Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (40 page)

On over Alpine snow towards Grenoble. At Laffrey, fifteen miles south, the Fifth Regiment of the Line, seven hundred muskets loaded and waiting for the order to level. To the strains of the
Marseillaise
(forbidden under the restored Bourbons) played by his own small Guards band he left his carriage and marched. The muskets were leveled. He unbuttoned gray surcoat and blue tunic, baring his breast. Captain Randon of the Fifth called “Fire!” N said: “Soldiers of the Fifth. Do you not recognize your Emperor? Do you not see here your old General? Well, if you wish to kill me, why do you wait? If you wish to kill your Emperor, here I am.” Captain Randon called “Fire!” N said: “If you believe I am come among you out of a desire to restore my own glory, to further new ambitions, then you are mistaken. Three of the major powers of Europe support my return from Elba. Forty-five of the best brains of the Government in Paris have called for me. France needs her Emperor again. Her Emperor is here, obedient to the wishes of the call of the land we all love.” Captain Randon considered calling “Fire!” He called it and seven hundred muskets cracked. Pistol-shot range. The former Emperor Napoleon the First of France lay dead at their feet. Unthinkable. Yelling, the troops broke ranks. They waved caps that spun on their bayonet tips. Long live the Emperor! They pulled the old tricolor out of their haversacks. “We will march together to restore those principles for which so many of your comrades died. The Bourbons are ruling you without right, without popular election. Where is their contract, where are the plebiscites? Are they not ready to turn back the clock, to reimpose feudal injustice, to squeeze tithes from you? We will not allow it, never, never. We mock our dear dead comrades in permitting such tyranny. On on on to Grenoble, and then the road to Paris and victory and glory and.” Wild cheers, caps in air, tricolor after tricolor after tricolor in the breeze.

A near thing, damned close run.

With a thrum and a thrum on the mettlesome drum and the Bourbons are scum and we’ll soon overcome. The Seventh was sent down to intercept and capture but instead the colonel handed over the regimental colors and, as a token of surrender, stove in the drum. With a thrum to Grenoble we come and the Bourbons are glum. At Grenoble the commander of the garrison was unwilling to open the gates, but soldiers were leaping from the town walls into the arms of N. Peasants carried torches of lighted straw, night falling, and were ready with pitchforks to oppose military disloyalty. As for argument, that was easy: Where was Bourbon Louis’s popular vote? The garrison commander still mustache-biting in indecision, sturdy artisans smashed the town gates open. N rode in on massive worker’s shoulders. Darling of France again. Teach how to dance again.

The inn feast was hearty. Lettuce salad Marie Sarrazin with gratuitous earwig. Roast potatoes, an eye here and there, Jeanne-Louise Sautarel. Onions from the fire stern in burnt greatcoats, gift of the family Auque. A piece of beef. A cluster of golden though tough-thighed fowls. Dry cake from the grandmother of Maurice Lisnard, to be helped down with a slab of hairy butter. Peppered stewed rabbits.

“Rabbits,” the Tuileries guardsmen sneered, seeing the packed bags loaded on to anonymous carts. “Scuttling off to Belgium.”

His Majesty King Louis XVIII flushed yet again as he thought of that new indignity. Some Paris wit had nailed up a notice in a public place: “From Bonaparte to Louis: Dear Brother, do not bother to send any more troops. I have enough now.” He had driven in the seasonable downpour to tell the two houses of assembly that the torches of civil war were being kindled by this incarnate devil, and the troops lining his route had shouted God Save The King, adding quietly
Of Rome
. He had heard, his hearing was alert enough. Ney had defected at Lyons, Ney. He could hear the jungle-snuffle all about him. Best to be off.

“Ignominious retreat,” his ministers muttered. “Not to be thought of. Drive down in open carriage, face him. The divinity of true royalty. He’ll look sick. He’ll bow before it, scuttle off like a rabbit.” It seemed very improbable really.

“Ignominy of my position,” Ney was saying at Auxerre. “I admit I promised to bring you back in a cage. I considered my first duty was to France, sick, sore, weary, and to the physician who, however clumsy his fingers, was charged with restoring her to health.”

“Yes yes yes, I understand, Ney. No recriminations, no punishments. Loyalty is a difficult commodity. You are to me as you were at Borodino. Nothing has changed.”

It all gushed out now. “You have no conception. The haughtiness. We are tolerated because we are useful. The humiliation at court. My wife especially. Because of her humble origins. They sneered at her. How is the chambermaid’s daughter your good lady? The King himself said that to me.”

