Authors: Patrick Rambaud
‘Public opinion?’
‘You must be aware of it, sire, listen to the street. . .’
‘To calm them down,’ added the Police Chief, ‘if you would appear at a window ...’
‘And what about the former aristocracy?’
‘They aren’t much in evidence, sire, but they have insisted that the fleur-de-lys flag be flown from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville ...’
‘Do the people here obey them?’
‘As one might obey a directive from Paris, sire.’
‘The garrison?’
‘They refused to give the oath to the King...’
There was more about this in the newspaper, which made Colonel Campbell and his commissioner colleagues turn pale. In Clermont-Ferrand, the soldiers had burned the white flag which was being carried in procession by the council. The royal insignia had been destroyed in Rouen, Orléans, Poitiers and Mouiins. In Lyons the troops were on the brink of mutiny, and were beating up allied patrols. In Paris, workers were helping the soldiers to run Cossacks through with their swords in broad daylight. There were attempted uprisings in Antwerp, in Mayence, in all the Eastern garrisons. The Emperor stood by the fireplace rubbing his hands, growing more animated as the foreign commissioners grew more alarmed. Once the worthies had departed, Napoleon sat in an armchair and called for his pharmacist. The man came running with a case marked with an eagle, took out a syringe which he gave to the Emperor, uncorking a flask so that Napoleon could fill his syringe himself with a mixture of zinc and copper sulphate, lead acetate and mercury, weighed out and dissolved in distilled water and laudanum. The Emperor had to undergo this daily injection because he suffered from a venereal disease, a gift from an actress during his first stay in Paris. Unconcerned about the foreign commissioners, who were unaccustomed to such intimacy, he pulled his breeches below his knees and, punctuating his phrases with the full syringe held between his fingers, he launched into a lesson in strategy
a posteriori.
‘Luck abandoned me on the twenty-first of March, gentlemen, and it was my fault! Around Saint-Dizier I thought I held all your armies before me, but all I was hunting down was a Russian corps ... If I had withdrawn to Paris, you wouldn’t be with me this evening ... Oof!’ (He had just given himself an injection in the penis.) ‘On the way I would have rejoined Oudinot’s and Macdonald’s corps, Compans’ infantry in Sézanne, Ledru-Dessarts’ men in Meaux!’ (He waved his empty syringe around like a sword.) Marmont’s and Mortier’s regiments would not have been slaughtered in Fère-Champenoise.’ (He held out the syringe to the pharmacist.) ‘What a disaster! That infernal storm that blinded the men and drenched the powder!’ (He reflectively pulled up his breeches.) ‘In Paris, I would have found the garrison and the National Guard, I would have had almost a hundred thousand men under my command, pressing down on the capital - and you would have been crushed, gentlemen!’
Napoleon rose to his feet to dismiss the commissioners. ‘Go and sleep wherever you can, tomorrow morning we will leave at six o’clock.’
They disappeared in search of somewhere to stay in the chilly palace. The Emperor put on his hat and his green jacket, cocking his ear to the continuing hubbub outside.
‘Is there a balcony from which the citizens might see me?’
‘Just above this room, sire,’ said Octave, who had reconnoitred the building.
‘Take a torch. You too, Bertrand.’
On the first floor, the Emperor himself opened a double window and commanded: ‘Each of you take up position on one side of this guard-rail, and light me.’
He emerged from the window between the two lanterns, held out his arm in an Imperial salute and intoxicated himself on the endless ovation unleashed by his appearance.
*
Octave had resolved to take notes. At each stop he pencilled down a few lines in his notebook so he would not forget the details that he would later assemble into a story:
‘Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, Villeneuve-sur-Allier, Moulins, Roanne, Tarare, Salvaguny, wherever we went the population gave His Majesty a warm reception, wherever we went he stopped and chatted with the priest, the doctor, the Mayor, a shopkeeper. In Lyons, honour was paid to him as though he was still on the throne. On Sunday we reached Vienne at dawn, and we breakfasted in Péage-de-Roussillon. Slates made way for Roman tiles.’
In Valence everything changed. The town was silent, no one came to meet the convoy, no one tried to hamper their progress. The Emperor would have liked to visit the furnished room where he had lived with his young brother Louis when he was a lieutenant in the 4th Artillery Regiment; he had been pleased to see the rue Perollerie again, and the Three Pigeons inn where he had taken his meals in those days - but the Bourbon flag flapped from every monument, on every statue, and he chose not to stop.
