Napoleon's Exile (34 page)

‘Really? I still believe it, even stone-cold sober, but at least we've been through some things. In one year, I've lived a hundred.'

‘I'm not sure we'll ever see such a great age ...'

‘What do you mean? A civil war when His Majesty lands in France?'

‘Drouot predicts a universal war.'

‘And that everything will start up again, yes, but for how long?'

The travellers on the
Inconstant
thus spent a second night without closing their eyes, too excited about the unknown. ‘
On Tuesday 28 February,
' Octave wrote,
‘the wind is blowing again after abandoning us for a whole day. We've seen the coast of Noli and the mountains over the Cap de la Garoupe - The crew and the grenadiers got to their feet to yell a terrible ‘Vive la France!' They have laughed, drunk and eaten, and in some cases danced like devils. On Wednesday 1 March, when the weather is calm, here we are in sight of the coast of Provence, and an extraordinary agitation is taking hold of us...'

The Emperor rewarded the first lookout to sight land by giving him all the gold coins he had in his pockets, and then he called Captain Chautard.

‘Fetch up the material we have in our suitcases, and distribute it so that everyone can make himself a tricolour cockade.'

‘Is it worth it, sire?' asked Cambronne, pointing to the grenadiers, who searched their haversacks and took out their old and slightly battered cockades. One of them even offered his to Napoleon, and cheers rang out when the Emperor pinned it to his hat, in fact the clapping of hands and stamping of feet could have capsized the brig.

The homecoming called for a celebration, and His Majesty's chief steward, on His Majesty's orders, shared His Majesty's personal supplies. Bottles of champagne, claret and tokay were passed around, and Monsieur Pons improvised:

The Eagle of our nation dear

On mighty wings ahead doth race

Aloft it soars, our beacon bright,

Soon to reclaim its rightful place.

He had to be interrupted in the end, however, because he was starting to add endless couplets.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon when the vessel dropped anchor in the gulf of Juan les Pins. From the deck, everyone looked at the beach, the Tour de la Gabelle, which seemed empty of troops, and the warehouses that lay between the shore and the main road that led from Antibes to Cannes.

‘Cambronne,' said the Emperor, ‘choose forty men and take up position on this road, but be careful, I know you're impulsive, so just don't use your weapons. I want to get back on the throne without a drop of blood being spilt. Tell your soldiers.'

A boat set off towards the shore carrying Cambronne and his grenadiers while the others were preparing to follow, bringing luggage and ammunition. Napoleon smiled to Monsieur Pons.

‘You seem very agitated.'

‘Yes, sire, I am extremely moved. After a long absence, I am returning to France behind an army.'

‘Where do you see an army? We'll get to Paris without firing a shot.'

*

Octave was resting, arms crossed, against the twisted trunk of an olive tree. The flotilla had assembled, and the brig had displayed a tricolour flag on her gaff then the boat had set sail again and they set off after unloading the equipment and the 1,132 men who made up the expedition. The Emperor was in the vineyard, standing on a wooden walkway between the rows of vines, dispatchng emissaries around the region. Cambronne had headed for Cannes with a detachment to buy mules and horses; some plain-clothes officers had headed for Antibes, with proclamations under their arms; the surgeon Emery had requisitioned a passing coach to take him to Grenoble, his home town, where he was to alert the Prefect of the Isère to the situation.

The first curious villagers who had arrived to investigate didn't seem particularly enthusiastic, in fact they seemed rather worried at the sight of the grenadier guards, even though they had thought at first, spying the ships through their telescopes, that they were Algerine corsairs who'd captured the boats of some Genoese fishermen, and were putting in at Juan les Pins to renew their supplies of water.

