Desiree by Annemarie Selinko
Count Rosen took the candle out of my hand, as it trembled badly. With painful difficulty I said: ‘Don’t pay any attention to that man. We must search for Pierre.’
We felt our way up a wide flight of stairs and came to a corridor with many doors. The doors were not properly shut, and groaning and whimpering could be heard from inside.
Quickly I pushed the first door open, and an indescribable odour of blood, sweat and excrement hit me in the face. I summoned all my strength.
The whimpering came from quite close by, close by my feet in fact. I took Rosen’s candle and held it high to see. Both sides of the room were occupied by rows of beds, and down the centre of the room straw palliasses covered the floor. The other end of the room seemed a long way away. There I could see a candle on a table and a red sanctuary light. A nun was seated at the table.
‘Sister!’
But my voice didn’t carry far enough through the moaning of the wounded men to reach her. Cautiously I took a few paces forward and shouted again: ‘Sister!’
At last she heard me, took the candle and came. I saw a thin, expressionless face under a big white bonnet.
‘Sister, I am looking for a wounded man by the name of Pierre Dubois.’
‘There are too many here,’ she said in a low voice, indifferently, ‘we do not know their names.’
‘But I have permission to look for Pierre Dubois. How am I to find him?’ I couldn’t help sobbing as I said it.
‘I do not know,’ the nun answered politely. ‘If you have permission to look for him, then you must look for him. Go from bed to bed, perhaps you will find him.’ She turned round and went to her table.
For a moment the stench almost overwhelmed me. But I pulled myself together. ‘Let’s go along the beds,’ I said to the Count.
Thus we went along from bed to bed, from palliasse to palliasse, saw men dying, men dead, men asking for water, men asking for their wives, men stammering requests to which I had no time to listen. But we didn’t find Pierre.
It was the same in the next ward, with the only difference that here the nun was young and gentle and full of pity. She thought I was looking for my husband, but I shook my head silently and continued my fruitless search.
When we had left the next ward Rosen suddenly couldn’t go on. He leant against the wall, and when I raised the candle to look at him I noticed beads of perspiration on his forehead. He turned away quickly, staggered a few paces and was sick. I felt sorry for him, but could do nothing but wait till he felt better.
In the distance I saw a red votive candle under a statue of the Madonna. I went up to it. It was a very naïve statue of the Mother of Our Lord in a blue and white robe, with healthy red cheeks, sad eyes and a laughing pink baby in her arms. I put my candle down on the floor, and for the first time in many years I clasped my hands in prayer, here under the flickering light with misery seeping out of all the doors around me.
I heard steps behind me and took up the candle.
‘I apologise, Your Highness,’ said my young Swede, ashamed.
Before we went into the next ward I told him he had better stay outside.
He hesitated, then said: ‘I should like to see this through to the end with you, Highness.’
‘You shall, Count, you shall!’ I answered, and went in, leaving him outside.
At the end of the ward sat an old nun reading in a small black book. She looked up at me without showing any surprise. ‘I am looking for a certain Pierre Dubois,’ I said, and could hear the hopelessness in my voice.
‘Dubois? I think we have two of that name.’
She took me by the hand and led me towards a palliasse in the middle of the room. I knelt down and by the light of the candle saw an emaciated face surrounded by untidy strands of white hair. It wasn’t Pierre’s face. Then the nun took me to the last bed on the left wall.
Yes, it was Pierre. His dark, wide-open eyes stared at me indifferently. The lips were swollen and had blood on them.
‘Good evening, Pierre!’ I said.
He kept on staring.
‘Pierre, don’t you recognise me?’
‘Of course,’ he murmured, ‘Madame la Maréchale.’
I bent over him. ‘I’ve come to take you home, Pierre, to your mother, now.’
His face remained without expression.
‘Pierre, aren’t you glad?’
Still no answer.
Utterly at a loss, I turned to the nun. ‘This is the man I am looking for. I should like to take him home to his mother. I have a carriage downstairs. Have you got anybody here to help me?’
