Memory of Flames (30 page)

‘That’s extraordinary!’ Marmont exclaimed. 'King Joseph is supposed to be in command of us all, but he’s left! And it’s a colonel who’s distinguishing himself instead! What’s the name of this colonel?’

‘He’s Colonel Saber of the 2nd Legion, Your Excellency.’

‘I want the Emperor notified that I would respectfully ask that this colonel be promoted to the rank of general. He has succeeded in causing the accursed Langeron a lot of trouble with the help of only a handful of men!’

‘But ... Your Excellency ... the colonel is dead. I saw him fall with my own eyes.’

The marshal’s face hardened. ‘That changes nothing. He is to be made a general posthumously.’

The regiments of the Army of Silesia, the Russian Guard and the

Prussian Guard finally managed to seize the heights of Chaumont. There were so many Prussians there that all along the slopes and heights their blue forms could be seen like so many ants. It was like a flood submerging the grassy heights, about to spill over and engulf the capital below.

These troops overwhelmed Marshal Marmont’s men from the rear, forcing them to withdraw to Belleville, and then hurried to set up their batteries of cannons and twelve-pounders. When they opened fire their shots battered the city of Paris itself.

The room was tiny, perched right at the top of an old house. Its walls and beams were covered with dozens of paintings, shunted together, their frames touching. There were depictions of naval battles with ships on fire sinking into the waves, the Great Fire of London in 1666, a forest fire, setting suns that seemed to set the sky ablaze ... It was a display of scarlets, oranges, vibrant yellows and other fiery hues, amidst expanses of sooty black, making it seem as if the room were permanently on fire.

Varencourt was standing facing the only window, watching the distant battle and counting the plumes of smoke. He distinctly saw black shapes crossing the sky and falling on the houses. In most cases, he didn’t witness any impact but from time to time a projectile struck the roof of a building at full tilt, spraying up debris, or clipped a corner, sending a wall crashing down, releasing clouds of dust. As he watched, a house burst apart, and another shell knocked a roof into the air. The detonations merged into one another, eventually making one continuous crackling. Now buildings were falling on all sides. A plume of black smoke over there -the first fire! Then somewhere else a building collapsed, burying an entire street. Debris showered over north-west Paris and the columns of smoke accumulated. Varencourt took a flask of vodka that he had bought in the ruins of Moscow after the French had left. He had never tasted it, keeping it instead for this very occasion. He poured himself a glass and drank a toast to the cannonballs destroying Paris. As the spirit slipped down his throat he felt as if he were swallowing the fire of Moscow.

Napoleon was still advancing. He was accompanied now only by those closest to him and about a hundred cavalry. All he wanted now was to reach Paris and take command of the defence of the city.

In the end the entire French front simply folded under the weight of the enemy. The heights were lost and the exterior defences overwhelmed, and still there was no sign of the Emperor. At four o’clock Marshal Marmont, who was wounded in the arm and had narrowly avoided capture, sent three officers to the enemy vanguards to ask for a suspension of hostilities.

The Allies had lost nine thousand men, either injured or killed, and the French, four thousand.

The silence was eerie. The soldiers’ ears still rang with the cacophony of combat, as if they could not believe that calm had returned. The silence spoke to Catherine de Saltonges, huddled in a torpor in the corner of her cell. It was murmuring something to her: the Allies had won. But she herself had lost everything. Almost everything. She still had her pride! In spite of the torment her ex-husband had put her through, in spite of the hardships of the Revolution, of her inability to keep her lover in her arms, the loss of her child, yes, in spite of all that, nothing would ever succeed in breaking her spirit.

She stood up, walked over to the door and began to beat on it with the flat of her hand and called out to her gaolers, This is it, Messieurs. It’s time for us to change places.’
 

CHAPTER 44

AFTER several hours of negotiation, the capitulation of Paris was signed.