“All over now, Ney. Don’t fret. The people of France are in the saddle again. I am not leading the way to Paris. They are leading me.”

“The ignominy.”

“No more of that, Ney.”

Guglhupf mit Schlag. Bauernschmaus. Topfenpalatschinken. Marie-Louise, defecting wife, was at Schönbrunn with her one-eyed lover General Count Neipperg. So simple. One little holiday in the Oberland and there it was: a faithful, more or less, and certainly loving husband forgotten. Neipperg, black silk patch adding to his charm, singing his way into her bed. Talleyrand saw his own treachery as of a somewhat different order. A metaphysical treachery, austere, not like hers, which was to do with cooing flattery in her ears, praise of her Mongol cat’s eyes, stroking hands on her arms. He, Talleyrand, had gone to the scabrous limit in denigrating N—incest with his sister Pauline, dropping with syphilis and a ravaged liver, Elba turned into a Sade cellar of wanton atrocity—but it had all been part of a chill and intellectual policy. Well, no further coat-turning was now possible. He must take the lead in denunciation: criminal act, unprecedented in the annals of infamy, enemy of civilization, the major powers must unite, sparing no cost, to drive this tigrine monster to his own perdition, hell as a punishment for creating hell. Funny thing though, Wellington had mused. Nobody told that Louis imbecile to get out. Got out of his own accord, scuttling off to Belgium like a rabbit. The people want old Bony back, no doubt of it. So we make war on the people of France. Has to be, though. Democracy can go too far.

They danced. United Kingdom of Benelux Benelux, Britain gets Malta and Cape of Good Hope. (Plenty for Austria, plenty for Prussia, but nothing at all in the paws of the Pope.) Santa Lucia, Mauritius, Tobago, Ionian Islands, also Ceylon. Swiss get neutrality, Russia gets Poland, so it goes on. But Russia and Prussia, England and Austria vow first to destroy him and never to yield. National banners but crusader’s shield. Seven hundred thousand they’ll put in the field.

N was telling them in the Tuileries, arranging the papers on his desk, finding odd prayer books and sets of rosary beads around and ordering them to be sent, with the Emperor’s compliments, to the former King, properly styled Bourbon Usurper, about his recognition of the fact that times had changed. Change, gentlemen, is the very essence of life. So long as it is not backward change, the restoration of a cruel and unjust past. Liberty, equality and so on still belong to the future. We must work for them. A new constitution is what we first require, and I have asked this admirable young man Benjamin Constant to draw one up. France, our concern is with France. We are happy to keep to the frontiers agreed in 1814. No desire for territorial aggrandizement. Of course, we must recognize that there is an aggressive spirit abroad, fostered particularly at Vienna, and that any attempt on our national borders will call forth immediate retaliation, anticipatory if need be. But none, at the moment, can say I have not tried to sue for eternal friendship between France and her former enemies. I have sent Montrond to see Metternich, I have written a personal letter to the Prince Regent of England. I expect no word of conciliation from either. We must defend ourselves, gentlemen. I am happy to state that volunteers have swelled the army to over three hundred thousand. I have drawn up—see, here it is—a plan for the fortification of Paris. But our primal desire is for peace.

Peace, thought Madame Mère, on her way to join her son. Well, he has had his share of peace. Elba was after all much like Corsica, so that dream of a quiet old age for myself, away from court muck and bowing and scraping, came true. I am glad it did not go on longer. He said it was a matter of honor and he was right. He is doing the right thing. There are not many who are doing the right thing, especially that little Austrian bitch. Loves her still, he says, lonely for her, finds the Tuileries too big to live alone in, moved to the Elysée. Well, she gave him a son, did her duty there, which the other one, though God rest her soul, never could. They said it was when she fell that time, that balcony giving way, but it was loose living, a judgment from God. But now these Austrians will not let him see his son. What sort of a world is it they are building, when a man cannot see his own son? And so long as he is unable to see his own son then you can say that he is in a state of defeat and has lost honor. So it is a matter now of recovering honor and he has my blessing.

“Honor,” N said, seeing the rain ease off. “What do they know or care about honor? It is not the pressures of the Manchester or Birmingham merchants that can inspire soldiers to victory. They have no fire in them, fire of honor. We will throw thunderbolts at them, we will pierce them with lightning. Good sailors I concede, but bad soldiers. The English are bad soldiers.”

“Villainton,” Bertrain said, “is an Irishman. We have had good Irishmen.”

