Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (10 page)

Corsican brothers, foes of dalliance,

Make vengeance spring, bid retribution reap:

O shake yourself awake and take your lance!

“A point you’ll hear much of,” Lucien said, “is this about the stigma of divorce. You change laws but you don’t get rid of stigmas. They’ll talk of divorce being no help to a public man with his way to make. But you know what
we
say.” They were already approaching Paris. Flowers and arches, crowds waiting all night with torches. God bless you, General Bonaparte, savior of our suffering country. Give us work, give us bread. Give us money we can spend.

“She is what she is,” Joseph said, “and will not change. Apart from this adulterous business, she’s been involved in some very shady transactions. Army contracts. Bribes. She’s been running heavily into debt.”

“I loved her, loved her, no man knows how much.”

Arches and flowers. Welcoming dirty hands groping at the carriage windows. Clean up our country, restore us to honor, dignity, solvency. Something like that.

“You’ll never be able to look our mother in the face again unless you. It has to be. Painful, yes. Make a new start.”

Your sun it is that flames, your waves that dance,

It is your children there that laugh and leap,

For Bonaparte has kissed the soil of France.

When she and Hortense returned, frustrated, throbbing with presentiments, to Paris, they found her trunks and boxes packed and stacked. His study door was locked. Eugène was there, his arms open to his sister. The distraught mother knocked and knocked, to no avail, till she lay prostrate in grief and weariness. The children’s sobs penetrated. The servants listened, as to an enacted drama.

O GOD TO THINK THAT ONE TO WHOM I ENTRUSTED MY VERY INNERMOST HEART IN KEEPING but I swear it is all long over it was foolish but it is long done I have lived a life of solitary virtue there is evidence talk to Madame Gohier your whole family is against me they will say anything I WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO LISTEN TO MY FAMILY A MAN CAN TRUST ONLY HIS KIND O GOD GOD THE TREACHERY LET ME NEVER TRUST ANY WOMAN AGAIN I WHO SPENT SUCH TRUST ON A WORTHLESS WORTHLESS
let us speak for
our mother let us speak for ourselves let us be a happy and united
family she loves you we love you you love her
YES Eugène YOU ARE A BRAVE A FINE YOUNG MAN AND YOU HORTENSE ARE O GOD GOD GOD I was foolish God knows I was foolish but I learned my lesson long before these calumnies spread IF ONLY I HAD NOT but you were bound to be KNOWN KNOWN
think of us think of
lied to since MY ISLAND BREEDS OTHELLOS your family hates me BUT I LACK THE they will do anything to KILLING SPIRIT blacken me in your I AM A MAN eyes as for black they talk of the tarbrush which is more WHO SEEKS BUT calumny PEACE PEACE and out of a mere peccadillo
oh you are breaking our
AND LOVE they wish to break all our AND A FAMILY OF LOVING
hearts
hearts HEARTS.

Marthe, oldest of the servants, nodded and nodded, toothlessly chewing every morsel, knowing that a strife of words meant communication, that no man could fight a woman’s tears or resist a woman’s white arms wreathing in anguish as in harp-playing, and a woman’s white bosom heaving, no better solvent of a man’s wrath than a decolletage, they would get to bed now in the gray dawn, some would get some sleep at last at 6 rue Chantereine, no, it was changed to rue de la Victoire, for him,
him
, he, he, he, la victoire. It was little Marie-Claire and the groom Antoine who were sent with the messages, that horrible black man he had brought from Africa guzzling in the kitchen and speaking little French. Lucien (head of the Five Hundred, big man now because of his brother there now at a lively peace conference in bed, big family, though only Corsicans) and Joseph (small head of the big family, they say it is his wife wearies and drags him down) arrived together as the day warmed. They were requested to go to the master bedroom.

“Murdered her in her bed?”

“Nonsense, he has not the murdering temperament.”

“He is wearied out then, he has made his decision, where will he have sent her?”

The Mameluke on his master’s mat growled, but Lucien, president of the Five Hundred, growled back and knocked. The
entrez
was tired but cheerful. They entered and saw him in bed with a naked woman. Well, he was entitled to seek consolation. They saw who the naked woman was.

“We have resolved all,
fratelli
. God knows, there is enough fighting to come without having it here in the family. Let us engage the corrupt state out of a happy fortress.”

