Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (22 page)

Waved the lackey out and Count de Bausset, who was prefect in attendance, went out too very quickly without being waved at, for he knew what was coming, everybody knew, and now here it was, coming. But it was not going to be easy for him either, as she could tell from the rattle of cup against saucer, like a sort of musical chattering of teeth she had thought madly, and now it came, and he trembled in front of the fire. Trembling he said:

“Your daughter. That is to say. Hortense will have said something.”

“No. No. Hortense? Nothing.”

“You understand? You
must
understand. Do you think I want this? Can you honestly sit there and think I want it?” Trembling.

“You mean. You are in love with. This. Christine de Mathis.”

“No. No. No no no no no, whoever that is, who is that, oh yes, a friend of Pauline’s, no no no, that is not it. Oh foolish woman, could you think that, oh ridic, no no, it is nobody.”

“You are not in love with anybody?”

“With you, with you, woman, stupid bitch, owwwwww.” And he howled and beat his brow with his left forearm, his right hand being thrust into his tunic, rubbing heartburn or some such pain, but
heartburn
, in what is it, metaphor, would be all too right a thing to say.

“Well then, if you are in love with me. All is well. But you should not call me what you.”

“Oh, I meant by that that, and it is I who am being stupid now, made stupid by the pain of it, you should have been a Russian princess or an Austrian one, and you should have given me a son. The stupidity lies in in, where does the stupidity lie? Fate? Destiny? The force of history?” Those big words which were
abstract
were making him tremble less. “I had best say the word, had I not? Well, the word is, the word is. Oh my God.
Divorce
.

A terrible word. All the two of them could now do was to taste the word, like coffee to see if it was sweet enough, taste it to see what it tasted like.
Divorce
. It did not really taste too badly, for all that it was the most dreadful word in the world. Perhaps the dreadful thing was that it had a
kissing
sound in it if you lengthened it enough, as her Creole way of speaking made her do.
Divoooorce
. On him it had a strange effect, like an aphro aphrodis, for he began to move towards her, right arm released from tunic, both arms out, eyes flaring. His words belied.

“The national interest alliance attempt on my life at Schönbrunn a male heir you understand you
must
under.”

And then it had seemed to her the proper thing to do, though her migraine had miraculously cleared and she felt madly in control, like the sea, to scream for the whole of the Tuileries to hear and then, with grace, everything with grace,
very
important, to collapse to the carpet. You
must
under. So she undered, eyes closed, hearing everything, hearing the whole of the Tuileries startled to movement like a flurry of bats in a cave if one screams by her scream. She could see his boots, very clean though agitated, then they flashed out of her sightline as he went, as its opening and his words then attested, to the door that led to the salon and she heard him say quite calmly:

“Come in, Bausset. Shut the door as you.” With Bausset there (his sharp intake of breath) she now had to cry:

“No! No! I cannot! I will not!”

“Carry her. Her majesty. To her.” He did not have much breath.

“Yes Sire I will.” She went totally limp, eyelids fluttered to a close, as he grunted, lifting her, should have taken his sword off first. And, while she was being carried, Bausset kept grunting
Sire
in reply to what he was stiffly saying: “National welfare, Bausset, violence to my true feelings, considerations of state versus the dictates of the heart, Bausset, divorce a political necessity, dreadful but true, I had not realized quite, must confess, that the Empress would react so strongly, Bausset, I had assumed, falsely as it has turned out, that she had already been prepared for the news by her daughter, Bausset.” Sire. Sire. Relishing the prospect of tattling it all, despite the difficulty of. He did not seem to have had much experience of carrying a woman. N must have been mad to entrust all this to a
hypocrite
and
eavesdropper
and
tattletale
, as he had always called Bausset, but the whole world would know it soon enough. She wondered whether to sigh deeply, but there was trouble in getting her down the narrow stairway and Bausset was evidently, she risked a glance, going to trip over his stupid sword, because he tightened his hold, in fright it must be, on her. She said quietly in his ear:

“Crushing me.”

And then she was on her ottoman in her bedroom and Hortense was there, and then Hortense was there again, having been
summoned
to him and now bringing it all back while it was still fresh.

“Yes yes dear, what did he say?”

