Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (30 page)

“But,” N said sincerely, “widows and orphans wholesale, en masse, are themselves ha ha comic. Stage direction: Enter a chorus of widows and orphans. Laughter. You see what I mean?”

“Ah no,” and Bessières spat out a fungoid tooth.

“Anyway,” young Eugène said, reasonable as always, “it’s always a smaller number in retreat. Enter left half a million, cross stage, then exeunt. Enter from right ten thousand, cross stage, exeunt. That is, I suppose, funny.” He smiled without hope.

“Men at least have some idea of what they’re doing,” Ney said. “A man knows he may get his guts shot out. But how about the poor damned horses? By my reckoning, and I think Caulain-court would agree with it, you’ve lost two hundred thousand of the poor damned beasts—trained all, cavalry, artillery, transport. That’s why it’s really the end:
no more horses
. Go and urge the mares in the fields of Europe to produce more foals to the greater glory of France. In any case, the bulk of your horse production is in the German-speaking lands, and they’re going to be eager, aren’t they, to foal out cavalry against themselves.
Ach ja ja Herr
Kaiser hier gibt es tausend und tausend Pferdekrafte
. Sometimes you make me very very sick.”

“Oh, I recognize all that,” N said earnestly, “and I want to express really heartfelt gratitude for all your kindness in being so willing to be so exceptionally candid. Thank you
tausendmal
.”

Lefebvre had started picking his forty-odd teeth with a sharp splinter of shell shard. “Tell me, my old one,” he casually said, “what you propose to do when you get back to Paname.”

“Well now.” N smiled and folded pudgy hands on pudgy tum. “The first thing is to be gay and happy. To talk of the triumphant retreat, the great glory of a planned withdrawal. Moscow on fire, no need to tell them whose fire it was. Then balls and balls and balls. Dancing till the happy dawn, Christmas coming soon anyway. Get some gold paint on the Coupole, give the café-sitters something to talk about it. Organize a succulent scandal. Ah yes, revelations from Switzerland. Germaine de Staël of clitoral fame, bitch, always plotting, should not be in the least surprised if she is really behind all the defection. Pamphlets. A personal account of the impotence of Bonaparte. Why Bonaparte would not sleep with me. Well, the batteries of vengeance may now fire. The Imperial Bureau of Obscene Scandal has it on the highest authority that Madame de Staël conducts weekly black masses with human victim. Madame de Staël has gone so far in depravity that she is regularly pedicated by goats from the famous herd of the late Monsieur Voltaire. All that should, I consider, keep everybody more or less happy till the glorious year 1813 clangs in with bells of jubilation. And then,” pudgy hands rolling drily round in each other, “we really get down to work.”

“Alas, poor Yorick,” Davout nervously ventured.

“Yorck, you mean? General Yorck? Nothing to worry about there, I can assure you. A loyal man, though a Prussian. How often do I have to tell you unbelieving bastards that the principles of Napoleonic revolutionary democracy are international? There are Prussian Bonapartists as there are Russian Bonapartists. It’s all a question of time. Anything else, gentlemen?”

“Oooooooh,” Lefebvre yawned voluminously, “such a long long funeral journey. Tell us a story, old one, to beguile the tedious time.”

“Ah, I was always a one for stories,” N smiled. “I could make them shiver round the winter fire in Ajaccio with my tales of specters and headless horsemen. Listen, then, all. It was a dark and stormy night in the bitter depths of winter, and the wind flailed and the hail hailed and the snow came hurtling down in the blizzard like furfur from the lousy locks of God. The young man Leo, whose full Corsican name meant Lion of the Valley, lay warm in his bed when he was shaken awake by an unearthly voice coming straight down the howling chimney. Revenge, the voice cried, revenge. Know, O you noble youth, that I did not fall from the cliff’s edge in a howling storm like unto tonight’s but was pushed therefrom by the villainous Count Paoli, who was unreasonably angry with me because I had dared to defile, as he put it, the chastity of his youngest sister when all I had done was initiate her into the arts of drunkenness and love. Revenge, revenge. The voice ceased and young Leo, Lion of the Valley, at once got out of his bed, wide-eyed, for the voice was of course the voice of his father. He dressed and went out as soon as the tempestuous dawn had arisen, seeking, as his dead father’s voice had bidden him, to encompass revenge on his father’s murderer. But as he left the hovel where he lived with his mother and brothers and sisters it dawned upon him that the villainous Count Paoli was no longer alive, having died drunk and swearing when his clothes caught fire as he was tottering to the hearth of his great hall to make a red-hot poker sizzle into his tankard of mulled wine. But revenge still had to be wreaked, so young Leo went to the castle of the Paoli family but found it locked and barred against all intruders.”

Davout yawned. “Waaarsaaaaw.”

“We’ll be at Warsaw soon,” N soothed. “Do please listen to the story. Poor brave Leo, try as he might, could not effect an entrance into the great castle, but he was able to go to the stables round the back, where the stableman was regularly, at early dawn, in a beery or vinous stupor. Without trouble he stole a fine piebald mare, but the other horses he ruined by knifing their tendons and, while his hand was in, he also knifed the sleeping stableman in the back. His revenge had begun. In the act of killing the stableman it suddenly dawned on him that, at the other end of the island, there dwelt a very poor third cousin of the villainous Count Paoli, a small clergyman with a tiny parish, a man given to books and praying. So, on the piebald mare, he rode and rode and rode till he reached the poor preacher’s dwelling. Come in, come in, my son, you are tired after your journey. Let me prepare a basin of hot bread and milk, sit, sit, rest. And then, while the parson was busy at the little fire and had his back to Leo, the brave and pious boy drew his already bloodstained knife and stabbed the cousin of the villainous murderer of his father many times till he fell dead. Then Leo looked around the small parsonage and saw nothing but books. The better-bound of these books he stuffed into his saddlebag and then rode home, having first fortified himself with bread and milk.”

