Far Flies the Eagle (24 page)

Louis XVIII and his Court had fled into Belgium; the Emperor was carried into The Tuilleries on the shoulders of a hysterical crowd, and from there he issued a statement.

He was willing to honour the Treaty of Paris imposed by the Allies after 1814, and he intended to reign peacefully as a constitutional monarch, restored by the will of the French people.

The powers at Vienna replied by declaring him an outlaw and a public enemy, and ordered their armies to march into France. Faced by the common danger, the allies solved their differences in a few sittings; Alexander contented himself with the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Prussia accepted the Rhine provinces instead of Saxony, and a treaty was concluded by June 9th. But Alexander was not in Vienna on that date. He had left the capital and was at Heilbronn, waiting for his army. And at Heilbronn he met the woman who had prophesied his second battle with Bonaparte.

It was a night when he could not sleep; he had been pacing up and down his bedroom, unable to find his usual consolation in women or in prayer, when his aide-de-camp and confidant, Prince Volkonsky, knocked at his door.

“What is it?” Alexander asked irritably.

“Sire, there's a woman downstairs insisting on seeing you. I didn't like to send her away without your permission.…” Volkonsky paused; he had admitted so many ladies to the Czar during the past few months.

“I'm not expecting anyone,” Alexander said. “Who the devil is she?”

“She says her name is Madame de Krudener, Sire.”

De Krudener … the mystic who had foretold his victory over Bonaparte while Bonaparte was still at Elba.…

“Admit her at once!”

He tried to visualize her as he waited. She was middle-aged, he knew, a woman with a notorious past who had suddenly become religious after seeing one of her lovers drop dead in the street as he passed her window. But whatever she looked like she might bring him peace of mind; surely it was an act of God that she came just at that time, while the armies of Prussia and England were advancing on Napoleon's forces and his own troops were being rushed to join them.

The door opened again and Volkonsky appeared.

“The Baroness de Krudener, Sire.”

A tall figure came slowly into the room; Volkonsky closed the door, and she threw back a long veil which covered her face. Even by the dim candlelight, Alexander could see his visitor was an extremely beautiful woman.

Madame de Krudener was singing to herself as she moved round the room. It was an elegant room, very well furnished, and it was full of flowers which she was arranging. She settled a large spray and stepped back to inspect the effect. It pleased her and she began filling another vase; the Czar liked flowers. He was coming to see her that evening and she prepared everything for him herself. Since that night at Heilbronn he visited her every day and had brought her to Heidelberg to be near him.

She sighed with contentment; he was paying all her expenses and had promised to take her to Paris with him after Napoleon's defeat. She knew Napoleon would be defeated, and she assured Alexander of it over and over again. They prayed a great deal; as soon as she knelt, the knowledge of her own beauty and eloquence affected her and enhanced her natural gift for acting. It was necessary, she admitted, to present prayer in an attractive way; so long as she saved souls for God the methods were not important, and since she had spent all her own fortune evangelizing, there was no harm in accepting money from someone as rich as Alexander. She had a large following of poor people whom she fed and clothed at her own expense, and later at the Czar's; her household was filled with reformed sinners like herself, and with some very unsavoury charlatans who made use of her name. Her gift for making vague predictions had won her a wide reputation and they were always nebulous enough to be made to fit any event of importance.

She told Alexander he was God's chosen among Europe's Kings, and roused his religious fervour to a pitch of frenzy; sometimes she took his hand while they knelt together and felt it trembling with emotion. She was fifty years old and more attractive than she had been at thirty.

She was blonde, with expressive blue eyes, a pale skin and a sensual mouth. Her figure was perfect and she dressed cleverly; the whole effect was sophisticated and yet simple; the woman of the world who had renounced the world. Emotional, passionate and a born exhibitionist, she believed in herself and her message for the world. The message was simple; brotherly love, peace, humility and constant recourse to the Scriptures. She also considered physical love the lawful result of close spiritual union, but she was shrewd enough not to mention that aspect to Alexander yet. It was necessary to attain a very high standard of mystical experience before the body completed the spirit's ecstasy. Some great event was needed, some overwhelming proof of her powers for the Czar. She had gone so far as to hint at a decisive battle within the next few days, while Alexander nodded; the armies of Wellington and Blücher must soon meet Napoleon in Belgium.…

She stood in front of a wall mirror and studied herself; at that moment she heard footsteps. Quickly she pulled the tiny muslin sleeves of her dress down, revealing her magnificent shoulders and the shadow between her breasts, then she ran to a sofa and lay down.

