The Last Great Dance on Earth by Sandra Gulland

supposed to mean?” Bonaparte demanded, his fists on his hips.
    “It means that Fouché should be arrested and shot, in my opinion.” Shot! Talleyrand’s words shocked me.
    “There has been enough bloodshed tonight, Minister Talleyrand,” I was relieved to hear Bonaparte say, passing off Talleyrand’s remark as a joke.
    Shortly after Talleyrand left, Fouché himself was announced. “Where have you been?” Bonaparte demanded.
    “At the site of the explosion, First Consul,” Fouché said, touching the brim of his battered hat. “Seven killed and over twenty injured.” Mon Dieu!
    “I suggest you give your drunken coachman a réward, First Consul,” Fouché continued, tugging at his stained linen cuffs. “Had he not been so reckless, you would be dead. The keg of gunpowder appears to have been set intentionally.”
    “Damned Revolutionaries!”
    “They would like to murder you, certainly, but they are not guilty of this act.”
    “Surely you’re not going to claim that it was the work of the Royalists,” Bonaparte scoffed. “Royalists may intrigue, but they do not stoop to violence.”
    “I say it, and what’s more, I will prove it.”
    January 2
,
1801
—
Malmaison.
    “I’m so relieved you’re all right, darling!” Thérèse exclaimed, removing a leather mask, * a cloak, a hat
and
a wig. “I very nearly died when I read the news-sheets.” She embraced me vigorously, enveloping me in a cloud of neroli oil. “How terrifying it must have been!”
    “I’m at the end of my strength,” I confessed. Fouché insists that Bonaparte’s Mameluke bodyguard follow him everywhere. Roustam even sleeps outside our bedchamber door at night. “As well, Fouché has posted two guards
inside
our bedroom,” I told her. Every few hours they wake Bonaparte, who assigns a new password. Accustomed to sleeping on the battlefield, Bonaparte falls quickly back to sleep. I, however, lie awake all night, fears swirling, trying to ignore the presence of the guards.
    Thérèse tapped a flower-shaped beauty patch stuck to her chin. “Make sure you have your doctor bleed you, but not much, just a bit. Cooling laxatives are called for—an infusion of senna with salts. It will be over soon, won’t it? I heard that the police have discovered the owner of that cart.”
    A cart with a barrel of gunpowder in it: the “infernal machine” everyoneis calling it. “They know who he is, but they can’t find him, Thérèse!” Petit François—a man with a scar over his left eye. “So long as he walks free, I cannot feel safe, no matter how many guards watch over us.”
    January 6—Tuileries Palace.
    Given that human temperament is composed of four humours—blood, bile, phlegm and melancholy—I’d say that the members of Bonaparte’s family have an excess of bile.
    Oh, how uncharitable of me! But truly, sometimes they are too much even for Bonaparte. “I turn into a wet hen around them,” he told me last night after Kings’ Day with the clan—or rather Cake Day, as we’re to call it now.
    After sharing the latest news (the scar-faced man has yet to be found), plans for the season, and the usual discussion regarding status, money and bowels, we got onto that other clan favourite: my fertility—or lack thereof.
    It began innocently enough, with Caroline announcing that her midwife had told her that her baby-soon-to-be-born is a boy.
    “Because of all that red wine you’ve been drinking,” Pauline said, resplendent in a revealing gown of white satin.
    “It’s the man who is supposed to drink the wine,” Bonaparte said.
    “That’s what I thought.” Hortense blushed.
    “What would you know about such things?” Caroline said. Swathed in ruffles and sequins, her big belly prominent, she looked like a carnival balloon.
    “What does it matter whether your child is a boy or not?” Elisa asked Caroline. “It won’t be a Bonaparte. It will only be a Murat.”
    “At least that’s better than a Bacchiochi,”