Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (25 page)

“It will keep, Sire. A matter of a certain verbal promise respecting the Duchy of Warsaw.”

“Promised you that, did I? Can’t remember, should have made a note of it, I suppose. Plenty more, Murat, where that came from. Don’t worry, my friend.” And then, to Talleyrand: “Have we worked out the terms of the war indemnity?”

“I could, if desired, issue the tentative figures, but I feel that for the moment, Sire—”

“I understand you, Talleyrand, plenty to digest for the moment. Of course, French troops will have to occupy Prussia till full payment is effected, rather a nuisance, I hate to see troops idle, but our brother and sister of Prussia will, I know, cooperate to the full. We may as well deal now with what will be generally recognized as a mere formality, and then we can enjoy ourselves a little. Like myself, you will all be looking forward to the infantry maneuvers at four, and I think our good friend Berthier has arranged another concert of massed regimental bands for you immediately after luncheon. Is that not so, Berthier?”

“Fff—”

“Something vigorous and stirring to shake us all out of ourselves. A mere formality, I said. Ah yes, thank you, Talleyrand, your majesty of Prussia is to make formal recognition of what we, for want of a better term, term the Bonaparte kingdoms—Naples, Holland and of course our new one, brother Jerome’s, Westphalia—and to accept the permanent reality of the Rhine Confederation. And, this goes without saying, you will once more join the Continental System.”

The Queen of Prussia was today wearing something demure, nunlike, form-fitting. “It does no good,” she said, “your Continental System. The English have found new markets in South America. And it is not being taken seriously by your own people. There are French buyers in Manchester and Huddersfield and the other place, Northampton. France cannot clothe her own armies, even. Am I not right, dear friend?” she added to Alexander.

“Lies,” N growled, “is it not all lies, Talleyrand? It is all lies, my dear friend,” he told Alexander, hand nearly crushing his knee.

“Is it lies too,” she said, “of your selling surplus French grain to Great Britain?”

“That was a masterstroke of policy,” Talleyrand said with sudden loyalty. “That was designed to drag gold out of London.”

“Poor Magdeburg,” the King said, to fill the pause that followed. The Queen looked sharply at him but then, loyal too in her way, began to fill her superb eyes with tears. Alexander’s own eyes began to swim. He said:

“Ah yes. War. It is a terrible thing.”

“Ggg-”

“Quite right, Berthier. We need to be taken out of ourselves. Come, all, the massed bands await.”

The entire company, except for N, sat stunned at the final banquet. As for noise, he throve on it: so he told them, beaming, while the eggs and chicken and crayfish were passed round. The King of Prussia, with hand cupped, said:

“Pardon, I did not quite—”

“
Noise
.
Thrive
on
it
.” Her evening dress was stunning, and he quite readily willed himself into being stunned by it. It recalled an earlier period, that of the Directory; it recalled early Josephine. There was no doubt about it, there was no getting the better of a handsome woman. A pair of female breasts was, so to speak, the ultimate and ineluctable dual argument. Well, he would prove himself not ungallant. He had something ready, had had it ready all along. “I take it,” he said, raising a glass of Chambertin and water, “that none here will refuse to drink a toast to the Freedom of the Seas?”

“Of the what?”

“
The Seas
, dear.”

They all obediently drank it. Drinking it, N felt the Chambertin and water strike his stomach like vinegar. The damned Seas, the accursed woman-element, the immutable boundaries of his Empire. “My dear friend here,” he said, “has great gifts of persuasion.” Alexander looked surprised. “He has, through his charm and his genuine magnanimity, prevailed upon me to grant a concession I would not otherwise have been willing to grant. Danzig,” he cried, “is to be declared a free city.” He swung his glass round, in a beaming invitation to toast Danzig’s free citydom. As they were all still on their feet they had to drink to it. “Of course,” N added, as they sat down again, “it will continue to be blessed with the calmative presence of a French garrison.”

Later he talked to Talleyrand.

