The Rape of Venice (59 page)

The change was not so much in the man himself as in the state of things he had created round him. In Paris he had only recently become acknowledged as a young General who might well have a future, and been somewhat feared for his sharp tongue. Here, he moved in an aura of adulation and glory, even grizzled veterans hanging on his words with bated breath whenever he spoke of war. Then, he had not long acquired his first coach, or been able to afford to replace his shabby clothes with such luxuries as an enormous hat laced with a three inch deep band of gold galloon. Now, although quietly dressed himself, he was the pivot around which revolved an amazing scene of pomp and splendour.

Roger had seen many Great Headquarters; not only those of Revolutionary Generals such as Dumouriez and Pichegru, but also those of the Prince de Condé on the Rhine, and of King Gustavus in Sweden. Compared with this, they were all as cottages to a mansion; for this was the Court of a mighty potentate. It was thronged not only with scores of officers in brilliant uniforms and lovely women, but also with ambassadors
from many of the German States, the Swiss Cantons and the lands to the east of the Adriatic, and notabilities from every city in Italy. The presence of these last brought home to Roger more than anything else the fact that from Nice to Venice, and from Rome to the Brenner Pass, the young Corsican, who had celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday only a fortnight before, ruled with supreme power and that, throughout all these many lands, his least word was law.

Nominally he was still the servant of the Directory, but even if he wished to consult them it took the best part of three weeks to get from Paris the answer to a question, and he rarely asked one. Meanwhile he acted like an absolute monarch, and played the part of a King as though he had been born to it.

During the campaign he had fed in private with his staff, and any of his senior officers who had been in the neighbourhood of his headquarters had always been welcome at his table. Now, like royalty, he had his meals served in public, in the great banqueting hall of the Chateau, with two or three hundred people looking on, and his Generals and other persons of importance were invited to eat with him only as a favour. Whenever he emerged from his private apartments, lanes of bowing courtiers formed for him to pass through, no one sat in his presence unless he indicated that they could, men removed their hats when he appeared, and only a very limited number of people enjoyed the privilege of addressing him unless he had spoken to them first.

To augment the semblance of a royal family, he had sent for his mother and his two eldest sisters, Eliza and Pauline, his features had a closer resemblance to those of Laetitia Boneparte than those of any of her other seven living children, and it was from her that he got all his strongest traits of character. His father, Carlo, had given him only a dash of gentle blood, a love of display and an openhandedness with money. The mother was of near-peasant stock. She had lost her husband twelve years before and had had a desperate struggle to bring up her large family. Honest, virtuous, strict and frugal, she had done so in a way that did her great credit; but her natural limitations deprived her of much of the pleasure she might now have derived from her son's rise to fortune. Tall, gaunt, and plainly dressed, her very presence was a censure on the frivolity of Josephine and her circle. Tight-lipped and frowning she showed her disapproval of the adulation paid to Napoleon, whom she continued to regard as an uncertain-tempered
young scatterbrain. Years of scraping had made her chronically mean, and his extravagance appalled her. But she had her principles, and remained the rock upon which the whole family was founded. For that he loved and honoured her.

Eliza was twenty; cold, hard and snobbish, from having been educated, although by Royal charity, at an academy for young ladies near Paris. She had recently married a Corsican noble, named Pasquale Baciocchi. Her mother had been pleased with the match and permitted it without consulting Napoleon. When he had heard of it, he had been furious as he had intended to provide her with a husband having better brains and fortune.

His elder brother, the pedestrian-minded, yet industrious, Joseph, he had had appointed Ambassador to Rome, but he had already usurped the headship of the family from him, and on that account been even more enraged with his second brother, Lucien, than with Eliza. This young man was such a rabid revolutionary that he had changed his name to Brutus, and some time before, in true democratic style, married a girl named Christine Boyer who acted as barmaid in her father's inn at St. Maxime. In the spring of '96, Roger had bought a property in the South of France not far from that little town, to enable him to give out in Paris that he was going to stay there for a while, as cover for secret returns to England; so it chanced that he knew the girl slightly. He thought her pretty, honest and reasonably intelligent, but that did not make up for her lack of birth and fortune in the eyes of Robespierre's old protégé—the poverty-stricken little Captain of Artillery—now that he had become the uncrowned King of Italy.

