The Barbed Crown (9 page)
Now his smile widened, his eyebrows elevating. “Your reputation for wit and perception is deserved. And you study the ancients?”
“Yes. You’re a student of history, Grand Chamberlain?”
“Of power, for the good of mankind.” He looked about. “Ah, Monsieur Gage, how triumphant this all is, and how anxious! Napoleon is out to create a new court in order to be accepted as an equal by royal houses that despise and fear him. It’s a longing that will bring much blood, I predict. No new emperor can compete in stature with an ancient line of kings. I’m his servant, but I’m also nostalgic for the less complicated past. Before the revolution men knew their place, beauty was worshipped, and life was refined. Now everyone is sweaty and striving. Those who didn’t experience the security of a king will never know the full sweetness of living.”
“Sweetness for a few,” Astiza said. “Most were starving.” My wife is disturbingly honest.
“True, true.” His agreement was judicious, as if we were discussing insects. “Still, there was a civility that was lost forever. Ask your governess. She’ll tell you.”
So he knew Comtesse Marceau’s background as well. A fine hive of spies we were. “She already has,” I said.
His hand fluttered. “So many swords, so many uniforms! This is a masculine age, Madame Gage. The years of the king were a feminine era. Marie Antoinette was slandered, but the truth is she was kindly, sweet, and deserved veneration, not beheading. I believe ages come in cycles, the wise domesticity of women alternating with the heroic aggression of men, peace cycling with war, and grace followed by grandeur. Both, I believe, are necessary for human progress.”
“You’re a philosopher, Grand Chamberlain,” my wife said. “And a believer in progress?”
“Progress that always comes at a cost.”
I felt rustic next to this worldly adviser, chaperoned by a giant, and surrounded by men who might kill me if they knew all my alliances. In a crush of five thousand people, I felt lonely, save for my wife. “This gathering sparkles,” I said without conviction. “And congratulations on your own elevation, Grand Chamberlain.” Compliments are never wasted.
“Regimes fall, but I do not.” He said it lightly, and then regarded me more intently, suddenly all business. “I was disappointed not to have more correspondence from you on our strategy for the American frontier.”
That hapless adventure had been three years before. “Again, I’m surprised you remember. In any event, I didn’t find a postal system among Red Indians. But as you’re no doubt aware, I came back to help with the sale of Louisiana to my own country. I was delighted it was successfully concluded last year.”
“Yes, a bargain for both of us. I understand an exploration of it is under way by Jefferson’s secretary, a man named Lewis, with a frontiersman named Clark.”
“Clark, too? I’ve met both. An able pair, but then Jefferson is a good judge of talent.” I implied we could include me in that roster.
“A Frenchman joined them, my correspondents tell me. A voyageur you knew by the name of Pierre Radisson.”
“You follow the travels of Pierre? You are remarkably well informed.” So my old friend was off with Meriwether Lewis. The West was where he belonged.
“It’s a small world,” Talleyrand said. “And will they succeed?”
“They are very capable. But the United States has become very big.”
“I’ll be interested to hear what they discover. We’ve little idea what we sold you.” That thin smile again.
What was this about? We were spies, not ministers, and the business of police, not ambassadors. Why was Talleyrand bothering with us? “You’re working, I trust, for an end to the present war with Britain?” I said in order to say something. “The United States wishes to resume trade with both sides.” France was under British blockade.
“The United States spent money for Louisiana, borrowed from a bank in Britain, that the emperor intends to use to conquer England. A small world, indeed. As for me, I’m always working for my country at great sacrifice to myself.” It was a sardonic lie, given that the man made a fortune from every office he touched, be it religious, revolutionary, or imperial.
“Councillor Réal told me the tricolor will soon fly in London.”
“I expect stalemate, Monsieur Gage. France is the elephant and England the whale, and each is struggling to come to grips with the other. Which is why Councillor Réal and I agreed that, rather than just jail and shoot you, we would ask you for advice. To help persuade you to truly help us, you’ve been brought here to see the future of Europe.”
“I doubt the emperor really needs my advice. Nor, might I add, does he need to shoot me.”