“Oh mother, he was very stiff at first and said something about the irrevocability of his decision, big words,
you know
, and that neither tears nor entreaties nor threats would make him change his mind.”

“What do you suppose he meant by
threats
?”

“That you might, I suppose, you know, do something—”

“Desperate? But that would be a terrible sin. Me do something
desperate
? He must have been extremely agitated.”

“Oh he was. Anyway, I was very stiff back to him, saying that he was the master Sire, calling him
Sire
all the time, but reminding him that he had been very very cruel, all those parties which only really began when you had gone to bed, and his sister Pauline bringing women all the time like a—”

“Brothel. Let us not mince words. And she herself is precisely a.”

“What I said was that the whole of France would see him as a heartless tyrant but that the Bonaparte family would be hugging itself with joy, and then tears came to his eyes.”

“Ah.”

“I said you would do what he and the Bonapartes wanted and what he thought France wanted, and that when we left him—you and me and Eugène I meant of course—we would take with us the memory of all the kindness he had shown us.”

“And then I suppose he
really
wept.”

“Sobbed and sobbed and went on sobbing about were we all going to abandon him and did no one love him anymore and if it had been just a matter of his own happiness he would have sacrificed it—”

“What did he mean by that I wonder?”

“But the happiness and security of France were at stake and then we all ought to feel sorry for him because he was going to give up all that meant most to him in the whole world. Then I said that we’d need courage too because we’d have to stop being his stepchildren—I changed that to just
children
—but that we’d never stand in the way of whatever plans he had.”

“Oh Hortense, this is
really
sad, this is heartbreaking. Oh Hortense, pass me that handkerchief, girl, no, the big one. You take the little one. Oh Hortense.”

“He said that I mustn’t leave him and that I had an obligation to my own children as well as to him, but I said my first obligation was to my mother who will need me so badly. He went on sobbing and I sobbed too.”

“Oh, it really is too utterly sad, my poor child. Come and cry on your poor mother’s shoulder.” And then, later: “Why does he have to make things so
difficult
for himself? All men are the same, but he is worse than most.”

“It’s about France and alliances and so on. Even Monsieur Talleyrand is said to have said something earlier about it being a sad day for France when the time came for him to do what he seemed to have in mind.”

“You mean they’ve
discussed
all this before?”

“They had to, mother, I suppose. It’s a matter of the state and so on. After all, they told me, but I couldn’t bring myself to to—”

“Without having the
decency
to breathe a word to me.” And then: “
Talleyrand
said that? I never thought that Talleyrand liked me. I’m sure I put myself out to try and please him, but he was always so stern or so
sarcastic
.”

“It comes of his having been a bishop, mother.”

“Ah.” And she dried her eyes, then, having the handkerchief in her hand, dried one of Hortense’s. “I’m glad you mentioned that. There can’t be a divorce, can there? The Pope wouldn’t allow it.”

“But isn’t the Pope his prisoner or something?”

“That may be so, I don’t follow these things closely, so much happening all the time and so much of it vindictive and
silly
, but I should have thought that it wouldn’t make any difference to the rights and wrongs of it whether he’s a prisoner
now
, since he wasn’t a prisoner
then
. And, in any event, taking the Pope prisoner can’t mean changing a truth to an untruth, it’s like saying that if one of these chemists who proved that water is oxygen and that other thing mixed up together is put into prison, then water is no longer what he
proved
it was. Do you see what I mean, dear?”

“What he said to me was about the parish priest not being there, which he has to be according to law.”

“Ah. So you
asked
him, did you? Well, there was a cardinal there, and the Pope himself was not very far away, but just because there’s no parish priest? I see, and they’ll all nod and say
that’s right
, men sticking together. I suppose we could fight it.”

“It wouldn’t do any good, mother.”

“And I loved him, Hortense, loved him, surely you must know that? I gave him my whole heart, but I see now it was only to break.”

“You didn’t give him. You know what you didn’t give him, mother.”

“What fault of mine was that? These things cannot be
ordered
, Hortense, as you know full well. You cannot order nature. The question is: what’s to happen to us now?”

Later, when she was lying alone in bed, he himself came in, having knocked humbly. He was wearing a dressing gown and his great eyes brimmed. He stumbled over to the bed like a disabled veteran and sat heavily on it. “The horror of the whole thing,” he began to sob. “And none of my purposing.”