The regular troops of the French army had been authorised to withdraw and they were to leave Paris by seven o’clock the next morning. The National Guard, on the other hand, was pronounced to be ‘in a totally different category from the troops of the line’. The text of the capitulation specified that ‘... it would be maintained, disarmed or discharged, according to the will of the Allies’. These orders circulated and Margont was alarmed when they reached him. Paris was going to be occupied and he was specifically forbidden to go with the retreating army. He was to wait for the Allies in the capital and report to them. He was worried that he would be thrown in gaol. On the other hand, if he disobeyed orders and followed the French army, he would be arrested anyway. ‘We’ll just have to discharge ourselves! I’d rather remove myself than wait to be forcibly removed by others,’ declared Lefine.

He took Margont and Piquebois round to his lady-friend’s house. It was dark. A woman opened the door. Margont was so exhausted and demoralised that he felt completely drained. The only things he took in about the woman were her striking face and the fact that her eyes were red from weeping. She burst into tears as she took Lefine in her arms. Margont stretched himself out on the floor and fell asleep instantly.

On the morning of 31 March, Margont, Lefine and Piquebois took the time to wash thoroughly to remove all traces of the gunpowder they were covered in. Lefine’s friend was a widow. They borrowed her husband’s clothes in order to pass themselves off as civilians. ‘We have to find Varencourt,’ Margont stated. ‘I’m sure he’s still in Paris.’

Lefine knew Margont much too well to be surprised by his proposal. He knew that his friend needed this investigation. But he was torn between his desire to help Margont and his desire to stay and protect his lady-friend, in case any enemy mercenaries should

show up. They finally agreed that Piquebois would stay with her and they would barricade themselves in. Piquebois was a formidable swordsman and woe betide anyone who provoked him to unleash his sabre!

Margont and Lefine left. They had stuffed their uniforms into two bags, which they abandoned a few streets away in the heart of the Marais, in a dark corner. They were unarmed, having given their weapons the day before to the retreating regular army. Piquebois, however, had kept his sabre, which he refused to be parted from, and a pistol.

Margont tried to work out what he would do if he were Varencourt. Would he wait in Paris? Would he try to profit from the general chaos to get close to Napoleon? Where would Napoleon be, and had he been warned about the proposed attempt on his life?

He followed Lefine without noticing where they were going. Other people seemed to be going in the same direction. They reached the Champs-Elysees and found it lined with an astonishing number of Parisians. Some were wearing white cockades or armbands;

others were simply waving white handkerchiefs and shouting, ‘Long live Louis XVI
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!’ So this was the grand procession of the Allies. At the head came the Cossacks of the Guard, in scarlet. Next the Tsar, Generalissimo. Schwarzenberg, the King of Prussia and the Prince of Wurtemberg, all accompanied by their sumptously attired general staff. Two regiments of Austrian grenadiers followed them, all dressed in white and wearing bearskins, then Russian grenadiers with shakos topped by long black plumes, and thousands of soldiers of the Prussian Guard and the Russian Guard. Then there was a mass of Russian curassiers, and more and more and more of them. The Chevalier Guard brought up the rear in their white uniforms and black cuirasses. It was these elite cavalrymen who had wounded Piquebois at the Battle of Austerlitz. Lucky that he wasn’t here, because the sight of them always reduced him to wild rage.

Margont still couldn’t take in what he was seeing. He kept looking from the part-built Arc de Triomphe to the streams of Allied soldiers marching rhythmically past, and back again to the

monument.

Lefine muttered to himself, ‘So it really is all over...’

The Allies were each wearing a white armband or a white scarf, and the Parisians thought they were demonstrating their support for Louis XVIII. In reality, however, the white was merely meant to distinguish them from French soldiers, since the diversity of uniforms on both sides made it hard to distinguish one side from the other.

Margont tried to think about something else. In fact he had something else very important to consider. The Roman lady in the mosaic came back to him. He decided to go through all the clues he had, but starting with the two that did not fit his original hypothesis, namely that Count Kevlokine’s face had not been burnt, and that the murderer had left the emblem of the Swords of the King on his corpse.

