The Barbed Crown (13 page)
S
o I returned to Paris as a dubious double agent, armed with the Jaeger rifle and ancient crossbow. Both fascinated Harry. I continued to leave reports for Smith in the Saint-Sulpice confessional without police interference. It was unlikely that anything I reported would frighten the British to sue for peace, but my cooperation with Napoleon allowed me to stay in the capital until the emperor’s formal coronation. As usual I got no reply from my English spymasters, and no money, either. Réal’s police had destroyed royalist communication,
allowing my missives to go out but nothing to come in.
As compensation, we now had a French stipend. My wife plunged more deeply into her studies in the archives. And Catherine, our ardent royalist dedicated to Napoleon’s overthrow, seemed more than willing to help with the winter’s coronation, since I’d persuaded her we had no choice. She came back from a meeting with Josephine positively giddy at her brush with celebrity. “I can spy from inside their family!” she justified.
The latest gossip was that Napoleon’s sisters had refused to carry Josephine’s coronation train and didn’t relent until their brother threatened to cut them off. More than pride was at stake; the coronation would put Josephine ahead of the emperor’s blood relatives in honor and inheritance. Napoleon was also replacing the fleur-de-lis, the lily symbol of French royalty, with the bee, emblematic of his own industry and hive-like order.
“He says the Invalides presentation in July was entirely inadequate, and that he wants a coronation more magnificent than any in history,” Catherine reported. “No expense is being spared. The coronation costumes for the royal couple will each exceed one hundred thousand francs. The jeweler for the crowns is Marguerite, with Nitot jealous he’s contracted for lesser ornaments. There are companies and platoons of costumers, tailors, and embroiderers. Nuremburg, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Saint-Denis all offered what they claimed was Charlemagne’s original sword, so to avoid choosing one and insulting the others, Napoleon is having a new one made. The planned music consumes 17,738 pages, and if every oath, prayer, and hymn that people propose is offered, the coronation will last until the Second Coming.”
She gave these breathless reports with censor and envy. “Napoleon has had dolls made of the invited dignitaries, and he and his wife move them around on a plan of Notre Dame like toy soldiers.”
“Astiza and I kept our shipboard wedding simple. A scrap of sail for a bridal train and ‘Yankee Doodle’ as wedding march.”
The comtesse shuddered. “I’d seek annulment. Or stab you in your sleep.”
Both women were so busy that more of Harry’s care fell to me. I was proud that even at four he could puzzle out some words in books, convinced that his genius reflected the supple seed of his father. All parents hope their children will prove, in the face of contradictory evidence, the brilliance of themselves.
I met again the mathematician Gaspard Monge, who’d made himself an expert on cannon and who lightened and simplified the French artillery train. Monge was one of many savants employed in state service. While Fulton’s experimental steamboat sat abandoned on the Seine and his submarine rested at the bottom of Tripoli harbor, resulting in the American decamping for England, different French schemes were being pushed to dig tunnels under the Channel or lay a pontoon bridge across it. Another proposal was to drift in vast “floating forts” that would fight off English ships with stupendous batteries of artillery. I was directed to contact Jean-Charles Thilorier, who proposed balloons that could lift three thousand men and horses.
It was at the end of September that I introduced myself to Thilorier with a letter from Napoleon’s staff that described me as a Franklin protégé, expert in electricity, military consultant, and scholar of Aztec flying machines. I showed him the gold model.
“It clearly shows the ancients were masters of the air,” he told me. He turned it about. “Unless this is merely one of their gods, like a winged Mercury. Or a bird. Or an insect. Or a child’s toy. Or something entirely else altogether.”
“The ancients did do a poor job of leaving explanatory notes.”
“Was the past more advanced than the present, in your opinion, Monsieur Gage?”
“One would hope so. And that the future is not even further downhill.”
“You and I are men of tomorrow, so we must invent devices to make life better, not worse.”
“I’m not sure aerial machines will accomplish that.”
“Perhaps your electricity?”
“It will get hair to stand on end, and can make a magnet out of a spike wrapped with electrical wire. I invented an electric sword, but it was the devil to keep powered. It’s difficult to see how electricity will ever be practical, though it’s great fun at dinner parties. I smack the ladies with an electric kiss.”
