Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements Read online

  “Realistic,” Lebrun repeated with greater firmness. “The First Consulate is no longer an elective office. The closest precedent to our governmental system is to be found in England—”

  “England, always back to perfidious England.”

  “The England of Cromwell. An hereditary executive, not monarchical, a republic incarnated in a family. Think of the alternatives—the Bourbons back, a military coup, Jacobinism.”

  “You’re thinking of me dead. You must not think of me dead. I’m erecting a preventive machine that will ensure my survival. As for the Bourbons, they’ll never be back, be quite sure of that, gentlemen. The machine is going to strike. Wait. You’ll see.”

  “Nevertheless,” Cambacérès said, “there is always the chance. The chance, shall I say,” smiling, “of your choking on a chicken bone.”

  The Permanent First Consul was good-humored again. “I thank you for the warning. No chicken bones. I’ll instruct my cook to that effect. No, ha ha, chicken bones.”

  Louis Antoine, Duc d’Enghien, prince of the House of Bourbon, picked the last of the meat off a turkey bone and threw the bone to Max, one of his beagles. Then he walked about his dining room, glass of Rhine wine flashing in the candles, seeing occasionally an erect young officer, long-nosed, in the tarnished mirrors. The news he had received from Strasbourg did not greatly perturb him. Georges Cadoudal had been arrested in Paris, having first shot one of the arresting policemen dead. He had talked, whether under torture had not yet been ascertained, but one naturally presumed under torture. “My assignment was to assassinate the First Consul only when a prince of the House of Bourbon was actually present in Paris. No such prince has yet arrived.” Well, that meant an indefinite putting-off, a lying-low. That suited him well enough. He liked this life of woodcock-shooting in the woods around Ettenheim, all at English expense, a plump Mädchen most evenings, a quiet read of a French romance in bed. He was safe here in Germany. When the time came to strike he would strike. Whenever that time should come. And it would not be a matter of striking Bonaparte, already killed by others, but of striking a paralyzed government into immediate acceptance of a Bourbon restoration. There was much to look forward to.

  He went to bed and reread Paul et Virginie, one of his sentimental favorites. He slept and dreamt that an army had entered his room and he awoke smiling at the absurdity of it. By his bed a uniformed general stood, armed soldiers with him, the noise of other troops on the stairs. He looked many times, blinking in the newly lighted candles, and then the apparition spoke. “General Ordener, citizen.” Enghien gaped. “Or your grace, if you prefer. Be so good as to prepare for a journey. Your valet is already awake and dressed.”

  “French? What are the French doing here? This is not French territory.”

  “We’re aware of a slight irregularity. We were discreet. We will be equally discreet going back.”

  “Back? Where?” He still lay, as though fascinated, under the thick quilt.

  “To Vincennes. The château there. You are, citizen your grace, to consider yourself under arrest.”

  When, dressed, he had been escorted downstairs, he found all his private papers neatly stacked, with a sort of sergeant-clerk tying red ribbon around them. There was no sign of any servant except his trembling valet. The papers were handed by a captain to a dispatch rider who saluted, pouched the documents, and strode out. General Ordener courteously led Enghien to a coach waiting in the drive. The grounds seemed to be full of dragoons. “I see. Clever. You’ve muffled the horses’ hoofs.” “Discreet, as I said.”

  In the coach, Enghien said: “I suppose I needn’t ask what the charge is.”

  “Disturbing the state by civil war and arming the citizens against one another or against lawful authority. Article Two of the Conspiracy Act.”

  “This is nonsense, of course.”

  “The citizen duke is not obliged to say anything now. There will be opportunity enough when the military court is assembled.”

  “Military court?”

  “A tribunal of seven colonels.”

  “This is nonsense.”

  “As you wish.”