Fighting? Family? He did not mean the
real
family, the
famiglia
. He was being melted into the Beauharnais. Their glands meanwhile played an opposed music. Those shoulders, those breasts she was now covering. Well, there it was, our common manly weakness: lechery will undo us all. Lucien had a confused image of a lot of lechery ahead for everyone, the whole of Europe a big bed.

Love, linger in this brief cherubic chance trance glance;

The eagles soar to trumpet from the steep:

O shake yourself awake and take your lance,

For Bonaparte has kissed the soil of France.

“H
onored,” he said. “Greatly.” Sieyès’s apartment smelled of bachelorhood, vaguely sour and dusty, with overtones of old apples that might really be the odor of his old books. The works of Voltaire, well aired, were in an alcove apart, under a flat wax effigy of the sage. As Sieyès sat down again he winced faintly. Bonaparte said:

“Hemorrhoids? I know about hemorrhoids. It is a varicosity that the application of chipped ice will reduce. As common in the field as in the er study.”

Sieyès had the appearance of a minaret that had been capped with an overlarge onion dome. His voice, to match, had the thinness of an old wailing bilal. “So you saw our head director. And what did Gohier say? That you were too young? Undoubtedly. He is a stickler for the letter, very much a lawyer. No directors under forty. How old are you?”

“Coming up to thirty. The letter that kills, I told him. From your colleague Paul Barras I caught a whiff of metal polish. How much does he expect to be paid for cleaning up the crown?”

“Well,” and Sieyès sniffled, “there seem to most to be two ways out only. Consider the condition of the country. Unemployment, thieves—”

“I was robbed of my baggage on the way north.”

“There you are then. Religious fanatics in the west, a million francs barely enough to buy a decent dinner. Those who don’t want the Bourbons back want a Reign of Terror, plenty of Jacobins in the two Councils—”

“And what do
you
want, Citizen Sieyès?”

“A new constitution, what else? We have no constitution.”

“Just what I’ve been saying, ever since I returned. They threatened me with the law because I left Egypt without orders, but I told them they had no law.” The two looked at each other with some warmth, and the grim profile of Voltaire looked out at a world of renewals. “You, sir, made our first constitution. Is not the time coming again?”

“Hardly the first, though my pamphlet on the Third Estate may be said to have started—What do you feel yourself to be, soldier or civilian? I see you are dressed as a civilian.”

“I am both.” Sieyès saw, with a sudden dyspeptic jab, what that might mean—general in one sphere its equivalent in the other—but let it pass. He allowed himself to take it to mean that this soldier was free to be politically persuaded. He said:

“We need a sword, we. I mean those of us who are agreed on the mode of action I will now outline. When I say a sword, I mean, shall I say, a show of force which shall be an emblem of order.”

“I understand thoroughly, I quite understand, I see that very clearly.”

“You will have had enough bloodshed already in your career. As I see it, the entire Directory must resign. This will mean panic in the two Councils, but I have already paved the way with certain of my friends among the Elders. We must have a meeting of the entire Assembly out of town. Paris is a panicky place, there is a mob, there are the unemployed. The palace at Saint-Cloud, I thought.”

“I quite understand.” He smiled in total sympathy as Sieyès winced again. “Chipped ice, remember. Leeches too are bloody but good. My brother, of course, will be useful in this conspiracy.”

“I did not use that word. Erase that word from your mind. That word must not be launched into the public air. It is merely proposed that the Councils ratify the liquidation of the Directory and approve the establishment of a committee of three to make a new constitution.”

“Establishment? That sounds like a permanent triumvirate.”

“One cannot yet look ahead to any mode of permanency. First things first. Now my friend Cornet in the Elders is to inflame his colleagues with oratory about danger and, while they twitter in apprehension, to propose that you take over command of the Paris district—for the safety of both Councils, naturally. The proposition will be carried, no doubt about it, nem con.”

“Good.”

“I am leaving it to Talleyrand—”

“Can Talleyrand be trusted? It was proved that I could not trust him, he endangered the entire Egyptian—”

“—Talleyrand to secure Barras’s resignation with a fair bribe—half-a-million, gold not paper. Gohier dithers, Gohier will give no trouble. That then will be the end of the Directory.”

