Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (32 page)

“I’ll speak of him in any way I choose, madam. There’s a damned hard day coming for the lot of them, I promise you.” To the servants, who listened, making mental notes for memoirs, he said: “Take that aromatic muck out and bring some of the imitation stuff. And don’t you drink it, because I’ll know. Oh, here, nobody’s to be trusted.” He took the coffeepot and strode over to a potted palm, degging the soil with the hot rich brew. The Empress cried.

“You are cruel. A cruel man. Always my father said.”

“A
ch du bist gehässig.” Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand
-
Périgord, formerly Bishop of Autun, now Prince of Benevento, Minister of Foreign Affairs till his master’s Tilsit euphoria spoke, in some hardly audible upper partial, of the prudence of resignation, at present merely Grand Chamberlain of the Empire, made his little group roar with laughter as he improvised one of his famous parodies of the Emperor’s domestic life. He did the gurgling Empress very well: “
Ach, du hast genug gesagt
,” and so on. He did not normally perform this act in the presence of the discarded Empress, his present hostess, but she was at the moment showing the Polish princess round the gardens. Women too, it appeared, were not averse to comparing notes about a common lover.

He stood in a corner of the great salon at Malmaison, enjoying the enjoyment of the ladies and the smiling crumb-spluttering of Cardinal Maury. “They do one very well here,” Talleyrand said. “Far far better than one has ever been done at the Tuileries. Only a potentate with no palate could conceive of a perpetual Lent and call it a Continental System.” Cardinal Maury, crammed with Ruccieri’s gâteaux, sketched a sort of blessing over the exquisite buffet table, a work of art in itself, a shame really so to ravage it, full of succulent exotica from the Malmaison hothouses. At length he said, accepting an ice from a bowing flunky:

“Her Ruccieri is a great genius. Laguipière was a genius too but wasted. I coveted his services at one time. Poor man, one of the more regrettable casualties of the retreat from Moscow. Requiescat, and so on.”

“Let us say Requies
cant
,” Talleyrand said, “while we are so comfortably praying.” He used a tone he had sometimes employed episcopally. “And the future tense may be made to cover the
morituri
as well as the
mortui
” The ladies, not much caring for this switch to piety—food or the fallen—were glad to be able to rush over and coo greetings at Henri de Guennec, handsome hero of Berezina, who had just arrived, left arm cleanly and somehow erotically bandaged. He was destined never to be one of the
mortui
—not, anyway,
in bello
.

“The
morituri
” Cardinal Maury said, “are as eager to salute their Caesar as ever. How much longer, my prince?”

“Not long, your eminence. When I saw him crown himself and our delightful hostess in 1804, I said to myself:
Ten
years
is
enough
. And ten years, indeed, may be accounted more than enough for so bizarre an adventure. I remember—it was just after the Marengo victory—saying to poor Germaine de Staël—she must now, I should think, be preparing an end to her exile—saying, I say, that I could not visualize an Emperor Napoleon grown old. His imminent death in battle was a very large aspect of his glamour. I feared, at one time, a sempiternal martyrdom that would have shoved any number of fat and talentless Bonapartes on the throne, but I think the Bourbons will soon be back with us. Nay, I
know
. And I can see a comic Bonaparte gibbering behind bars, desperately wishing to die but unable to effect his own quietus. The reign is going to end in a mixture of absurdity and shame.”

“Shame?”

“It will be a kind of shame to many to have to defer to victorious foreigners in the capital—Prussians, Cossacks and so forth. Perhaps the English too. But it is a kind of shame that his stubbornness and pride will ironically bring about. He will not accept compromise treaties and old boundaries. Everything or nothing. And so—the frog-dance and the goose-step in Paris. In the streets, not the cabarets.” He grinned at Cardinal Maury, even while repeating: “Absurdity and shame.”

“There was a time when you did not speak your treason so publicly.” Cardinal Maury smiled, saying it. The term
treason
had ceased to have deadly harmonics. Once it had been applied to the hirelings of the Bourbons, but now the Bourbons evidently, logically, had to come back. Then one could start making
treason
clang like a dangerous bell again. For treason had to do only with the Lord’s true anointed.