They passed beyond the town. Napoleon was stretching his legs by walking up a hill when a carriage overtook him; it parked on the verge not far away. A man wearing a travelling cap got out and stood in the middle of the road, with his hands behind his back. The Emperor walked straight towards him. It was Augereau, the Duke of Castiglione, in civilian clothes. A marshal and adventurer, this fruiterer’s son from the rue Mouffetard had been a fencing master in Naples, had sold watches in Constantinople, given dancing lessons, served in the Russian army and abducted a young Greek girl to live with him in Lisbon. The Directory had crowned him with laurels and Napoleon had showered him with gold. He was the champion of Areola, having taken the place of Bonaparte (who had fallen into a ditch before he reached the bridge) and the undisputed hero of Millesimo, Ceva, Lodi, the head of the Army of the Rhine and then the Army of Catalonia; before the Austrian advance he had abandoned Lyons without a fight, exhausted by the war.
Count Bertrand told Octave the identity of this famous marshal, whom he knew by his name alone. Octave dreamed of having the power of Gyges, the King of Lydia, whose ring granted him invisibility. So many significant scenes went unwitnessed, like this random encounter which he was unable to observe at close quarters; he could merely guess its progress at a distance, from the attitudes of the two old comrades at arms. The Emperor had taken off his hat, and the other man insolently kept his on. Had he been invisible, Octave would have slipped between them and heard a brief and brutal conversation.
‘Good day to you, Lord Castiglione,’ said Napoleon.
‘Lord of what? A lousy village that I held against the Austrians in spite of your orders? Castiglione, oh, yes, it has a ring to it, but it rings hollow, like all that you give and all that you have done.’
‘I have been deceived about people.’
‘No, it is you who have deceived them.’
‘You owe your fortune to me, your grace.’
‘You always bring everything down to yourself.’
‘Go and spit on me in Paris, your grace, the Bourbons will pay you handsomely for it.’
‘You’re as rapacious as your eagle! Look what you have brought us to.’
‘Be off with your grudges!’
I’m not your puppet!’
Augereau put two fingers to the visor of his cap. Napoleon pulled his cocked hat low over his forehead and, turning his back on the marshal, strode to his carriage. Later, when all the passengers had disembarked from the berlins that were about to cross the Isère, Sir Neil Campbell showed the Emperor an order signed by Augereau, which some soldiers wearing white cockades had handed to him in Valence. Napoleon asked Bertrand for his glasses and read it emotionlessly:
You have been freed from your oaths ... You are freed by the abdication of a man who, having immolated thousands of victims in the service of his own cruel ambition, could not die a soldier’s death. Let us swear loyalty to Louis XVIII and wear truly French colours . . .
The Emperor ripped this proclamation into shreds and, saying to the Englishman, ‘The Duke of Castiglione has confirmed all that to me,’ he threw the pieces of paper into the wind, which carried them to the swift waves of the Isère.
*
In Montélimar at sunset, the Emperor had a long discussion with the Sub-Prefect, M. Gaud de Rousillac: he was entering hostile territory, and was sorry to have dismissed his escort of chasseurs in Nevers. The Midi had always been royalist in its soul. Napoleon had forgotten that, but deep down he did not need to be reminded of it. The day after the Thermidor coup, the inhabitants of Tarascon had hurled sixty republicans over the castle walls. In Aix and Nîmes, the people of Provence had indiscriminately slit the throats of the occupants of the prisons. Wolves had returned to attack the hamlets; armed bands of deserters marched by night and laid waste the region from the Alpilles to Les Landes. The people of Marseille were learning Russian so they could talk to their liberators, because Suvorov was coming back up from Milan towards the Alps. Napoleon remembered those times. He thought he was back there when he reached Donzère, which was celebrating the Restoration. ‘Down with the tyrant! Long live the King!’ they shouted at the carriages with their eagle insignia as they quickly passed by. Wishing to be spared mockery, and to avoid musket fire, the Emperor transferred to the barouche of the Austrian commissioner, General Koller; he asked him, ‘Does your postilion smoke?’
‘Probably, but not if he’s carrying Your Majesty.’
