Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (13 page)

“Good God, a letter from Desaix.”

“Desaix, sir?”

“Old comrade from Egypt. Poor devils. He got through the British blockade, we could do with him here. Tell him to join us at Ivrea—No, wait, I’ll write myself.”

Fifty thousand men of the Army of the Reserve to be moved over the Alps. Position on Great St. Bernard? Steep, deep in snow. The guns are the problem. General Marmont? Drag the guns, one hundred men to a gun, in improvised trough-sleds—tree-trunks hollowed out. Sleds on rollers. Pull the carriages to pieces and transport them in sections. Mules and men for the mountings of the eight-pounders. Send the wagons empty ahead. Good. Nine days rations and forty rounds for each man. Start in moonlight.

It was a murderous climb to the Col, cold as hell, ice on your whiskers, breathing like snuffing up a pair of scissors, your spittle turned solid, the wind like a million little flutes, the moon looking down sort of surprised at seeing a huge fucking chunk of its own landscape stuck down there. But right at the top we came to a kind of monastery, three old miles above sea level, with monks, not a bit fat and not a woman in sight though they may have hid them all away specially, giving us a blessing but a bit of bread and cheese as well and a swig of wine, nothing in it for them you’d think, but there must be a catch in it it stands to reason, and there were these big fluffy dogs panting away with little barrels on their chests which made us laugh to see, brandy in them for those they track half-dead in the snow, what will they think of next? Anyway, after that it was all downhill and we got away from the snow but now it was all this raging fucking torrent and slippery stones and us slithering down on our arses, and there the bastards of Austrians were ready for us in this little fort at Bard, as it’s called, right on top of a rock right at the narrowest point of the valley, four hundred grenadiers they reckoned and God knows how many guns, and we had to creep through in the night, but it did no good, they got some of us and we had to run yelling back, and then it was a matter of a mule track and us clinging to the side of the mountain with our fucking fingernails. Join the army and see life.

“N
o luck with Fort Bard at all, the garrison is evidently dislodgeable. Met the situation before, Berthier, as you know, in Syria. The days of reducing garrisons are gone, waste of time, have to creep round them somehow. Now, Lannes was right, you agree? The mule track, Monte Albaredo. Paving the other way for the other divisions. A good man, Lannes, you think Lannes a good man?”

“A vvv—”

Berthier had seen with wonder the First Consul sliding and rolling down on his bottom, with some NCOs pulling his mule after him. Torn and wet but cheerful as he approached the headquarters bonfire, six miles or so north of Bard, pulling his wringing wet gauntlets off. “Well, old friend, this is better than being a glorified office boy, yes? Command in the field, taken some weight off you already.” And he had given Berthier a hearty and affectionate kick in the puddings.

“I know what you’re wondering about, Berthier—how to get the cannon through. Well, look at it logically. Mule track impossible, right? Therefore it has to go through the village of Bard, right under the Austrians’ snouts. How? Nighttime, obviously. There’s not much moon and there’s plenty of cloud. Drag the guns through the village at night.”

“But the nnn—”

“Exactly, the noise. Get the men gathering horse-shit, cow-shit, straw, plenty around, I’ve seen it. Spread it on the streets, Berthier. Muffle the wheels in old rags. Think of it.” A visionary gleam. “The biggest army in history to cross the Alps.
With heavy artillery
” He gave Berthier’s guts three finger-jabs, one for each word. Then he smiled at the staff, gathered round the map-table. “I always,” he said simply, “wanted to cross the Alps.”

It was a meager dinner—a bit of stewed mountain goat—but the wine was good. The First Consul drank it unwatered, alone with Berthier, and he monologuized about Egypt. “We’ve experienced the extremes, old friend, the desert, the mountains, all the degrees of the thermometer. Remember the little shrine you built, dedicated to your Giuseppina? At the time that my Giuseppina—” The great eyes darkened, the mouth drooped. “Oh, she was living a life of chastity then, it was just the disclosure, the belated horrid disclosure. Best to forget these things, Berthier,” slapping him hard on the knee as though Berthier were insisting on remembering. “Desaix, you remember Desaix? A good man, yes?”