  Later, very much later, nearing Vincennes, Enghien said: “How would you feel in my position, scion of a butchered royal house? I’ve sworn hatred against this Bonaparte, rightly. I would otherwise be a traitor to my own kind. The French must be made to see their error. If arms are the only way—”

  “You may as well take that down,” Ordener said to his ADC in the dark corner opposite. The ADC wrote: Sworn implacable and undying enmity to the lawfully

  “Just reprisal,” he shouted, leaving his dinner untouched.

  “But he has not yet been tried,” she said.

  “You keep your stupid woman’s nose out of this.” He sucked a licorice and aniseed comfit for his heartburn, staining the papers he held with bold black thumb-whorls. He read about Strasbourg, where Enghien had had his net, and a certain Francis Drake (some British seaman was not that also?), agent in Munich, and Moreau the darling of bluestocking bitches and salon plotters, disaffection and jealousy, imperative you eliminate Bonaparte, letters of exchange in English pounds, and the acids swirled in him and stuck knives in his throat. “Treachery treachery. Fucking ingrates.”

  “It is not right that you use such language in my—”

  “Treachery everywhere. I have not forgotten yours, woman.”

  “We had agreed to. You will not let it go. That fat Italian opera singer in the rue de la Victoire.”

  “I will do what I have to do. I will do things my own way.”

  “The servants sniggering at me.”

  “You brought it on yourself. Well, she has gone now. Taking my child with her to be born for all I know.”

  “That is cruel. That is inexcusable. That is.”

  “I’m not firm enough, I’ve always been too soft, too compassionate, easily melted. Well, not this time.”

  elected executive also against the whole of the French people upon whom he proposed

  “I understand you,” Cambacérès said, “better than you think. You are impelled by a logic that your ancestors did not question but which you, who have risen above your, if I may term them so, narrow origins, must examine and see for what it is and, in the light of cold justice, endeavor to transcend and—”

  “Don’t throw these big words at me, Cambacérès. His family strikes at mine, I strike at his in just reprisal. Let him go and the factions will be encouraged. I will end by having to kill the whole world.”

  Cambacérès heard more in that than Corse rhetoric. He shuddered.

  to make war whenever occasion offered.

  “Occasion offered,” the presiding colonel read out. It was a fine cold March day at Vincennes; Enghien’s eyes, rarely closed these last nights, smarted in the huge sharp light that beat through the high windows of the dining hall of the chateau. The blue-clad tribunal swam and dissolved in eye-water, not tears, never those.

  “I did not quite say that. You must consider my position, my birth—”

  “Irrelevant. You are a conspirator like any other. We are especially charged with the duty of reminding you of this.”

  “Charged by whom?” There was no answer. “Since you pause, permit me to have set on record the total illegality of my arrest. Permit me to counteraccuse your master of wretched and despicable cowardice. To invade a territory is one thing, to sneak into it like a parcel of thieves is another.” He knew the cause was lost. “The technique is in character. Your master is a cheat, a bully and a coward.”

  The statement went unrecorded, but a member of the tribunal, a young colonel with a squashed nose, barked that the prisoner must take care.

  “I see. The head of the executive is beyond criticism. This sounds very like old-fashioned despotism to me.”

  “Irrelevant,” the president said. “To resume. You received money from a foreign power, an inveterate enemy of France—”

  “That does not make me, myself, an ene
my. France is my dear country, I have no quarrel with France—”

  “A declared enemy of the Republic. You received a salary of four thousand two hundred guineas a year. You admit this?”

  “—Only with the present government.”

  “Democratically elected. You declared war on France.”

  “If that is so, I demand the rights of a prisoner of war.”

  “What makes you think you are not being given those rights?”

  “Prisoners of war are not usually executed. No—wait—there have been, under this new regime, instances of the execution of, nay, the massacre of—”

  “Under Article Two of the Conspiracy Act—”

  “I defer to the pattern. History will vindicate. The injustice will be remembered.” Outside, on the gravel path, a man sang a kind of bugle-tune, following it with a presumed fart that sounded like the rip of calico. Two or three of the colonels smiled.

