Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (3 page)

“W
hat does he say?”

“I can’t read his writing.” And she threw the letter like a bone to the pug Fortuné, who sniffed at it and then began to chew it.

“But it’s important to know when he’ll be back. My angel. Mmmmmm.” Lieutenant Hippolyte Charles, First Regiment of Hussars, at present in undress, munched at her right, or left, nipple.

“Paul Barras is excited. About victories. Can you read those names there?”

He tussled with the dog a moment. The dog let go Millesimo, Ceva and Dego, though with an ill grace. “It’s a lot of marching,” he said. “All those foothills. That’s why it’s called Piedmont.”

“I never thought of that.”

“And why should you, you little bundle of deliciousness? Mmmmmm.” He munched lower. “Does he ever do that to you?”

“He tried. He’s always in such a hurry about everything. Oh, sweetheart, what are we going to do?”

“Now? I’ll show you. Get that damned dog off the bed. I’ll have no toes left.”

“Stays here, don’t oo, precious? Mummy’s little messenger when horrid men kept mummy in prison and were going to cut mummy’s head off.”

“Don’t look too far ahead is what I say. He’s a long way to go. There’s Milan and Vienna and Venice. Lots of time. It would be nice to be in Venice.”

“He’s always so quick about everything. Do that again. Keep on doing it. Oh, sweetheart, I’m so unhappy. Oh, that’s lovely.”

“Y
ou’re too moderate,” Saliceti said. Bonaparte, half-dressed and unshaven in the cool spring dawn of Cherasco, looked with no liking on the Government Commissioner of the Army of the Alps. All that red white and blue, including red white and blue plumage a mile high. And yet a sort of magpie really, ready to peck at anything bright and stow it.

“Look,” Bonaparte said, “Citizen Commissioner, or whatever you like to be called. I know precisely what’s in your mind. Loot loot loot.”

“They need money in Paris. This is partly—not wholly, I never said that—but partly what this war is about. To finance the new order. Look at this damned palazzo, for a start. Whose is it?”

“Count Salmatori’s. You want to finance the new order out of that bit of porcelain there and those damask curtains? That silver Neptune would fetch a few hundred francs. You, citizen, would like a little loot for the palazzo Saliceti that is to be, and I’m not going to have any looting. We’re here to make friends and respect property. I know what the Directors want to do with Italy—ransack it and then exchange it for the Rhine frontier. Have you ever considered that it might be a sort of duty to bring the Revolution here? Or is that too naive a notion?”

Saliceti felt the coffee pot and found it cold. “Send for some more, will you? Victor Amadeus is the enemy still. He’s priest-ridden, tyrannical, bigoted. He’s also father-in-law of the Count of Provence. The man they call Louis the Eighteenth. He’s got to be thwacked and punched and throttled, which means he has to vomit up gold and silver till it hurts.”

“Oh, that will happen. But it will all happen officially and legitimately, with papers signed and countersigned and damned great seals on them. But if I catch you, sir, citizen, encouraging the acquisition of loot, then I come down with the chopper.”

“Do you realize that I represent the Government in Paris? Do you realize that you’re a mere salaried employee whose task is to win battles for your masters? Do you realize that the chopper can come down for you on the squeak of a pen?”

“Oh, Christophe, if I may still call you that—We used to be friends before you got this liking for feathers—Oh, don’t you see that times are changing? Those old Representatives to the Armies—all of two years old—where have they gone to? They didn’t work. You, and the rest of the new Commissioners, represent a step down. A good revolutionary general doesn’t need orders, he only needs supplies. Nobody ever had a monopoly of the Revolution, though some of them thought they did. Let me put it simply and say that I am in charge here. No looting. And, if I were you, I’d dress more like a revolutionary. All those feathers, God help us.”

“We’ll see who’s in charge. We’ll see.”

