Far Flies the Eagle (26 page)

But like Gruzino which he admired so much, the colonies were a hell of slave-driving and brutality, and Alexander knew as little about what really happened in them as he did about the methods used at Gruzino itself.

He spent hours kneeling in Araktcheief's private Chapel, where a marble bas-relief of his father was set into one wall with an inscription in letters of gold.

‘My heart is pure and my spirit just, before You.'

Araktcheief was almost the only contemporary of Paul I who could truthfully claim that; if Alexander ever hoped to forget his own guilt and his servant's loyalty, he had only to enter that Chapel.… Only a man who knew how sick the Emperor was would ever have dared erect such a monument. But Araktcheief knew, and it was the secret of his power over Alexander.

They were discussing a revolt in the colonies that evening as they sat in the study. The room was an exact copy of the Czar's own study in the Winter Palace; every piece of furniture, every ornament was duplicated; he might have been in his own home. He was sitting in a high-backed chair before the fire, his head resting against his hand; he looked old and over-burdened.

“I can't understand why they should revolt,” he said. “It's a perfect system; they're fed, housed, clothed, properly disciplined. Is there no sense in the human race? Do they prefer to live like dogs?”

Thousands of serfs penned up in the Chuguyev district had rebelled against the system and been put down after unspeakable cruelty.

Araktcheief raised his stiff shoulders.

“They will learn, Your Majesty,” he promised.

They would indeed, after he had done with them, he thought. He would go to Chuguyev himself to supervise.… He might even take Anastasia with him; Anastasia would enjoy Chuguyev. She was a gipsy who had been his mistress for the past nineteen years; together they had organized the most revolting exhibitions of sadism Araktcheief could remember, but they had to be very careful not to go too far with the miserable serfs at Gruzino while the Czar was there. Anastasia was always kept out of Alexander's sight.

“I have done my best,” he was saying. “Everything seems to end in failure.”

Araktcheief began to comfort him; part of the man's horror was the fact that he was easily moved to tears, and they filled his eyes as he saw the Czar's distress.

“Ungrateful swine,” he wept. “But what does one district matter? Everywhere else it's a great success. You haven't failed, Sire! Just leave this to me. I'll attend to it!”

That was what Alexander wanted him to say. Araktcheief would deal with it, as he dealt with most of his problems. It left him so much more time to pray for himself and for his sister Catherine.

Catherine. He stared into the fire, forgetting Araktcheief and the rebellion. He had to pray for Catherine. It seemed impossible even now that she was dead. She had died at the begining of 1819, but he still looked for a letter from her or thought he heard her voice or her quick step. It was an effort to remember there would be no letter, that her voice and footstep was only an echo in his own mind. She was dead and buried in Würtemburg, and he could do nothing now but pray to God that she might not be damned.

The idea of Catherine in hell had obsessed him for months after her death. He knew her, he cried, he knew how wicked she was, how jeering and unrepentant! Oh, God, no one knew as well as he did! He remembered her face the night of his triumphant return after 1815, and his own blind panic to escape her and himself. He shuddered for her and caught cold kneeling on the stone floor of his private chapel praying for her soul.

He had given Araktcheief wide powers to govern in his name; it was necessary since he travelled so much. Since the end of the war he had journeyed all over Russia, ostensibly inspecting his country, in reality fleeing from himself. He was alone. His sister was dead, he had no mistress, his family were only interested in the succession; he had no one in the world he could trust but Araktcheief and his daughter by Marie Naryshkin, the child Sophie. He loved Sophie. She was gentle and devoted to him; through her he kept an affection for Marie alive, a feeling without passion and almost without guilt. They were both older and life had struck each of them down in different ways; Marie had ruined her health and reputation, and he had come back from France a sick, dispirited man.

Now when they met it was as Sophie's parents; Marie had noticed that he seldom smiled except when he played with his daughter.