‘Quite the contrary! Such familiarity will prove that I am not aboard your carriage. And why don’t you sing a little? Vienna is the opera capital of the world, is it not?’
‘Sire, my singing is appallingly out of tune . . .’
‘Then whistle! Anyone can whistle! Show a lack of respect, for God’s sake, to conceal my presence!’
General Koller tried to whistle a bit of Mozart that was so distorted as to be entirely unrecognizable. Napoleon sat sullenly in a corner of the seat and pretended to sleep as they passed through the streets of Orange - but they had to stop at the post-house on the way out of town to change horses. A fleur-de-lys flag hung from the roof of the stables. While the Emperor hid himself away, Count Bertrand took advantage of this forced stop to reach an agreement with Campbell.
‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘our convoy is attracting too much
attention. For the sake of prudence we should divide it in two.’
‘You’re right.’
‘You go on ahead and open up the road for us. Your English uniform will protect you - the southerners seem to like your compatriots.’
‘I believe that is so, your grace.’
‘You take the two carriages of cooks and valets, with their provisions, if necessary; they may have to set up a canteen in open country if the towns are too turbulent. Monsieur Sénécal will go with you on horseback, ensuring contact between you and His Majesty. In two days’ time we will all meet up, if possible, at the port of Saint Tropez.’
‘That seems like a sensible plan.’
So Octave set off with Campbell and the two administrative barouches. They entered Avignon at four o’clock in the morning. The city was not: asleep; on the contrary, it was celebrating. People were dancing to the sound of discordant bands, beneath garlands of multicoloured Chinese lanterns. They were dancing the farandole, singing at the top of their voices and drinking a heavy wine that made their heads spin. Some recently liberated Spanish prisoners played the mandolin and rattled their castanets. Draft dodgers who had been hunted by the Imperial gendarmerie had emerged from the mountains where they had been hiding, and passed through the streets to cheers, with pine cones in their hats. Outside the door of the
mairie
, a large portrait of Napoleon was ablaze. Some worthies threw his bust out of a window. It shattered on the cobbles to cries of joy. Bells rang out, white flags hung from the windows of all the buildings,
and the whole population was wearing the Bourbon cockade - on their hats, on the lapels of their jackets and pinned to the dancers’ hair.
Not far from the Place de la Comédie, where armed men were keeping guard, the berlins lined up beside a coach decorated with a string of little white flags that was leaving for Lyons at daybreak. The town guard checked the travellers.
‘Hey, look!’ said a boy. ‘The bird of ill omen!’
He pointed at the Imperial coat of arms painted on the sides of the administrative coaches. A crowd gathered immediately. A shaggy shepherd wearing a rough woollen jacket opened one of the doors, and dragged out a terrified cook by the throat. His faint protests met with a shower of curses. From his pocket, Octave took the white cockade that he had worn with Sémallé in Paris. He fixed it to the ribbon of his hat and was able to intervene.
‘My friends! My friends! What are you looking for?’
‘The tyrant isn’t hidden under one of your cushions, is he?’
‘If you’re talking about the former Emperor, he’s not with us.’
‘And who might you be?’
‘A representative of the provisional government of his Majesty Louis XVIII.’
‘That’s fine!’ said the shepherd.
‘Then cry
Long live the King!
’ said a joker.
‘Long live the King!’ cried Octave, who was used to doing just that.
‘Long live the King!’ cried the little crowd.
‘And the rest of them!’ the shepherd continued.
Valets and cooks complied as cockades were fixed to their hats, and the residents of Avignon, armed with buckets of tar, daubed the hated eagles that gleamed too brightly on the carriages. Colonel Campbell, who had also alighted from his berlin, negotiated with a captain of the city guard. Free to do as he pleased thanks to his usurped title and the royalist colours that he wore voluntarily, Octave rode over to Campbell.
‘Captain Montagnac is in command here,’ the Englishman explained. ‘He’s telling me about the risks that the Emperor runs.’
‘I’m sure that’s so, but he can’t avoid Avignon; a detour would be too long and no less dangerous.’
‘Does he have sufficient escort?’ asked the Captain.
‘It’s non-existent.’
‘Give us reinforcements,’ Campbell suggested.
Octave went on, ‘Can you assure us that His Majesty will be protected while the horses are being changed?’
‘I’ll try . . .’