Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution

Epilogue

E

NGLAND

A

UGUST

11, 1802

AS THE SHIP SAILS INTO PORT, JOSEPH RUSHES TO THE RAILS, begging to be picked up so he can see the shore. At four years old, my son wants to run, and touch, and explore. Everything is an endless adventure for him. I lift him onto my hip and ask what he can see on the docks.

“Happy people,” he says.

I smile. Yes. There is one man, in particular, who will be happy to see us. I search the crowd for his face, and he is standing beside my brother and his wife. After ten years, it is as if nothing has changed. He wears his hair loose around his shoulders, and there are still smile lines around his eyes. From the cut of his coat, I can see that he is doing well for himself. Then, for a moment, I panic.

What if he is disappointed in what he sees? I am not a young woman anymore. In the eight years since Robespierre’s fall, I have been married and given my husband two sons: Joseph, and Francis, who is two. They have not been easy years. After the end of the Terror, whatever money I earned, François gambled or drank away. We have been poor, then wealthy, then poor again, and now my fortune has changed with rise of a Corsican general named Napoléon Bonaparte. He has taken for his wife a young woman I once knew as Rose de Beauharnais, renaming her Joséphine and promising to someday crown her Empress over all of France. Together they have rebuilt what was once torn down, and though I did not think I would live to see peace between England and France, Napoléon has signed a treaty. It has allowed me passage to the man I have yearned after now for ten years.

Much has been given up for this voyage. I have left my mother behind with my second son, since she is too old to travel and Francis is too young. It is my hope that François will take care of them. The models I did not bring on this ship, I left with him. But my guess is that it will be Maman and Isabel who will run the Salon de Cire in my absence. Under the constant threat of death, François was one man, but in the aftermath of war, he became another. Still, he has given me two beautiful gifts, and for that I will always be thankful. I look at my son and ask if he has ever seen such tall, white cliffs.

As the ship is being secured at the dock, I catch my reflection in a small window. I would like to believe that I am not much different than the thirty-one-year-old woman Henri left in Paris. On the inside, however, a great deal has changed. I take Joseph’s hand, and we step together onto the plank. At the bottom, just as he promised he would be, Henri is waiting.

Whatever happens for me here in England, I shall not betray my heart again.