He looked at me warily. “Perhaps we’ll have more practical success with balloons. Here’s my idea: why spend hundreds of million of francs trying to defeat the English navy when we might fly over it? If we simply scale up existing hydrogen balloons, I calculate we could transport a regiment at a time. Wait for a favorable wind, hoist them aloft, and descend on London.”
“So long as the wind doesn’t shift and carry them out into the Atlantic.”
“If they landed anywhere in Britain, they’d cause chaos. The first step, of course, is to test the idea with smaller models. Can you help?”
“My son can load them with lead soldiers.”
I learned that an aeronautical device that looks logical on paper can prove maddeningly difficult in practice. Even on calm days our experiments tended to drift unpredictably. One ran into a church tower, and another exploded in a bright ball of flame from a cause we never discovered. A line broke on a third balloon, its basket tilted, and Harry’s toy soldiers tumbled out in a distressing dribble that extended across three cow pastures. I spent an afternoon helping him look for his little army. He still cried when seven stayed missing. Astiza decided she didn’t want my son around eccentric inventors and kept him with her.
Next, Thilorier and I built a one-third-scale mock-up, a project still so vast that it required a silk bag twice as big as those usually sewn. To test its lifting capacity, we invited cadets from the École Militaire to climb aboard, but their professors wouldn’t let us risk them. Instead, we flew ourselves with two hobbled donkeys, a pig, and fifty bags of millet. The combination was a poor choice because the animals kept trying to get at the grain.
It was a fine October day, the last leaves turning, and initially I found it fun to drift over farmyards and wave at pretty milkmaids below. But the sun on dark harvested fields created a thermal of rising air that lifted us higher than we planned, and when the savant released gas to bring us down, we plunged once we drifted out of the updraft. We eventually crashed into trees and had to hire three farm laborers to help lower the terrified animals with a rope. The bag was ruined.
When Thilorier asked for more money to try a full-scale version, he was turned down. “We do not believe your experiments are sufficiently advanced to chance the fortunes of a regiment,” the War Ministry informed us.
I was relieved. I’m happy to lend ingenuity, but Thilorier was balmy.
Astiza was having better luck.
A peculiarity of Paris, and a sight that added to the nervous edge of the times, was the constant cortege of funeral wagons taking exhumed bones from city cemeteries and dumping them into new catacombs. These underground ossuaries were established in the tunnels of limestone quarries that ran under the capital. More than a millennia of burials had crammed city churchyards so full of remains that there was no room for either the dead to sleep or the living to redevelop, so more than a million corpses had already been dug up, dusted off, and wheeled through the streets for quick reinternment, the skulls anonymous as cobblestones. Authorities said there were famous people in the bunch, but you couldn’t tell their notoriety now.
Harry asked about the funeral wagons with detached fascination; while he understood in theory that he would someday die, at age four the prospect is an abstraction. He liked the way men doffed their hats as the big black dray horses plodded by, and the rattle of their cargo.
One day my wife proposed that we descend to this bizarre new crypt.
“All in good time,” I tried to joke.
“The catacombs are deserted at night. Even after the rationality of the revolution, men fear spirits. But that gives us privacy. A chemist asked that we meet him there.”
“A chemist? Do we need drugs?”
“We need his guidance, and it was mere chance I stumbled upon him. In the Bibliothèque Nationale I finally got access to some archives from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, as you know, were the height of religious conflict and philosophic speculation in Europe.”
“I didn’t know, but go on.” People are always fighting and always speculating, it seems to me, and I’m not certain why historians bother to keep track.
“From those books in the Mazarine Gallery I descended to the library’s crypt, a warren of shelves stuffed under low Roman arches. Candles dimly light it, the shelves are dark oak, and the heavy leather-bound volumes have the scent of age and lost wisdom. It’s called the Saint-Denis scriptorium, named for the patron saint of Paris, the early Christian martyr.”
“The stink of lost wisdom,” I corrected. “Mildew.”
