Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (37 page)

“Rabbits! Rabbits, Berthier!”

Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Marshal of the Empire, Prince of Neuchatel, Prince of Wagram, flushed. He had organized, as Imperial Hunt Master, a great Imperial Rabbit Shoot. He had made a mistake in the ordering of the rabbits, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. Beaters and bearers, the buffet was sumptuous, glorious autumn weather. The rabbits, released, scampered about in joy. N took his gun and prepared to begin the slaughter. But the rabbits believed that they knew N well, an old friend. They were, that was the mistake, tame rabbits. They thought N was their keeper and feeder. They charged him, an army of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. N was astonished. The equerries tried to beat the rabbits back. N was astonished. He retreated astonished to his coach. The rabbits, an act of strategic empathy, split into two wings and did a flanking movement on either side of the hunting party. They were into the coach along with N, supposed feeder and cherisher. The coach moved off in panic for Paris, furry bundle after furry bundle after furry bundle being flung out of the windows of the coach.

“Ignominious retreat,” N said. “Defeated by a battalion of rabbits. Bad staff work, Berthier. You could have done better than that.”

“But, wwwith respppect, it was not my fffault you shshshot Marshal Massena in the in the.”

“Eye. What has that to do with it? That was a boar hunt or something. That was a different occasion.”

“But I was bbblamed for that becccause of the rabbits.”

“Are you feeling all right, Berthier?”

“You wwwounded Massena in the in the while I was in the luncheon tttt. I was nnnowhere nnnear. And yet you bbblamed me for it. Bbbecccause of the of the.”

“Rabbits. I’m sick of hearing of these damned rabbits, Berthier.”

“With resppppect, it was you who bbbrought the rabbits
up.”

“I don’t want to hear any more about the rabbits. It was a shameful business, Berthier, and you ought to try to live it down.”

“Bbb.”

“Do I make myself clear, Berthier? Rabbits, indeed.”

Sugared violets Vendémiaire. Peaches Montenotte. Petits fours Leoben. Coupe Stradella. Bombe Mombello. Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese, breathed vanilla and caraway on the young man, Byronic without the limp, who stood by her, then, fixing her superb eyes on his, made a totally unambiguous rutting gesture. Candied pears Senatus Consultum. A fat duchess, rings and ringlets, was saying: “Can’t let the bugger out of my sight one minute without he’s getting his hand up some little bitch’s skirt. And the more common the better.” Raspberry souffle Fructidor. Talleyrand was thinking: Is it, then, possible to make a new aristocracy? What is breeding? Is talent enough? It is certainly not a matter of good manners. The manners of the old court were often atrocious. It is perhaps, after all, the sense of divine right. There is no such sense here. Not even genius is enough. It cannot last. A smell of incipient decay comes off this table loaded with sweetmeats. Swiss tea is being served instead of Indian; chicory instead of coffee. It is a beleaguered culture. Its dynamic is sustained by war. Look at these dukes and princes, one-eyed or with nicked ears like tomcats, limping, scarred, loud and randy. Our furniture is gold-frogged, our beds look like tents, those stools there look like military drums. But let them dance, there is a time to dance.

Masse de décision, bataillon carré. Fantassins, fantassins, corps d’armée. Grosse-bottes, grognards, grénadiers à chéval. Corps d’observation, G-Q-Général. Voltigeurs, voltigeurs, levée-en-masse. Congé, une poule dans un hôtel de passe.

