The Linguist and the Emperor (2 page)

And this is symbolic of what their relationship will be throughout their lives. Jean François, volatile and passionate with the excitability of a visionary, will have much trouble making his way in the world. Jacques, less inspired, will be his brother’s mainstay and support, always believing in him and overlooking his moodiness and fits of temper.

Even physically the two present a contrast, Jacques having none of his brother’s exotic looks. He is a large, thickset young man, with regular features and eyes heavy with learning; having been forced to give up his formal studies, he pursues them on his own late into the night, immersing himself in Greek and Latin and Hebrew. What he lacks in brilliance, he makes up in devotion. His head filled with Plato and Homer and Virgil and the Bible, Jacques staggers to work in the morning, sitting all day recording how many bolts of cloth have been sold and how much money has been collected and how much is owed. He dreams of escape.

But escape is impossible during the Terror. During the Terror,
nothing
is possible—except for violence.

The Champollions: would-be scholar Jacques, sitting on his clerk’s stool in Grenoble; undisciplined, unschooled Jean François going his dreamy, solitary way; bankrupt bookseller Champollion
père;
and invalid Champollion
mère.
They are all lucky simply to be alive.

A NEW WORLD
is being born. If its birth pangs are inseparable from the death agonies of its enemies, so much the worse for them! Thus proclaims the “midwife”—Robespierre the “Incorruptible”—a skillful orator whose stirring speeches have helped him seize power (a power maintained with denunciations and spies and fanatic scoundrels). The flesh holds no interest for Robespierre. He is a celibate, tortured torturer, a compiler of execution lists, and, when the mood is upon him, a maker of exquisite lace.

Day by day, citizens are arrested to satisfy the bloodlust and morbid suspicions of the Incorruptible. Among them is a sensual Creole named Rose who will play a large role in the events that follow. Daily, Rose expects arrest, so when it finally comes, she cries out with anguish, “I have done nothing! Nothing! I am from the Americas—an innocent woman!” She clutches her two children, a girl of ten and a boy of twelve, as she is dragged from a small house just outside Paris.

What she says is true: She was raised on the island of Martinique and in poverty, too, on a half-abandoned sugar plantation ruined by hurricanes. Yet these circumstances do not save her. She is thrown into a Paris prison with her husband, a rich aristocrat she married when she was fifteen.

Then Rose had been a girl filled with romantic dreams, sent to Paris to repair the family’s fortunes. But her new husband quickly disillusioned her, despising her provincial manners and her innocence. Debauched and sated with all manner of pleasures, he has only a technical, legal interest in the young Creole brought from the islands: Without a wife he cannot inherit the family estate.

By the time of the Terror, Rose has had two children with him. She is in her early thirties. Since her arrest, her teeth have become bad, her complexion has begun to coarsen, and her clothes have gotten ragged. After her husband is guillotined, she takes what she thinks will be a last lover in prison. Something about her fascinates men; her beauty is a sum greater than its parts. And when this lover is guillotined as well, she takes
another
last lover. What sense is there in waiting for death alone? Besides which, a pregnancy would mean a nine-month reprieve. A lie will win her four at the least. Such is her reasoning as she desperately seeks niches and corners where she and her friend can steal a moment alone: in the chapel of the convent turned prison, beneath a winding staircase, even the women’s privy provides a brief chance. A guard finally discovers Rose and her would-be savior in flagrante delicto
,
and drags them off to different cells.

Though she will not become pregnant, Rose will end up cheating the executioner. She will live to fascinate many other “last lovers,” including a younger man. The most ardent of her lovers, he and his passion will both frighten and amuse her. This serious and brooding soldier will one day rename her “Josephine” and make her empress of France.

For the time being, though, Napoleon is unaware of Rose’s existence. “I have only one passion, only one mistress and that is France. I sleep with her,” he says grandly, taking up his first military command with a good conscience. What is the Terror to him? “The revolution?” He shrugs with a soldier’s realism. “It is an opinion with bayonets.” If he is a member of Robespierre’s party, it is only because it is useful for him.