“He’s a bad bad general leading bad bad troops. It will be nothing. It will be a summer picnic.”

“I recommend,” Drouot said, “that you start your picnic at midday. Give the ground a chance to dry out. We need firm ground for the twelve-pounders.”

After midday. “That column on the right flank is Prussian. We can smash Villainton before the Prussians move up. What in God’s name has happened to Grouchy? Where are those cavalry detachments I asked for? There has to be communication between him and HQ. What the hell does Grouchy think he’s doing?”

Two o’clock. “News from Grouchy,” Soult said. “He’s still at Gembloux. He says one Prussian corps has withdrawn to Wavre.”

“Direct movements on Wavre, tell him. And for Christ’s sake establish communication with HQ.”

Later, “That Grouchy is a fucking thaumaturge. Would you not say that only a man of miracles could fail to do something decisive with thirty-four thousand men and one hundred and eight fucking guns? This Blücher is nothing. This Blücher should be wiped out by now.”

“With respect, Sire, don’t underestimate—”

“I say this Blücher is nothing. And this Grouchy of ours is a milksop. Where’s his initiative? Where’s his energy?”

“With respect, Sire, he was only obeying orders.”
Inspiration in war is appropriate only to the commander-in-chief
.

“Well, let’s see how Ney gets on at the other place. And now we have the Guard artillery to worry about. Drouot should be there, but what can we do? Mortier is fucking idiot enough to be ill and who else but Drouot can command the Guard? It’s a damned nuisance.”

One-thirty. “Ney reports launching of first main attack.”

Four massed columns of infantry thrown in, repulsed, losses heavy. No time to deploy. English volleys smack, smash. Lord Uxbridge’s cavalry launch well-timed charge.

Three-thirty. “Ney says English line is in general retreat. He’s sending in the cavalry alone.”

“What?” N screamed. “First infantry without cavalry support, now cavalry without inf—He’ll never break those squares. And now there’s Bulow with his damned Prussians. We’ll have to throw in the general reserve. Fourteen thousand men. That should do it.”

Six-thirty. “Ney reports La Haye Sainte captured. Requests the Guard infantry be sent. Final assault on English center.”

N danced with rage. “Troops? He wants me to send troops? Where the hell does he think I can find troops? Does he think I can make them out of this damned clay? Does he think I’m fucking Prom—”

Seven-thirty. Five battalions of the Guard sent to Ney for his final assault.

“They’re retreating, Sire. It’s over.” Panic, rout. N was incredulous, then he could believe only too well. Everything could be explained, everything always could.

“I’m beat. I’m so tired I could drop.” Helped him onto his horse. A thing never before seen. Helped onto his horse. Retreat to Charleroi. Riding to Charleroi he could explain everything. Strategy had never really changed, even from his first battle. Now well-known, now common knowledge. Now, in their reports,
Bonaparte predictably
—And growing old, though only in forties still, really growing old. Body fags, brain fags. We are not what we were. No initiative among the generals, but then I never wanted them to have it. Initiative was my monopoly. A rational explanation is, though, always a kind of victory. I reject superstition. All those double vees. To Souk he said:

“What’s the meaning of the name? Waterloo, I mean?”

Soult told him. I reject superstition. All is not lost. I can still lay my hands on one hundred and fifty thousand men. To Paris quickly. I can guess what is happening in Paris. Dissolve the legislature? Reign by the axe? No. And by now the two Chambers will have announced that a decree of dissolution is treason. The National Guard will be protecting them. Another abdication.
I
proclaim my son Napoleon II
,
Emperor of the French
. But the boy is a prisoner of the Austrians. I need a new great traitor, of Talleyrand’s stamp. Fouché is well qualified for the post. He will be waiting in Paris, welcoming the victorious Allies.

The victorious Allies marched into Paris, firm pounding crotchets of battalion after battalion after battalion of infantry, the more skittish quarter-notes of the hoofs of cavalry on the cobbles. The sun of early July set the helmets and stirrups on fire and the brass of the horns and trumpets. Blücher looked murderous, the war not yet won until he could with his own hand shoot that outlaw and enemy of mankind. Wellington pointed his stern bony nose into a grim future. There were no flowers thrown. It was, for many reasons, no time of glory. The words of his own report, set to his mount’s clatter, beat in the Duke’s ears. Most desperate business I ever was in ever was in. Never took trouble about any battle about any battle so much so much. Never so never so near being beat. Losses immense especially infantry. Specially infantry. After the infantry and cavalry and gunners and sappers the baggage train came.