Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (18 page)

“You’ll have a big headache when the crown goes on those chestnut curls tomorrow, ha ha,” the First Consul said with heavy humor. “The weight of imperial responsibility.”

“Oh, but I understood that—”

“Yes yes yes, my little joke. Laurel wreaths in gold, very tasteful, good Parisian workmanship. Ah yes,” he beamed round at all, “we’re back to richness, to ceremony, and a good thing too. A nation needs ceremony, it needs the mystical, a ritual of dedication to the glories of its past, prefiguring the glories of its future.” A fat cardinal paused, pasta writhing on his fork, to consider the possible meaning of that, if any.

“It is the sincere hope of us all,” Pius said, “that a little prince, a future emperor—I pray,” he added simply. A palpable cloud passed over the First Consul’s chewing features. “How long is it now, my dear daughter, that you have been married?”

“Germinal, Year Four,” the First Consul said. “I began badly. I was late. Kept them all waiting—the registrar, Tallien, Barras, that lawyer of yours, angel. And you, of course, my treasure. Still, we wasted no time once I was there. Got it over in a couple of minutes. Two squeaks of a pen—done.”

Mouths began to open all down the long table, some showing unchewed food. Pius began to tremble. “I cannot,” he said. “I cannot. A secular contract. You are not married. You are living in sin. Why,” he asked the table, “did nobody think of this?”

Nobody knew why not. They had assumed. It was naturally taken for granted. Nobody had actually considered the possibility that. A natural actual considered assumption.

“The coronation ceremony,” Pius said. “A sacrament. My participation. Unblessed by Mother Church.”

The First Consul ate the few morsels left on his plate, considered his plate, wiped up what was left with bread, swallowed the bread, said:

“If you will excuse my wife and myself, Your Holiness, Your Eminences—”

He and she talked it all out in her boudoir. He lay on a sofa from Constantinople, she sat at her dressing-table mirror, all gilt putti. “You realize,” she said, “that there can be no turning back once we have done it.”

“Divorce, you mean, divorce. Yes yes, immense legal problems, the papal disaffection, the people.”

“I have no wish to bind you further if you do not wish to be bound. I think it totally unlikely now that we will have children.”

“The flaw is in me, the fault, but suppose it is not—”

“Be honest with me on that. This Italian woman, that little Egyptian kitten, others, I know there are others—”

“Not many. No. I am always honest, I think. I think I am always honest.”

“The question should be a question of love, no more.”

“Yes,” he said with great firmness, “yes,” getting up from the sofa. “Can you doubt that, eh? I love you. I adore you. You are my empress.”

“Being empress is not the point.”

“Love love love. Can you doubt it? Tomorrow the whole world shall be sure. It has never before been done in our age—except for Marie de Medicis I believe it was. I place the crown on your delicious head. It is a sanctified and solemn embrace.” He attempted an embrace less solemn, certainly not sanctified. “We shall be married tonight, just before bedtime. Cardinal Fesch can do it.”

“Don’t we have to go to confession first?” She disengaged herself, a woman’s sense of propriety.

“If you wish. It may be a relief for you to get those things off your conscience.”

“Oh my God. And you?”

“My conscience is clear, I think. I think my conscience is clear. Venial sins, perhaps. No more.”

D
ecember Sunday, clear and cold, saw them enter, Mars and Venus, in shining mantles, borne up by cheers and bell-clangor, the cathedral of Our Lady, he in purple adorned with his letter, an N embraced with branching oak and olive and laurel. Thirty-five years of age, he had come a long way in a short time (a long way? Ridiculous,
all the way
) and the best of life was yet to come. Citizens Carné, Thiriet, Blondy, Tireux, Hubert, Fossard, Teisseire, Carrère (Jacques), Carrère (Alexandre), Trauner, Barsacq, Gabutti, Mayo, Bonin, Borderie, Verne, Chaillot, Barrault, Brasseur, Dupont, Salou and their wives and children or widows and orphans or quiet or unquiet ghosts, and thousands upon thousands more, had waited from dawn to see it all. Inside the vast forest of the cathedral the officers of the new empire waited, some with unquiet bladders, in the glory of a myriad candles that dissolved the Gothic shadows. Talleyrand, magnificent in his chamberlain’s ermine, seeing N coming down the aisle, aware of hours of tedious magnificence to come, thought: his dysuria will serve him well. N saw them all, old companions-in-arms, now transmuted to a mythology glorious in plush, silk, satin, silver, gold, sky-blue, sea-blue, with palms and eagles and bees and doves and dogs and lions and leopards as emblems and mystic riddles, seeing too Corporal Gallimard in the crowd, who must really be told to do something about his drinking, and Sergeant Pichou, who he had intended should be promoted but things had got in the way (he made a note of it, advancing up the nave to where His Holiness waited among swords and ivories of office). To his consort, who shone like a goddess and walked with the pace of a goddess and would not be hurried up to the more martial step that seemed to him,
imperator
, more appropriate, he said:

“You remember that notary, Raguideau? The one who told you not to marry me?”

“What?” The coronation march, played on brass and drums and clarinets, was very loud. “Oh, Raguideau.”

“Said I’d never own more than my cape and sword. I had him in this morning.”

“What?”