But even the Terror must finally come to an end. It is in the nature of things: Sooner or later, violence turns in upon itself. On the very day that Josephine is supposed to die, Robespierre, who has grown increasingly out of touch with reality, makes a fatal speech. “I fear impure influences . . . from impure men,” he tells the National Assembly, staring at face after face with an intense gaze whose significance is quickly understood. “My nearest colleagues, the Committee for Public Safety itself must be purified.” At first there is silence, but suddenly there are cries of “Murderer!” “Criminal!” “Tyrant!” A flood of rage is released.

The next day, Robespierre himself is dragged to the guillotine. His jaw has been broken during his attempt to escape. As he is forced onto the scaffold, he snarls and strikes out. The blade descends and his severed head is held up to the crowd. A deafening shout echoes in the Place de la Revolution. The great orator has fallen silent forever.

A time of abandoned celebration follows, a time when everything is possible. Society women walk bare-breasted across Paris on a bet. Young men,
les incroyables,
strut about in fantastic get-ups while young women take to wearing gauzy, transparent dresses that would have outraged Republican virtue just a year before. And macabre
bals du guillotine
are given, in which the revelers dance wildly, making the jerky motions of a decapitated body as the horrors of the Terror are forgotten in fountains of wine.

In the midst of the frantic merrymaking, an awkward young man in a field uniform stands silently.

“His face is thin and pale. He is contemptuous in his bearing. He has none of the qualities of the men of the study or of society,” a shrewd observer (Mme. de Staël) remembers him. “If he recounts his personal experiences, he discloses the lively imagination of an Italian. Character, mind, speech—all have a strange stamp. This very strangeness helps him to win over the French . . .”

Though he has been fighting for France, Napoleon is not a Frenchman. He is from Corsica, a rugged island off the coast of Italy where blood feuds and an exaggerated code of honor formed him—and where gentry such as the Bonapartes are almost as poor as the peasants.

Sent on a scholarship to France, to the royal military academy at Brienne, young Napoleon is taunted by his aristocratic classmates for his Italian accent and his poverty. But he is a scrapper, willful and stubborn. His sense of himself only becomes stronger during his years at the academy, first at Brienne and then in the
École Militaire
in Paris where he concentrates on mathematics and artillery.

If he is an outsider, though, what sets him apart is not so much his background, his foreign birth, and poverty: it is his
consciousness.
A fellow Corsican, Paoli, sums him up, “There is nothing modern about you, Napoleon. You are straight out of Plutarch.” True: It is from classical readings that Napoleon derives inspiration. Such figures as Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great stir his imagination with visions of a godlike glory and make him dissatisfied with anything less.

Which is why he stands silent and brooding at the
bal du guillotine.
Ambition gnaws at him, only made sharper by his first taste of victory. For though he has shown himself brave and a bold strategist during the early days of the revolution, what has he done, after all? Relieved a French port, Toulon, from foreign occupation. On the world-historical scale of his vast imagination, it is barely worth noticing.

What would Caesar or Alexander or
 .  .  .
?
A wine glass is placed in his hand and a friend taps him on the arm. The preoccupied and abstracted soldier finds himself face-to-face with the Creole woman Rose, rescued from prison and on the arm of the Director Barras, one of the five men who now rule France.

“You should know each other: You are both from islands,” the director laughs, “and you both know how to fight . . .”

Rose is about to say something pleasant and move on, but something silences her in the look Napoleon gives her: a serious and imploring and strange look very out of place in that setting.

From the beginning, everything about Rose touches him to the quick. Napoleon will remember his first impression of her with pain even after it is all over, after they have both betrayed each other and he is a defeated and exiled emperor on his prison island writing his memoirs. At this momentous meeting, her laughter is shot through with melancholy. Her abandon—her dress is very revealing—somehow has an innocence about it. Not a girlish innocence. At the time she is womanly and is more experienced, more so than he, with his one or two abrupt experiments in the physical act of love and his romantic sighing over interchangeable women. Her innocence, he decides, doesn’t depend on her experience or lack thereof, but on a kind of radical purity of soul.

