Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements Page 3

  “Why do you say Venice? Venice is a long way from Milan.”

  “Not for lui. You’re always saying how quick he is. One of his big faults, you always say.”

  Dappled Tuileries summer sun, mad with motes, danced on the map and on Barras’s ringed finger. “If we gave in, events have proved that we were right to do so. See what he’s done with his unified command. Look. The tricolor all over Lombardy. Florence. Leghorn—one in the snout for the English. Ah, I forgot.” He stuck a toy flag on a Mediterranean island.

  “Where’s that?” peered Moulins.

  “Corsica. Another one in the snout. That was the Leghorn Corsicans. Back in the fold, anyway. Apart from the actual occupations, there are the various invasion threats. Tuscany, Naples, the Pope. Good hard cash there. He’s already paying his men in silver.”

  “Is that wise?’’

  “Half silver, the rest paper.”

  “And all these damned works of art, as they’re called,” Reubell said. “I’d rather see more money.”

  “Paris,” Barras said primly, “is the great new center of culture. Revolutionary culture. Revolutions aren’t just decapitations and screaming women with no drawers on. Beauty and light—aspects of our republican policy.”

  “Cramming the museums with saints and the rest of the superstitious garbage,” the hunchback Larevelliere snarled. “Beauty, indeed. We have a solemn mission, and that is to keep the state Godless. If I had the Pope here now, I’d—”

  “Yes yes, your well-known zeal continues to be well-known.”

  “I admit the cleverness,” Moulins said, “but what worries me is the high-handedness. Look what he said about Saliceti.”

  “He has a strong objection to what he terms looting,” Barras said. “He draws a perhaps over-nice distinction between the wholesale and retail varieties of er spoliation. Ethically, that is. Saliceti has, apparently, been engaging in simony.”

  “A man’s tastes are his own,” Reubell said.

  “Let’s have that plain,” Larevelliere said. “I’m a plain man.”

  “Saliceti has been looting churches, selling chalices and ciboria and other godless trappings of godliness. Sometimes ciboria with the consecrated wafers in them.”

  “And right too,” snarling. “Show those priest-ridden cretins what superstitious wickedness it all is.”

  “You,” Barras said, “are a responsible man and a Director. Do think carefully. Consecrated hosts cannot be desecrated overnight. The priest-ridden cretins are quite capable of turning on their er liberators. There is such a thing as discretion, diplomacy.”

  “I think I have a right to object to that. I always think carefully. I would ask you to withdraw—”

  “A little more discretion and diplomacy towards the Directory would be in order,” Moulins said.

  “He lives and dies,” Barras said, “by the Constitution. That is, in a sense, touching. But there is a word hovering on my tongue, and undoubtedly on yours. Ambition. A word made rather fiery by the days of the Terror.”

  “What you mean is,” Reubell said, “that we don’t want him back in Paris.”

  “Oh, he can be controlled, I think,” Barras said. “But he will not be in Paris for a long time yet. He talked of compassionate leave, but his wife—his bride, I should say—is already on her way to Milan. A wife can be a great solvent of ambition. In the honeymoon phase, that is. Let him carry on with his wholesale spoliation.”

  “And the politics?”

  “Let him preach fraternity and equality and so on. Sister republics? I’m not quite sure about sister republics.”

  Some of them knew what he meant, though not Larevelliere.

  “Time to worry about that later,” Barras said.

  She turned herself into a thing. He was not heavy though he was very active. The guns and fireworks of Turin were now a steady headache, and they flashed through the pitch dark. And the dinner, with Joseph Bonaparte there. The whole family soon, Corsican claws. Oh, the cold greasiness of that main meat dish. The Palazzo Serbelloni, rose and crystal candy granite, nothing too good for her.

  He floods in me like a river, she thought. Like urine.

  “Oh my God oh my. Angel oh my own heart’s. Blood. How I’ve been able to. Sustain this. Long time of waiting only God. And the angels know. And even now, my celestial vision, it is. As it was at the beginning. A snatch of heaven in your arms and then. Back to it.”

  “To what?”