N was telling them, a drinking crowd away from the dancing, himself with nothing in his hands, hands indeed behind him, about art and politics and human greatness. Voltaire no poet? Nonsense, man. Best test of poetry is whether you can recite it without shame in the open air.
Caesar’s Death
—you know the play? You should. After Marengo I remember saying the lines to the sunset: I have conquered forty years in service and command, Have seen unfold the destiny of a world held in my hand, And have known how each event, the trivial, the sublime, In the fate of states has hung on a single tick of time. But Voltaire didn’t know the Oriental world, had to guess at it. Writing about camels and houris and muftis from Switzerland, can you imagine? The classical spirit rests on exactitude, on exact and accurate rendering of the world closely observed. Look at Gros’s paintings (gave him his start really), five hundred horses on canvas and you can see the torn fetlock on one of them. Art, gentlemen. And why shouldn’t I give the Iron Crown to Crescentini? I know, I know, he’s a singer not a soldier, no bravery in battle there, I know, but, gentlemen, he’s a castrato, isn’t he? Been wounded, hasn’t he?
Eh
eh
? Opera. Nothing like opera. The only art that comes close to the art of war, don’t laugh, gentlemen. Massing of choruses like troops, exact timing. My bands play operatic arias while the battle proceeds. Don’t let me hear that term
tragedy
loosely used. Gods playing about with men, predetermination. Destiny is not up there but in here here here. Told that German that, poet, can’t quite recall his. Politics is destiny—there, write that down, somebody. Not everybody, just somebody. Struggle, clash between strong personalities, idealist and cynic, disparity between the impossibly ideal and the really possible. And always, remember, told this to that fool Benjamin Constant, tragedy must never have chairs on the stage. Tragic characters never sit down. Sit down and they become comic. Think about it, gentlemen. Stand up to live and lie down to die. Yes yes, also lie down to make love if your tastes run that way, but we’re talking now of the representable. Well, we’ve not done badly for tragedy in our age: Raynouard, Brifaut, Lancival.
Tippo-Saib
should last as long the Empire—yes, Jouy wrote that.
Les Templiers
.
Don Sanche
. As immortal as the spirit of man itself. Chateaubriand. That bitch de Staël with the outsize clitoris. Very unhealthy quality there, antirepublican, non-classical. Putting themselves in their books, you know? As though human personalities were more important than society itself. Scotch mists, wishy-washy colors, nothing bold, positive. Where’s the great splash of scarlet, the archangelic shout of gold? Don’t like it, gentlemen, wide-eyed unruly unruled unrulable heroes. Don’t like aquacity, tempestuous formlessness. Keep everything under control, set bounds to nature. Nature must not get the better of us. Greatness? A great man? Self-effacing, subordinating his own interests to those of the community he serves. Incorruptible, loving, even quixotic. And you start with the family, gentlemen. That is the basic community. If a man does not serve his family first, he is unlikely to serve the greater family of state, country, empire.

State country empire and. State country empire and. Madame Mère watched the dancing from her own gilt throne, fanning herself, thinking in dialect. All a big toy for them and they will wake up and grow up when it is too late, glad of their mother then, glad of the pieces of gold tucked away in mattresses and old socks. Jerome there, merry monarch, giving it all away to those Germans in Westphalia or whatever it is called, pockets full of Jeromes as he calls them to give away. Give away to your mother, I say, while your hand is in, and he will be glad of it when the throne tumbles, for the game will not last forever. Pauline a disgrace sleeping with any pretty man she takes a fancy to, but it is the family fire, I know, they must learn to control it, nature should not get the better of them, the family beauty too is there. It has missed poor Élisa, married to that gutless fiddler, a great one for fiddles she is, what with that Paga something man at what she calls her court, Lucca, good for olive oil but not much else, Princess of Lucca, a lot of nonsense, still, a good businesswoman, though women should have nothing to do with business, all those busts of Nabuliune from Carrara marble. Four hundred fifty francs each is it they are fetching in Paris? And Louis become a proper Dutchman, King of Holland, all a big game, but poor Louis will not last with that weakness in the blood. Poor boy, he was in my dream last week, in his mother’s arms. And Joseph giving the Spanish what he calls freedom of worship and conscience and they bang right back at him with only the Catholic faith, they’re right, it doesn’t do to play about with religion. I told His Holiness the Pope, just imagine, I told him they would all come back to it when they’d played their little games of being atheists and freethinkers and so on, they’ll all come back to it on their deathbeds. Well, it will be pleasant enough back in Ajaccio, the whole family round me and Nabuliune a bit chastened, and talk about the great games they all played. For games it is and no more, all they’re fit for perhaps, but that is the aristocratic blood coming out, too good for common work. And yet
honor
, which Nabuliune is telling them all about now, is not quite a game, for without honor we are nothing. Anything for honor. That was always said in both our families: the honor of a Corsican. And when as a little girl I would ask what it was this honor, they told me not to ask because if you try to see what honor is made of then you pull it to pieces and cannot put it back together again. You must merely honor honor, that being the only honorable thing in the world.