“I was searching for histories of the monk Albertus Magnus, looking for references to this Brazen Head. One tome had mention of an automaton, calling it no more than a legend, but said it was part of a wider quest for physical and spiritual alchemy. Wizards of the time didn’t just want to make lead into gold, they wanted to lift the soul into heaven. As such they were trespassing on church prerogative and were hunted down as heretics. But
curiously pressed on that page, as if left as a message, was this.” She held up a dried rose, stem and thorns squashed flat. It was brown as paper.
Rose, the name of the redheaded spy and the symbol she’d said to use to signal her. Odd coincidence. “What does a flower have to do with the catacombs?”
“Why would it be left in a book of ancient wisdom? No lover would be likely to find it there. No, it was a message for someone seeking knowledge. I took the stem with hope and foreboding.”
“You stole this from the library?” She was so virtuous that this act of thievery surprised me.
“This was left as a sign. For a week or more I pondered what it might mean, and then one day I acted on the name of the scriptorium and walked the length of the rue Saint-Denis.”
“Known for its ladies of the evening.”
“So was it coincidence to happen upon an apothecary that had a red rose on the swinging sign above its door?”
“A common enough decoration, surely.”
“I went inside, not at all certain what I was looking for, and then saw a wizened chemist with a bent back and shuffling gait. He reminded me of Enoch in Egypt, and he wore a most unusual symbol in revolutionary France: a wooden crucifix.”
“Religion is making a comeback, apparently.”
“The juxtaposition came to me instantly: Rosicrucians.”
She’d intrigued me. The Rosicrucians are a secret society seeking ancient wisdom that is tied into any number of others, including my own Freemasons, Cagliostro’s nefarious Egyptian Rite with which I’d tangled, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Scottish Rite, and so on. There’s a lunatic lacework of all these groups, and I’ve been tangled in their nets in my travels. “The rosy cross, symbol of their order,” I said. “It stands for knowledge, sacrifice, and redemption.”
“Exactly.” My familiarity with such things made me suitable as her husband. “So on a hunch I took out the pressed flower and said I’d been told that with the right alchemy, the petals could bring great power. His old eyes glimmered, and he studied my face carefully. ‘You’re not French,’ the chemist said. ‘Egyptian,’ I replied, ‘but a member of all nations, and all races.’ After
consideration he beckoned me to a back room with shelves of chemicals and asked where I’d found the blossom. I said in an old book. And he said, ‘A rose can prick and a rose can seduce, and sometimes a rose can also lead to foresight and immortality.’”
“The promise of the Rosicrucians, and the Brazen Head.” I felt a chill, as if once more we were being led on paths winding and perilous. We’re all puppets, Réal had said, and not just of each other but some higher power. Napoleon had told me several times he felt driven by unseen forces, and my own life had become nearly as strange as his.
“I said yes,” Astiza recounted, “and he said that we must meet to discuss possibilities further. He invited us to the catacombs.”
“Like being invited for dinner in a dungeon, by a dragon.”
“He wants to learn what we’re about and decide whether to help us.”
“What’s this chemist’s name?”
“He gave it as Palatine, the noble title given to the famed alchemist Michael Maier by the Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia, two centuries ago. Maier was a German doctor who studied the teachings of the rosy cross.”
Yes, I’d certainly married a pretty bookworm. “And this Palatine left his flower in a dusty book and then waited for someone to bring it by years later? That’s more patience than a fisherman throwing a line into the polluted Seine.”
“Perhaps it was left by others. Perhaps the Brazen Head prophesized when it would be found, and Palatine set up shop accordingly.”
“To wait for us.”
“To wait for whoever found it. We’re to find something more, I believe, which disappeared in Germany or Bohemia during the Thirty Years’ War.”
“Good heavens. So instead of toppling Napoleon we’re on his errand, instead of quietly retiring we’re spying for all sides, and instead of setting up a home like a normal married couple we’re lusting after a lost object of supernatural power. Just to be clear about the mess we’ve mixed for ourselves.”
“We’re reconstructing a lost history, first in Egypt and the Holy Land, and now here in Paris and central Europe. We’re seeking not for Bonaparte but for ourselves, and not for treasure but for wisdom.” She took my arms. “I’ve felt directionless since we returned to France, Ethan. Now I realize we’ve been put here to participate in great things.”