C
itizens Carné, Thiriet, Blondy, Tireux and the rest, not forgetting the flame-headed giant Dupas, the wine and meat of Mondovi working in their bodies, listened to him as he performed his big scene from his white horse, riding up and down the ranks, the great tail swishing (more flies here, more dung, fertile plain, thank Christ we’re finished with those fucking mountains). “…And we outflanked them, we’re over the Po, and we’re only a few miles south of Milan … And they’re across that river there, the Adda, and it breaks my heart that you can’t do it … Because you can’t, you’ve got cunts between those jelly-shivering legs of yours, there’s not one of you here willing to follow your commanders over that bit of a bridge there … Frightened of victory, that’s what it is, scared of the responsibility of showing these cringing Italian bastards that you’re better than they are because you’d got the guts to throw off your chains … Well, a time for courage comes once, and it’s been and gone for you … There’s a gate there, you see, and all I have to do is give the order to open it and send brave citizen soldiers shouting and screaming to get at the Austrians as they go over, but you’re not the ones to do it, oh no …”

A good act, Dupas thought, it works up the growls in them. Come on, growl, you bastards, I’m tired of just standing here.

They roared, not growled. The drums rattled and the flutes screamed
O come ye children of the motherland the sun of glory fills the sky
and they started to clatter over, some of them going splash over the sides in the press, there being no parapets, and the Austrian guns flaming at them, bloody murder. A few yards from the end some jumped into the Adda and tried to wade ashore, and then the cavalry came at them, sabers and great whinnying horsemouths, and there was not one Frenchman on the further bank, but they still poured across, Massena yelling and Berthier forgetting his stammer and no sight of our cavalry, why the hell couldn’t he wait till he knew our cavalry was across?

And then, by Christ, there they were, Kilmaine and his bony nags and the screaming men on them, right onto the Austrian flank, stopping the guns, until you could hear the thumping and trundling of the feet of the Savoy infantry coming over the bridge over the Adda.

God almighty it was a near thing, Bonaparte was thinking, God almighty it wasn’t planning this time, it was taking a chance, it was impossible gambling that came off, and it tastes like brandy, it feels like that delirious flying moment when you spend into her thighs, now that I know I am a living spirit and a very special one as well as a military library and a craftsman and a machine as modern as a semaphore telegraph or a hydrogen balloon. And suppose the cavalry had not been able to ford that river? They almost did not, almost,
almost
. It is in the region of Almost that the blood sings. We won, my love. Sixteen guns and nearly two thousand prisoners. Prisoners, my love, are such a nuisance. War feeds on war; what do prisoners feed on?

And he took his love’s miniature from his inner pocket to kiss, against a background of bivouac fires, the fried-bacon reek of cannon-smoke fading. Raising it to his lips he nearly staggered. Marmont was concerned.

“Look, Marmont—the glass is broken.”

“Well, then,” smiling, “our first task in Milan must be to—”

“No no no. It means she is very sick or very unfaithful. Oh God God God.”

“Don’t believe it. We shall be in Milan in a day or so, and she will not be many days after. Murat should be in Paris by now. He will bring her, you will see.”

“Y
ou will be receiving a letter,” Saliceti said. “Meanwhile I am empowered to tell you of the Directory’s intentions.”

Bells bells bells, but now it was merely angelic noontime in Milan.

“The Directory would have made no difficulty about preparing a passport for her,” Bonaparte said. “As for a letter, Murat has written—she is a bad letter-writer, God bless the girl. It seems I am to be a father. You must put off that stern look and have some wine. This absconding archduke kept a good cellar. There’s a fine bin of—”

“I refer to different business altogether.”

“—Chambertin. Business?”

“It is the Directory’s intention to split the command. General Kellermann of the Army of the Moselle—”

Bonaparte sat down on a magnificent uncomfortable chair. He noted a quick irrelevance: mouse-dirt under the escritoire.

“—to continue the northern campaign against the Austrians. You to fight Austria’s southern allies.”

“Kellermann is sixty-odd. He lives on his reputation at Valmy. I am, in effect, demoted.” He picked up the keys of Milan, very heavy, very solid. “Set in his ways, thinks he’s God. I’m not having it. I’ll resign first. Where’s their sense, let alone their gratitude? No, forget the gratitude. Nobody has a monopoly of the Revolution. Said that before, didn’t I? All I say now is that joint command ruins everything. You need the single voice. The fools. One bad general is better than two good ones. Tell them that from me. I’ll tell them myself, I’ll be writing a letter.”

“You mean that about resignation?”

“That’s my duty to the army, not that anybody in Paris cares much about duty. Or should I say it’s all one-way duty with them. I told the army all about the Directory’s confidence in them through me. They’re simple men, they believe in these things, they need them. Now they’re going to have this stuck-up swine with the Austrian name barking at them.”