Though Rose is Barras’ mistress, the director has already begun to tire of her. She is willing to receive Napoleon’s attentions. Soon he calls on her and she quickly becomes everything to him. She finds him strange, a diversion, though somewhat oppressive—abrupt, serious, romantic, often silent, unsmiling. He is the opposite of the pleasure-loving, worldly Barras, and the opposite of herself. Rose—soon to be transformed into Josephine by the importunate soldier—thinks no more of changing her lovers than of changing her shoes.

After their first night together, Napoleon writes to her, “I have awakened full of you. The memory of last night has given my senses no rest . . . Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an effect you have on my heart! I send you thousands of kisses—but don’t kiss me. Your kisses sear my blood.”

And Josephine profitably sells Napoleon’s letters to the chief of police Fouché, who spies on all figures of any political importance, among whom he counts the “hero of Toulon,” a man whose victory has already earned him a measure of fame.

Napoleon wants to marry Rose quickly, before he goes off to battle. She agrees, after consulting with Barras. He feels Napoleon shows promise. Moreover, Barras tells her that he intends to put Napoleon in charge of the revolutionary army languishing in the Alps.

But just who it is she is marrying, she has no more idea of now than when she saw him silent and brooding at the Directory ball.

His Italian campaigns will do more than make him a hero and a demigod in France. They will astonish the world. Given command of a ragged army that has been languishing for months in the Italian Alps, Napoleon inspires them with his own strength of will: “Soldiers, you are hungry and almost naked,” he tells the cold, half-starved men, immediately forging a mystic bond with them. “I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth . . . There you shall find honor, glory, riches. Soldiers of Italy, can resolution fail you now?”

And he makes good on his promises. Combining brilliant tactics with desperate courage, Napoleon turns this side-theater of the war into the main one. One after the other, he defeats the superior Austrian armies sent against him. He forces the Austrians to sue for peace. He fills the empty coffers of the Directory with tribute and he searches through the churches and palaces of Italy to send the finest works of art back to France.

This means nothing to him. “What I have accomplished so far will earn me a footnote in history,” he tells his adjutant. He craves much more. Like Caesar, like Alexander, he wants immortality. He decides, after much agonizing, that he will look for it in the sands of Egypt.

IT IS THE
place their paths will cross imaginatively, Napoleon’s and that of Jean François. They will sit and talk about Egypt the way two men talk who have loved the same woman. But not yet. For first Napoleon must conquer it. And Jean François must learn how to read.

Napoleon steps onto the world stage from nowhere. He appears suddenly: a gaunt, passionate young man filled with nervous energy and in love with glory. “What is happiness?” he asks in his diary during his student days. “It is the possibility of making full use of one’s powers.”

During the monarchy, such happiness is beyond his reach. Under Louis XVI, aristocratic birth is everything, merit nothing. Because he is a commoner, Napoleon was given an insignificant command when he completed his studies, and that is all he could expect in the future as well. And so he suffered. His genius stifled, his aggression turned inward and he wanted to die: “I see no place for myself in this world,” the young officer writes to his brother. “If this continues, I shall end by not stepping aside when a carriage rushes past.”

The revolution changes everything. France is attacked on all sides by monarchs fearful of her radical example. For their part, the leaders of the revolution welcome war. They understand that if their revolution does not spread to other countries, it will die. War is a necessity.

But the French army is in disarray. Its aristocratic officers have fled for their lives, leaving the rabble without a leader. Thus Destiny, in which Napoleon believes with a perfect and pagan faith, has opened the way for him.

Destiny, glory, immortality—Napoleon conceives of war in grand, heroic terms, as if he were an ancient warrior and not an artillery officer in the nineteenth century, trained in the latest, most scientific methods. This is a paradox at the heart of his character: This most realistic of realists is never disillusioned by the horrors of war. For him, it will always be what the Greek philosopher Heraclitus calls it—a say-ing Napoleon scribbles in the margins of an order for the day, on the back of a letter from his mother, across a bill from Josephine’s dressmaker—“War, the father of all good things.”