“I must be on my way to Königsberg,” he said, “and then back to Paris. I think everything went pretty well. You can see that the Tsar or Czar positively worships me.”

“I should not be too sure. Commercial interests in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Reactionary elements in the Kremlin. Beware of the impressionable, since anything is likely to impress them.”

“I hinted to him at the possibility of my divorce. I sounded him on the feasibility of my marrying his sister. He seemed overawed at the prospect.”

Talleyrand looked at him for a few seconds. “Overawed? Are you sure you interpreted his words or gestures or whatever it was aright?”

“He seemed overawed.”

“Was that when you were drinking coffee with him in the corner?”

“Ah, you were watching, were you? You have a good head on your shoulders, Talleyrand.”

“I thought you had just demanded some last-minute concession from Russia. Overawed, I see.”

“Turkey, Talleyrand, this business of Turkey. You’d better let them know in Constantinople that my present policy as regards the Porte is—well, shall we say
shaky
? But Sébastiani must be expecting something new since the assassination of Sultan whatsisname Selim.”

“So you just handed over Turkey, just like that.” N.

“Can you not see,” and his eyes glowed and expanded with persuasiveness, “that we are on the verge of great things? This year 1807 pulls back the curtain on the beginning of our last and glorious act. A neutralized Prussia—”

“That does not necessarily mean a quiescent Prussia.” Ng.

“—Alexander the devoted friend of France, meaning of course of myself—why, the British will soon be screaming for peace. And think of those ultimate peace conferences in London, Talleyrand—Gibraltar ours, India, who shall we put in Buckingham Palace, Talleyrand? You see now one other urgent reason for divorce. The Romanoff girls have always been fertile, have they not, rich in sons? A little king of Corsican and Slavic stock, waiting to lash those puddingy English into
Europeanness
.”

“What other things did you talk to him about?” Ngi.

“Alexander? He listened with mouth open and eyes large, starving to be taught. Techniques of leadership, the handling of large armies, the modern way of maintaining supplies. He was sincerely interested. The Russians are so much behind the times, Talleyrand. One of our missions is, after all, to educate. Remember this, though: write it down somewhere: Women are totally ineducable. You cannot educate a woman.”

“You are perhaps referring to Her Majesty of Prussia?” Ngis.

“There was a moment, Talleyrand—” He mused, amused, bemused. “She was sitting in her carriage, waiting, while the King was having a final word with young Alexander. Eyes full of tears, smiling bravely, so beautiful and so much
alone
—because that long-faced bastard she’s married to is no good to man, beast, woman, Prussia or anything else. There was a moment, I say, when I nearly jumped in there and gave her what she so obviously needed—passionate kisses on mouth and neck and bosom, a pair of strong arms around her. And then, of course, she would have gone on about dear suffering Prussia, and then I would have said: Oh, have it all back, poor angel, what is a kingdom compared to a woman’s tears? The world well lost, there’s a play about that, I think. But I was strong, Talleyrand, I did not yield. Now you see what I mean when I say that
women are totally ineducable
.” Ngise.

Ngiser. Resign.

See a fif

ty mile long column shuffle

through

Borovsk and Vereya

H
e lay warm enough in his camp-bed in camp near Loshnitsa, hearing coughing from round the campfires without, but unable to will himself to the hour or so of sleep he had to have. It was not so much the weight of thought as the complication of its structure: creep round one hummock of it to find a bare corner inductive of sleep and there awaited another hummock of different color, shape and geologic formation. Borodino, for instance, back to Borodino, a fifty-mile-long column winding through, inspecting its own shame. There must have been thirty thousand corpses there, and the wolves had been at them. Their teeth, disdaining harder work, had gone for the soft portions, ripping open bellies to get to the rich bags where digestion had been abruptly halted, biting off genitalia and spitting them out again as too spongy, insufficiently nutritious. O Jesus Christ O Lord Jesus, a man tripping in a cannonball-furrow, hitting his head on a rusty helmet, unwilling, though his eyes were wide with a horror spelling life, to go on, for what did one go on to? To perhaps a remnant of time wholly filled with seeing Borodino again and again, forever. Now this would not do, and N, warm in his bed, nearly spoke the words aloud, for the quantitative view of death, misery and so on was built on illusion. Which is worse, he had once said to a subaltern in the Gendarmes de l’Ordonnance vomiting at his first sight of many dead, ten thousand bodies cleanly shot or a solitary child anally raped, throat slit, eyes pulled from their sockets and knotted neatly into a grotesque single diophthalm by a tugging and then twisting of their stalks? Do not be misled by number, my son.

