Empress Josephine: A Private Life

1814, Malmaison

The house is too full of relics and too empty of consequence. Letters are sorted into little piles before they reach me, as though grief and exile can be made orderly by arrangement. The rooms smell of damp garden air, wax, paper, and those medicines that promise rest and deliver only a softer kind of discomfort. My chest has grown unreliable in the cold. The hands tremble if I write too long. Visitors come with tenderness that is never quite free of curiosity, and I know at once when they are looking at me and when they are looking at the place history has decided to assign me. France has changed masters again. Europe busies itself over maps and dynasties while my own life is being packed away into souvenirs, correspondence, recollections suitable for salons. They will make me graceful, decorative, forgiving. Perhaps they already have. If I do not intervene now, I shall survive in memory as something arranged for effect rather than something that endured the room itself.