Alexander was not even preceded by a servant. He flung the door open and stood staring at her, his face flushed, too breathless with excitement to speak. She rose and hurried to him; he caught her hand as she tried to curtsy to him.

“Madame,” he stammered, “Madame, your prophecy has been fulfilled! The news has just come through … he's been defeated, routed! We've won, Madame, we've won once and for all!”

“Oh, thank God!” She closed her eyes. “Glory to God! Where, Sire? No, no! Don't tell me … I know, I can see the place … Belgium.…”

“Waterloo!” he burst out. “You're quite right, it was at Waterloo!”

She caught both his hands in hers and pressed them eagerly.

“Kneel with me!” she urged. “Kneel and give thanks for your great victory.”

It made no difference to him that Russian troops had taken no part in the battle. It was still his victory. The prophecy was fulfilled; he had beaten the anti-Christ again. Napoleon's army was scattered across the countryside; his Old Guard were almost annihilated, fighting to the death to save their Emperor.

At the end, the traitor Ney and Napoleon himself had fled the battlefield for their lives.

He knelt, listening to the exultant tones of Madame de Krudener's voice; her words meant nothing to him, neither did his own when at last he joined her; it was a chant of triumph, the praise was for him, the glory of God was his glory.… The French defeated, the French who had ravaged his country, menaced his throne … the eagle standards which had once been carried into Moscow now lay in the dust, and Napoleon himself had ridden, as he himself had done at Austerlitz, in peril of his life from the victorious armies.

They looked at each other and began to rise at the same moment; they were still holding hands. Alexander's head was swimming, he felt superhumanly exalted, filled with the strength of ten men. For a moment they stood motionless, and Madame gazed up at him, her eyes brilliant with excitement, her full lips trembling. Neither knew who moved first, but the next instant they were in each other's arms, and the near-hysteria she had induced in him blazed up into furious passion. The borderline between religious ecstasy and eroticism was very narrow, as she knew from her own experience; weeks of emotional tension had brought the Czar to the edge of it, and the news of Waterloo had pushed him over.…

Outside the door one of Madame's penitents straightened up from the keyhole with a smile and pattered away to tell the rest of the household that Madame the Baroness had completed her conversion of the Czar and they would all be kept in comfort from then on.

“My Beloved Sister.”

The words stared up at Alexander as he took up his pen for the third time to try and write the letter.

“I have a great deal to tell you and it is difficult to know where to begin. Firstly, Bonaparte has been exiled to an Island in the Atlantic called St. Helena. He placed himself under the protection of the English after Waterloo—truly God took away his wits, for they're more harsh towards him than anyone—and instead of giving him asylum in England they made him a prisoner when he boarded their ship the
Bellerophon,
and took him to this place. I have heard the island is very unhealthy and he is to be very strictly kept.

“Ney was arrested, and I regret to tell you that he was shot; so also was Murat. They were both brave men, and the executions have aroused great resentment among the people. The King returned to Paris after Waterloo, and the police are arresting so many Bonapartists it is being called the Bourbon Terror. Otherwise Paris is very gay and all the
émigrés
are back again.”

He paused and dipped his pen into the gold inkwell. The King was in Paris, as he had said, but so was the English commander Wellington, and Wellington was the hero of Parisian society while the Czar of Russia was neglected. He couldn't bring himself to tell Catherine that; the humiliation stung too bitterly. He wrote about the review on the plain of Vertus instead.

“I held a military review on the 10th September at Vertus outside Chalons; one hundred and eighty thousand men and six hundred heavy guns. It was a most imposing and magnificent spectacle; if any of my allies feel inclined to underestimate my strength, they have only to remember Vertus!

