“Cheats? Lies?”
“Well, of course!” The First Consul was astounded. “All our strategy is based on lies. The enemy slumbers through a lie and then wakes up to the truth. The point in war is to say something, truth or lie. The Austrians are saying nothing. They should by now be attacking. I don’t know Melas’s intentions. This worries me.”
“You will have to provoke him.”
“Provoke—that’s the word. Now, as to your place in our scheme. I’m giving you an army corps—Boudet’s and Monnier’s divisions. Victor will take over Gardanne’s division to brigg his corps back to stredgth.” The salt douche was wearing off. “Dab-ded code.”
And damned rain rain rain as they advanced to the river Scrivia, then crossed it, the light cavalry finding no trace of the enemy, rain rain rain. “Avoiding action,” he said. “Austrian swine.” He had bullied his cold into being better. But the rain was dispiriting. He sent out a flurry of orders—Desaix to move with Boudet’s division towards Rivalta and cut the main road from Genoa to Alessandria: Melas must not be allowed to fall back on Genoa; Monnier to come up into central reserve; Lapoype to be ready for a march on Valenza, join up with Chabran’s force, prevent the enemy from cutting the French line of communication by pushing towards Milan. But no sign of Melas, Melas was avoiding a battle. At Marengo, only a few thousand of the Austrian rearguard quick, when Victor and Gardanne advanced on them, to yelp off towards Alessandria. He shouted, went into a spasm of coughing, shouted again:
“This damned plain is the only damned plain in Italy where he can put his cavalry to work. Why doesn’t he come? Where the hell is he?”
He is here, said a bright Sunday morning after a night of peering for Austrian camp fires. The men heard guns in their sleep. They awoke: it was no dream. Guns hammered, larks soared. The First Consul, licoricing out a faint benignant indigestion (chicken, oil, crayfish, eggs: last night’s dinner, bizarre multiple trophy of the foragers), was a flame at Torre-di-Garofoli. “Aggression, I asked for his aggression, a statement, a word, but I did not really expect it. The Austrians are not acting like Austrians.” A hundred cannon, the galloping intelligence made it, three columns of some ten thousand each. Narrow bridgehead though on right bank of the Bormida, Melas following false report of French at Cantalupo, detaching cavalry. But five guns only for Gardanne and Chambarlhac of Victor’s corps, shielding Marengo behind the Fontanove. “A bluff,” he shouted, “a cover. Melas is withdrawing to Genoa.”
“Or to the Po.”
“Or to the. Lapoype’s division to march north towards Valenza—”
“That drops us three-and-a-half thousand.”
“I know what I’m doing, blast you. Send a quick message to Desaix. Boudet’s division to make for for for Pozzolo Formigioso. Sounds like the smell of cheese when you say it quickly.” Calmed them down: humor.
With the sun well up he rode to the scene and saw more clearly the peril. Had his intuition then been wrong? Lannes and Murat were now supporting Victor’s corps—fifteen thousand, about half the Austrian force. A division under Watrin, to the right of the village, was being hacked by Melas’s own column. Ott, over from Genoa, was as good as in control of Castel Ceriolo to the northeast. So the only thing to do was to send ADCs after Lapoype and Desaix, calling them back. For God’s sake come up if you still can. The Austrians regrouped, flexed, took breath. Watrin’s division was in ribbons. The Consular Guard moved up, all nine hundred of it. The final reserve, a division under Monnier, moved on to Ott and Castel Ceriolo. A matter of time time time. The First Consul lashed his leg again and again with his whip. “Hold on, a matter of time.” Twenty-three thousand Frenchmen were pushed staggering back to San Giuliano, miles east of Marengo. It was three in the afternoon.
“He must,” he divined, “believe they have the victory. Who said he was wounded?”
“Melas, sir? It came through the lines. You know how these things get put about.”
“They’re regrouping. Columns. All this damned smoke.”
“General Desaix, sir.”
The massive breast of the First Consul took in and gave out a whole carboy of air, Desaix, panting, all mud. The relief.
“The river was swollen. I got your message at one o’clock. Three minutes to.”
“Thank God the river was swollen. What do you think of it all?”
“Quiet. Ominously so. You’ve lost a battle.”
“We,” the First Consul said, “we have lost a battle.”
