storm anyone could remember.
In the refinery, Rose-Claire Tascher lay on a makeshift bed, watched over by her mother and mother-in-law and the black mid-wives. She was past her time.
She had no privacy. The entire population of the plantation slept in the same large but crowded room, the master and his children and other relatives, the slaves, many of whom lay stricken with fever, the overseer and the few visitors who arrived with supplies and messages from outside.
On the oppressively hot night of September 2, three weeks after the storm struck the island, Rose-Claire went into labor. She was prayed over, massaged, protected with amulets and given rum to drink when the pains became too great to be endured. Finally, on the following day, her baby was born. Everyone in the community, caught up in the drama, listened for the cries of the newborn infant, and smiled when they heard its first thin wails. The birth was an omen of better times to come, they told one another. The hurricane had brought death, yet despite its ravages, new life was coming into the world.
But Joseph, haggard and careworn, turned his face away from his child and tried to hide his tears of disappointment. He had another daughter.
CHAPTER 2The Scent of Sugar
Five years after the hurricane destroyed the Trois-Ilets plantation, the Tascher family was still living in the refinery. Some of the land had been cleared and replanted, and the slaves had built themselves new huts from scrap lumber and bits of debris. But the old, gracious plantation house was not rebuilt, because Joseph Tascher did not have the money to rebuild it, and what with the tremendous losses he suffered in the storm, and his ever increasing debts and continuing poor health, the state of his finances worsened year by year.
Rose-Claire, who greatly disliked making her home amid the clanking of machinery and the crunching of cane stalks, resented her husband's financial failure and resented as well his constant stays in Fort-Royal. She had hoped that if they had a son Joseph would spend more time at Trois-Ilets, but no son arrived, and she was losing hope of having any more children.
Fortunately the three girls, eight-year-old Yeyette, six-year-old Catherine and five-year-old Manette, had all survived the perils of infancy. Of the three, Yeyette was especially promising, a sturdy, smiling little girl with wide dark eyes and a musical voice whose sweet nature and natural kindness were very appealing. Pleasing as she was, however, it did not appear that Yeyette would be a beauty, and at least one of the three girls would have to be beautiful so that she could marry well and salvage the family fortunes.
Marrying well was. after all, how the Taschers had managed to stave off ruin for at least the past two generations. Gaspard Tascher, Joseph's father, had been an impoverished nobleman who emigrated to Martinique from France four decades earlier and had married an heiress who brought him an estate in the nearby island of Santo Domingo as well as lands in Martinique. Joseph's own marriage had brought him wealth in property. Now his daughters would have to be groomed to find rich husbands.
Joseph's attractive blonde sister Edmee, who had attached herself to no less than a marquis, was the family expert in securing matrimonial advantages, though her own situation was complex and not quite respectable.
At nineteen, Edmee had become the mistress of the forty-two-year-old François de Beauharnais, a man of modest wealth and considerable rank. Such liaisons were common, but socially acceptable only if both the lovers were married; consequently Beauharnais supplied Edmee with a husband, Alexis Renaudin, a young officer with a shadow over his past and an inclination to violence. Renaudin understood that in marrying Edmee he was doing a favor for a senior officer, and that she was to be his wife in name only; he could be counted on not to object to her relationship with Beauharnais.
Edmée had secured for herself most of the advantages of marriage to the marquis, and after his wife died, she became, in fact if not in law, stepmother to Beauharnais's son Alexandre, the boy who had been born and raised in Martinique, then sent to France at the age of nine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Josephine by Carolly Erickson. Copyright © 1998 Carolly Erickson. Excerpted by permission of St. Martins Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1 Into the Wind-House,2 The Scent of Sugar,
3 A Troubled Passage,
4 Cankered Bond,
5 "The Vilest of Creatures",
6 "The Little American",
7 Liberation,
8 Transformation,
9 A Turn into Madness,
10 Citizeness Beauharnais,
11 The Days of the Red Mass,
12 A New Life,
13 "She Offered Her Entire Soul in Her Eyes",
14 "The Lubricious Creole",
15 Italian Sojourn,
16 "I Don't Like the Honors of This Country, and I Am Often Bored",
17 "Our Family Shall Want for Nothing",
18 "The Most Unfortunate of Women",
19 "All I Do Is Cry",
20 A Fissured Marriage,
21 A Ride Through the Forest,
22 "Luxury Had Grown Abundantly",
23 "A Violent and Murderous Ambition",
24 "May the Emperor Live Forever!",
25 "Josephine Empress of the French",
26 "I Will Behave Like the Victim I Am",
27 "They Are Inveterate Against Me",
28 "As Though a Deadly Poison Were Spreading Through My Veins",
29 "The Elder Sister of the Graces",
30 "Alone, Abandoned, and in the Midst of Strangers",
31 "A Profound Solitude Would Please Me Most",
32 Recessional,
33 "I Have Never in My Life Lacked Courage",
34 Restoration,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,
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