Napoleon's Exile (12 page)

‘Am I an obstacle? So be it. The Duke of Bassano will read you the note that I have just written.'

Bassano took the letter held out to him by his Emperor, and deciphered his small, jerky, sloped hand, all in lower case with words joined to one another. He read in a loud voice, amid a heavy silence.

The allied powers having proclaimed the Emperor Napoleon to be the sole obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, Emperor Napoleon, true to his oath, declares that he is prepared to descend from the throne, to leave France and to leave even his life for the good of the fatherland, which is inseparable from the rights of his son, those of the Empress's regency and the maintenance of the laws of the Empire.

The marshals were dumbfounded. They surrounded Napoleon, clutched his arms, kissed his hands. The Emperor looked at them with a certain disdain, but they didn't notice.

*

That accursed day was not over. Octave was sitting on a green taffeta love-seat, head on his folded arms, fighting fatigue, forcing himself to be vigilant. On the other side of the partition he heard the Emperor pacing around his study, ceaselessly, like an animal in its cage. Octave thought of the following day's reply. It seemed inevitable, even with battalions reduced by death and desertion, and soldiers many of whom seemed very young, but who had seen active service in the plains of Champagne; their rage stood in for experience. Waiting for Napoleon to head for bed, to brood over the imminent battle, Octave would then go into the study and put everything away, and sweep up the coarsecut snuff that His Majesty scattered around the place.

A vague sense of unrest somewhere in the palace shook Octave from his dreamy torpor. Sounds were getting closer, faint voices. Roustan had risen to his feet and gripped his sabre. Octave patted the hip where he had attached his knife; he parted his livery to draw it at the first sign of danger. Doors slammed. Calls rang out in the corridors. A stamping of feet, now, in the François I gallery. The aide-de-camp suddenly pushed wide the door to the antechamber. General Belliard and a helmeted cuirassier, serious and annoyed, urgently asked to see the Emperor. Octave tapped at the door to his study.

‘Who is it?'

‘Belliard, sire!'

‘In the middle of the night?'

‘It's eleven o'clock, sire.'

‘What's so important, Belliard?' said the Emperor, opening the door himself.

‘Bad news.'

‘Bad news is your lot.' (This was the same Belliard who had announced the capitulation of Paris to Napoleon when the Emperor arrived too late to enter the city.)

The General entered the study, and the door closed once more. Octave saw some officers hanging around in the gallery: what was going on? The officers themselves were very keen to know, but the General was clearly keeping his information to himself. Further off, some colonels had turned a drawing-room into a gambling den, and decided to keep watch while frittering away their last gold coins, perhaps before dying in a few hours' time. Octave thought he could make out the silhouette of Maubreuil, in the uniform of a chasseur of the Guard. Did Maubreuil see him?

Rather than coming over to him, the figure made off and disappeared around a corner in the corridor. Octave set off in pursuit. Soldiers and servants carrying lanterns were arriving, perhaps in response to Bassano's news. Octave pushed against the current: he didn't want to lose Maubreuil, and spotted him at the bottom of the staircase. He raced down the steps, dashed through the doors and down the grand staircase, forcing his way past cheveauleágers and hussars with great queues hanging down their necks coming pell-mell in the opposite direction. Could the enemy have launched a night offensive on the Essonne front? Octave found himself wondering what all this agitation was about: he hoped it would help him eliminate Maubreuil discreetly, and thus solve the problem. Clearly the royalist was fleeing because there were too many people around the Emperor; he didn't much fancy being torn to pieces, but even if he had abandoned or postponed his enterprise, he still had to be liquidated.

Octave concentrated his attention on this pitiful would-be assassin, who was now crossing the main courtyard, his back illuminated by the chandeliers that were currently being lit behind the palace windows.