The men cleaned their weapons, ate soup and set up camp at the bottom of a creek. Peyrusse had given them two weeks' wages, and they could hardly see two feet in front of them. At a loose end, Octave walked a few hundred yards along the road, to an inn that would not have been noticed from the shore, behind a clump of pines with grey foliage. On the sign, he read the strange name of the establishment:
On the dot
. He planned to improve his rations by allowing himself a chicken and some wine, and in he went. The main room was deserted, but a delicious smell of chicken soup drifted from a cauldron in the hearth. Octave called out. No one answered. He ventured further, pushing doors open, and found himself in a gloomy chamber where the innkeepers sat at the bedside of a little girl whose face was dotted with red spots, like flea-bites. A serving-wench he hadn't noticed dragged him from the room. Carrying an empty cup that she was going to fill from the cauldron, she said crossly: ‘What d'you want? The inn's shut.'

‘What about this soup?'

‘It's for the girl.'

‘Is she ill?'

‘Very ill, Monsieur. She has measles.'

‘The Emperor has landed today ...'

‘What Emperor?'

‘What do you mean? We've only got one!'

‘So?'

‘I thought I could buy some food and wine from you . . .'

‘It's shut, I told you.'

‘Aren't you moved?'

‘Of course I am, measles is dangerous.'

‘I mean by Napoleon's return.'

‘Whether he comes, whether he goes, whether he comes back, it doesn't change anything for us, and I told you before, the girl has measles.'

‘Yes, I heard ...'

‘Heard but didn't understand.'

‘What am I supposed to understand?'

‘As far as we're concerned, there's nothing more important in the world than that horrible measles.'

Disarmed by the situation, Octave thoughtfully set off again. He crossed the road amidst carts and horses: Cambronne's detachment was returning from Cannes as night fell. The moon was bright, but the air was icy.

Octave turned up his collar and walked towards the bivouac, where piles of vine shoots were burning. The Emperor had pulled on a woollen jumper and was sleeping on his folding armchair, his boots on a chair, his grey frock-coat wrapped around him like a blanket. His face was peaceful. Napoleon was dreaming of Bonaparte.

On 20 March the Emperor returned to

the Tuileries, supported by a popular movement,

and one hundred days later came Waterloo.

Notes for the Curious

i.
T
he
A
ncestor
C
ult
: C
onversation with
M
yself

'Another historical novel?'

‘No.'

‘What do you mean, ‘no"?'

‘I don't write historical novels.'

‘Are you joking?'

‘Not at all.'

‘Come on! I have the novel in front of me. You take us on a tour of 1814, or am I mistaken?'

‘Your definition's at fault.'

‘What definition?'

‘The definition of the historical novel.'

‘Let's have it!'

‘The term, certainly reductive, even contemptuous, refers to adventure stories telling timeless tales of love and revenge in exotic settings. The hooligan suddenly assumes nobility in his disguise as a medieval cut-purse, he lends colour to an ordinary yarn. This donning of gilded folderols is very contrived. Personally, it doesn't interest me in the slightest: the chosen era serves as a backdrop, you can easily replace the fortified castle with a Florentine palace or an English building: it doesn't change anything.'

‘An example, please.'

‘Take
Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare sets his historic drama in Verona during the Renaissance, because he wants to stay close to the Italian story from which he drew his inspiration, written by Matteo Bandello in the sixteenth century. Bandello himself has taken it from a story by Luigi Da Porto. And in any case, love thwarted by parents was hardly a very new theme. You find it in Ovid, with the misfortunes of Pyramus and Thisbe. In this case, the age in which the action takes place is unimportant. Throw Romeo and Juliet into fifties New York and you get
West Side Story'

‘I can see that, but nonetheless your novels are historical!'

‘Because history isn't the setting but the theme. In actual fact, I'm trying to stage little fragments from our past.'

‘Why?'

‘It's a matter of personal taste, first of all, then curiosity, and finally the desire to communicate what I think I've understood, as best I can. It's the European version of the ancestor cult. I feel quite close to those Indonesian villagers, on certain islands, who take it in turns, day and night, to protect the wooden effigies of their dead against antiquarian tomb-raiders. The ancestors are part of our lives, as in Asia, as in the Rome of the Caesars.'

‘Let's run through that again. You said ‘personal taste' ...'