“We,” Desaix said, “have time to win another.” And his stomach fell within him: we were what survived: he foresaw in an instant, and he could neither exactly formulate nor explain it to himself, you and I being silently removed from a marble field by weeping draped female figures. Was we merely the surviving ghost of I? Was I a brushed-off cell-flake or dead hair of we?
“No more retreating. I must address the troops.” And he mounted, five-and-a-half feet of him, small, even dainty, that huge tank of air he bore above his ribs some extraneous property of myth, and rode off to dispense issues of charm, simple stirring rhetoric, words like comrades, bravery, France, we.
Lapoype, then, had not received his message, but it would not matter. Marmont thumped and tore with his eighteen cannon at the solid column Melas, tired, wounded, confident, had handed over to his chief of staff Zach, and the column groaned and staggered. Desaix led his brigades into the smoke to meet with shock a white-jacketed battalion of fresh and ready grenadiers. But Marmont hurled four salvoes, close range, and, an unhoped-for gift, a whole ammunition wagon exploded to yells and panic. Kellermann wheeled in with four hundred cavalry against the left flank of the column of six thousand. It wavered, shuddered, broke. Time, history, wavered, shuddered, a minute sooner or three minutes later and it could not, broke, have succeeded.
See it. Is that green smoke or are those trees?
In the right foreground the plumed generals prance,
While hrassarded Lejeune leads prisoners.
The solid cruppers of the mounts are answered
By broken skeletons of limber wheels.
A cannon shoots its flower, and frozen smoke
Opens a horse’s mouth in shock forever.
In graceful postures men lie wounded. There,
The Consul, in left foreground, shows his staff
The things it can already see: a forest
Of flustered enemy, of tangled horses,
Of shouts and totterings and crazed dismay.
High in the high left corner shadowy
But hideously substantial lines of French
Move in geometry, unwavering parallels
That meet at the horizon. But, there, see
Desaix already struck, a graceful fylfot
Who’ll fall this second yet will never fall.
So cunning is the art that the substantial
Masses lead the eye to him, and he
Is nothing, the expendable, the faceless.
He needs no face, being about to die.
Germaine de Stael said, “Carnot? Moreau?” Her drawing room was delicious—honey and cream, but toothsome not melting.
“They fail somehow,” Talleyrand said, “to capture the imagination.” He limped restlessly about the room, his hands behind him. Suddenly, like a lizard’s tongue, an arm would shoot out and long mobile fingers engage a bibelot. He would give it to his eyes for some seconds—a porcelain cherub, a silver Hermes—as though his eyes were a nose and it was a nosegay—and then put it by impatiently, as though the handling had been forced upon him.
“The Duc d’Orléans?”
“You see,” he said, facing her squarely, though twisted, “the whole anomaly of the situation lies in the fact that France palpitates over his living or dying. The solidity of his allure lies in the insolidity of his physical future. Set a man on the throne and surround him with sweetmeats and mistresses—a fat hulk blessing everybody from his gold carriage, chewing—You see the problem?”
She s
aw herself in a gilt mirror an instant—handsome and thirty-four, the face fascinatingly tortured by the contrary tuggings of reason and passion—and, since the mirror was wide enough, set the First Consul’s image beside hers. What a pair they would make, would have made. It was the way of such men, to fall for the swaying languor of such as that one, empty except for dreaming of flowers and lovers. She said:
“I see it all all too clearly,” somewhat deep and cooing. “Intolerable. Everything set on the turn of a battle. But if he dies, if he is dead already—”
I mourn him as I mourn a brother. Brilliant in battle, good and just as a man, a most virtuous citizen. Had he lived, who knows what heights he might not have scaled?
Sieyès said, “The talk, you see, of his being made First Consul for life presupposes a disaffection with the republican philosophy. They are all reading of Cromwell these days. And then your Cromwell dies and you have an incompetent inheritor. Why not turn Bonaparte into General Monk while your, or their, hand is in? I tell you, we will come back to a kind of monarchy.”
Those who listened, mostly men in old Enlightenment wigs, nodded and took more of his wine. There was the matter, for some of them still, of tracing the point at which his direct line to power had been somehow allowed to shift or deviate, so that he was, despite everything, now really nothing. One of them said:
“But if he is killed? In battle, that is?”