“Asked him what he thought about that now. Eh? Eh?” Seeing N so merry, everybody smiled. A one-legged discharged sapper cried: “That’s right, laugh, you little bugger,” but it was drowned in shouts of “Long live the Emperor.” And so N and J approached the high altar. It was the first Sunday in Advent, but the mass was a votive mass of the Blessed Virgin. Talleyrand said to the officer next to him:

“The feminine theme, you see. France is to be regarded as a sort of Blessed Virgin.
La patrie
. Fathermotherland. The Blessed Virgin,” he chuckled, admiring the magnificent satiny J. “The spirit of the chevaliers. Poor Germaine would have loved all this.” And then he saw that nobody, however emancipated or clever, really had room any more for laughter, unless initiated by N. A Corsican nothing had turned himself into a greater than Charlemagne.

N and his almost empress were bowed to golden thrones by a beaky cleric not unlike the custodian of the Louvre who (his brain had filed the fact away) opened twenty minutes late the day before yesterday.

“That parrot of yours. It has to go.”

“Why?”

“I can’t have it shrieking
Bonaparte
all the time.” Her tears gushed. “There there, angel. It can live in the servants’ quarters.”

“I was thinking,” she sniffed, “of poor little Fortuné.”

The Carolingian ghosts attend him now.
¹

And hover o’er the new nobility.

Great Pepin’s glory
²
shines upon his brow

And shining trumpets seek the vaulted sky.

Then
Vivat imperator
is the
³
cry,

The organ
⁴
bids the massy
⁵
columns shake
⁶

While drums thud deep and martial flutes shriek high.
⁷

An age is dead, a new age doth awake,
⁹
.

See night roll back and see a glorious morning break.
⁹

1.  His Holiness blesses the imperial regalia then hands to N the sword, scepter, hand of justice, orb.

2.  His Holiness prepares to crown him but N places on his own head the golden laurel.

3.  J with hands joined proceeds to the steps of the altar but her trainbearers (Madame Julie replaced by Pauline) seem in deliberate clumsiness to seek to hobble her steps and make her trip. N frowns and whispers something harsh. They are subdued, with grace J kneels.

4.  N crowns her with care, setting the featherweight gold on her curls with the deliberation of a Paris coiffeur.

5.  Mass continues. Incense, lavation, osculation, sanctification.

6.  The Emperor dozes off an instant. A Mameluke waddles towards him, bows, his head becomes detached, its owner catches it dexterously, pours blood from it into a cup shaped like a big hollow hand, bids him drink. The Emperor starts awake.

7.  His Holiness gives the blessing and discreetly leaves.

8.  The Emperor swears to maintain Liberty Equality etc and to rule for France’s greater happiness and glory, seeing them, as momentarily the congregation, in terms of total compatibility.

9.  The herald at arms takes a deep breath.

The herald at arms took a deep breath and cried with a main voice: “Now is he consecrated and enthroned, the most glorious and noble and august Napoleon, Emperor of the French Republic.” Main voices of gold and bronze and nickel and silver gushed swung crashed in jubilant flame, cannon roared in public parks, the citizenry roared. The fetus in the womb heard, the tombs of the glorious and inglorious, those who had been lucky, those who had made mistakes, trembled minimally. But he came out modest and charming, Empress on arm, a republican, ready to start work again tomorrow morning at seven, a great deal to be done.
Te Deum laudamus
. I am sun and wind, I am your best solvent. The roaring open mouths seemed to be roaring for glory. Well he would give them glory, glory was very much on the agenda, plenty of glory
Te Deum laudamus
on its way.

II

There he lies

Ensanguinated tyrant

O bloody bloody tyrant

See

How the sin within

Doth incarnadine

His skin

From the shin to the chin

N
onsense, of course. And this whole situation was, if not exactly nonsense in that sense of nonsense, to be recognized as the perpetration of an error that he himself would never have perpetrated. He knew, if anyone did, the difference between a live body and a dead one. The savants of the Empire knew much, but they were curiously ignorant of the special properties of godblood, godflesh and so on. Such studies had been unaccountably neglected. A god could be struck down so that handkerchiefs might soak up the lavish holy blood and the more exiguous holy semen, but what followed was not death but a sleep of peculiar profundity. The sleeping god should be embowered amid evergreens and then stretch and smile awake with the trumpeting of the violets.

They had all made a hardly credible mistake, and now he was waking (unseasonably, true, that had to be admitted) under a boiling sky, being jogged towards the source of a piercing wind. His body, clad in a loose and dirty cerement, was corded to a splintery board of, he thought, mahogany. His head could move hence his eyes could see that the board was set upon piles of what seemed to be loosely stuffed gunnysacks, secured to them by tarred ropes, one about his ankles, another above his navel, of the thickness roughly of a woman’s wrist. The sacks were set upon a kind of farm tumbril, and this four asses drew. He remembered distinctly and irrelevantly how, as a cadet, he had read a poem too quickly and wondered for a second at the conceit of a soul braying. These souls merely plodded, patient in immemorial asininity, gray and shagged and unwhipped.

See

How the sin within

Doth incarnadine

Capering on the cobbles of a street he did not recognize, twanging large Jew’s harps and blowing brass instruments that farted ragged military calls, though deeper in pitch than any bugle known to the Great Army, there were men who, he soon saw in shock, were caricatures of himself, live and yet flat, as if line and wash had become animated. They wore a mockery of the chasseur uniform. Sometimes they grew the third dimension required for organic reality, but only to thrust out cushion bellies in a parody of frotting. On either side of the narrow way were massed laughers and jeerers. He cried to them but none heard. He called to the seething sky. Surely at least his moving ball of a head could be seen, as also the eyes he knew to be enlarged with the chemicals of desperation, the calling lips? No. He was a corpse, so therefore the eyes and mouth and head were to be taken as frozen in corpsehood.