‘In the fifties, children were immersed in history. Comics taught us about it every week. Thanks to things like
Tintin
and
Spirou
, by the age of seven we were familiar with Soucouf, Vauban, the Boxer Uprising, Marco Polo. We knew Samarkand, Babylon and Shanghai.
L'Oncle Paul
and
Alix
extended our Latin classes. That was when I learned the names of the seven hills of Rome, which I've never managed to forget ... And then there were books like
Salammb
ô, the works of Dumas ...'

‘Dumas, exactly! The cycle of the
Three Musketeers
, that's the historical novel in its pure state!'

‘No, I don't think so. His characters can't be transposed in time. You can't imagine them in our own time, or in ancient Greece, during the crusades or among the pirates of the Caribbean. They tell us of the transition, in France, from the Baroque to the Classical age.'

‘I don't see ...'

‘At the beginning we're in the reign of Louis XIII, an age damaged by feudalism, and Richelieu knows it, he fights the feudal lords. You have a sense of bravado, of sworn oaths, emotional outbursts and decent food. You have panache. Twenty years later, it's all changed. Under Mazarin, our musketeers are out of step: honour has been replaced by cunning, negotiation and politics. With the accession of the young Louis XIV, in the novel
Le Vicomte de Bragelonne
, the state wins the day, the aristocracy makes way for the bourgeoisie, and Colbert installs centralized power. You have to adapt or go under. Our musketeers pass through that precise age, when society is being transformed around them. They are nostalgic, they have plenty of regret but no remorse. By the end they have lost their illusions. It's the finest novel of passing time.'

‘Like Proust? Are you joking?'

‘I'm not joking at all. And anyway, Proust was thinking about Dumas when he wrote the
Recherche.'

‘Really?'

‘One day he revealed his project to his friends. To help them understand, he said, ‘You see, it's like
Vingt Ans Après'
Léon Daudet was there, and he corrected him: ‘No, it's more like
Bragelonne."'

‘Whatever. Go on. You say you write to learn, as well.'

‘Of course! It seems quite clear that when you set about reconstructing the past, with a bit of imagination thrown in, you make discoveries, you move from one surprise to the next. The reality, seen from close up, by eye-witnesses, is more complex, more unexpected, funnier or harsher. Each book, for me, is based on questions. What's a battle? What was Moscow like before the fire? Was Berezina really a defeat? How can a man who governed Europe end up on a little island with the power of a sub-prefect?'

‘And those are the curiosities that you hope to pass on?'

‘I want to imagine where we come from. Roots aren't innocent. And yet ignorance is manifest these days. One Saturday evening, on an Antenne 2 radio broadcast, a former Culture Minister revealed his ignorance of the fact that 4 September celebrates the birth of the 3rd Republic. On a television quiz, the contestant was asked: ‘What tribe did Vercingetorix command?' He replied without hesitation: ‘The Romans.' We ‘old Europeans' are ending up like the American students quoted in the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
in 2001. When they were being welcomed on to a campus, some young Germans were startled by the things the students wanted to know: ‘Is Hitler still your president?' or: ‘Are there problems on the border between Germany and China?"'

‘It's a long way from there to sacrificing at the altar of the ancestor cult.'

‘Not at all: it's a good perspective. And the further we go in life, the more we are surrounded by the dead. There even comes a time when we know more dead people than living. Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by this procession of familiar phantoms, and books can awaken them. When I leave my Paris street, near Les Halles, I know that Victor Hugo, in 1832, when he was at work on
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
saw with his own eyes the barricade in the rue des Petits-Carreaux that he would use in
Les Misérables.
I also know that on the quay, there, opposite the Tour de l'Horloge, during the Terror there were people who sold the hair of the beheaded to be made into wigs. The walls of our cities, the hills, the villages, are impregnated with very strong memories.'

‘All the same, the contemporary world has little in common with those revolutionary centuries ...'

‘Wrong again. The fundamentals haven't changed, and we've barely evolved since Homer. If formidable technical advances change the brains of future generations in due course, it's always worth mentioning that Cicero predicted the harmful employment of screens.'