Octave quickened his pace. It was a moonless, starless night, and there was similar confusion in the streets of the town of Fontainebleau: soldiers forming processions, brandishing smoking torches, burning branches covered with dry leaves to cook their grub. Octave kept his eye trained on Maubreuil's shoulders as he pushed his way through the yelling and indignant columns. Threatening-looking grenadiers with walrus moustaches, muskets sloped, were heading towards the castle yelling, ‘To Paris! To Paris!' The young conscripts, admonished by their elders, broke away from their officers and joined the free-for-all. For a moment Octave lost sight of his quarry, but no, there he was, over there, turning into a side-alley. Octave speeded up once more, and the two men emerged almost together into a little square lit by campfires, where the chasseurs of the Guard were saddling their horses. Octave reached Maubreuil and was about to raise his knife when his foot slipped in the stream of dung flowing through the middle of the cobbles; he tumbled to the ground and dropped his knife. The chasseur turned around at the sound of his pratfall.

‘You look a sight, Monsieur, with your four paws in the air!'

It wasn't Maubreuil. And besides, from close up and in the light of the flames, his uniform was less shiny than the assassin's. Cavalrymen gathered around them to look at the valet sitting with a sore bottom in the gutter. Octave started explaining himself.

‘Forgive me, Lieutenant, I mistook you for someone else ...'

‘And what grudge did you bear against that someone else?'

‘The individual I was chasing wears the same uniform as you do, he's stolen it, and his plan was to approach His Majesty ...'

‘Well, blow me! Since when have servants been acting as detectives?'

‘I'm a detective acting as a servant.'

‘Have you come from the palace?' asked someone else.

‘Indeed I have.'

‘Has the betrayal been confirmed?'

‘What betrayal?'

‘You're coming from the palace and you don't know what people are saying?'

‘I thought only of the man I was attending to.'

‘False valet,' said the false Maubreuil, ‘the 6th Corps have just defected.'

Octave struggled to his feet, white stockings and boots stained with Fontainebleau mud. The chasseur explained.

‘Eleven thousand of our men have gone over to the enemy, monsieur.'

*

The 6th Corps, which Marmont had regrouped along the river Essonne, after passing through the Russian and Bavarian camps in the middle of the night, were marching on Versailles to give themselves up to the provisional government. The soldiers were loyal but their leaders were not; Marmont had negotiated his renunciation with the allied staff, who had skilfully flattered him; the men had obeyed because their generals had lied: ‘The army is going to attack at dawn, we must cover them.' Thus duped, the regiments had set off, but in the wrong direction. Some soldiers had noticed, like the cuirassier captain that Belliard had brought to the Emperor: he had escaped across the fields and travelled the eight leagues to Fontainebleau.

When the defection became known, Napoleon did not react. Outside, his Guard were storming furiously through the town; some emissaries had told them they still had the weak division of the incorruptible General Lucotte on their side, that the rearguard squadron of Polish cavalrymen had refused to go along with the suspicious deployment; that Mortier was requesting instructions, that he was stretching out his corps as far as Corbeil to protect Fontainebleau.

The Emperor had gone to bed.

He had not risen by late morning, when Caulaincourt, looking distraught, climbed out of a barouche from Paris. The Duke hurried towards the mezzanine apartments, and bumped into Napoleon's chief valet.

‘I've got to see the Emperor straight away !'

‘But he's asleep ...'

‘I don't care! Wake him, Monsieur Constant, wake him!'

As the valet didn't dare do anything so familiar, Caulaincourt burst into the room and roughly shook the sleeping man until he opened his hooded eyes and sighed, ‘Ah! Caulaincourt...'

Very unkempt, his complexion yellow and puffy, the Emperor struggled to sit up on his pillows, then sat down on the edge of the mattress, his feet on the little stepladder that he used to climb into bed. Constant ran over to him, put his ugly red slippers on his feet and helped him into a dressing-gown. Caulaincourt explained his unhappy mission; he described how Tsar Alexander had changed his mind on learning of the defection of the 6th Corps, how he had rejected the regency that he, unlike the other sovereigns, had until then supported, and now joined the rest in demanding an abdication pure and simple, and exile - but the Emperor was barely listening, for he could think only of Marmont, the Duke of Ragusa, whose loyalty he had never doubted.

‘Marmont!' he said. ‘Deserting in the face of the enemy! And when did he do it? fust as our victory was certain! He is trampling the national cockade underfoot to wear the mark of the traitors he has been against for twenty-five years! Who could have believed that of him? I loved him, Caulaincourt, he was a man with whom I have broken bread, a man I dragged from poverty, a man whose fortune and reputation I made! The ingratitude of it! He will be unhappier than I, you'll see.'