Pauline, however, was admirably sustaining her new role as a Princess. She was the beauty of the family, a lovely young creature of seventeen, gay, flirtatious and always surrounded by a group of admirers, although she too was married, and had been so only for a few months. But she had married, under Napoleon's auspices, the handsome and gallant General Charles Leclerc.

Louis, Laetitia's third son, was also there. As the only possible means of giving him an education Napoleon had, after a leave in Corsica as a young Lieutenant, taken him back to France. He had shared with Louis his modest lodging, kept him on his meagre pay and tutored him at nights; so he looked on Louis as a son rather than as a brother. Louis was now
nineteen; he had served through the Italian campaign on Napoleon's staff and worshipped him.

Jerome, the youngest boy, as yet only thirteen, was at school under Joseph's care in Rome, and Caroline, the youngest girl, aged sixteen, was with Hortense de Beauharaais, Josephine's only daughter, at Madam Campan's, a smart finishing school for young ladies outside Paris.

Josephine's son Eugene was also doing his step-father credit. He was short, sturdy and had a waddling walk, but was full of fun, generous and, although still in his teens, had proved his courage in several battles as Napoleon's youngest A.D.C.

Lastly, this semi-royal family circle was completed by Joseph Fesch, Laetitia's half-brother: a mild-mannered little priest. He had inherited nothing of her forceful, narrow, but clear-cut views and iron will to maintain her old principles, yet he was already being fawned upon by the Bishops and Cardinals who came to pay court to his pale, young, dynamic, and terribly explosive nephew.

After supper on Roger's first evening at Montebello, Josephine beckoned him to her and told Napoleon how she had rescued this old friend of theirs in Venice. Close to, Roger found him little changed either physically or in manner. He was as thin as ever, an undersized wisp of a man; yet his feats of endurance, and his having played a bold part in the hand-to-hand fighting on several critical occasions during the campaign, testified to his actual fitness, and the strength that lay concealed in his slender body. His skin seemed a little less yellow but it was stretched as tightly as ever over his high cheekbones, and his prominent nose stood out sharply from them. The greater part of his broad forehead was hidden under a fringe and long lank locks of hair fell down to his collar on either side of his immensely strong jaw. He seemed a little listless and disinterested as Josephine spoke to him of Roger, but his fine eyes had already shown friendly recognition and, when she had done, his mobile mouth breaking into a sudden smile, he said quickly:

‘I am pleased that Madame, my wife, should have arrived so opportunely to save you. Sometime you must tell me what you have been up to for all these months. When I have a moment I will send for you.'

For the next two days, Roger mingled with the Court, renewing some acquaintances and making many new ones. Joachin Murat he already knew. It was this handsome, dashing
Gascon who, in the pouring rain on the night of 12th Vendémiaire, had fetched the guns from Les Sablons and so enabled Buonaparte to give the Paris mob ‘a whiff of grape shot' on the morning of the 13th. Since, starting with a brilliant charge at Borghetto, he had established himself as Boneparte's finest cavalry leader, and now decked himself out in uniforms of his own invention of which the cloth could hardly be seen for gold. Marmont, a young gunner who was Boneparte's special protégé, he had also met, and Alexander Berthier, the Chief-of -Staff, as ugly as Murat was handsome and rivalling him only in the splendour of his uniforms.

Among his new acquaintances were stolid old Sérurier, tall, stern, gloomy, with a big scar on his lip; Joubert, a young General who had greatly distinguished himself and in a very short time become one of the most trusted leaders of the army; André Masséna, tall, dark, thin, Jewish-looking, who seemed a dull man socially, but was said to be a living flame of inspiration on a battlefield. It was he who, in the final advance across the Alps, had stormed the Col de Terwis, and at Rivoli he had led his division in a way which had already earned him immortal glory. Desaix was also there. From discontent at the lack of initiative shown by the Army of the Rhine, he had left it and come down to Italy to offer his homage to Boneparte. His request for employment had been accepted and soon this brilliant soldier was being looked on by the General-in-Chief as one of the ablest of his lieutenants. Lannes was another; as yet only a Brigadier, and still suffering from terrible wounds received in the campaign, but he had been the first man to cross the river Adda and was already regarded as the most audacious leader of infantry assaults.

