Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements Read online

  “Look at that troop there,” Kilmaine said. “There’s not one poor nag that’s not sagging in the middle.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t understand it, really. I lay in bed last night trying to, you know, work it out.”

  “What?”

  “There are times when that little bugger scares the shit out of me.”

  “Ah. Let’s see if he can—” Massena rubbed his beak, grinning sadly. He looked north towards, say, Cairo.

  Buonaparte turned himself into Bonaparte. When they took Milan he could perhaps juggle with that u, conquering French or fraternal Italian as the occasion dictated. As he dictated the occasion. He finished dictating his letter to the Directory and said to Berthier:

  “The days of the minuet are over. These are the days of the waltz. Not, mind you, that I necessarily approve of this frank embracing on the ballroom floor. Still, the speed is too great for lasciviousness.” As Berthier had expected, he took the portrait from his inside pocket and gave it a quiet smiling smack, as to sanctify, by particular application, the beatings of lust. “Speed.” Having restored the portrait to its nest he kept his hand on it. “The application to the art of warfare should be obvious. Let’s have more red pins.”

  Berthier handed him the pins one at a time and watched him pierce the enemy positions. The positions seemed, like pricked thumbs, to start to well blood. Better him than me, Berthier thought. Back in Paris they both want and don’t want victorious generals. If they’re dangerous in the field they’re dangerous back home. And it’s a youngster’s game these days. The old, such as have been kindly allowed to live, can’t be trusted. Doubtful loyalty. Old heads trundled off in market-carts like cabbages. As for me, born into what they used to call the officer class, forty-three and looking it, loyalty not really in question. Fought in a revolutionary war before their Bastille fell, a citation at Philipsburg. Let the bloodletting civilians, if their blood hasn’t been let, stuff that into their revolutionary pipes. But keep me out of the victorious general’s role. Better off as I am. Bonaparte said:

  “As we expected, no reply from the Genoese.”

  “They’ll have told Bbbeaulieu, be sure of that.”

  “Now look here.” He fisted the map. “If Italy’s a leg, then we’re midway between the navel of Nice and the genitals of Genoa. Right? Put it to the troops that way, humanize your geography. Beaulieu, dodderer that he is, will think we intend the march through Genoa. He’ll bring his lot down from Alessandria, which is the sort of inner recesses of the genitals, Italy being a woman. Right?”

  He’s soaked in it, they should have given him a longer honeymoon.

  “Scherer tttook that ffforce to Vvvoltri before you before you—”

  “We’ll give Beaulieu something substantial to play with at Voltri. Play on, rather. La Harpe, ha ha.”

  “Not a ddd—”

  “Not a division, no. But enough to give Beaulieu confidence. He’ll move too far south from his Piedmontese, we can crack his right wing up in the hills there. There—Carcare. The top of the pubic hairs.”

  Has the whole thing worked out.

  “Close that gap. Massena’s division there, Augereau’s there. Very foul-mouthed, Augereau, by the way. Risen from the ranks, it shows.”

  “His dddiscipline’s all right.”

  “Sold watches in Constantinople, didn’t he? Must ask him about Constantinople, have to look ahead. Used to give dancing lessons. Let’s see if he can use a watch as well as sell one. I want all divisional commanders to put the hour on their messages as well as the date. Speed. Timing. No more minuets. Augereau knows all about the waltz. We’ll waltz them back to Vienna. But first knock Piedmont off the dance-floor. They’ll welcome a little liberation.”

  “Ccc—”

  “The French Army has come to break your chains. I must work something out. In Italian as well.”

  Citizens Carné, Thiriet, Blondy, Tireux, Hubert, Fossard, Teis-seire, Carrère (Jacques), Carrère (Alexandre), Trauner, Barsacq, Gabutti, Mayo, Bonin, Borderie, Verne, Chaillot, Barrault, Brasseur, Dupont, Salou, sixteen thousand others, went forward in their washed-out blue rags and old revolutionary caps or rotting shakos, but boots boots, mark that, boots most of them, to engage. Easier, lads, if you remember what it’s all about. Those Austrian bastards can’t forgive us because we’re free and they’re in chains and we claimed the right of free men to whiz the head off that bitch of a queen we had that was an Austrian herself, and now they want to bring stinking kings and unholy bishops back and more, wanting their revenge as you can understand. Who we’re attacking is Argenteau, Austrian in spite of his name or says he is, there must be some French traitor’s blood there somewhere, who’s pounding away at our thousand men specially set up for him in the fort over there and we’ll get him in the flank and rear while General La Harpe’s lot goes for him in the front. Any questions? Yes, when do we get some fucking leave, how about our back pay, I’ve got this pain in the balls citizen sergeant.