“A vvv—”

And if he was such a good man, why had he left him in Egypt? Berthier remembered that if they had called
lui
the Great Sultan they had called Desaix the Just Sultan—
Sultan El-Adel
. Never made much of himself, a conscientious and self-effacing harrier of Turks and Mamelukes, with never enough guns, never more than about three thousand men, brilliant really. Was he too good a man to have out of Egypt? Well, he was out now and was on his way to Italy.
Lui
was going to use him. A little bemused by the strong wine in this region of rare air, Berthier wondered if there were any difference, in the new language that
lui
was making, between
use
and
use up
.

“I shall be glad to use him, Berthier.”

T
he physician Corvisart walked with her in the garden at Malmaison. “A haven,” he said, “I can see that. Here you must lose your Tuileries headaches.”

“Oh, they persist. They drive me frantic sometimes. Your pills help a little.” Corvisart nodded to himself: bread, that’s all they are, bread. Hypochondria, melancholy, look for some malady of the mind. It was well-known that guilt could be at the root of twitches, pains in the joints, megrims.

“The scent of your roses is delicious.”

“What we have to learn,” she said, with sudden animation, “is how to combine scent and color with longevity.”

“Yes yes, I see that—creative occupation, a great solvent of melancholy. And charming, yes. Rose is your true name, is it not? You perpetuate yourself, in a manner.” She looked at him. “You can speak freely with me, madame, as you know well. You know, and I know, that there is no Lupercalian magic in the waters of Plombières—”

“Luper—What is that word?”

“The feast of Lupercal in Rome. The ritual whipping of the barren. The magical promotion of fertility. Caesar’s wife, as you will know from your reading—”

It was a sky of most tender blue. She looked up at it, he admired the delicacy of the chin, the slenderness of the neck. A young woman still. A myriad blooms nodded in chorus.

“I know,” she said, “all Paris knows, that I gave him cause for—”

“We ought not to use the word ‘infidelity.’ He is a man, a soldier, restless, importuned by the adoring. He loves you most dearly, he says this to all. What you, however, feel is that, with a child, his and yours—though, of course, he adores, as is well-known, his stepchildren—that if he should become a father—”

“I feel,” she said, ceasing to walk, facing him in woman’s gravity, “that he may be trying to find out if the fault, if the barrenness, is really his. He is in a position, as a poet might put it, to scatter his seed wildly.”

Corvisart grinned inwardly at the image. The First Consul as fertility god, a wandering Priapus. But it was true: a great man was expected to scatter bastards abroad, very much abroad in this instance—Italy, Egypt. War, some mad philosopher had written, long since guillotined, reading one of his own little books with scholar’s pleasure as he walked toward the impending blade, war might be an instrument of, what was his term?—of
exogamia
.

“You have proved, madame, the tangible and delightful proof is in your son and daughter—”

“I am still of childbearing age, am I not? I have, you say, no symptom of premature, premature—what is the word?”

“The term we use is ‘menopausis,’ a word of two Greek elements. No, if, as you tell me, the menses continue to be regular.” Then he wondered how much more to say. The consequences of an infraction of the marital code could, as if morality resided in nature and not in the imposed and arbitrary decalogues of theocrats, be an unsuspected physical morbidity. Thou shalt not get drunk, said the crapula. Thou shalt not fall into the arms of the dashing hussar whose arms have been too often open, said the—Said the what? Said the lesser disease of love which, mere transitory agony in a man, could in a woman be the cause of an unseasonable sterility. Or so some hypothetized. He had best keep the hypothesis to himself. “The thing to do,” he said, as he gently steered her by the elbow towards a blazing bed of carnations, “is to be cheerful and believe that all will be well. We know that the belief is not always, nor indeed often, fulfilled, but the optimistic stance is our best sustainer. I think, though, there is little point in your continuing your excursions to Plombières.” Ironically, if the tales were true, and they were, of course they were, it was the road to and from Plombières that had brought her to this state.

“He’s unfaithful to me, and it makes me unhappy. A husband should be faithful, whatever the loftiness of his rank in the state.”

And a wife, and a wife, even in retrospect. “It is the animal in us, madame,” he sighed. “It is nature, that Rousseau taught us was all good. He meant, presumably, for himself.”