It was on the third morning that Roger was sent for, and he found the General-in-Chief in one of his tempers. He had been reading some news-sheets financed by the extreme Right which had articles in them deliberately belittling his achievements, because he was regarded as a die-hard republican.

As Roger was shown in, he threw the papers on the ground, trampled on them and cried in his harsh French, with its atrocious Italian accent, ‘Lies! Lies! Lies! How dare they say that all my plans are made for me by Berthier, and that old Carnot sends me day-to-day orders from his Cabinet in the Luxemburg.'

Pausing for a moment, he stared at Roger, then went on angrily, ‘But you know the truth, Monsieur Breuc; you know
the truth. When we had that long talk together in my room at the Rue des Capucines, I told you my intentions, did I not?'

‘Indeed you did,
mon General,'
Roger replied enthusiastically, ‘and you have carried them out most brilliantly.'

‘All but; all but. We should be in Vienna now, had my colleagues accomplished a tenth of what I have done. Four times the Austrians have put armies in the field much greater than mine, and four times I have defeated them.

‘And what with, I ask you? What with? When I came to it the army was no more than a rabble. I spoke to the men. I said: “Soldiers, you are naked, badly fed. The Government owes you much; it can give you nothing. Your long suffering, the courage you show among these crags, are splendid, but they bring you no glory; not a ray is reflected upon you. I wish to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world. Rich provinces, great towns, will be in your power; there you will find honour, glory, riches. Soldiers of the Army of Italy, can you be found lacking in honour, courage and constancy?”'

As Roger listened, he realised what such a declaration must have meant. Up till then, France had been fighting against a Monarchist coalition to save the Revolution—to defend herself from invasion and having a King put back on her throne by force of arms—and, where her legions had carried the war into other countries, Belgium, Holland and Piedmont, it had been with the proclaimed ideal of liberating these peoples from the tyranny of autocratic rulers. But Boneparte had thrown all that overboard. He had altered the whole policy of the war to one of open aggression, declaring it upon peaceful states that in no way threatened France, and inciting his troops to follow him by promises of a free hand to loot and pillage them.

Roger's face remained impassive, but he realised now that the small thin man, dressed so quietly in white breeches, tricolour sash and green coat, who ranted at him, was another Attila who, for his own glory, would stop at nothing and prove a terrible scourge to mankind. Meanwhile the tirade went on:

‘I marched them and fought them until they could no longer stand. In eleven days, I forced the Piedmontese out of the war. In a campaign of fourteen days I conquered the Milanese. In fifteen days I forced the Pope to sue for peace, Within thirty-six days of leaving Mantua I was only seventy miles from Vienna. Had I consulted my own interest, and the comfort of the army, I should have remained in Italy. But I threw myself into Germany to extricate the armies of the Rhine. I crossed
the Julien and Nordic Alps in three feet of snow. I brought my artillery by roads where not even a cart had ever been and everyone said it was impossible. Had Moreau crossed the Rhine to meet me, we should be in a position to dictate the conditions of peace as masters. As it is, I am left to bluster and intrigue to hold the half of what I have won. Meanwhile, these gentlemen in Paris have the insolence to criticise my treatment of the Milanese and the Venetians. But I shall show them. Yes, I shall show them. I have sent Augereau to Paris and he will know how to deal with such traitors.'

Suddenly he broke off, gave Roger a long stare and snapped, ‘And you? What have you been doing?'

Roger told him that knowing that one of his greatest ambitions was to conquer England, he had in the spring of '96 had himself smuggled over to renew his contacts there and to be the better able to report on the chances of a successful invasion.

At first he seemed to be only half listening and thinking of something else; but when Roger went on to say that a chance had arisen for him to go to India, Boneparte's large luminous eyes suddenly lit up.