  “The war, Würmser, the Austrians. But we won’t think of the Austrians today or tomorrow, my seraph. We won’t move out of this bedroom.”

  “Do we have to have it so dark? I like the moon and the sun to follow. This is like being blind.”

  “And blind is what I am except for this light in the center of my soul. My fingers must learn your beauty by night. Blasted. Damn that. I won’t have that dog in here, I’m not going to share a bed with a. Damn. Right on the shin.”

  “My precious. Mmmmm. Mother’s brave little pug. Tomorrow,” she said with relief, “is Bastille Day. A gala performance at La Scala and a ball after.”

  “Oh.” And then: “There’ve been a lot of balls in Paris. And you at every one. That was courageous. Take that dog’s nose away.”

  “He can’t see in the dark, can you, angel? Why courageous? Oh, I see what you mean. It was duty, really. They couldn’t have you so they wanted me.”

  “Ah. All that dancing—could it have possibly—”

  “It was a false one. It sometimes happens. But it made me very tired. Oh, Eugène and Hortense send their love.”

  “We must have children of our own. We will.”

  And, straight to the target again, as ever, pushing the snarling bundle away, the reserves pouring in fast and joyful, he was back on to his angel and heart’s blood. She tried to think of Charles, but it was difficult. The one did not fit easily into the other’s body, not even in the dark.

  And then: “Where will you be going, and for how long?”

  “Mantua. We’re besieging the Austrians there. If it looks like being a long business, then, core of my innermost heart of light, I shall send for you.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Is you scared then of the nasty blood and noisywoise, sweetheart?” For a moment she thought he was talking to Fortuné. “But you was so brave in Paris. Besides,” he said, lopping the baby-talk clean off, “you’ll be a long way from the noise of the guns. They’ll be just summer thunder, the cannon. The muskets will go ping ping.” One ping for each nipple.

  “Ow. Oh no.”

  In her dream her husband was trying to take her naked on the terrace, in the presence of the servants who were clearing the table: she distinctly saw a spot of coffee fall from the lifted pot on to the marble pavimento. Oh no, oh no. But he kept laughing that this was the town of Romeo and Juliet. Then they both saw white specks like ash drifting slowly down the mountains. “Good God, they got through,” he said. Then the Austrians were climbing by vine-ropes on to the terrace itself, and she tried in vain to cover her nakedness.

  Her maid Louise woke her, sleeping in her clothes. “Colonel Junot, madame. And a lot of soldiers.” There were whinnyings and clompings outside on the cobbles. This was Peschi something. Peschiera. She could hear General Guillaume talking in the next room: responsibility patrol boats on the lake advised her strongly strongly insisted responsibility.

  There was bad coffee and yesterday’s bread. “We set up,” said Junot, “a command post at Castelnuovo.”

  “He told me to wait for him here. Where’s Castel—?”

  “Inland. On the road to Verona. You must have passed it last night.”

  “This sounds to me as if the Austrians are everywhere.”

  “A brief defensive interlude call it.” Junot smiled, very tired, with his unshaven bristles catching the laky light. “Our first, or very nearly.”

  Her pout was a woman’s unreasonable rebuke for lui: you said I’d like this play and I hate it; you said it would be fin
e and it’s rained all day.

  It was Louise who pointed at the shining boat on the beautiful lake as big as a sea, so lovely in the Italian summer morning. Then smoke puffed with great cracks and whines, the coach swerved and sidled and tilted and stopped, with Junot shouting, Louise going oh oh oh, and the noise of thuds and mad hooves, then the sight of two horses threshing and foaming as they tried to die between the shafts. A dragoon was dead with one foot in the saddle, being dragged by his frantic horse, a cheek ripped open and the back of his head scraped raw along the road. Junot had them out of the coach and, using it as a shield from the firing, made them crawl into a shallow dry ditch, then he whipped the lead offside horse with his sword and had all four trundling the empty coach off with the patrol boat guns still cracking away at it.

  Louise wept in the ditch. “Quiet, girl, quiet, this is an adventure, this is something to tell them back in Paris, this is war.”

  “Waaaaaaaar.” That started Fortuné barking.