  Drizzle fell coldly on Montenotte, then thickened to proper rain.

  Bonaparte watched from a thousand feet up. It is in some way, my own heart’s darling, an emblem of love, this engaging of armies. My ADC Marmont says it is to do with atomies of electricity crackling between the male and female poles, or some such thing, but I feel it is the quality of the beating of the heart, which is the same for both love and war. The priests in Ajaccio used to say that the Song of Solomon in the Bible was a metaphor of the marriage of Christ and his church, but now we know better: it is plain or not so plain love between a king and his chosen handmaiden, and I am struck by the phrase which makes this love terrible as an army with banners. I take out your image and rain weeps on the crystal. I kiss the rain away and look down to see the interlocking of the blue and white ants. Three blue to two white, hand to hand, mostly bayonet-fighting, we have no problem. Your slim white back, I must imagine, is turned against the musket-puffs and the thin noises that rise from below. I lock you again in the warmth of my breast, out of the rain and slaughter. This is our first victory and I must go on to others. I see Austrian banners in French hands and whole blocks of white now as still as snow-patches. Prisoners are always a nuisance.

  “What does he say?”

  “I can’t read his writing.” And she threw the letter like a bone to the pug Fortuné, who sniffed at it and then began to chew it.

  “But it’s important to know when he’ll be back. My angel. Mmmmmm.” Lieutenant Hippolyte Charles, First Regiment of Hussars, at present in undress, munched at her right, or left, nipple.

  “Paul Barras is excited. About victories. Can you read those names there?”

  He tussled with the dog a moment. The dog let go Millesimo, Ceva and Dego, though with an ill grace. “It’s a lot of marching,” he said. “All those foothills. That’s why it’s called Piedmont.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “And why should you, you little bundle of deliciousness? Mmmmmm.” He munched lower. “Does he ever do that to you?”

  “He tried. He’s always in such a hurry about everything. Oh, sweetheart, what are we going to do?”

  “Now? I’ll show you. Get that damned dog off the bed. I’ll have no toes left.”

  “Stays here, don’t oo, precious? Mummy’s little messenger when horrid men kept mummy in prison and were going to cut mummy’s head off.”

  “Don’t look too far ahead is what I say. He’s a long way to go. There’s Milan and Vienna and Venice. Lots of time. It would be nice to be in Venice.”

  “He’s always so quick about everything. Do that again. Keep on doing it. Oh, sweetheart, I’m so unhappy. Oh, that’s lovely.”

  “You’re too moderate,” Saliceti said. Bonaparte, half-dressed and unshaven in the cool spring dawn of Cherasco, looked with no liking on the Government Commissioner of the Army of the Alps. All that red white and blue, including red white and blue plumage a mile high. And yet a sort of magpie really, ready to peck at anythi
ng bright and stow it.

  “Look,” Bonaparte said, “Citizen Commissioner, or whatever you like to be called. I know precisely what’s in your mind. Loot loot loot.”

  “They need money in Paris. This is partly—not wholly, I never said that—but partly what this war is about. To finance the new order. Look at this damned palazzo, for a start. Whose is it?”

  “Count Salmatori’s. You want to finance the new order out of that bit of porcelain there and those damask curtains? That silver Neptune would fetch a few hundred francs. You, citizen, would like a little loot for the palazzo Saliceti that is to be, and I’m not going to have any looting. We’re here to make friends and respect property. I know what the Directors want to do with Italy—ransack it and then exchange it for the Rhine frontier. Have you ever considered that it might be a sort of duty to bring the Revolution here? Or is that too naive a notion?”