‘The porters have gone home, Madame. You must wait till to-morrow.’
But I didn’t want Pierre to stay here a minute longer. ‘Is he very seriously wounded? My adju— a gentlemen is waiting outside, and he and I could support him, if Pierre could walk down the stairs and—’
The sister seized my hand and lifted it so that the light fell full on the blanket. Where Pierre’s legs ought to have been the blanket was flat, quite flat.
My breath left me. At last I managed to say with difficulty: ‘I have a coachman downstairs who can give me a hand. I shall be back in a minute, sister.’
I told Count Rosen to fetch the coachman to carry Pierre to the carriage. ‘Take my candle and bring all the blankets we have with us,’ I added.
I waited, and thought of Pierre who had lost his legs and would never to able to walk again. Yes, this was the Hötel Dieu, Our Lord’s Hostel where one person learnt to pray and another to be sick, where one began to understand that the whole world was one big Hötel Dieu.
They came, Rosen and the coachman Johansson.
‘Please help us, sister, to wrap him up in the blankets. Johansson will carry him downstairs.’
The sister pulled Pierre up by the shoulders. He couldn’t resist, but his eyes sparkled with hatred. ‘Leave me alone, Madame, leave me—’ he shouted.
The nun pulled back the bed cover and I shut my eyes. When I opened them Pierre Dubois lay before me like a well-tied-up parcel.
Somebody tugged at my coat. I turned and saw the man in the next bed trying to sit up. But he fell helplessly. I bent down to him.
‘Madame la Maréchale he called you, didn’t he? Which Marshal?’ the man asked.
‘Bernadotte.’
He motioned me to go nearer to him. A bewildered smile distorted his mouth, his feverish lips nearly touched my ear. ‘I thought so,’ he whispered, fighting for breath, ‘give your husband … in his castle in Stockholm … the regards of one of his men … who crossed the Alps with him … Tell him, if we had known … Tell him, he would never have got over the Alps … alive … if we had known …’ Small bubbles of blood and saliva trembled on his lips as he continued with increasing difficulty: ‘If we had known … that he … would let us die in Russia … My regards … to him, Madame … from … an old comrade.’
A protective hand, that of the nun, took my arm. ‘His will be done on earth and in Heaven. Let us go, Madame.’
Johansson lifted the parcel which had once been Pierre, a young man who went to war with a rose-bud in his rifle, and carried it through the door. Count Rosen took the candle and showed the way. But I clung to the old woman and she led me down the stairs. ‘But you are no longer the wife of Marshal Bernadotte,’ she said unexpectedly, ‘but the Crown Princess of Sweden, are you not?’
I lost control of myself and sobbed loudly.
‘Go with God, my child, and strive for peace with your people.’
She let go my arm. The one-armed doorkeeper opened the gate in silence. When I turned round to kiss the old nun’s hand she had disappeared into the dark.
Count Rosen sat on the back seat. The parcel that had been Pierre Dubois lay by my side. I felt over the blankets for his hand. When I found it it was cold and limp.
And that was how I brought Marie’s son back to her.
Paris. The beginning of April 1813
‘In half an hour I shall see h
Last night a courier brought Jean-Baptiste’s answer to Napoleon. It was sealed. But Count Brahe had sent a copy of it for my information and added that the text of this letter from the Swedish Crown Prince to Napoleon had been transmitted to all papers for publication.
I got up and read my copy for the last time:
‘The sufferings of the Continent cry out for peace, and Your Majesty cannot reject this demand without multiplying ten-fold the sum total of crimes you have committed up till now. What did France receive as compensation for its gigantic sacrifices? Nothing but military glory, superficial splendour and deep misery within her own frontiers …’
And this letter I was to take to Napoleon! Things like that could happen only to me. I grew hot with fear as I read on:
‘I was born in that beautiful France over which you reign, and her honour and well-bang can never be a matter of indifference to me. But without ever ceasing to pray for its happiness I shall always defend with all the means at my disposal the rights of the nation which called me and the honour of the monarch who accepted me to be his son. In the fight between tyranny and freedom I shall say to the Swedes: I shall fight with you and for you, and all peoples who love their freedom will bless our arms.