  She had not seen Lieutenant Charles at Verona, there had been some talk of his doing well in battle, he would not now be concerned about the quality of cloth and the sit of a cravat, but she shut him out of her needs, lying there as the sun mounted, hearing the flies around the corpses: she did not want now to be in a Paris drawing room with Charles witty and saying my dear what a delightful foulard. She wanted the protection of her General. Later, of course, she knew, it would be different. One does not move straight from a ditch to a drawing room.

  “There’s a farmer’s cart there,” Junot said later.

  They jolted in flea-leaping straw past more war: buzzing mounds of horse and man flesh, the acrid smoke a solvent of the foul sweetness. She was half-asleep when rough hands pulled her out of the cart. Having missed death in war it seemed that she was now to meet it in love. His love, all howls and tears, tears she joined in, was confused with desire to strike at once at the renegade French swine Field Marshal von Würmser, leader of the attacking Austrians. He shall pay dearly for your tears. “Waaaaaaaar,” howled Louise, joining them. He got her and her dog to bed in a rough room of his headquarters, and she could hear the rustle and thumping of maps as she fell into sleep dug deep as a pit, gun-crumps, shadows in lantern-light, his words: local disorganization disorganization of the entire front. Bbbest make the atttack southeast of Bbbrescia?

  Mark how the Alexander of our age

  Bids soldier’s skill fulfill a lover’s rage.

  His numbers far inferior are found:

  Too many ring resistant Mantua round,

  Too many languish in the fevered swamp,

  Too many through the restive boroughs tramp

  With freedom’s flag unvocal to convince

  Men long enslaved to prelate and to prince.

  Though Würmser’s roll take twice the time to call,

  Yet is he tardy in unrolling all.

  Our general is impetuous to fling

  His total force upon a single wing,

  Then on the other, then he splits the spine

  In center of th’ attenuated line.

  At Castiglione see the guns advance

  And tricolor of liberating France.

  The double-eagled banner dips and droops,

  And Würmser whines, then growls, and then regroups.

  But at Bassano, Rovereto, Trent,

  His front is fractured and his rear is rent.

  He spies th’ encircling trap that soon awaits

  And refuge seeks in Mantua’s battered gates.

  Ah, Mantuan Virgil, could but time re-roll

  And from th’ Elysian meadows pluck thy soul,

  A greater than Augustus would inspire

  A mightier chord upon the trembling lyre,

  And verbal flames might match that swift reverberant fire.

  “But it was terrible,” she said, in his arms in bed in Brescia. “Pushed along like that. Parma, Florence, and that other place. I told him that a battlefield was no place for a woman. I’d told him before.”

  “My precious.” He did not smell so fresh as he had in Paris. Nor perhaps, she thought, did she. They both had gunsmoke in their skin. And he was quicker, more urgent, as though infected by lui. He was no longer the boudoir soldier; he had been mentioned in dispatches.

  “He’s mad,” she said. “He doesn’t love me—he worships me. I tell you, it’s not civilized. Oh God, if only we were back in Paris.”

  “And I worship you too. More than he does, angel.”

  “Don’t say that, for God’s sake. I don’t want to be worshipped. I want everything to be calm and pleasant and sane.”

  “Love isn’t sane. Love’s a madness. Pagan, elemental, dark. Feel that.” It felt like a weapon, something that would go off.

  “Oh Hippolyte, he says these things as though he means them.”

  “I mean them too, my treasure.”

  “No no, as though he means them as he means, you know, the other things. Like taking over all Italy and then marching to Vienna and then invading the English. He writes a battle order about turning flanks and so on and then he writes about stripping the skin off me and possessing me wholly and then he goes back to his dispatches about enveloping the left wing or whatever it is. I’m frightened.”

  “You’ll always have me, precious angel. Always have me to turn to. I don’t frighten you, do I?”

  “His brother knows, I’m sure. Joseph. He has another brother here now on his staff. He’ll have the whole family here soon, if he wins all his battles. And Joseph will talk to his mother and his mother will talk to him and. Corsican jealousy. He’ll have you court-martialed and shot. Me too perhaps. He’s mad enough.”