  Saliceti felt the coffee pot and found it cold. “Send for some more, will you? Victor Amadeus is the enemy still. He’s priest-ridden, tyrannical, bigoted. He’s also father-in-law of the Count of Provence. The man they call Louis the Eighteenth. He’s got to be thwacked and punched and throttled, which means he has to vomit up gold and silver till it hurts.”

  “Oh, that will happen. But it will all happen officially and legitimately, with papers signed and countersigned and damned great seals on them. But if I catch you, sir, citizen, encouraging the acquisition of loot, then I come down with the chopper.”

  “Do you realize that I represent the Government in Paris? Do you realize that you’re a mere salaried employee whose task is to win battles for your masters? Do you realize that the chopper can come down for you on the squeak of a pen?”

  “Oh, Christophe, if I may still call you that—We used to be friends before you got this liking for feathers—Oh, don’t you see that times are changing? Those old Representatives to the Armies—all of two years old—where have they gone to? They didn’t work. You, and the rest of the new Commissioners, represent a step down. A good revolutionary general doesn’t need orders, he only needs supplies. Nobody ever had a monopoly of the Revolution, though some of them thought they did. Let me put it simply and say that I am in charge here. No looting. And, if I were you, I’d dress more like a revolutionary. All those feathers, God help us.”

  “We’ll see who’s in charge. We’ll see.”

  Citizens Carné, Thiriet, Blondy, Tireux and the rest, not forgetting the flame-headed giant Dupas, the wine and meat of Mondovi working in their bodies, listened to him as he performed his big scene from his white horse, riding up and down the ranks, the great tail swishing (more flies here, more dung, fertile plain, thank Christ we’re finished with those fucking mountains). “…And we outflanked them, we’re over the Po, and we’re only a few miles south of Milan … And they’re across that river there, the Adda, and it breaks my heart that you can’t do it … Because you can’t, you’ve got cunts between those jelly-shivering legs of yours, there’s not one of you here willing to follow your commanders over that bit of a bridge there … Frightened of victory, that’s what it is, scared of the responsibility of showing these cringing Italian bastards that you’re better than they are because you’d got the guts to throw off your chains … Well, a time for courage comes once, and it’s been and gone for you … There’s a gate there, you see, and all I have to do is give the order to open it and send brave citizen soldiers shouting and screaming to get at the Austrians as they go over, but you’re not the ones to do it, oh no …”

  A good act, Dupas thought, it works up the growls in them. Come on, growl, you bastards, I’m tired of just standing here.

  They roared, not growled. The drums rattled and the flutes screamed O come ye children of the motherland the sun of glory fills the sky and they started to clatter over, some of them going splash over the sides in the press, there being no parapets, and the Austrian guns flaming at them, bloody murder. A few yards from the end some jumped into the Adda and tried to wade ashore, and then the cavalry came at them, sabers and great whinnying horsemouths, and there was not one Frenchman on the further bank, but they still poured across, Massena yelling and Berthier forgetting his stammer and no sight of our cavalry, why the hell couldn’t he wait till he knew our cavalry was across?

  And then, by Christ, there they were, Kilmaine and his bony nags and the screaming men on them, right onto the Austrian flank, stopping the guns, until you could hear the thumping and trundling of the feet of the Savoy infantry coming over the bridge over the Adda.

  God almighty it was a near thing, Bonaparte was thinking, God almighty it wasn’t planning this time, it was taking a chance, it was impossible gambling that came off, and it tastes like brandy, it feels like that delirious flying moment when you spend into her thighs, now that I know I am a living spirit and a very special one as well as a military library and a craftsman and a machine as modern as a semaphore telegraph or a hydrogen balloon. And suppose the cavalry had not been able to ford that river? They almost did not, almost, almost. It is in the region of Almost that the blood sings. We won, my love. Sixteen guns and nearly two thousand prisoners. Prisoners, my love, are such a nuisance. War feeds on war; what do prisoners feed on?

  And he took his love’s miniature from his inner pocket to kiss, against a background of bivouac fires, the fried-bacon reek of cannon-smoke fading. Raising it to his lips he nearly staggered. Marmont was concerned.