M
ilan again: it seemed an age since those brazen and argent and aureate bells had crashed a welcome to this victor. Fallen like a thunderbolt, he had written to Joseph, and thunderbolts of sound (those humming particles, what was their scientific cause, the acoustic science had perhaps not been given its due in the
Institut)
fell and fell with a ponderousness mocked by the myriad blossoms thrown, the polychrome rain of petals. Well, a thunderbolt was right. Sixty-six thousand troops in Northern Italy now, having conquered the agonies of the Alpine passes, and the enemy was still incredulous. Melas’s line was overspread, a fragile arc about Turin, and here we were thickening, concentrating, a lively bubbling broth ready to pour and scald. Why Milan, Berthier had wished to know. Why not proceed to the relief of Genoa? Because, dear old friend, the aim in war is not to comfort one’s friends, however dear and old, but to harass one’s enemies. And the Austrians would soon let Genoa free from the clamp when they knew that their line of communications along the Po’s north bank was as good as slashed to ribbons. They had got out of Milan quickly enough, leaving only a small garrison in the citadel that Murat was prompt to start smoking out. And now such a treasury of abandoned guns and supplies. Indeed, everywhere in this sector: Lannes had found between three and four hundred cannon, siege and field, complete with carriages, in Pavia of all places. Four guns captured at Ivrea, those besieging the Fort of Bard ought to be here soon, surely that garrison has at last yielded. The First Consul set himself up in cool baroque splendor and poured the orders out till amanuensal pencils smoked, broke, wore down to a stub.

“—And Duhesme seizes the Lodi bridge—back to the bridge, it seems an age since—and Murat and Boudet proceed to Piacenza and make a bridgehead over the Po and Lannes marches to Belgiosi to find a suitable crossing-point for the army to move on Stradella, Stradella is the true key, and when Moncey’s corps reaches us here it is to be incorporated in a division we shall newly form under Gardanne.”

“News that Bard has fallen, sir.”

“And about time too. Good, that means more artillery. Take a note to General Lannes, say I am convinced that the Austrians will move on Stradella, I will not be satisfied until I learn that there are at least twenty thousand men at Stradella.”

“It is nearly time, sir, for your conference with the Milanese clergy.”

And, demure as a bishop’s chaplain, he faced two hundred tough priests in a vaulted hall full of holy statues, saying:

“Our immediate mission, as you will understand, your reverences, is to protect our own homeland, forestalling an Austrian invasion of France here in this beautiful country whose language I may claim as my own. That you, like your fellow-citizens, have no love of the arrogant Austrian may be regarded as a matter of little relevance to the purpose of this, our informal assembly. As a child of the Revolution I must naturally come under suspicion as a votary of atheism or rationalism or pantisocracy or deism or some other upstart negation or perversion of the faith that I, like you, reverend fathers, sucked in at the maternal breast. Be it known, then, that the France I serve as its unworthy First Consul will soon see fully restored the entire apparatus of an organized Church, for man cannot live without God. Regard me as the friend of your faith, its earnest promoter—”

Applause applause applause. Encouraged, he continued:

“We are all the children of the one God. We in France have made many changes—erected a state in which privilege is outlawed, talent rewarded, science set to work for man’s comfort and enlightenment—but we are not a new breed of beneficent monsters. We hold fast, after a period of understandable confusion, to the beliefs that—” A grave-faced aide appeared at the end of the hall, saluted, remained standing. Bad news, urgent. Bring this to a. “Respecting the holy prophet, worshipping Allah—” He caught puzzled looks. Wrong country, wrong religion. “—the pagan Egyptians may yet see the light.” Got over that difficulty. “Think of us as missionaries. The armies of France will bring that light to the benighted. And here, in the country of light, we are all soldiers of Christ.” Applause but also murmurs. He marched out, the aide preceding him to the malodorous Milanese day.

“General Murat has captured dispatches of General Melas. To the Aulic Council in Vienna. Genoa has fallen.”

“Nonsense, a mistake. A mistranslation.”

“General Massena requested negotiations at the very moment that General Melas decided to abandon the siege.”

“O God, no no no. That fool Massena. He could have hung on. Cannibalism, anything. A traitorous act. O Jesus Christ.” Some emerging priests nodded approval at the piety. “And now that means they’ll use Genoa as an operating center. The fucking British navy out there. Get us at Stradella. God curse the fucking idiot.” Aware of the priests, he kept that low.