  “No, precious treasure. Not yet. Mmmmmm.”

  “Oh, don’t joke. I’m serious.”

  “Mmmmmm.”

  “Ious.” The word diversify came, for some reason, into her head. Skirmishes, feints, confusing the enemy. Then everything became confused, transfused, fused.

  At last, adorable, adorable, behold me reborn. Death no longer in my eyes, glory and victory in my heart. We defeated the enemy at Areola, six thousand killed, five hundred prisoners. Mantua will fall to us in less than a week. Then then then I shall be back in your arms.

  And on her lap, a flag in his hand, her arms holding him still, fidgety because Mantua had not yet fallen. Young Antoine Gros, favorite pupil of David, was painting him in the after-breakfast light, hero of the Areola bridge. Bonaparte was saying:

  “An old woman in Ajaccio said it. She said that the earth would be my friend and the water my enemy. It was, I confess, a very unpleasant experience—all that swampy mud right up to my shoulders. And my poor shot horse screaming and writhing. No, I must not descend to pity for animals. A horse is an instrument, no more.”

  “Do keep still,” she said.

  “I’ve finished the passage,” Gros said. “It will be you, madame,” smiling, “who needs the rest.”

  “He’s not heavy.” And he wasn’t, all skin and bone, pared down with fever. Bonaparte jumped up and walked round to the canvas.

  “Hm. Who am I to say whether it is a good likeness? It is more like some character out of myth. Perhaps the face of Ossian?” He gave Gros an acutely painful pinch of affection on the lobe. “You have some good young men about you,” he said to her. “Collect more, we need good young men. Like that young Charles of yours, a very promising soldier.”

  She tried not to show the change in her breathing.

  “How would you,” he said to Gros, “like to take over the art commission? I know what I like, but I’m not well able to judge of masterpieces. Italy’s grateful tribute to her liberators. How would you like that?”

  “I would be greatly—”

  “Water,” he said. “These Italians are water. Water must be controlled, made to work mills, be tamed into canals, have bridges thrown over it. I’m not afraid of water.”

  They did not quite understand.

  The first full moon of the new year, as the d
ead regime would see it. But it was really Nivôse, still in the Year Four. To his right lay that fearful river, now tamed. He shivered again; the warm greatcoat seemed too big for him. And that old woman had said that he must also beware of the moon. Why? The moon pulsed out now like a lake in the sun. He was with Joubert on the plateau of Rivoli. He saw camp fires all about, far below: five camps, each signifying an enemy column. To the north, beyond his vision, on the slopes of Monte Baldo, General Alvintzi planned, he knew, a six-column advance, but, in that terrain, so complex a strategy would be difficult. The columns of Liptay, Koblos and Ocksay would find it impossible to deploy cannon. To the west and east of the plateau the columns of Lusignan and Wukassovitch waited to fall on the French rear. But it would be a hard passage to besieged Mantua, that they knew. Then there was General Quasdanovitch, ready to roar up the gorge of Osteria to the east. It was all too much, he hoped, for Alvintzi to coordinate. He said:

  “That village, San Marco, is one of our keys. Take it, and you split their advance. A great deal depends on our reinforcements.”

  “When?”

  “I expect Massena before dawn. He will precede his division. You, Joubert, are to hold the eastern side of the plateau with one brigade. That should secure the gorge and Ocksay’s column. For a time, that is. Your two other brigades must hold off Koblos and Liptay in the northern sector.” He seemed to feel Mantua raying out its dangerous heat behind him.

  When Massena arrived, he ordered him to hold the valley of the Tasso (ah, noble name) on the left flank, using a single brigade, and to mass the rest in readiness around the plateau. The moon moved to setting. At dawn they began.

  In blissful nescience of the1 drift of man,

  Fulfilling only its2 Creator’s plan,11

  The wide3 plateau9 extends its windy plain,

  A rarity in that engorg’d terrain,4

  Where eagles wheel8 about the mountain-wall,6

  Soar to the height then like a plummet fall7

  Th’ Italia of the poet’s lay is far:

  A cold land sleeps5 beneath a colder star,