As far as my personal ambition goes, let me say this: I am ambitious, very ambitious, but only in order to serve the interests of mankind and to gain and guarantee the independence of the Scandinavian peninsula.’
The letter addressed to Napoleon, France and the world ended on a personal note:
‘Independent of any decision you may come to, Sire, whether peace or war, I shall always cherish for Your Majesty the devotion of an old comrade of many wars.’
I put the copy back on the bedside table and went out. We were to be at the Tuileries at five o’clock. Within the next few days the Emperor would take the field again with his new armies, to face the advancing Russians and the Prussians who had joined them.
Count Rosen was wearing the full-dress uniform of the Swedish dragoons and the adjutant’s sash.
‘You accompany me on many difficult missions, Count,’ I said as we passed over the Pont Royal. Since that night in the Hötel Dieu a strange kind of affinity connected us, probably because I had been present when he was sick. These things bring people together more than one thinks.
We drove in an open carriage through the sweet-smelling dusk of an early spring day. ‘A pity,’ I thought, ‘to have to go for an interview with the Emperor of the French instead of going for a sweet and secret rendezvous …’
We were shown in at once to the Emperor’s big study. Caulaincourt and Meneval were present as well as Count Talleyrand, who was leaning against the window.
Napoleon, in the green uniform of the Chasseurs, his arms folded over his chest, refused to meet us half-way but waited for us standing behind his desk at the far end of the room, a supercilious smile on his face. I bowed and handed him the letter. He broke open the seal, read it without a muscle in his face moving and then handed it to Meneval. ‘Have a copy made for the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and put the original with my private papers,’ he ordered. Turning to me he said: ‘You have dressed up nicely, Your Highness. Purple suits you. By the way, you are wearing a strange hat. Are tall hats the latest fashion?’
This sneering was worse than the violent eruption I had anticipated. I said nothing.
Napoleon turned to Talleyrand: ‘You know something about beautiful women’s fashions, don’t you, Excellency? How do you like the new hat of the Crown Princess of Sweden?’
Talleyrand kept his eyes half shut. He seemed to be infinitely bored. Napoleon turned to me. ‘Did you dress up for my sake, Highness?’
‘Yes, Sire.’
‘And adorned yourself with violets’ – his tone became jeering – ‘to bring me this scribble by the former Marshal Bernadotte? Violets, Madame, flower in quiet places and their scent is sweet. But this treason, at which all Russian and English papers exult, stinks to high Heaven!’
I bowed. ‘I ask to be allowed to leave, Sire.’
‘You are not only allowed to leave, Madame,’ he yelled, ‘I shall force you to leave. Or did you think that you could come and go here at court when Bernadotte marches into battle against me? He is going to train his guns on the regiments which he himself commanded in innumerable battles, and you, Madame, dare to appear here adorned with violets!’
‘Sire, that night when you returned from Russia you urged me to write to my husband and bring you his answer. I read a copy of his letter, and I realise that I am seeing you for the last time, Sire. I put on the violets because they suit me. Perhaps they’ll induce you to remember me more agreeably. May I now say good-bye to you, for the last time?’
Silence fell on us, a dreadful awkward silence. Meneval and Caulaincourt stared at the Emperor in amazement, and Talleyrand, interested, opened his eyes, because Napoleon quite unexpectedly became embarrassed and looked restlessly round the room. At last he said in a totally different voice: ‘Please wait here, gentlemen, I should like to have a few words with Her Royal Highness in private.’ He pointed to a door in the wall: ‘Please follow me, Your Highness. Meneval, offer the gentlemen a glass of brandy.’