Honor: the trumpets said it. Honor: the drums. The winter night sky of Paris had fireworks in his honor imposed on it, streaking like signatures on black parchment or else stamped like fiery seals. He was in his coach with his Empress, drawn by eight bays, on his way to the theater, for the première of Enuiluban’s mythological heroic drama, written and performed in his honor. The coach passed fountains, water heroically tamed, with stone elephants trunking out great trumpeting jets, tigers snarling but at the same time vomiting water, bears hugging trees whose silver branches were water, goddesses of fecundity with the eternal milk of water gushing from their nipples. Holding torches aloft, the people of Paris did him honor, and his memory whirred like an oiled engine and dealt out names to attach to some of the faces split open with cheers. Montreuil, a discharged corporal with a wooden leg; Cambrai, a bowed tailor; Montdidier, a cheating quartermaster-sergeant who had been forgiven and pensioned-off; Vervins, whose bravery was an aspect of his stupidity; Vouziers, a craftsman good at delicate goldwork; Rouen, who could smell out water two miles off; Lisieux, whose teeth were like millstones and who could grind hay like a horse; Bernay, who once drank clinical alcohol and ran a mile in a straight line; Avranches, who had offered his pocked houri to give him comfort in the bad Egyptian time; Mortagne, with two hooks for hands; Fougeres, a known bugger; St. Brieuc, a former lieutenant who could recite Horace by the yard; Morlaix, a pastry cook who did wonders with jam; Pontivy, who knew a horse as another man might know a machine, but whom horses hated; Laval the palindromedary, so once called in joke not understood at Cairo; La Flèche, shortsighted and blunt of speech; Cholet the cheeseman; Ancenis with the crude tattooed crucifixion on his back; Loches the sugar-lover; Romorantin the sycophantic banker, soon to be ruined; Veuve Auxerre, whose husband had been overcomplaisant; Montbard, who carried Dijon mustard in his haversack; Langres, who screamed in his dream that the Mamelukes were cutting his head off; Vesoul, author of a little tract on the possibility of developing mobile telegraphs for the use of the Great Army; Pontarlier, an undistinguished drummer-boy with a wart one inch above his navel; the whole family Charolles, drunk down to the eight-year-old daughter; thin wan Belley of the disgraced 69th; Montluçon the toymaker; Confolens, who was said to have killed a priest at Cognac (where, by the way, they had the best bottle-corks in the world); Montmorillon, seller of children’s windmills not far from the Tuileries; Jonzac the joker—

A man in rags, evidently unarmed, broke through the hedge of soldiers and made for the imperial coach. Strong arms grasped him and drew him away, but he shouted:

“I’m in love with the Empress! I adore the Empress!”

“My friend,” said N calmly, “you have chosen the wrong person in whom to confide.”

Fontenay the poor man’s lawyer; Sarlat, who in a charge would cry
Reculez pas, drollos!
; Parthenay, who swore he was a virgin; Dax, a clerk in the Department of Statistics; Bayonne, curator of a very small museum specializing in bees, founded by N; Condom-Mirande-Castelsarrasin, a man too trivial for his name; Florae, a cook whose ineptitude made him a sort of genius but who, when Indian tea had been available in France, had been able to make a really reviving strong dish of tea in the English manner; Tarbes the satirical poet, who had once written a sonnet on the imperial fart, in which appeared the lines:
That sweet
efflation speaks as Memnon’s statue speaks: Oceans of wisdom
sound in one soft wind that breaks;
Draguignan, who loved to fish in the Var; Le Vigan with his eternal card tricks; big Albi and little Castres, inseparable friends; Limoux from Narbonne; Narbonne from Limoux; Céret, who had prophesied a successful invasion of England in the Year IX; Gourdon-Figeac, furniture-maker; Brive, fine silkman; Mauriac, who had conceivably the best singing voice in the 47th or was it the 74th, discharged now because of a gangrened foot; Isère, who swore his cousin owned half the property of Grenoble; Nyons, who was always Going To Die, but never did; Issoire, Ambert and Riom, who had a complex sexual relationship; St. Julien, who always talked of opening an
auberge
near Briançon, a great lover of the Alps; Brioude, a sergeant who saw ghosts at inconvenient times; Nérac the hatter; Montbrison, purveyor of fine wines mixed with fine well-water, found out and fined; Marmande, Gourdon, Vesoul, Saunier, others others, millions of others.

The rain struck some three minutes before the completion of the journey. It was exceptionally heavy and it sent many of the torches hissing out and the bearers scampering for shelter, showing their tails. Reinaus, Lousev, Nodruog, Ednamram. Rabbits, N was thinking, watching them. But no, those rabbits had run towards him and his gun in expectant joy, sweet innocents. Nosirbtnom, Eduoirb, Moir and Trebma and Eriossi. Helped out of the coach while the trumpets blared welcome, he insisted on standing bareheaded in the downpour. Snoyn, Erési, Cairuam. Lightning split the black sky, chiding the presumption of the fireworks. N saw himself standing there, upright in the presence of the lightning. A good picture for Gros perhaps. The thunder followed, chiding the presumption of the kettledrums. Some stood outside the theater still, cheering wetly, bearing blackened straw smoking up in weak defiance of the rain, and N thought that he did not know the names of any of these.