Free The Second Empress by Michelle Moran Page B

is becoming frustrated. If only I could be an empty-headed girl content with new gowns. “I do not know these answers,” he replies curtly. “But the emperor has prepared extensively for this wedding, and no expense has been spared. There are new apartments ready for your stop in Compiègne—”
    “I’m to visit the same city where King Louis first greeted Marie-Antoinette?” No one has told me this, and now even Maria looks away.
    “I shall hope you are not superstitious as well as romantic,” he says dryly.
    I stare at him to see if he is joking, but he is my father’s foreign minister, a diplomat through and through. I spend the rest of the ride in silence, listening while he tells me about Napoleon’s daily regimen. He is up at six and has a cup of orange-flower water at seven. By eight, he has read through all his letters, and the valet has finished drawing his bath. By nine he is dressed and in his study, where no one is allowed to disturb him until noon.
    “And what does he do in there?” Maria asks.
    Metternich glances at my father. “The same thing your husband does, Your Majesty.”
    I laugh sharply, for I very much doubt this. My father has never locked himself in his rooms plotting the overthrow of the Western world. Nor has he journeyed to another continent to subdue its people and pillage its wonders.
    “He answers letters,” Metternich continues, ignoring my outburst, “and dictates instructions to his secretary, Méneval.”
    “What sort of instructions?” my father asks. I know he is intrigued by this man, in spite of himself; a commoner who at twenty was made lieutenant colonel and by thirty-six had crowned himself emperor of France.
    “If a new chair is needed for the Tuileries Palace, he is the one to choose its color. He wrote fifteen thousand letters from his tent in Poland—”
    “He was only there for six months!” my father exclaims.
    “Nothing escapes his notice. There are also eccentricities Your Highness may wish to note …”
    Maria meets my gaze. But Hapsburg women have faced far worse than this.
    “At his desk, the emperor keeps figurines,” he explains. “No one is to touch them. They are arranged in a very specific way. While he is working, or thinking in his study, his papers will be strewn all about the floor. They are garbage, but no one is allowed to clean them until night. And every book that is published in Italian or French is brought to him immediately.”
    “He reads them all?” my father asks.
    “Not exactly.” Metternich uncrosses his legs. “The nonfiction he keeps. The fiction he often burns.”
    “ What ?”
    Metternich shrugs, as if we all burned unwanted literature in our fireplaces.
    I sit back against the seat and close my eyes. I don’t want to hear any more.
    “But he likes to read,” Maria says hopefully. “His conversation—”
    “Is not about books,” Metternich warns. “He will not discuss literature with anyone but a Haitian servant named Paul.”
    My father is astounded. “He keeps a slave ?”
    “The man is the Princess Borghese’s chamberlain.”
    Metternich prattles on about the emperor’s schedule—his Spartan lunch at noon, his twenty-minute dinner at eleven—but my head is throbbing and I’m only half listening. “And there is one last thing,” Metternich adds, as the carriages roll through the gates of the palace. “It is the emperor’s younger sister, Queen Caroline of Naples, who is arriving to meet Your Highness in Braunau.”
    My father’s reaction is so violent that the coachmen stop the carriage to see that he is well. “Is this an insult?” he rages, and suddenly I am fully awake. “ That crown belonged to her grandmother,” he shouts, “not some Corsican commoner! Queen Caroline of Naples ?”
    I have never seen him so angry, but it was my grandmother, Queen Maria-Carolina, who once sat on that throne.
    “If this is intentional—”
    “Your Majesty,” Metternich interjects, and his voice is