“Alsatian. I see. You’re just
threatening
resignation.”

“Dirty politicians. You need the single voice.”

“That sounds like a threat too.”

T
hey were sitting in an alcove, taking a sorbet. The swish of the ball-gowns and the clink of the medals came through, along with the sweet and lively violins.

“There was another thing I heard.
General Bonaparte has got off the Po and is now busily wiping up
.”

She laughed, taking care to hide her teeth. Bad teeth or not, he was thinking, she has this very rare thing, can’t quite think of the word. Grace? That sounds religious. Hair covered with roses for her real name, the high-waisted silk sheath made to cling with Cologne water to her breasts, the most delicate instep, the delicious pose of languor. Bonaparte sent letters full of extravagant desires (“feed off your throat, bite off your nipples and watch new ones grow like rosebuds, wear out your little cunt with kisses”), but he, Lieutenant Hippolyte Charles, had the pleasure of real fulfillments, neither poetically extravagant nor Corsican coarse. Call it vicarious, a subaltern’s duty to a general. That she would not find funny, she talked too much of love. And money. She needed money for flowers and gowns and shoes. There were so many victory balls these days. He himself was not doing too well for money.

“How much longer,” he said, “do you think you can put it off?”

“You live one more day, just like in the Carmes prison. Besides, I’m ill, or pregnant—I’m not sure which.”

“Not well enough to make the journey. But Junot and Murat are still waiting. And still writing, presumably. There are also the newspapers, which undoubtedly
lui
sees. Interesting that our poor sick Lady of Victories should be the belle of the Luxembourg ball.”

She looked at him puzzled. “Do you
want
me to go?”

“The poets write of the world well lost for love. True love, as true lovers know, is built on caution. Besides, my own General Leclerc will do anything for Madame Victoire. We could both go. There are some pleasant things to be picked up in Italy these days, so I hear. The fruits of conquest. And Venice is very lovely.”

“Oh, you’re mad.”

“Not really. Too many ears and eyes and noses in Paris. Better to have one pair of eyes, his. All for you and none else.”

“Why do you say Venice? Venice is a long way from Milan.”

“Not for
lui
. You’re always saying how quick he is. One of his big faults, you always say.”

D
appled Tuileries summer sun, mad with motes, danced on the map and on Barras’s ringed finger. “If we gave in, events have proved that we were right to do so. See what he’s done with his unified command. Look. The tricolor all over Lombardy. Florence. Leghorn—one in the snout for the English. Ah, I forgot.” He stuck a toy flag on a Mediterranean island.

“Where’s that?” peered Moulins.

“Corsica. Another one in the snout. That was the Leghorn Corsicans. Back in the fold, anyway. Apart from the actual occupations, there are the various invasion threats. Tuscany, Naples, the Pope. Good hard cash there. He’s already paying his men in silver.”

“Is that wise?’’

“Half silver, the rest paper.”

“And all these damned works of art, as they’re called,” Reubell said. “I’d rather see more money.”

“Paris,” Barras said primly, “is the great new center of culture. Revolutionary culture. Revolutions aren’t just decapitations and screaming women with no drawers on. Beauty and light—aspects of our republican policy.”

“Cramming the museums with saints and the rest of the superstitious garbage,” the hunchback Larevelliere snarled. “Beauty, indeed. We have a solemn mission, and that is to keep the state Godless. If I had the Pope here now, I’d—”

“Yes yes, your well-known zeal continues to be well-known.”

“I admit the cleverness,” Moulins said, “but what worries me is the high-handedness. Look what he said about Saliceti.”

“He has a strong objection to what he terms looting,” Barras said. “He draws a perhaps over-nice distinction between the wholesale and retail varieties of er spoliation. Ethically, that is. Saliceti has, apparently, been engaging in simony.”

“A man’s tastes are his own,” Reubell said.

“Let’s have that plain,” Larevelliere said. “I’m a plain man.”

“Saliceti has been looting churches, selling chalices and ciboria and other godless trappings of godliness. Sometimes ciboria with the consecrated wafers in them.”

“And right too,” snarling. “Show those priest-ridden cretins what superstitious wickedness it all is.”