“Never forget that he could do so; the Jaeger rifle is to remind you how powerless you are to a man surrounded by an army. I’d hate for you to make a misstep. So tragic for your wife.” His glance at her was now cold. “She, too, must help us as we help you.”
“Am I to speak to Napoleon?” I could barely see the new emperor. He had on a bicorn hat with cockade, pivoted so that the ends pointed toward his shoulders, as he preferred. But at five feet six and sitting, he did not tower like a Charlemagne. He’d lost some of his campaign leanness, too, and was thicker than I remembered. His coat was military blue, his stockings and breeches white, and he wore only a few simple medals. The simplicity marked him apart. A man is truly important when he doesn’t have to show it. “I’d have to tunnel or vault just to get to him.”
“The meeting is not here, but at a later time and in a place of his choosing. Today is just to remind you of his power.”
“I am reminded.”
“Are you willing to contemplate what Réal suggested?”
I had to be careful. “I’m doubtful of the utility of such a course, but I’m also trying to save my family. I become ever more confused as to which side I’m really on.”
“That just means you’re able. Napoleon says all intelligent men are hypocrites.”
“Half a compliment, I suppose.”
“And I think Napoleon is not only intelligent, but a genius.”
I was surprised. Talleyrand by reputation had a cynical view of the abilities of everyone, especially those he had to answer to. But he was serious.
“Yes, I respect and fear him,” the chamberlain went on. “Like me, he has no friends, but he buys loyalty with reward and keeps his marshals off-balance by setting them against one another. His policemen spy on one another, don’t they, Pasques?”
“No good policeman trusts another,” the giant grunted.
“His ministers compete for favor to get their budget. Every decision goes across his desk. I’ve never seen a man work harder. Reward, divide, control. He understands power better than any politician I’ve met.”
“But to what purpose, Grand Chamberlain?” Astiza asked.
“That is a tremendously insightful question. Too few ask it.”
“I hope you’re sharing your own wisdom with him.”
“I share my experience. History will decide if it’s wisdom. Ah, it’s beginning.”
The drama unfolded as scripted. There were hymns and patriotic songs. A parade of flags, including banners captured in battle and tricolors impressively shot through by bullet and shell. Octave-Henri Gabriel, Comte de Ségur, was master of ceremonies. The Comte de Lacepede was inducted as the Legion’s first grand chancellor. He gave a windy speech, a roll call of the Legion’s grand officers was read, and then the chosen legionnaires came forward to receive their medals. The first, a wounded and crippled veteran of the revolutionary wars a decade earlier, had to be helped up the stairs for Napoleon to tenderly pin on the medal. It was a touching sight, even to me.
The requirement was service, the motto “Honor and Fatherland,” and the pay to Legion members ranged from 250 francs for an ordinary legionnaire to five thousand to Lacepede. As usual, the less a fellow needed the money, the more they gave him.
The bauble itself had a noble look. A white radiating star had the head of Napoleon in the center, pinned on the breast as a mark of distinction. No one would accuse the Corsican of false modesty.
“Civilization works through information, Monsieur Gage,” Talleyrand murmured as we watched. “That’s all we’re asking from you, that you convey what you see. As courier or go-between, you can make history.”
“So long as it safeguards my family.”
“Your family will safeguard itself. I’ll pay your new French stipend while you and your family attend Napoleon at the army camps on the Channel coast.” He turned to Astiza. “It was to be five hundred francs a month, but for your cooperation, let’s make it six.”
“You can simply pay the money to my wife here in Paris,” I said.
“But Napoleon wants her, too, along with the boy and the comtesse.”
I was surprised. “For what?”
“He’ll tell you in due time.”
The oath was to both France and emperor, the roars of
Vive l’empereur
shook the church, and at last we were released, long lines of men lining up at temporary privies to pee.
As the mob slowly carried us outside, I put a question to Talleyrand. “To a realist does such ceremony matter? I mean, a trinket and a ribbon? It’s like trade goods to the Indians, isn’t it?”
“Napoleon heard the same doubt in his Council of State. To which he replied, ‘By such toys are men led.’”