  “Look, Marmont—the glass is broken.”

  “Well, then,” smiling, “our first task in Milan must be to—”

  “No no no. It means she is very sick or very unfaithful. Oh God God God.”

  “Don’t believe it. We shall be in Milan in a day or so, and she will not be many days after. Murat should be in Paris by now. He will bring her, you will see.”

  “You will be receiving a letter,” Saliceti said. “Meanwhile I am empowered to tell you of the Directory’s intentions.”

  Bells bells bells, but now it was merely angelic noontime in Milan.

  “The Directory would have made no difficulty about preparing a passport for her,” Bonaparte said. “As for a letter, Murat has written—she is a bad letter-writer, God bless the girl. It seems I am to be a father. You must put off that stern look and have some wine. This absconding archduke kept a good cellar. There’s a fine bin of—”

  “I refer to different business altogether.”

  “—Chambertin. Business?”

  “It is the Directory’s intention to split the command. General Kellermann of the Army of the Moselle—”

  Bonaparte sat down on a magnificent uncomfortable chair. He noted a quick irrelevance: mouse-dirt under the escritoire.

  “—to continue the northern campaign against the Austrians. You to fight Austria’s southern allies.”

  “Kellermann is sixty-odd. He lives on his reputation at Valmy. I am, in effect, demoted.” He picked up the keys of Milan, very heavy, very solid. “Set in his ways, thinks he’s God. I’m not having it. I’ll resign first. Where’s their sense, let alone their gratitude? No, forget the gratitude. Nobody has a monopoly of the Revolution. Said that before, didn’t I? All I say now is that joint command ruins everything. You need the single voice. The fools. One bad general is better than two good ones. Tell them that from me. I’ll tell them myself, I’ll be writing a letter.”

  “You mean that about resignation?”

  “That’s my duty to the army, not that anybody in Paris cares much about duty. Or should I say it’s all one-way duty with them. I told the army all about the Directory’s confidence in them through me. They’re simple men, they believe in these things, they need them. Now they’re going to have this stuck-up swine with the Austrian name barking at them.”

  “Alsatian. I see. You’re just threatening resignation.”

  “Dirty politicians. You need the single voice.”

  “That sounds like a threat too.”

  They were sitting in an alcove, taking a sorbet. The swish of th
e ball-gowns and the clink of the medals came through, along with the sweet and lively violins.

  “There was another thing I heard. General Bonaparte has got off the Po and is now busily wiping up.”

  She laughed, taking care to hide her teeth. Bad teeth or not, he was thinking, she has this very rare thing, can’t quite think of the word. Grace? That sounds religious. Hair covered with roses for her real name, the high-waisted silk sheath made to cling with Cologne water to her breasts, the most delicate instep, the delicious pose of languor. Bonaparte sent letters full of extravagant desires (“feed off your throat, bite off your nipples and watch new ones grow like rosebuds, wear out your little cunt with kisses”), but he, Lieutenant Hippolyte Charles, had the pleasure of real fulfillments, neither poetically extravagant nor Corsican coarse. Call it vicarious, a subaltern’s duty to a general. That she would not find funny, she talked too much of love. And money. She needed money for flowers and gowns and shoes. There were so many victory balls these days. He himself was not doing too well for money.

  “How much longer,” he said, “do you think you can put it off?”

  “You live one more day, just like in the Carmes prison. Besides, I’m ill, or pregnant—I’m not sure which.”

  “Not well enough to make the journey. But Junot and Murat are still waiting. And still writing, presumably. There are also the newspapers, which undoubtedly lui sees. Interesting that our poor sick Lady of Victories should be the belle of the Luxembourg ball.”

  She looked at him puzzled. “Do you want me to go?”

  “The poets write of the world well lost for love. True love, as true lovers know, is built on caution. Besides, my own General Leclerc will do anything for Madame Victoire. We could both go. There are some pleasant things to be picked up in Italy these days, so I hear. The fruits of conquest. And Venice is very lovely.”

  “Oh, you’re mad.”

  “Not really. Too many ears and eyes and noses in Paris. Better to have one pair of eyes, his. All for you and none else.”