He was thinking of Sophie then, half dozing by Araktcheief's fire. She loved him and looked up to him; God had been merciful to let him have her; it eased the overwhelming sense of anti-climax that tormented him. He had beaten Napoleon—by this time the other nations' contributions had faded from his mind altogether—instituted the Holy Alliance and restored hereditary monarchy to the world, and his reward was this burden of personal despair. The strain had broken him mentally; there were times when his mind was fogged by religious mania, and his body was impotent and worn out by self-imposed penances.

He still asserted his will with bursts of savagery and then lapsed into apathy again or disappeared on a long pilgrimage.

In the Europe he had liberated there was widespread unrest; revolutionary parties in Spain, Italy and Germany were clamouring for reform. And in Russia too. In Russia even the army was tainted. He scowled; Araktcheief would deal with that. How dare they presume to question his will when God had chosen him out of all the Kings as the instrument of His Divine purpose! But God was releasing him at last; he had felt for some time that his own soul's salvation was the first consideration now.…

Metternich had called another Congress to be held at Troppau; he must first attend it before he could make the initial moves in a plan known to no one. A plan which would mark him out for posterity as more than just the man who had beaten Napoleon. It had begun as a wish, become an idea, and developed into the goal of his life. The time had come to set the scenery in place for the last great act of his reign. After Troppau.

He was dining quietly one evening with the Empress Elizabeth, Araktcheief and Prince Volkonsky when he was told a courier had arrived in St. Petersburg with an urgent message. It was a dull meal, taken with the Empress for formality's sake, and Alexander welcomed the interruption; he had no idea what the news could be, unless another revolt had broken out in the military colonies. His face clouded with anger, and he said sharply, “Will you excuse me, Madame. A dispatch has arrived marked urgent, I'd better read it now.”

He sent for the courier and opened the sealed letter at the table. Araktcheief, who watched everything he did, saw his colour change suddenly. He sat there holding the paper for some moments, until one by one the others looked up and saw that something had disturbed him so much his hands were trembling. Only Araktcheief dared to ask him.

“What is it, Sire? Bad news?”

Alexander lowered the letter and looked round the table.

“News from St. Helena. Napoleon is dead.”

The Empress Elizabeth was the first to speak.

“Oh, is that all! I was quite alarmed for a moment, Sir, you seemed so agitated. Well, thank heavens the world is rid of him.”

Volkonsky and Araktcheief joined in the talk that followed; only Alexander was silent, still holding the letter, with his wife's casual words echoing in his ears. ‘Is that all.…'

The Master of the World whose legions had been as invincible as the phalanxes of ancient Rome … the man he had engaged in the greatest struggle in history and finally overthrown.

Napoleon. His head was full of noises, thundering cannon, the tread of armies, their eagle standards shining in the sun, the clatter of great troops of cavalry.… The faint battle cry he'd heard for the first time at Austerlitz, “
Vive L'Empereur!
” as the hordes of French infantry advanced into battle. Bugles blew, French bugles, sounding out over the countryside on a sunny June morning, and a tiny figure in the uniform of his Old Guard stepped forward on the raft at Tilsit and shook hands with him.…

Erfurt, performances by the Comédie Française, State dinners, brilliant military reviews and the quiet talks with Talleyrand.… Talleyrand had fallen now. The King had dismissed him.…

Then in his mind he was back at Vilna, attending the Ball at Zakret when Balachov approached him, and he heard his whisper as distinctly as if he were at his elbow again.

“The French have crossed the Niemen, Sire. We are invaded!”

The smell of burning was in his nostrils; Russian towns and villages blazing under that hot summer sky of 1812 as he rode back with Barclay de Tolly's army; the smoking shell of Moscow, shaken by explosions as the invaders dynamited. The map in his study in the Winter Palace, pinpointed by lines of little flags marking the advance of the enemy and then turning back on themselves as the retreat began. The churches he had knelt in for hours, beseeching God's guidance; Catherine Pavlovna weeping for Bagration, leaning over his shoulder to study the maps with him, following the progress of the war with the intelligence of any man.