The crowd was yelling, ‘Long live Louis XVI
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! Long live the Bourbons!’ and some were even falling in behind the Allied procession in the footsteps of the last Chevalier Guards. But Margont neither saw nor heard them.

Varencourt had not been able to resist burning the second victim. But he had spared his victim’s face, contenting himself with burning his arms. What would have happened if he had mutilated his face in the same way as Colonel Berle’s? Count Kevlokine would not have been identified. Nevertheless, Joseph would probably still have sent Margont to the scene of the crime, because of the Swords of the King symbol. So the two elements came together to give the same result: that Margont would investigate the murder. Margont knew that Varencourt wanted to use Margont’s identity but why did he need to become ‘the man investigating Count Kevlokine’s murder’?

Margont finally worked it out. Yes, this time his hypothesis incorporated those two discordant elements that had previously made no sense. But now the pattern the clues made was not the same. Only a few tesserae had changed places but it was no longer Napoleon’s face that the mosaic spelt out. Margont grabbed Le-fine’s arm.

‘Varencourt is going to kill the Tsar. He led the Swords of the King to believe that his plan was to poison Napoleon, because he needed their help. But actually he manipulated them just like he manipulated me. He murdered Count Kevlokine in order to get near Alexander!’

‘But—’

The Tsar knew Count Kevlokine. He will want to know who killed and mutilated his friend so he would probably agree to see anyone who had information about the killing. If Alexander were to be killed by a “French officer”, “Lieutenant-Colonel Margont”, carrying an instruction from Joseph Bonaparte, the Russian soldiers would think that the Tsar had been executed on Napoleon’s orders. They would immediately vent their rage on Paris! They would put everything to fire and the sword! And that’s exactly what Charles de Varencourt wants. He wants the Emperor wandering through a Paris reduced to cinders, amidst the rubble of the monuments he’s had erected, and the incinerated remains of the people he loves. That’s what Varencourt’s vengeance is really about. He’d like Napoleon to go through exactly what he himself went through - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Paris for Moscow.’

Lefine tried to find an objection, but Margont added: The Tsar would be dead and Paris razed to the ground, because the Russians would burn everything. That would be vengeance indeed against the two people responsible for the burning of Moscow. Because even if that’s not what Alexander wanted, he was the one who set in train the events that led to that catastrophe. Everything began in Moscow, everything was to finish in Paris. Ever since the disaster of the retreat from Moscow, Charles de Varencourt guessed that, sooner or later, the Empire would collapse. So he came here and worked out his plan while little by little the Tsar and the other crowned heads of Europe closed in on France, dreaming of their triumphal entry into Paris, just as we have paraded through Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Moscow ... He progressively adapted his plan to events and opportunities ... Since his life had been destroyed he was obsessed with fire. Fire and gambling.

Gambling was the only thing that could distract him from fire. Thanks to gambling he was able to experience vivid emotions, he told me as much. Gambling temporarily filled the void in his life and kept fire at bay for a few hours ... Only Catherine de Saltonges might have been able to prevent all this. With her Varencourt almost succeeded in rebuilding his life one more time. One day she found the damaged button and eventually he told her the whole story. But unfortunately she did not succeed in laying the ghost of her lover’s past.’

Lefine was speechless.

‘Where is the Tsar?’ Margont asked him.

‘Well, he passed in front of us more than three hours ago ...’

‘If I’m right, Charles de Varencourt will try to put his plan into action now. It’s exactly the right moment. All the Allies will still be reeling from yesterday’s fighting ... We have to warn the Tsar!’
 

CHAPTER 45

VARENCOURT left his cramped living quarters. He had expected the streets to be empty but, on the contary, there were masses of people around. The Parisians wanted to see the Allied soldiers up close. People looked at him in alarm and civilians gave him a wide berth as though his face were ravaged by leprosy. It was because he was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant-colonel in the National Guard and that made him a target. He had obtained the uniform by brazenly bursting into a military outfitter’s and showing them the letter from Joseph. He had received what he needed in less than two hours.