N
apoleon watched England from a gray wooden gallery with glassed oval ends, nesting on a bluff above Boulogne. The pavilion was built near the legendary site of Caligula’s Lighthouse, erected when that mad Roman emperor dreamed of conquering Britain and fired catapults at the water when storms dashed his chances. Soldiers called the one-hundred-foot-long aerie “the Big Box.” When Channel squalls blew, the pavilion was a cozy refuge. On clearer days, a telescope gave a view of the white cliffs of Dover and the British navy between. A long table inside was strewn with maps of England and its shoaling shores.
There was only one chair. Attending generals were required to stand in order to keep meetings short. When Napoleon launched into monologues, they leaned on the hilts of their sheathed swords to give their legs relief.
The emperor’s panorama was like that of a giant child with an unlimited supply of toy soldiers. The Channel shore had been dubbed the Iron Coast for its menacing artillery batteries. On the sloping meadows around the French seaport was a vast military city of eighty thousand men, living in mud-and-wattle barracks with thatched roofs and smoking chimneys. It was no secret that there were thirty-five thousand more drilling in Saint-Omer, fourteen thousand at Dunkirk, twenty thousand at Ostend, and ten thousand at Bruges, along with ten thousand horses and hundreds of field guns. All of this I had duly put in coded messages with sympathetic ink and passed to Sir Sidney Smith, as Réal cheerfully suggested.
Waiting to take this army across the Channel were thirteen hundred boats classed as
prame
, chaloupe, bateau, or péniche, with another thousand under construction.
The quest was hung with history. Napoleon had displayed the famed Bayeux Tapestry in Paris the previous winter, reminding the French of their success with the Norman conquest of England in 1066. And William the Conqueror had led a platoon compared to this lot.
But patrolling offshore, like sentry dogs, were scores of English ships.
Elephant and whale, indeed.
My family and Catherine rode in a coach from Paris to Boulogne on the swift stage roads we’d avoided before, us chattering and our escort Pasques as mute as a mummy. Since the royalists had been crushed and I was supposedly working for both sides, I didn’t understand the need for a watchful policeman, but at least the giant was useful in getting men to slide out of the way at an inn table. He tended to get faster service and hotter food, too, with less need to check the arithmetic of the bill. I like large companions.
It didn’t require a spy to know we were approaching military encampments. Even in summer the roads were churned to wallows from a constant stream of supply wagons. The outskirts of Boulogne had a new tent city of sutlers, prostitutes, moneylenders, horse traders, food wagons, and casinos. As we rode past we were offered pigs, chickens, pastries, bare breasts, campaign equipment, loans, and gypsy fortunes, Harry taking in more of life’s realities than I would have preferred. He was most mesmerized by the uniforms and guns. Cannons thudded in practice drills. Muskets crackled on the firing range. Newly purchased mares were commanded and spurred next to a deliberate cacophony of cannon blast, bugle call, gunshot, drum, and practiced screams from a chorus of village women hired expressly for the purpose, to mimic the cries of combat.
“Why are they yelling at the horses, Papa?”
“A mount is useless if panicked by battle, and so horses have to be trained not to bolt when the noise starts. They have more sense than people and want to run away.”
“Aren’t the horses brave?”
“Nobler than their masters.”
We settled in Boulogne, a small port with cobbled quays and a new stone basin shaped like a half-moon. This was filled with the moored invasion fleet. Larger warships, floating batteries, and underwater chains formed a protective hedge beyond to deter British attack. Four gigantic army camps squatted upslope, three north of the city and one south. A letter from Réal directed me to seek out General Phillipe-Guillaume Duhèsme, to whom I was to offer my eccentric expertise. While the women and Harry explored, I went looking for him.
The scale was imposing. Men of an
ordinaire
, or squad, were housed fifteen to a hut in rows more than two miles long. Soldiers did their best to make these hovels a home. Some were whitewashed, had wooden floors, and some even had secondhand carpets. Next to each were plots for vegetables, flower gardens, and chicken coops. Officer villas were in a row beyond, and kitchens and latrines beyond that.
There were street signs with the names of French victories, such as Valmy, Fleurus, or Marengo. Veterans of the Egyptian campaign set up miniature pyramids or obelisks made of clay and seashells. Pet cats that helped keep away the vermin prowled longingly beneath the birds in the officers’ aviaries.