Names sounded like trumpet calls. Smolensk. Borodino. The bells of Moscow ringing the alarm for ‘Fire'. Days and nights of blizzard, the worst water for many years, and then the swollen waters of the Beresina and the voice of Kutuzov trembling as he described the shriek of terror that went up as the bridge collapsed and hundreds fell to death in the river.…

Kutuzov was dead; the brave Ney who had stood in Talleyrand's drawing-room pleading for the Emperor, Ney had fallen before an execution squad after Waterloo. So had Murat, who was almost a cavalry legend; Berthier, Napoleon's Chief of Staff, had thrown himself out of a window as he watched Russian troops crossing the frontier into France for the second time in 1815.

A British warship had sailed out across the Atlantic with Napoleon aboard, bound for an unhealthy little island which was to become the most famous prison in the world.

He suddenly remembered the face of Josephine, the pretty face of an old-young woman, as she looked up at him in the dusk of the rose garden at Malmaison.

“I was loved by the greatest man of his age and I was too stupid to appreciate it.…”

The thunder of those great wars dying down to a whisper in men's conversation, the veterans whom no one cared to listen to.… French eagles in the Russian Imperial Museum, cannon rusting in the countryside and children playing over them. A total of ten million dead.

The letter.… “General Bonaparte died at St. Helena after a painful illness.…”

General Bonaparte. That was the English. They forbade the members of his staff who followed him into exile to address him as anything else. General Bonaparte was dead.

“Oh, is that all!” his wife had said.

He pushed back his chair and left the room without a word.

Metternich had not seen the Czar since the last Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle two years before. When the Congress reassembled at Troppau he would hardly have recognized him. Alexander stooped, as if he carried an invisible load on his back; he was nearly bald, his splendid physique had gone. There was a distant expression in his eyes that startled Metternich; it gave the impression Alexander was not even listening to much of what was said. During one discussion the Austrian thought he saw the Emperor's lips moving as if he were praying, but he dismissed it as a trick played by his own eyes. But the change in Alexander was not only physical, he discovered that very quickly, and his shrewd brain saw endless possibilities.

His old adversary of Vienna was a sick man, impatient and lethargic by turns; he had become bitter and almost insanely suspicious; his great triumphs had turned sour and he was rapidly withdrawing from the world. The more he listened to Alexander, the more convinced Metternich became that his eyes had not deceived him when he suspected the Czar was praying at the conference table, for it was clear that the gay and brilliant idol of the Vienna salons had got religious mania. The influence of people like that humbug Madame de Krudener and the monks and mystics surrounding Alexander at home had culminated in this, the Count thought contemptuously; they had turned the Emperor into a crank and a tyrant as soon as he no longer had the common sense of his vixenish sister to protect him.

Metternich watched him carefully, and within a few days invited him to dine with him privately. He would be so grateful, he murmured; he was badly in need of the Czar's advice.

Much of the past still rankled where the Austrian was concerned, but Alexander accepted, reminding himself that it was Christian to forgive. Also he now found himself in general agreement with much of Metternich's policy.

The dinner was excellent, and the host exerted all his wit and conversational gifts to amuse the Czar, and gradually Alexander thawed. He laughed at Metternich's easy malicious comments on the other envoys, and accepted a good deal of courtly flattery without noticing how much trouble the Austrian was taking to gain him over. When they left the dining-room, brandy was served; the footman withdrew, and as soon as they were alone, Metternich began to discuss the problems which the Congress was debating.

“It's tragic to think this spirit of revolution is so widespread,” he remarked. “After the miseries of Napoleon's wars and all our efforts for peace—especially yours, Sire—you'd think people would be grateful for stable government. I sometimes feel as if the system of monarchy has never been in greater danger!”

He glanced sideways at Alexander; he had heard about the revolts in the military colonies, the murmuring among even the nobility. Alexander shouldn't have let his officers mingle so freely in European society during the Napoleonic wars; they had developed a dangerous taste for freedom of expression.

“Why did the King of Spain give way?” the Czar demanded angrily. “Why did he give them a constitution and encourage every other malcontent to start making demands! Of course he's another damned Bourbon, and none of them are fit to rule!”