“I have never deviated, your eminence, from my initial loyalties. But a man must survive. Your eminence, if I may say so without disrespect, has practiced the art of survival as assiduously as I. It is the only art worth studying. Where,” he grinned wickedly and with the shocking descent to sudden insolence for which he was becoming well-known, “has his holy squirrelship stowed his nuts? Has he, like so many patriots, a pseudonymous gold deposit in the central bank of the archenemy?”

“Ah—so you too? Well, the churchman, like the diplomatist, has to be a kind of international creature. Like those gray squirrels out there.” He looked out to the garden, where a deposed Empress and the princess of a grand duchy were talking in womanly animation. Autumn was on its way. Cardinal Maury smiled at Talleyrand and then sketched a toast in ice cream. His Grace the Duke of Parma came over to join them, patting a belly well-satisfied, Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, formerly Minister of Justice, still President of the Senate—Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, hale and chronically overfed. He said:

“The honey-hued hair of the Walewska lady—positively esculent. And our dear hostess so amical towards her: see, they practically
eat
each other. Women are strange creatures.” He stared at them through the open window as though wondering how best they might be cooked.

“Women,” Talleyrand said, “are
permanent
creatures.”

“Eh?” Cambacérès did not understand but did not mind not understanding. “The strangeness, I would have thought, in this particular connection that is, lies in the fact that the Walewska lady provided the very tangible and visible proof of the fact that the—The root and occasion, in other ways, of—may we call it divorce, your eminence, or does Holy Church prefer some more er euphemistic, some more ecclesiastically acceptable er—”

“It’s been called an annulment,” Talleyrand said, the old bishop peeping out, “but I think most of us regard it as divorce, full-cream, undiluted. You refer, your grace, to the Walewska by-blow.”

“One way of putting it, I wouldn’t myself use that sort of—Well, yes, she is the golden-haired banner which proclaimed our poor Josephine’s lamentable sterility.”

“There had been others,” the Cardinal said, in a worldly manner. “Hole-in-the-corner others. I still maintain that it is the hardest task in the world to prove paternity. There are people, I know,” he primly worldlily added, “who would say
Deo gratias
to that.”

“You say
poor
” Talleyrand said to Cambacérès. “
Poor
is what you said. I too, God help me, have said
poor
often enough—”

“Pardon me, I don’t quite follow your reference—Oh, I see, yes, I see—” He nodded with vigor and his jowls shook like puddings. “Our poor—Yes.”

“But where has our permanency lain? She has been the abiding myth, the goddess invoked by frozen soldiers limping back from Russia. She is the core of a whole national superstition. There is a very worrying quality about that family—”

“Worrying?”

“Yes yes, with her daughter Hortense the one shining genuinely aristocratic light at the Tuileries. With her son Eugène the only competent and loyal marshal he has left—well, very nearly. They will survive, and through no trickery. There is something in the blood.”

“The Beauharnais blood was good blood,” Cardinal Maury said. “Is, I should say. I was thinking of General Beauharnais, one of the nonsurvivors. Fifty heads a day at the Carmes.” He shuddered. “Well, the days of Robespierre are far, thank God. We’ll never see anything like that again.”

“There is something in the blood,” Talleyrand repeated. “I used to deride the notion of inheritable qualities of that kind. But now we are hearing a lot about the superiority of one kind of blood over another. The aristocratic principle has been expanded from the family to the nation. Not our nation. We have never spoken of great qualities in the French—only in particular Frenchmen.”

“Including honorary ones,” Cambacérès said. “A Frenchman is somebody who speaks French and lives in France. Like, say, poor tortured MacDonald.”

“Tortured?” said Cardinal Maury in alarm. “Oh, I see. Mentally—”

“It was not his fault if Yorck made special arrangements with the Prussians. And it is, I think, my prince, the Prussians you have in mind when you talk of the new principle—what did you call it?”