“Talleyrand,” Bonaparte brooded. “Untrustworthy, slimy. Very much an unfrocked bishop.”

“I, remember, am an unfrocked abbé. Leave that. Should things in the Tuileries not go quite as planned, should Barras or Moulins, say, give unexpected trouble, then you will leave three hundred of your men in Paris. As I see it, it is all a very simple matter. It is a
reasonable
matter, this liquidation of a weak executive. I anticipate no trouble at all.”

“A triumvirate, eh? Very classical.”

Sieyès pointed his long nose at Bonaparte like a toy gun. “I said nothing about a triumvirate. I mentioned only the formation of a committee of three. That is not the same thing, except in the matter of strict denotation, as a triumvirate.”

“I quite understand, I see that thoroughly.”

A
ugereau watched them march in while the string band played:

Let extortion and tyranny tremble

Now the blood-red flag is on high.

“Look at the bastards,” he said, “in their togas like a lot of stage Romans. Lawyers, that’s all they are. The more impotence the more show. What with the directors and their yard-long feathers nodding in the breeze. Bald-headed men fuck best. Well—so they say.”

“You should have been with us at Gaza.” Bonaparte was tricolor-sashed, gold-frogged, breeches a ripple of snow silk. They both stamped up and down for the circulation, it was a cold Brumaire they were having, no brume today though.

“I had enough dirty work to do here. In Paris, that is. That seems to be the lot. All those red togas and red squashy things on their heads and the tongues of the troops hanging out for a smoke and a drop of brandy. Not a pipeful of shag to a platoon. Keep us waiting all morning while they have that stagy rubbish stuck up in there, honor and glory and the Sun-King shining on their napes, take their time marching in, four repeats of the
Marseillaise
I made it, and now it will be jabber jabber to no end without end.”

“They’ll be quick, I think.”

Bourrienne came back with a report picked up from somebody just inside the door of the Apollo Gallery. “They’re going to draw up a list of nominations.”

“For the committee?”

“For a new Directory.”

“For a—You sure you got that right?”

“Proposed and seconded they do that. Voted on. Nothing else on the agenda.”

Bonaparte did a brief quarterdeck pace. Then he said to Bourrienne: “You and I are going in there. Berthier too. Get Berthier.”

Augereau gaped. “You’re going to drop yourself completely in the—”

“Remember Areola? Think of Areola. That was the real, ha, ordure. Nonsense, Augereau. They’re a lot of stupid disobedient old men.”

“Disobedient?
Disob—
”

The three clank-stamped in, but not before Bonaparte had noticed a ranker whom he insisted he knew. “Don’t tell me, it’s Carné, we were at Toulon together, drove the English out didn’t we eh? Carry on smoking.” Berthier performed a silent stutter at the louisine opulence, gold gold, the many-frescoed sun-god, cream pilasters, gold gold gold, magnificent no doubt about it, the elders like a bunch of women in scarlet toques and skirts, some clapping gently at the sight, unexpected, irregular really, of a frowning victorious general, others drawing their red skirts about them in fright or affront, a bunch of women.
Lui
wasted no time, he said:

“Liberty and equality in danger. Volcano’s edge. Allow to speak with blunt soldier’s frankness. I am your sword, defender. Have already sacrificed so much for liberty and er equality. Must be saved.”

“Am I to understand,” a twisted man in steel spectacles said, “that the general is speaking against the Constitution?”

“In the name of the Constitution foul conspiracies are already at their deadly work. You, the people’s representatives, are in grave danger. I am a soldier, I know these things.” Over the cries of
who
and
what
and the deaf saying
what does he say
about the people
, “I have myself been approached by the directors Barras and Moulins to assist them in the overthrow of the Republic and the reestablishment of the hated monarchy. You, gentlemen, our guardians, wise, just, moderate, have ever upheld our republican principles, loathing Bourbonism and Jacobinism alike. Dangers,” he repeated. They all looked at him. “That is to say, I will protect you.” They all looked at him. “From the dangers that threaten, I mean. Will not one who has founded republics protect the mother of republics? With arms, if need be. Old comrades, I see you standing behind me, bayonets ashine in the sun of victory, that is to say freedom.” They all looked at him, except those who looked for the old comrades, who were not there.