“That’s not much of a story,” Eugène pouted. “Besides, it’s horrible.”

“Wait, I have not yet finished. He took, as I said, the books back to his mother and brothers and sisters, one for each. Thank you, thank you, Leo, they all said, but alas we cannot read. Never mind, says Leo. We will feed the fire with them. And he smiled, because he was a good boy and happy that his pious mission was accomplished. There. Do you not think it is a good story?” He beamed all round at them.

Some laughed, some protested, some spat. Caulaincourt, who had somehow got into the coach, said: “It’s a Corsican story, anyhow.”

Murat said: “The story you really ought to tell is about what that Austrian bitch of yours is doing back in Paname. By God, I wager she’s being rogered, in faith. Shagged all ways and coming up screaming for more.”

“It was the same with mother,” Eugène said. “She was driven out of her mind by what she termed, neatly I always thought, Corsican ineptitude. Her theory was that most Corsicans are by nature homosexual but rarely willing to admit it.”

“It would explain a great deal,” Lefebvre said, nodding gravely and still teeth-picking. “The rage of the betrayed homosexual lover—him and Alexander, I mean. To fail in woman-water and then to fail on manland—what’s truly left, faith, for him to do? He can’t even make water, by the way, without getting into a foul temper, and then he pisses squirt squirt all over his breeches.”

“Breeches bridges,” Davout said. “He’s done well enough, faith, so far with bridges, but you mark my words a bridge at the last will let him and all of us down.”

N listened to this, panting hard, looking from face to face with growing first incredulity and then anger. “Faith,” he breathed, “you talk of faith, all ye of little faith. INRI. Imperatorem Napoleonem Regem Interfaciamus. I know what’s in the collective mind of the whole collection of you, traitors. I’ll make sure your third cousins are safely knifed, never fear. It won’t sink into your fat minds what I said about the wafer-thin membrane between the ridiculous and the sublime. Fat, yes, fattened on the kingdoms and duchies I’ve given to you as if you were my own brothers and cousins. I’ve a mind to replace the whole fat lot of you with young keen leaders who have their way to make. And then of course you’ll cry
vendetta
and kill the King of Rome. My baby. My poor little boy.”

“Of this you’re sure?” Davout said seriously. He crossed one leg over the other and let the top one gently oscillate from the knee down, leaning forward seriously. “You know it’s yours? You have
proof
?”

“Look at this,” N said furiously quietly between his teeth, “and then talk to me of
proof
.” He had some difficulty in lowering his breeches. Where was that black bastard to help him? “Have to cut them,” he panted. “That knife,” Murat said, “looks razor-sharp to me, vendetta-sharp so to speak. Do be careful.”

The scream, muffled by the curtains of the sleeping coach and by the rattling jingling squeaking clopping was heard by the driver, who shrugged it off. Roustam, on the box, also heard it but he did not shrug. Instead he nodded with obscure Mameluke satisfaction. Kismet and so on. The hand of Fatmah. That town in the snowy distance there was called, apparently,

H
is Grace the Duke of Tarentum sang bitterly in the bitter cold one of the earlier of the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore:

Sweet the groves

Where love and I lay dreaming

Swans on the waters gleaming

He, Étienne-Jacques-Joseph-Alexandre, was surnamed MacDonald, a name romantically exotic to some of the more literate of his fellow-officers, whom it had reminded of, during the time of the popularity of Ossian, Ossian. Scottish, yes, he had at first bothered to tell them, but Irish by persuasion. Still, they turned it into a sort of French name anyway and he had now for a long time been taken wholly for French. Marshal of the Empire with a fair duchy. A multiracial Empire anyway, and just look at the Great Army, what was left of it, now shambling home, whatever home meant. French mixed up with Poles, Dutch, Hessians, Swiss, Mecklenbergers, Croats, Bavarians, Württembergers, Portuguese, Illyrians, Italians, Saxons, Westphalians, Austrians, Neapolitans, Badeners, Prussians and again Prussians. His own Tenth Corps, Left Flank of the Army, had hardly a Frenchman in it—nearly all Poles, Bavarians and Westphalians. Until recently there had been Prussians. But now there were no Prussians.

He was riding, with half a corps only, through snow and ice toward Königsberg. The New Year had just about begun, and he had received his orders to retreat from the Riga area on December 18. Withdraw the flanks, we are evacuating. He had been a long time taking in the story that, in bits and pieces, got to him in Riga. Not possible, it just did not seem possible. He had always believed the Russians would come to terms, he had always rather liked the Russians, a people not unlike the Irish—drunken, lachrymose, manic, pious, unpredictable. Ah, but it was the unpredictability, was it not? Anyway, he had left the Riga area on December 19, making first for treacherous Tilsit in two columns. Not much of a Christmas, not much of a New Year. On Christmas Day the Russian Diebitsch had isolated the second column, the Prussian one under General Yorck—seventeen thousand Prussian troops, sixty French guns. General Yorck, a Prussian with an English-sounding name—he, MacDonald, had sometimes called him, for his pinkness and fatness,
Jambon de
Yorck
—had made no secret of his resentment at being dragged, on the orders of his own timorous monarch, into a campaign he detested. So the Russians and the Prussians had looked at each other for a long time—from Christmas Day to New Year’s Eve—and General Diebitsch had talked and talked with General Yorck, and now here it was, the Prussians turned into neutrals. For the time being neutrals. Seventeen thousand men and sixty guns. The Convention of Tauroggen. He, MacDonald, Duke of Tarentum, had known all along it was going to happen.