“I ordered a Service of Thanksgiving for victory to be offered there the next day, and Madame de Krudener came with me.”

He had taken a house for the Baroness in Paris, adjoining his own residence. After Heidelberg he found her indispensible, and she easily convinced him that their fiercely sensual relationship was lifted above the level of human in by their spiritual condition. He prayed and read the Bible with her and discussed his plans for a world alliance based on Christian precepts. He gave her large sums of money for the support of her charities, and allowed her to rouse him and herself to that pitch of fervour which always ended in erotic excess. She began to speak of this aspect of their relationship as a rite in which she sacrificed herself, and for the first time Alexander's common sense was jarred. He was quite ready to believe he could reach peaks of spiritual experience through the senses, but there was nothing unselfish about Madame's eager response. The pose irritated him, and then gradually Madame herself began to get on his nerves. He frowned as he wrote again.

“My proposals for World Peace were accepted and signed on September 26th. I have called it the Holy Alliance. Only England and the Pope have refused to sign. It is the finest achievement of my life, Catherine. Under its rules all nations can live at peace together, and if one commits aggression, the rest combine to punish it. All the disappointment, the treachery and ingratitude I've experienced since I left Russia at the end of 1812 has been worthwhile, for this has passed my Allies' full approval. It is my plan and no one else's.”

He underlined the last sentence heavily. That was Madame de Krudener's mistake; he had discussed the idea with her and she had promptly claimed the authorship. All over Paris the intellectuals who thronged her salon were saying that the Holy Alliance was her conception and not the Czar's original idea. The boast cost her his patronage. His pride, already outraged on so many points, was now hurt by this woman who owed everything to his generosity. She was making herself more and more ridiculous every day, and ridicule was catching; their relationship seemed to have quite unbalanced her, and his advisers were imploring him to get rid of her and her household.

The spell was broken, and he recognized the whole incident as eccentric and revolting; though he knew the Krudener to be as sincere as she was mad, her influence was at an end.

“You will have heard of Madame de Krudener,” he continued. He could imagine Catherine and the pious Baroness.… “She is a good woman and her companionship has helped me a great deal. However I am leaving Paris tomorrow, my dear sister, and the lady is not coming with me, though I fear she expected to do so. I long to see you! Do you know, I shall be thirty-nine soon and I feel like an old man.… At last it is all over, my sister; I have accomplished what I promised you that night at Tver when we Waited for word from Kutuzov. Do you remember that evening? I said I would drive Bonaparte out of France. Now he is driven out of Europe, out of the counsels of the world as if he had never been born.… It is done, and by December I shall be back in St. Petersburg.”

Alexander returned to his Capital as the greatest conqueror in Russian history. The streets were packed tight with cheering crowds in spite of the bitter cold; lines of troops held them back as the Emperor passed, acknowledging the shouts and waving hands. A salute of cannon sounded as he entered the city and every church bell pealed. The procession halted at the Winter Palace and Alexander was met by his mother, his two younger brothers, his wife and his sister, waiting at the head of the whole Court.

“Ah, my son,” the Empress Dowager cried, as she kissed his hand with tears of pride on her cheeks; he embraced her and paused to salute the Empress Elizabeth; for a moment their eyes met before he touched her cheek quickly with his lips and passed to Catherine Pavlpvna.

They forgot protocol at that moment; she curtsied to him and then clung to both his hands as he kissed her warmly. Her mocking eyes were shining, she looked brilliantly beautiful with a high flush of excitement in her face.

“Hurry,” she whispered, “I can't wait to hear everything.…”

He smiled and promised under his breath, thinking how strange it was that they should once have been rivals, and that out of his conflict with Napoleon, this love for his irreligious, unprincipled sister should now be the strongest feeling in his life. He greeted his second brother, the Grand Duke Nicholas. Nicholas had grown even taller than he was himself, and he was good looking in a stiff way. Alexander remembered Catherine's jeering description of him as Nicholas bowed. ‘I'll swear he's worked by clockwork!'