I entered the room where years ago I had pleaded for the life of the Due d’Enghien. Nothing much had changed here, the same small tables, the same piles of documents and files. On the carpet in front of the fireplace I saw a number of small wooden blocks, in different colours, with prongs sticking out of them.
Involuntarily I picked up a red one. ‘What are these? Toys of the King of Rome?’
‘Yes – and no. I use these blocks to plan out my campaign. Each block represents an army corps, and the prongs mean the number of divisions of that particular corps. The red one you have picked up is the Third Corps of Marshal Ney. It has five prongs. So Ney’s corps has five divisions. The blue one is the Corps Marmont with three divisions, and so on. If I put them up on the floor I can see the order of battle quite clearly on the map. I know the map by heart.’
‘But do you chew these blocks?’ I asked, and looked at the red one in surprise.
‘No, that is the little King of Rome. When he is brought in here he gets them out to play with and chews them too.’
I put the red block back on the floor. ‘You wanted to have a word with me, Sire? I am afraid I cannot discuss my husband with you.’
He made a deprecatory gesture. ‘Who wants to talk about Bernadotte? No, it was not that, Eugenie, it was only—’ He came close to me and stared into my face as if he wanted to commit to memory every feature of it. ‘No, when you said good-bye for the last time I thought—’ He turned away brusquely and went to the window. ‘We cannot say good-bye like that when we have known each other for so long, can we?’
I stood in front of the fireplace and with the tip of my foot played with the small wooden blocks representing armies. I gave no answer.
‘I said,’ came Napoleon’s voice from the window, ‘one cannot leave just like that.’
‘Why not, Sire?’
He turned back to me. ‘Why not? Eugenie, have you forgotten the days of Marseilles? The hedge? The field? Our talks on Goethe’s novel Werther? Our youth, Eugenie, our whole youth? You never realised why I came to you that night, after my return from Russia. I was cold, I was tired, I was lonely.’
‘When you dictated to me the letter to Jean-Baptiste you had quite forgotten that you knew me when I was still Eugenie Clary. Your visit was meant for the Crown Princess of Sweden, Sire.’ I felt sad. ‘Even when we see each other
He shook his head vigorously. ‘Of course I had pondered over the alliance with Bernadotte on the morning of that day. But when I came to Paris I only wanted to see you, you alone. And then, I don’t know how it all happened, I was so tired that night, as soon as we mentioned Bernadotte I forgot about Marseilles. Can’t you understand?’
It grew dark. Nobody came to light the candles. I could no longer see his face. What in the world did he want of me?
‘I brought together a new army of two hundred thousand men. By the way, did you know that Britain is paying Sweden one million pounds to equip Bernadotte’s troops?’
No, I didn’t know. But I made no reply to Napoleon.
‘Madame de Staël is with him in Stockholm. Did you know that, Madame?’
Of course I did. It doesn’t matter, why talk about it?
‘Bernadotte does not seem able to get hold of more pleasant company in Stockholm.’
I laughed. ‘Oh yes, Sire, he does. Mademoiselle George was in Stockholm a short time ago and enjoyed the benevolent patronage of His Royal Highness. Did you know that, Sire?’
‘My God, Georgina, sweet little Georgina!’
‘His Royal Highness will soon be united with his old friend Moreau. Moreau is returning to Europe and is going to fight under Jean-Baptiste. Did you know that, Sire?’
It was a good thing that darkness stood between us like a wall.
‘It is being said that the Tsar offered Bernadotte the French crown.’ Napoleon’s voice came slowly through the dark.
‘That sounds crazy,’ I thought, ‘but possible.’
‘Well, Madame? If Bernadotte ever as much as toyed with the idea it would be the blackest treason ever committed by a Frenchman.’
‘It would. Treason against his own ideals! May I go now, Sire?’
‘If ever you yourself feel unsafe in Paris, Madame, I mean if the mob should ever inconvenience you, you must take refuge at once with your sister Julie. Will you promise me that?’