She was determined to be dry-eyed now. She had spent an hour of appalled cosmesis on her face’s ravagement, all his fault. She was not going to let him make her cry again. For a man it was different, but of course everything was: crying just made them look younger. “If a man,” she said, “loves his wife, he does not go looking for an excuse to leave her.”

“It is no excuse, no excuse, oh God God God, God knows it is no excuse. It is urgent necessity, it is the future of France.”

“Who,” she said, “are you proposing to marry?”

“It isn’t certain yet. It’s a question of either Russia or Austria. And one or the other has to give me a son, an heir, a successor. They tried to kill me, damn it. Meanwhile, it’s all to be a sort of limbo. It can’t be announced yet, all we can do is to let the rumors circulate, see how the people take it. And we have the victory celebrations in a couple of days—”

“Am I supposed to join in the celebrating of a
victory
?”

“Well, you have to, haven’t you, with all these German kings and grand dukes and princes and so on coming to Paris? You’re the Empress still, remember, till we get started on the divorce.”

“Divoooorce.” She would not cry, she refused, not any more. But he cried enough for more than two. Stimulated by the word
divorce
, he was also on to her at once, kissing her face, feeding her whole spoonsful of fresh brine.

“This is not the way for a.”

“Oh, what do they know about it, any of them, it doesn’t alter anything, you cannot legislate for love and passion.” His appetite for her was fiercer than she had known it in years, there was nothing like the word
divorce
for, it seemed, bringing a couple close, or perhaps it was some Corsican superstition about frightening, by mention of that word, the genetic process into at once starting work on a son, not that that could really help much, since she was neither Austrian nor Russian. Afterwards he lay panting and said: “In three days’ time there is to be this Te Deum at Notre Dame.” That made the tears flow again, and he tried to quench them by gritting out the terrible word. “And the city gives us a banquet and ball the following day.”

“Terrible. What happens afterwards to me and Hortense and Eugène?”

“Well.” He thought, wiping his eyes with his chubby fist. “You have many things to choose from, no limit really. How about an Italian principality, with Rome as your capital? Plenty of palaces there, a fine city really, I could have it cleaned up for you of course.”

She could not quite understand why that should make her so angry. She beat on his chest with her fists and said: “I’m not going to be shut up in Rome, I’m to stay here in France, in Paris, or near Paris. You can give Italy to Eugène.”

“Perhaps Eugène doesn’t want Italy. Could I have one of those hothouse peaches over there?”

“Not until you. Oh, all right then.”

He mumbled at the peach with relish, mixing its juice with a still steadily flowing brine, and said: “All right, you can have Malmaison and the Élysée Palace, and still be called Empress and Her Majesty and so on, and have the imperial livery on everything. And, yes, three million francs a year. These are good peaches, hungrier than I thought, of course it’s in the heroic tradition for grief to produce hunger, and we had little enough dinner, God knows.” Then: “
Grief
. Oh my dear God, the
grief
of it.” She wondered for an instant if that word too was a, but then he went on to say, almost with the consideration proper to an enquiry about ill health, “Your debts. How are they these days?”

“And I want the carriage to be drawn by
eight horses
.”

“Yes yes yes. No problem.” Plenty of horses around. “Debts. I’ve had no time lately to examine your accounts, subjugating the Austrians and so on, but I should imagine they.”

“About two million, I think. It has been an expensive time.”

“Oh blessed lord Jesus Christ, what do you
do
with the money? Oh holy Mary mother of God, how do you manage to get through that amount?
What
on
, by St. Joseph and all the martyrs? Oh God, I suppose I shall have to arrange for a loan on your future revenues.” He seemed quite cheerful now, though still weeping a good deal. She was able to notice now, with a certain relief at being able to bring it into the main area of her mind, that his breath was bad enough for her to feel a certain relief at being relieved of it as an aspect of her life, though she
must
tell him to do something about it before marrying again. What did one do? Cachets and peppermint and so on, no. He bolted his food, he had terrible pains, poor man. No, it was something you had to have along with the imperial purple. He wanted the whole of Europe, and the whole of Europe had to have bad breath blowing over it.