There were cheerful oddities everywhere. One hut I passed had a pilfered chandelier, another a pair of Spanish bull horns, and a third chairs fashioned from driftwood. Two veteran sergeants occupied these seats, smoking clay pipes and calling out advice and insults to all who wandered past. A garden statue of Venus was festooned with bawdy notes, and another hut had a mast and boom on the roof, with a rotating sail like a weathercock.
Duhèsme was a tall, thin, and restless officer with an anxiously friendly face; his head tended to bob when talking, like a rooster. He wore his bicorn hat at a jaunty angle, and muttonchops held his chin like calipers. His headquarters were in a requisitioned stone farmhouse, staff offices on the ground floor and sleeping quarters above. Three farmwives had been hired to keep house, and two hunting hounds lay like lazy sentries.
“Ah, the American. Did you bring the Jaeger?”
I’d wrapped the rifle in oilcloth to discourage thieves from its gleam of gold. It was opulent enough to be embarrassing. “I haven’t had an opportunity to use it, General.” I untied the bundle.
His eyes gleamed at its craftsmanship as he reached out.
“May I?”
“Of course.”
He turned it and sighted. “Pretty as a woman. And worth a small fortune.”
“A present from the emperor.” The rifle gave me more credential than a satchel of medals.
“An impressive patron to have in imperial France, though exactly where our empire is—a grand claim for a nation ringed by enemies—has eluded my discovery. I suppose the emperor is an optimist.” He grabbed a tin plate from the table by the house’s kitchen. “And you’re curious about your pretty gun, no? I certainly am. Do you have powder? No? We’ll requisition some. Come, come, let’s give it a try.”
We trudged up a long sweeping hill with the general pointing out Napoleon’s pavilion. “He has an iron bed with a horsehair mattress there, but usually sleeps on feathers on the other side of town, in a mansion called Pont-de-Briques. That’s when he sleeps at all. Mostly he prowls from six in the morning until five in the afternoon, at which time he returns to headquarters to do paperwork, dashing off a hundred orders to all corners of France until midnight. It keeps men at their jobs, I can tell you. He’ll pinch your ear if you displease him, and give you a silver snuff box if he approves.”
“I’m not sure why he brought me here. Perhaps to meet with him?”
“Not today!” He laughed. “Our
petit caporal
took it in his head to be the first to shoot the mighty mortars we’ve installed to hold off the British ships. The monsters fire sixty-pound shells, and a single hit would be enough to sink a frigate. But as a
former gunner Napoleon was too confident, and he stood so close that the roar and concussion deafened him. He’s had cotton in his bleeding ears the past two days and is sour as bad milk.”
An injury report from famed spy Ethan Gage was something Smith could use, I thought. “You mean he can’t hear?”
“Temporarily, the doctors say. Meanwhile, he shouts because he thinks we can’t hear him.” Duhèsme laughed again, an officer of rare good humor. His face was weathered from coastal duty, pockmarked from some earlier disease, and handsome in the lean way of a hound. “His enthusiasm is always getting him into trouble. He’s fallen out of boats and had to swim for his hat, and been thrown by his horse while crossing the river. But his frenzy produces respect. He’s caught sentries napping. He also came upon one soldier they forgot to relieve and took his place on a blustery night, saving the man from freezing. Or so the story goes. Bonaparte is as much legend as fact anymore. What do they think of him in America?”
“The hope was that he’d sustain a democratic republic.”
“Copy the chaos of your United States? I think not.”
“Then what was your revolution for?”
“Liberty. But people in France are tired of freedom. It’s when people can vote that they realize how catastrophic and stupid are the opinions of their neighbors. Better to have a Bonaparte in charge whom you can never remove, and always blame.” He laughed again.
There was a thunder of hooves behind. The general jerked me off the track, and a captain of the Hussars rode past, whooping drunkenly and holding a champagne bottle. Duhèsme gave him a wry salute.
“Your officers gallop intoxicated?”
“It’s his initiation after a promotion. To confirm his new rank, the cavalryman is given three horses and has three hours to gallop a twenty-mile course, all while drinking three bottles of champagne and rutting three whores. The order with which he accomplishes these tasks is entirely up to him.”
“And they accomplish it?” Even I was astounded, and a bit envious.