See a fif

ty mile long column shuffle

There was far more horror, cause for suicide, say, in one man’s act of defection than in the sight of a whole slaughtered brigade. In this clean Russian air he could smell the perfume Alexander had worn at Tilsit far more clearly than the wood-fires that burnt through the night. The boy, man rather for he saw himself now as a man, had submitted to bad teachers, and N had a notion that Talleyrand had been one of them (do not encourage grandiose notions in him, sir; there must be a limit to the Napoleonic ambition). Ah, Tilsit, and the Prussian monarch on his knees, and Alexander listening, watching, adoring. He, N, had been too kind, too accommodating. Why did one never learn the great lesson, that the whole aim of teaching was to convert the learner into a teacher in his own right, that the postures of worshipful discipleship were a bliss to the master as transient as spring or as youth itself? See, my son: here is your true sphere—the Eastern Baltic and the whole of the faceless and limitless East; my talk of a role in the Mediterranean was a mere gesture of grace, an exorbitant troubadour flourish. Did I not refrain from restoring the ancient kingdom of Poland, leaving a mere harmless Grand Duchy in your front garden; did I not choose to draw my troops into Iberia, there to suffer, as you well know, from obscurantism, superstition, the treachery of the British? Oh, but the ignominy of begging for an armistice, biting my nails through a Moscow autumn, waiting for a letter that never came. Why did you do this to me?

Single images supervened on that one of a kind of animated portrait of Caesar Alexander. His scent at Tilsit became the sweet stench of half-roasted horseflesh in the ravening teeth of an artilleryman with bleeding knuckles. The tens or twenties of thousands of horses dead on the road turned into a single platter of horse-shaped morsels of meat, canapés taken laughingly at some reception at the Tuileries.
Ach
, said Marie Louise,
es ist ein Pferdchen
, and she ate three in a row. That language, then, was now in his own bedchamber, the tongue of mystical dawns and mountains. The naked man whom the Cossacks had first stripped then ripped, from nose down, into two almost exactly symmetrical fascias, became the torn toy dog that his dear son, King of Rome, gurgling now in Paris, had ravaged in a tantrum. He saw the laughing cat-eyes of his wife, begging him to do it again, with no interim of convalescent peace. Under the blanket he was aware of a lifting phallus, the only one tonight surely, he sadly grinned, in the entire Great Army. Or what was left of it. Or what

What is left

is left of the Great Army

through

Borovsk and Vereya

Down, proud flesh. Choose, sleepless brain.

Force the line of the Berezina at Borisov, whip the army on to Minsk to join Schwarzenberg’s forces for one last massive assault. And that was out now, for there was certainly no way of crossing the Berezina, not there, since Tshitshagov had captured and destroyed the bridges. There had been frantic riding along the Berezina’s bank almost as far as Bobruisk, but no crossing-point offered. So there was then, and he spread the map in his head (at best an inaccurate picture of the terrain, at worst the ultimate and mythical hellmouth), so there was then the alternative of a drive to the north towards Wrede’s positions, then a march on to Vilna. But Russia, that one dreamed of in childhood as a summer of plums and sweet william followed at once by snow, had its lengthy autumn and its mud. No real roads and much mud. Men falling in mud and not wishing to get up again. Mud.