possible, does it?
“You didn’t know?”
Augustus bent nearly double to try to get a view of her face. He could only be thankful that her tastes didn’t run to the sort of bonnets Jane favored, the sort with broad, deep brims that shadowed the face. The confection perched on Mme. Delagardie’s head left her entire face bare to scrutiny, exposing her every emotion for those who chose to see it.
“You truly didn’t know?”
Mme. Delagardie shook her head, setting her feathers and ribbons quivering. “I do read
“An emperor and an empress,” said Augustus. “And a whole imperial court to go with them.”
As lady-in-waiting to an empress, Mme. Delagardie would be the object of admiration and adulation; sycophants would cluster around her, basking in the reflection of her reflected glory, using her as a conduit to the imperial ear. Knowing Bonaparte, he would probably do his best to arrange a marriage for her, pairing her off with one of the more successful of his generals or one of his captive European princelings.
Pauline Bonaparte had become Princess Borghese. What might the former Emma Morris become?
She ought to have been delighted.
Mme. Delagardie turned in a slow circle, her gown whispering around her ankles, her eyes drifting over statues and bits of columns. Imagining her glorious future? Planning her gown for the coronation? There would be a coronation, Augustus had no doubt of it. Bonaparte didn’t miss a trick. If Charlemagne had one, so would he.
Mme. Delagardie sounded very far away when she spoke, the sound of her voice distorted by the vast marble walls of the former palace of kings. “It sounds so antique, not something for the modern age at all.”
“That is part of the idea,” said Augustus. “A return to the grandeur of Rome, with Bonaparte as our Caesar.”
Mme. Delagardie’s skirts tangled around her ankles as she came to a halt, fixing her gaze on him. For a future lady-in-waiting, she didn’t appear to be particularly exultant. Her blue eyes looked like a cloud had come over them and there were twin lines between her brows. “Didn’t Caesar come to a bad end? I seem to recall knives being involved.”
“That was March, not May,” pointed out Augustus. “And his dynasty lived on long after him.”
He wasn’t sure whether she heard him. Lost in her own thoughts, Mme. Delagardie glanced away. “I thought he meant to refuse.”
“Refuse?” Augustus wasn’t sure he had heard quite right.
“If they offered,” she said. “I had thought he meant to refuse.”
In profile, the delicacy of her features was even more pronounced. She was too thin, Augustus thought, even for her narrow frame. From the side, the hollows beneath her cheekbones showed like gashes.
“Whatever gave you that idea?” asked Augustus, with genuine curiosity.
“It has been done before,” Mme. Delagardie said defensively. “Like General Washington. He might have been made a king if he liked, but he refused, out of principle.”
“General Washington is no Bonaparte,” said Augustus. And wasn’t that the understatement of the new century. General Washington hadn’t voted himself First Consul for life or set up the succession among his family members.
“Yes, yes, I know. Bonaparte still has all his own teeth.” Mme. Delagardie’s teeth, small and even, worried at her lower lip. “Do you remember that pamphlet—it must have been a few years ago—the one claiming that Bonaparte was the direct descendant of the man in the iron mask?”
Augustus nodded.
“Then you know what I mean,” she said earnestly. “I was there, at the Tuileries, when Bonaparte heard about it. He said it was laughable.”
It had been laughable, but not for the reasons Mme. Delagardie meant. Someone had gone to the trouble of making an argument that Louis XIV’s twin brother, the rightful king of France, had escaped from incarceration, made his way to Corsica, and begat the line that eventually produced Bonaparte—all, presumably, without removing the mask.
Personally, Augustus got a good chuckle out of the image of breakfasts in the kitchen of a Corsican farmhouse, with the chickens pecking at the legs of the table and the man in the mask reading the morning paper while little Bonapartes tumbled about in the dirt around him.
Mme. Delagardie clasped her hands together. “He might so easily have claimed to be a Bourbon and let them make him king, but he didn’t. He ordered the pamphlet suppressed. He said he had no interest in being made a king.” She looked searchingly at Augustus. “And that wasn’t so very long ago. A man’s philosophy doesn’t change that much in just three years.”
“King and emperor are two different things,” said Augustus gently.
It wouldn’t suit Bonaparte’s ambitions to be just another Bourbon monarch, an offshoot of a degenerate tree. No, he wanted to be all in all, self-made and self-sustaining.
“He fought for the Revolution. Why proclaim the rights of man one day and an empire the next? There must have been some mistake. Adele must have misunderstood.” Her show of bravado was belied by the anxious lines between her eyes as she added, “Don’t you think?”
Bizarrely, Augustus found himself wanting to be able to comfort her.
Comfort her? He had to be mad. She was on her way to becoming one of the most envied women in France. There was no reason to lose all grip on reality.
“Don’t you want to be a lady-in-waiting? There are those who would give their right arms for the position.”
Mme. Delagardie twisted her face into a wry expression. “I like my right arm. I’m accustomed to it. It’s quite useful.”
“Are you that set against the idea?”
It took her a moment to answer. She gave a small, hopeless shrug. “I’m not made for courts and palaces. I’m too much an American for that.” In a smaller voice, she added, “It feels wrong.”
“You’re already frequenting courts and palaces,” Augustus pointed out. It was a bit late to be having attacks of republican principle.
“Yes, but…” She looked hopelessly up at him. “It felt different when Bonaparte called himself First Consul. It made it easier to pretend.”
“Pretend what?” Augustus prompted.
She looked down at her gloved hands, worrying at the lump of a ring beneath the leather. When she spoke, it was so quietly that Augustus had to strain to hear her.
“That nothing had changed.”
“Pardon?” It wasn’t the most elegant question, but Augustus had no idea what she was getting at.
Mme. Delagardie’s eyes were still on her hands, but she was seeing something else entirely. “Hortense was the first girl I met at Madame Campan’s. We were friends almost from the first. She used to have nightmares, you know, about her mother being shut up in prison.”
“No,” said Augustus, since something needed to be said. “I didn’t know.”
“That was all before Bonaparte. Madame de Beauharnais had a little house in the Rue Chantereine, with tiny rooms up in the attic for Hortense and Eugene. I used to stay with Hortense in her room.” Mme. Delagardie shook her head. “It was like living in a theatrical set. There’d always be people coming and going and never enough chairs to seat them on. There was never any food in the larder, except right before a party. Madame Bonaparte would order in all sorts of absurd delicacies, but she’d always forget something, like the bread or the milk. We’d find ourselves with wine but not the glasses to serve it in, or chocolate but no milk to mix it with. Hortense and Eugene and I would be sent off to the neighbors, to beg or borrow whatever Madame de Beauharnais needed. It got to the point that when the neighbors saw me coming, they’d meet me at the door with an armload of crockery.”
She smiled at the memory, and Augustus found himself smiling with her, at the image of a small girl in a white gown staggering under the weight of plates and platters.
“It sounds…unique,” he said.
“It was lovely,” she said, in a voice that brooked no disagreement. “My family was millions of miles away and Madame de Beauharnais was all that was kind. Even after she married Bonaparte, we had such pleasant times. We