  “The order of this court is—”

  Was that he be shot. The first day of spring, he told himself as he was marched out. The chaplain muttered prayers for his sinful soul but he hushed him. The hopelessness he felt as he faced the squad was, he was sure, of a new order. There was nothing after this. No martyr’s crown. Heaven had been canceled by some act of the Year One. God had been put to sleep like an old dog. No history, no vindication. He willed himself into a zero, uniting his will with the order to fire, the annihilating spatter. The last thing he fully saw was a cloud intricately shaped, full of capes and inlets, like some map of a territory visited but almost wholly forgotten. A building swallow flew with a heavy twig and dropped it. That came just too late for him to hold and consider the image. Then he was shaken out of his dream and shot at two in the morning. The enemy was full of surprises.

  “Let us,” Councillor Regnault said, “consider the true meaning of the word imperium.” There were some groans. “Or, better, the word imperator” He gave what looked like a little curtsey in the direction of the consular platform. Only Lebrun and Cambacérès were present today; the chair they flanked could, however, be addressed, one might fancifully think, like a tabernacle. A tabernacle was, was it not, etymologically the tent of a general officer or imperator? “What I am trying to say,” Regnault said, “is that there is no contradiction beween the republican and the imperial notions. We are not talking of the restoration of a rex but of the establishment of an imperator. It is all there in Roman history. The imperator is entrusted with the imperium on behalf of the people.”

  “How about the contract?” shouted somebody not clearly seen. There was usually somebody concerned about the contract. The question was not answered, but Regnault said:

  “As for the hereditary element in the imperial office, it is understood that the First Consul has insisted to the Tribunate that the transmission of the title must be effected by popular vote.” There were some cheers (spoken like a good republican). “Here we may see the crux exhibited.”

  “Strong numinous flavor about everything today,” muttered Lebrun to Cambacérès across the empty or perhaps not empty chair.

  “The will of the people, not, as in the old discredited metaphysic, the will of God.”

  “Talking about God,” Tronchet said, “I find it very hard to envisage a republican coronation. I mean, he has to be crowned by somebody, and who is this somebody to be? Hardly himself. There has to be some sort of priest, representative so to speak of the abiding spirit of the republic. But we have no hierarchy. We have freedom of worship.”

  Cambacérès said: “One thing at a time. Let us not eat all our courses at once. Chew slowly. Soon, ha, some honorable councillor will be taking it on himself to discourse on the content of the coronation banquet.”

  “Leave that to you,” some honorable councillor muttered.

  “Oh,” Regnault said, “is it not now all a matter of procedure? The whole of France is agreed on the necessity of protecting the life of our dux or imperator by the simple act of conferring immortality on him.” Well put, the murmurs said. “There are some intransigents still, admittedly, who need to have it demonstrated to them that an emperor is not necessarily a king. I ask them again to look at Roman history—”

  “Crown him,” an intransigent said, Barsac or somebody, a man from the West who had mended the left leg of his spectacles with a kind of puce-colored cotton thread, “and he becomes a king. What’s needed is a mere matter of signing a paper, something severe and very republican.”

  “A contract,” that voice said.

  “You mark my words,” the intransigent said, “it will soon be just as it was before. You can transmit rule but you can’t transmit talent. You could have some gibbering idiot on the throne or some head-lopping womanizer, just because he has the right family name. He ought to have a son, by the way—”

  “How do you know he hasn’t?” said the councillor next to him.

  “A lot of Corsicans squabbling over France as if it were a brass bedstead. You mark my words.”

  There were loud cries of withdraw withdraw and the Second Consul had to bring the meeting to order. Soon Cambacérès had something to say about the Pope. He consulted a slip of paper and it was evident that these were the notes of somebody else, somebody absent. “There has to be a coronation and there has to be a priest. We want the best priest or, if you wish, the chef of priests. Who could that be but the Pope? Also consider that the papacy thus seems to bless and sanction the Republic and that it will give the whole of Catholic monarchist Europe something to think about. England too, for that matter. A sort of French victory over England.”

