The Emperor remained standing for a while on the last step. He cast a lingering glance up at the sky, as if searching among the countless stars for his own. His white breeches shone with a ghastly luminescence. His black hat was reminiscent of a little cloud, the only one visible amid the clear sky. He stood still, as in one of his many portraits, alone in the vast, calm summer’s night, although the gentlemen of his retinue were following closely behind him on the steps. He was alone and lonely, and he was searching for his star.
He turned, gestured to his adjutant, and spoke a few words. Then he descended the final step. He walked quickly the few paces to his carriage. The servants cried: “Long live the Emperor!” They waved to him with their hands, their empty hands. The cry surprised him. He turned even as he was about to enter the coach. He took a step forward. The women servants fell to their knees. The men followed hesitantly. This was their routine whenever the King departed! thought the Emperor. They must have kneeled like this when he fled from me.
“Stand up,” he ordered, and they all rose. He felt compelled to say something more, to obey the theatrical law that commanded just as he commanded his army. What had he to say to lackeys, servants, and slaves? “Long live Freedom!” he cried. And they all answered: “Long live the Emperor! Victory! Victory!”
He turned away quickly. He got inside the carriage with haste, and the carriage door closed with an unusually loud shudder. The torch flickered at the coachman’s side. A soft, practically caressing crack of the whip, and they were racing, flying away from the park, sending a few bluish sparks from under the horses’ hooves.
Another carriage rolled up. The Emperor’s attendants climbed in. It was all done quickly and with a cool precision.
Once they were all inside, but before the carriage set off on its way, the lackey turned his torch upside down and practically bored the flame into the cold, damp night ground. Then he stamped his foot upon the last smoldering remains of the torch. To all who saw him, it seemed he had extinguished an entirely different flame.
Among the servant women in the park was also the maid-servant Angelina Pietri.
Book Two. The Life of Angelina Pietri
I
At that time Angelina Pietri was living among the anonymous lower servants of the Imperial court. She came from a respected and honored Corsican family. Angelina’s widowed father had been a poor fisherman and had died when she was just fifteen years old. Many young people, both boys and girls, were leaving Corsica in those days; they were going to France, where the greatest of all Corsicans ruled — the Emperor Napoleon.
In Paris lived an aunt of Angelina’s, Véronique Casimir. The First Laundress at the Imperial court, she was childless, kindhearted, and a mistress of the art of fortune-telling with cards. Tales were told back in Ajaccio that she prophesied the outcome of battles for the great Emperor himself.
A friend of her father’s, old Benito, brought Angelina to Marseilles in his little sailing vessel. He paid for her trip to Paris and escorted the girl to the mail coach. Gravely and sadly, he took leave of her; and, speaking so loudly that all the other passengers could hear, he said: “You will pass along sincere greetings from old Benito Croce. I knew his late father well. If he asks you why I haven’t come to Paris myself, tell him I’m too old. Were I younger, I would have gone long ago to join his fight and conquer the world. My son has enlisted in his army in my stead. They surely know each other; he is serving with the Twenty-Sixth — a magnificent regiment! All right, then. Go with God and don’t forget to relay everything I’ve told you.”
This was the personal message that old Croce had for the Emperor.
Angelina was quite unable to deliver this message. The Emperor was unapproachable. But she dreamed of him. His portrait hung in all the rooms, the same portrait she had seen in rooms all across Corsica. It depicted the Emperor after a victorious battle, seated on a snow-white steed while reviewing the decimated ranks. His horse shimmered and his red eyes gleamed. He held his right hand outstretched, pointing somewhere into the inscrutable distance. He looked magnificent: both near and remote, kindly and at the same time terrible.
Angelina was under the command of Véronique Casimir. She thus belonged to the section of thirty-six male and female servants charged with washing the laundry of the ladies and gentlemen of the court and keeping the bathrooms in order.
She washed the sky-blue, pink, and white silk blouses, the cambric handkerchiefs, the collars and cuffs, the delicate linen of the beds in which the ladies and gentlemen slept, and the costly stockings in which they walked. Early mornings, in the gray steam of the laundry room amid tubs and kettles, she scrubbed and wrung out the clothes, forcefully beat the damp, rolled-up bundles with a wooden stave, unrolled them, and draped them over the countless ropes that were strung up densely yet in an orderly fashion across the room, forming a peculiar grid, a second and more delicate ceiling of ropes.
In the afternoon dried masses of wrinkled garments lay on the wide table, awaiting their resurrection. Then, just as she had learned to do at home, Angelina would take a mouthful of water and spray it from her bulging cheeks onto the silk, linen, and cambric. After this, she used her strong arms to brandish the smoothing-iron, hot coals glowing from within. To test its heat, she placed a moistened finger on the iron’s surface and listened as it sizzled. She began to press — the coarse linen first, then the delicate silk, next the cambric, and lastly the pleated collars and cuffs. And it seemed to her that the more industriously she worked, the closer she was to the ladies and gentlemen of the court and to the Emperor himself. This very shirt that she was ironing might be worn tomorrow by the Emperor. She rubbed his dazzling white breeches with a special type of greasy, insoluble chalk and through her zealous efforts they shimmered like freshly fallen snow.
There were days when Véronique Casimir appeared suddenly, at an unusual hour and wearing an unusual outfit. When this happened, the young laundresses would fall abruptly silent in the midst of a song, for they knew that Véronique had just read the cards for someone of prominence. She wore her heavy black silk gown and around her neck a present from the Empress Josephine, a massive golden chain bearing a vivid green jade amulet. She would stand there, in the steam of the washroom, before her white-clad young girls — portly, ponderous, and solemn, a true dark priestess of the great Emperor. What ominous events might she have just been prophesying? The fate of what corner of the world had she just foretold?
Twice a week Angelina was obliged to attend to the palace bathrooms. Her first stop was the Emperor’s bathroom. She could see the fresh marks of his moist feet upon the floor. She could detect the scent of his body in the damp towels, and she would stay for a long time in that spot, bewildered and forgetful of her task. But sometimes she would gather the nerve to clutch a towel against her heart, pressing a fleeting, stolen kiss upon the linen and blushing even though she was all alone. She adored even the slightest evidence of the Emperor’s presence. She was anxious that she might accidentally meet the Emperor. However, when she left the bathroom, she felt bitter disappointment within her heart, as though he himself had broken a promise to meet her there. She was devastated yet at the same time euphoric.