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the bed, felt his hands part my legs, felt the warmth of his breath, his … Mon Dieu. I swallowed, took a sharp breath.
    Bonaparte was curiously unrushed. A voluptuous warmth came over me. I curled my fingers through his hair as waves of pleasure rose in my blood.
    After, I lay for a moment, catching my breath, drying my cheeks on the covering sheet. Bonaparte was sitting on his haunches, regarding me with an awed expression. Then he grinned. “Well, that’s the best one so far,” he said, swinging his feet onto the floor.
    “Come back here,” I said, grabbing his hand.
    9:00 P.M.
    A kiss and he is gone.
    I hear the crackling of the fire, my scullery maid singing tunelessly in the bath chamber, the heavy tread of my old manservant’s wooden shoes on the narrow stairs, carrying up buckets of hot water for my bath. My pug dog Fortuné sniffs in all the corners, looking for “the intruder.” I listen to the busy clicking of his little nails on the parquet floor.
    The sounds of normal life, I realize. But for the battered tin snuffbox forgotten on the window ledge, the dog-eared volume of Ossian’s Carthon on the mantel, one would not know that Bonaparte had ever been here. This man, who has come into my life like a whirlwind, has just as suddenly gone, leaving me breathless, dazed … and confused, I confess.
* Joephine’s first husband, Alexandre Beauharnais, the father of her two children—Hortense (twelve) and Eugène (fourteen)—was beheaded on July 23, 1794, at the height of the Terror, the violent phase of the French Revolution in which thousands of aristocrats were guillotined.
* Madame Campan had been lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Antoinette, who had been beheaded two-and-a-half years earlier during the Terror, when the monarchy had been abolished and a democratic Republic installed in its place.
* Josephine’s mother, a widow, lived on the family sugar plantation in the Caribbean island of Martinique (“Martinico”), where Josephine had been born and raised. A small percentage of the plantation’s earnings constituted Josephine’s main source of income—when she received it, that is, which was rarely. Formerly under French rule, the island was now controlled by England.
* The executive authority of the Republic was vested in a council of five directors—”five Majesties.” Director Paul Barras was considered the most powerful of the five, and hence the most politically powerful man in the French Republic.

In which I break the news to my family & friends
    March 17, 1796—Paris. A bright spring day.
    I’ve a new maid. She curtsied at the door, lifting the hem of her linen shift. Her long chestnut locks were pulled into a tight braid that hung down her back. She is young, not yet of an age to pin up her hair. “Louise Compoint, Madame,” she said, taking in the furnishings. “But I am called Lisette.”
    I slipped a finger through Fortuné’s collar and asked her to come forward. Her mother had been a maid-of-the-wardrobe, she informed me, her father unknown. She’d been “adopted” by the aristocratic family her mother worked for and educated in a convent. Now her mother was dead and the aristocrats had fled during the Revolution. “I can wick lanterns, Madame, as well as dress hair. I understand clear starch and my needlework is good. My mother taught me well.”
    “This is a small household,” I told her. “My lady’s maid must serve also as a parlour maid and even as a kitchen maid, should the need arise.”
    “Yes, Madame. I’ve churned butter and blackleaded grates. I can also let blood. My mistress was often ailing,” she explained, in answer to my startled look.
    She is only seventeen, but I liked her forthright spirit. She had a natural grace. “We are a Republican family, Lisette. I will treat you with respect; I expect the same in kind. I permit no followers, and if any man makes advances, I expect you to inform me. You are allowed a half-dayoff a week to do as you