‘Talleyrand did everything in his power to make him abandon us.'

‘Talleyrand? For him, betrayal was a means of escape. His role was written for him. He knew I wanted to stop him, but what interest could the others have in betraying me? And it's those I have raised highest who are leaving me first: within the year, Caulaincourt, they will be ashamed of having yielded rather than fighting, of having been handed over to the Bourbons and the Russians!'

Caulaincourt told the Emperor that Talleyrand had sent Marmont his old aide-de-camp from Egypt, Montessuy, dressed as a Cossack, to persuade him. Montessuy had flattered the vanity of the Duke of Ragusa, showing him that by deserting with his army he alone could spare the pillaging of Paris and consolidate peace in Europe. The Marshal had signed an agreement with the allied staff, but upon learning that the Emperor was abdicating in favour of his son, and that the regency was possible, he changed his mind and returned to Paris in Ney's coach to plead his own case to the foreign sovereigns. Alas, he had entrusted the army to his generals; in his absence they had carried out the original plan and delivered their regiments to the enemy.

‘When he learned of the defection, at the same time as we did, the Duke of Ragusa felt dishonoured.'

‘And he is!'

‘General Souham, who replaced him, has convinced his peers ...'

‘Souham?' said the Emperor. ‘Yesterday he asked me for six thousand francs, and I gave it to him. Money, ambition, their positions, that's what guides them, the birdbrains! What about the soldiers?'

‘When they reached Versailles they worked out that they'd been trapped, and mutinied. They wanted to join you, sire.'

‘It was too late ...'

‘Yes.'

Caulaincourt returned to his mission, explaining that while the allies hoped to send Napoleon to the ends of the earth, he and the Tsar had sought to negotiate an exile for the Emperor that might not be quite so harsh, on an island off the coast of Tuscany, because the coasts were fortified, and that. . .

‘Thank you, Caulaincourt.'

With a gesture of his chin, the Emperor dismissed the Duke of Vicenza.

*

Ney arrived a few hours later with Macdonald, having called in at his Paris town house on the bank of the Seine and sworn to his wife that he would make sure that war didn't break out, and sworn to Talleyrand that he would very soon bring him the unconditional abdication of the man he called ‘the tyrant'. The Marshal was like that, always treading a path between two extremes, fundamentally irresolute, more courageous with a sabre than with words. His mind teemed with ideas, certainly, but standing before the Emperor he mumbled, standing with the others and delivering his report. Napoleon had regained his composure, but kept his hands firmly behind his back, beneath the turnbacks of his colonel's uniform; he had forgotten that the occupying forces wanted to send a quarter of his army to Normandy. To reopen that wound and watch him crack, Ney handed him the latest issue of the
Journal des débats
, hot off the press, the front page of which began:

Marshal Marmont, Duke of Ragusa, has abandoned the colours of Bonaparte to embrace the cause of France and of humanity ...

The Emperor folded up his lorgnette and very calmly put the paper down.

‘Gentlemen, I have been thinking.'

Silence.

‘All is not lost. Soissons is putting up resistance, and so is Compiègne. Some places are holding out against the invader: Strasbourg, Antwerp, Mantua, Barcelona, the garrisons in Germany. Partisans are harrying the rear of the enemy—'

‘But in Paris,' Marshal Ney broke in, ‘peace has become a magic word ...'

‘Peace! With the Bourbons? Louis XVI's brother is old and crippled, and he needs a machine with pulleys to lift him into his barouche! The Bourbons! The people around him are nothing but passions and hatreds dressed in human clothing!'

‘Do we have any other choice?' Macdonald ventured.

‘Yes, Marshal, we do have a choice other than a king brought back from England by foreign regiments. Let's head for the Loire.'

‘Sire,' intervened Major General Berthier, ‘I have shown you the latest reports from our light cavalry ...'

‘I know. The enemy is advancing along the Orléans road, they have taken Pithiviers and they are trying to surround Fontainebleau. The Russians have crossed the Loing. So?'