  “But will the Pope come?”

  “Of course. Since the Concordat he can hardly say no. He sincerely loves France, he says.”

  There were a number of murmurs against the Pope. A slow-witted councillor who was a confirmed atheist said:

  “Does this mean then that the contract will be signed in a church?”

  “A solemn oath, not a contract. Of course a church. Where else? In the Opera House? On the Field of Mars? And not a church either but a cathedral. Incense, music, massed choirs and trumpets, a Te Deum, a pontifical high mass, everything. We must beat these monarchies at their own game.”

  The older councillors chewed over their excited bewilderment, remembering when naked women representing Reason or some such reasonable abstraction had pranced (naked) in Notre Dame and people with crowns on had been decapitated. Well, new thrills now. Call it progress. The world had to move on.

  The consort of the Permanent First Consul pleaded a headache at the prospect of a dinner with the Bonaparte family, or such members of it as were willing to come. But the headache was genuine and even fierce: they had had a quarrel about his acceptance of the ultimate honor, she saying that he was wrong and he replying that she only spoke thus because she feared he would divorce her, going up in the world and taking a woman who had not been various men’s mistress and perhaps having a son by her, well she need not fear divorce (giving her a couple of most painful loving tweaks on the lobes, dislodging an earring she could not later find, and then a pair of husky smacks on the buttocks, ha ha), he would stick with her, though he was now a great man, since he had an ordinary man’s decent feelings, let us spend five minutes together on the bed. She pleaded a headache.

  He did not wait for the coffee and cognac before getting down to business with the family. He was no Cambacérès, making a dinner into a sacred silent rite, and besides no cognac was served. They were an impatient and fairly mannerless family anyway, and the wrangle about the succession began with the soup (all too clear, like salty warm water). Most of the family, especially the males, were growing plump, the First Consul noticed with distaste. Waiting for the next course, they wolfed all the bread that was on the table.

  “I’ll tell you why not you,” he said to Joseph, pointing at him with a fork. “Because all you have is a couple of daughters and I’m not having the empire ruled by a girl.”

  “You talk as if I’m going to die.
You talk as if I’m not going to father any more children.”

  “If you do father more, they’ll be girls. It’s a matter of the stronger element, as has been scientifically proved. Madame Julie will see that you have daughters.”

  “You seem to forget I am the head of the family.”

  The First Consul beamed at that, lolling back in his chair an instant. “That won’t stop you having daughters.”

  “What I mean is my rights.”

  “Rights? Rights? Under what law or system or contract or covenant do you have rights? Is there some old Corse tradition in which says that if your younger brother is made emperor of the French you then—by rights—become his heir?”

  Joseph looked thunder at that and Lucien grinned. The First Consul said:

  “Oh, I know that you, Lucien, think yourself to be a very great man since Brumaire, but you know what I think about you and your so-called marriage and your so-called wife who is not here.”

  “My marriage is my own business.”

  “Oh is it? I’m not having these irregular relationships, I tell you. I had my own ideas on marriage for you, as you know perfectly well.”

  “With respect, sire, or whatever it is you’re to be called, if our mother raised no objection—”

  “This has nothing to do with mother, mother is not the emperor-designate of the French.”

  “You would not talk of her like that,” Joseph said, “if she were sitting here now.”

  “Mother will toe the line like everybody else,” shouting. He did not moderate his tone before the servants who had now brought in the main dish.

  “Ergh, what is it?” Elisa made a child’s vomity face. It was chicken sauteed in oil with crayfish and fried eggs bedded on croutons. “A horrible mixture, some soldier’s sort of muck.”

  “That,” the First Consul said with horrible sweetness, “was served at the battle of Marengo. That is already a great historical dish. Eat it,” he cried. Lucien said:

  “Well, for my part, I have little appetite. I beg to be excused.”

  “Stay where you are, sir, I haven’t finished with you yet.”