Guest post written by Napoleon’s Mirage author Michelle Cameron
Michelle Cameron is the author of Jewish historical fiction, with her most recent being Napoleon’s Mirage, the sequel to Beyond the Ghetto Gates. Previous work includes Babylon: A Novel of Jewish Captivity, a finalist in religious fiction in the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the award-winning Beyond the Ghetto Gates and The Fruit of Her Hands: the story of Shira of Ashkenaz. Michelle is a director of The Writers Circle, a NJ-based creative writing program serving children, teens, and adults. She lives in Chatham, NJ, with her husband and has two grown sons of whom she is inordinately proud.
About Napoleon’s Mirage: In this sequel to Beyond the Ghetto Gates, an epic saga of love and adventure spans continents and conflicts during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. Napoleon’s Mirage tells the story of two long-distance lovers amid war, plague, and the stirrings of a bold new future.
These days, unless you’re being ghosted or even blocked by someone who is clearly “not that into you,” it’s practically impossible to lose touch with your romantic partner. They are always just a text, phone call, chat message, or email away. Staying in touch isn’t affected by distance, either: you could be in the next room or all the way across the globe.
In fact, a lot of fictional plot lines now depend on cell phones running out of power with no ability to recharge or cell service being down or unavailable in order to create the anxiety and confusion between lovers worthy of romances of yester year.
It wasn’t all that long ago, however, when that wasn’t the case. My personal long-distance romance took place before the advent of nearly any of these technological marvels. Separated by some six thousand miles from my soon-to-be husband, we had just two choices when it came to contact. The first was the phone call. But unless it was an emergency, international calls were prohibitively expensive. Those were the days when you had to employ the stratagem of making a collect call, which the receiver would refuse, calling you back immediately after you both hung up. A direct call was much less expensive, and the collect call merely the signal that you were there and waiting for the phone to ring on your end.
The second choice was to write a letter, which has never been a foolproof method of communication. During my romance, six thousand miles meant a letter took between two weeks to a month to arrive. So, a true, back-and-forth conversation was difficult to maintain. After all, by the time a letter reached you and you responded to it, life had moved on, sometimes in dramatic ways. While letters could be – and often were – beautifully written, lyrical statements of love – the possibilities of misunderstanding were always there.
Not so long ago, in fact. Yet how much more fraught were long-distance romances in a world where even phone calls did not exist. Such as in my historical novels, Beyond the Ghetto Gates and Napoleon’s Mirage, when Napoleon led his soldiers to battle in distant lands and the women who loved them could only imagine their fate. Letters could so easily be lost. And in Napoleon’s Mirage, letters could take three months or more to reach either party.
Napoleon himself suffered when the letters he longed for from Josephine did not arrive swiftly enough to satisfy his burning passion. As he writes her during his Italian campaign, taking place during the time I describe in Beyond the Ghetto Gates:
Verona, July 17, 1796
I write you, my beloved one, very often, and you write very little. You are wicked and naughty, very naughty, as much as you are fickle. It is unfaithful so to deceive a poor husband, a tender lover! Ought he to lose all his enjoyments because he is so far away, borne down with toil, fatigue, and hardship? Without his Josephine, without the assurance of her love, what is left him upon earth? What can he do?
Suspicions of Josephine’s infidelity with any number of possibilities tormented him. Waiting for her to respond and not receiving a letter back, his contradictory feelings are on full display in the following letter:
November 1796:
I don’t love you anymore; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a vile, mean, beastly slut. You don’t write to me at all; you don’t love your husband; you know how happy your letters make him, and you don’t write him six lines of nonsense…
Soon, I hope, I will be holding you in my arms; then I will cover you with a million hot kisses, burning like the equator.
It is when Napoleon is in Egypt, in fact about to enter the Pyramids, that he is confronted by General Jean-Andoche Junot who has proof that Josephine has, indeed, embarked on an affair, making all of Paris buzz over her infidelity. And of course, this proof is contained in – what else? – a letter. As I write in Napoleon’s Mirage:
General Junot had finally confronted the besotted commander, telling him that back in Paris, his beloved Josephine was cuckolding him with the retired soldier-turned-businessman, Hippolyte Charles, even showing Napoleon a letter filled with details of her adultery. Bonaparte, it was said, had cried out, “Josephine! And me six hundred leagues away!” He threw his hat on the desert sands and stomped off, muttering “Divorce – I must divorce her!” If he’d entered the Great Pyramid then, he’d likely stalked its depths in a white fury, emerging shaken at his disgrace. Others reported that he’d added, “I won’t be the laughingstock of all those useless Parisians. I will divorce her. Publicly.”
But Napoleon is not the only lover to have difficulties due to his long-distance romance. This was a time when a woman who is neither married nor betrothed was not supposed to receive letters that had not been first scrutinized by a parent and approved as innocent enough. When my character, Mirelle, eagerly awaiting word from Daniel Isadore, finally receives a letter after months of waiting, her mother insists on reading it first. She also demands that her daughter not send a letter back without letting her see it.
But Mirelle needs to hint to Daniel that she loves him and that, she knows, her mother would never allow. A modest girl in the 1790s could not address a man in those terms. Instead, she must wait for him to make the first move. Desperate, she writes her letter in secret and is careful to use suggestive phrases rather than come straight out with her feelings. To accomplish this, she alludes to Dolce, her erstwhile best friend who had previously tried to entice Daniel into marriage, saying Dolce is still jealous of them, and adds:
For, unbecoming and immodest as it is for me to commit my feelings to paper, to confess without waiting for your declaration – if in fact you intend to make one – I truly hope she does have reason for her jealousy.
Please direct your letters to the shop, because the last one came to the mansion and Mama refused to let me have it until she had read it. It was innocuous enough, but I ardently hope the next one will not be.
Daniel, upon receiving her letter, is ecstatic. He can’t wait to write back to her, to declare his love. But just as he is about to do so, disaster in the form of the British prevents him. The Battle of the Nile was devastating to the French forces in Egypt, and the resulting naval barricade blocks almost all correspondence between the French and the rest of the world. Daniel desperately tries to find a way to dispatch his ardent letter to his love – and is stymied at every turn.
In our technological age, we might feel desperation in being “ghosted,” but those feelings surely can’t compare to the intensity of lacking even this feeble lifeline of communication. Mirelle, not receiving a response to her letter and not knowing about the blockade, can only imagine that Daniel has rejected her too forward advances. Or worse, that he might have been wounded or killed in battle. As the months turn into a year and more, Daniel himself is in despair. If she does not hear from him, he thinks, she may feel justified in moving on. In marrying another. And, in fact, she very nearly does.
So the next time your beloved tells you their cell simply ran out of charge and are mystified and maybe even a little annoyed by the fifteen frantic messages you texted them, remember how lucky you to live in an age of instant communication. And if you haven’t done so recently, maybe text them that you love them. Add some heart emoticons while you’re at it.