“I had not yet got down to calling it anything,” Talleyrand smiled, “but, since you press me, I will launch the term
master
race
. It is the whole race, you see, and not just its exceptional representatives, that is to prevail. We may, in our post-Napoleonic crapula, be unable to meet the mad challenge of so preposterous a religion. But the German people, under the Prussians, are ready to shout its slogans. You’ll be hearing them in Paris before long.”

“Ah,” Cambacérès said, “you too have suffered from this nightmare. I wake with it myself—often after stewed pike, for some reason—and it stays in the bedroom with me. Coarse sausage and beer by the kilo mug and national songs. There is a sobbing quality about the German language—the very lilt of the L in a word like, let me see,
kalt
or
alt
is an anthem of sentimental conviction. Gentlemen, I have eaten and eaten well—she does you very well here—but I am impelled to sample a few of those
biscuits glacés
. Her man Ruccieri is a genius of the lighter order.”

“And your own genius?” the Cardinal smiled.

“Yes yes, it is time you came,” munched Cambacérès. “It has been a long time since you honored my table. Tomorrow—why not? You too, my prince, if you can spare the time from weightier matters. I have a dinner for—no matter—somewhat complicated—a faceless gentleman from St. Petersburg. But ah, there is a fascinating problem. I have two really huge sturgeon—giants—brought live, in immense vats, now swimming in blissful nescience of their impending ah quietus. A gift, a gift but, a somewhat embarrassing one, since one fish is some fifty pounds—or ah twenty-three kilograms as we must say now, ridiculous really—bigger than the other. I may not serve the two at the one dinner, since the greater must shame the less. And how could I commit the solecism of serving two fish of identical breed on two successive days? I look to you, Prince Talleyrand, for a diplomatic solution.”

“Hm.” Talleyrand thought awhile. While he was thinking, his hostess and the Princess Walewska came in from the gardens. A little chilly, Josephine seemed to indicate by her delicate shoulder-rotating, her arms across her bosom. She said, smiling a radiant smile that hid her teeth and yet still left that traditional after-image of a margaric effulgence, “My apologies for being a neglectful hostess. But Her Highness really had to see the disposition of the beds before dark. And tomorrow she leaves early.”

“Such displays,” the honey-haired princess enthused, with a charming Slavic inflection. “Such richness and variety. It is something that Her Majesty has given to the whole world—this art of breeding the perfect rose.”

“They are overblown, most of them,” Josephine said. “You must come back in June, bringing your son with you.” No whit embarrassed, the perfect rose, art of breeding. “Your Grace,” she said to Cambacérès, “must find my buffet somewhat primitive—”

“It is a civilized innovation,” the Arch-Chancellor bowed and bowed. “To talk and walk and pick such delicacies from this comestible Eden, counterpart of your bird-haunted paradise without.” Smiles and smiles and bows and then she said, seeing the handsome wounded warrior:

“My dear Henri—”

The Arch-Chancellor had swept the dish clear of
biscuits glacés
. Talleyrand said: “Try this, sir. Bring in the lesser sturgeon. Bring it in in triumph, to the strains of flutes and strings. Make all exclaim on the majesty of it. Then arrange for a clumsy bearer of the dish to stumble. The lesser sturgeon will then go sliding to the floor in a flaky fishwreck.
Ichtyofrage
—may one use such a neologism? No matter. Cries of woe and distress. Then lo—the greater one is borne in in even larger triumph, with trumpets and drums. Imagine the rapture, the applause.”

“You were always bound to go far,” Cambacérès said, nodding in great gravity, as though Talleyrand had confessed to a major sin. “You always had this ingenuity, a kind of artistry of destruction. I admire you, sir. I cannot emulate you, not in a general way. But your
ichtyofrage
—brilliant, truly so.”

“Are they Baltic sturgeon, sir?” the Cardinal asked.

“Yes, indeed. Sent overland in their huge vats, fresh now as the day they left their native waters.”