He winked. “We’re a highly trained army. Are you a military man, Gage?”
“Not by profession. Armies seem to scoop me up.”
“You’ve seen action in the Orient and the Americas, I understand, and by reputation are quite a shooter.”
“I learned on the American frontier but am out of practice.”
“Let’s see you practice now.” We reached a camp firing range set against a dune. Duhèsme placed the plate a hundred paces away. “Show me what your pretty gun is capable of.”
I loaded the Jaeger. Unlike a soldier’s musket ball, a rifle bullet is tightly squeezed in the barrel so it can grip the grooving and spin for accuracy. That means ramrodding takes care, strength, and time. I spent a full minute inserting powder cartridge, ball, wadding, and primer.
“My God, the battle would be over by now,” Duhèsme judged, looking at his pocket watch. “This is how you won the American wars?”
“For speed, use a musket. You can almost drop the bullet in. But to actually hit anything, use a rifle.” I primed the pan, cocked, aimed slowly, and squeezed the trigger. There was a bang, kick, and a puff of powder smoke. Through its haze, the distant tin plate twitched. I felt satisfied. I was rusty but could still shoot.
The general snapped open his telescope. “Just centimeters off the center. Impressive, American. Try again.”
I shot five more times. Every bullet pierced the plate. Then Duhèsme followed, hitting three of four shots.
“Impressive, Frenchman.”
“It’s the gun. The inaccuracy of firearms is the intriguing dilemma of the battlefield. We’ve run tests with our infantry firing at targets the size of horses. With a musket, just half struck the target at a hundred yards. At three hundred, the accuracy dropped to one hit in four. Charging cavalry can gallop that distance in half a minute.”
“Meaning your soldiers get off just one or two volleys.”
“And that’s on a firing range. Put peasant boys on a smoky and hellish battlefield, men bleeding and horses screaming, guns going off in their ears, and we’re fortunate to get them to point their muskets in the enemy’s direction. It took more than four hundred shots at Marengo to produce each Austrian casualty.”
“You might as well wait for them to keel over from consumption.”
“Our soldiers stagger from sixty-five pounds of gun and kit. You need bright uniforms to tell friend from foe in the murk of powder smoke. Drums and bugles because no one can hear their officers. And should the rank be one deep, two, or three? It’s not uncommon for the third rank to shoot the ears off those in the first.”
“The British stand two deep, I’m told.” This was no secret.
“All those men must be fed. A cannon requires ammunition and gunners, and the gunners food, and so a battery of field pieces requires a hundred horses that need to eat in turn. Any economy saves lives and francs. What if our army was armed with Jaegers?”
So that was in it. This Frenchman wanted to mimic Daniel Morgan’s frontiersmen in our Revolutionary War, picking the British off from an impregnable distance. “Rifles are fussy,” I warned. “They take too long to load, are more apt to foul and misfire, and are easily broken. Muskets can take the abuse of an oaf and be loaded by a village idiot.”
“An elite rifle unit, then. Lafayette brought back enthusiasm for skirmishers from your Revolutionary War.”
“Red Indians are most expert, so perhaps you should go back to arrows. They’re silent and don’t emit smoke.”
The idea was meant as a joke, but he took it seriously. “Do you know how to shoot a bow?”
“Regrettably, no. Years of practice are required, I’m guessing.”
“Crossbows, perhaps. Let me ponder that.” Duhèsme had more imagination than most army officers I’ve encountered.
“For every advantage there is a disadvantage.”
He nodded. “You understand war, Monsieur Gage. People think generalship is arrows on a map, but it really is difficult choices, and getting men to function when they’re hungry, thirsty, and exhausted. They seldom know exactly what they’re fighting for, so they fight for friends and flag. Their reward is proof of their own courage.”
“Men fight wars to become men.”
“Indeed.” He cocked his head. “So why are you here, so far from home?”
“My goal is peace, which no one seems to share.”
“You’re not loyal to a flag?”
“I understand being loyal to yourself, your family, and even the country that protects them. If that’s represented by the flag, then of course. But if the flag represents a king’s quest for glory, or a vainglorious general? Then I’m loyal to reason. I’ll retreat or desert if it will save my life.”