The highest position in the Army of the Republic and, who knows, with such virtue, such integrity as he displayed in Egypt, might not he have evinced a genius for civil rule second to none? Anyway, let it be set on record that I mourn him before proceeding to rejoice in the victory which he so signally helped to achieve, and, should any pictorial representation of this sad moment be ever effected, let tears be depicted rolling down my cheeks.
The telegraphs flashed and clanked across the summer skies of France and set the bells to clashing, such as had not become cannon. Marengomarengomarengomarengo. Across the meadows at Auteuil the message came in silvery hosannas almost drowned by the sunset swallows. Talleyrand grinned.
“All conditionals. If if if. And now he comes back trampling on our ifs.”
“Fifteen Austrian colors captured,” someone read from the Moniteur. “Forty guns.”
“Eight thousand Austrian prisoners,” over his shoulder. “Six thousand dead.”
“Number of French dead?”
“Not stated here,” smiling. “But undoubtedly infinitesimal.”
“Let us not,” said an exquisite, “fill a lady’s drawing room with such gore and carnage. War really is disgusting.”
“I foresee,” Germaine said, “a period of repressive autocracy. The mob will just beg to be trodden on.”
“Oh, the mob will do well,” Talleyrand said. “It is the position of the intellectual that must be in doubt. Such,” with a hint of smugness, “as have not rendered themselves in some way or another indispensable. Bluestockings,” he said with open malice, “are in his view—” He was about to say a sort of hermaphroditic anomaly, but that would have been, considering the rumors about her longitudo clitoralis, to say the least indiscreet.
“He told me once,” she said, “and loudly and defiantly too, that women are for the bedroom and the kitchen. I foresee for myself,” she said, surveying her exquisite drawing room with regret, the exquisites that filled it with less regret, “a period of exile.”
“Constructive exile one hopes,” Talleyrand said.
“Switzerland is a pleasant enough country. Sanctified by the memories of Rousseau and Voltaire.”
“I shall stay,” Talleyrand said. “I shall outstay him. I find it hard to envisage a Bonaparte grown old.”
Water was the enemy. In his dream he was crossing that Italian river in his carriage, and it was deeper than he had thought, and the horses slithered on the slimy bottom and panicked as they went deeper and the water had begun to fill the carriage (a sort of stupidly irrelevant annoyance as he foresaw the cushions made filthy with green slime and water-weeds) and his own panic rose. He fought his way up out of the dream now, finding himself in a dry and clean coach thundering across the Place du Caroussel. César the coachman was reckless tonight, mad. Drunk, of course. The new calendar had never quite driven out the old. Everyone had always known tonight was, despite the Goddess of Reason, really Christmas Eve.
He remembered now where they were going. So damnably sleepy. A long day, a doze by the log-fire, early bed. But at the Opera House they were to perform Haydn’s Creation. A religious oratorio, see how far they had come, able now to tolerate, unthinkable under the Jacobins, a celebration of God’s making the world out of nothing. He had looked in one day, no activity beyond his interest or patronage, to hear the orchestra rehearsing what they called, with some justice, The Representation of Chaos. Modern music. He liked something with a tune. A clarinet or some such instrument snaked up out of the depths like life coming up out of the primordial slime. Well, she wanted to hear the work. And Hortense. “Oh come, sweetheart, don’t always be dozing by the fire like an old old man. See how beautiful Hortense and I have made ourselves.” He could not hear nor, looking now out of the rear window, see their carriage. It must be well behind. Woman-like, she had thought of some last-minute change of ornament or shawl. He, First Consul for Life, must gallop ahead, complete with retinue of grenadiers.
Rue Saint-Nicaise. Some recognized the coach, waved and cheered. He leaned out to smile and wave back. The street lighting could be better here, there must be some sort of estimate made out on the cost of improving street lighting. Good lighting deterred crime. Leaning out, he saw with surprise and annoyance a horse and cart set along the street, partly blocking free passage. What was needed was a sort of street or traffic police: streets and roads were arteries of civilized life. The drunk mad César did not, as he might have done, pull up and curse the owner of the horse and cart. Instead he dared the narrowness and rushed through to the rue de la Loi. Some sort of cask or barrel on the cart there.
The street exploded. Representation of Chaos: in a minute pellucid bubble of his brain the connection was made, the gross image of unity allowed to flash. If we have missed the opening we have had reality not art here. But the connection with battle after battle was not made, though this was artillery onslaughts made crude and raw. It was a matter of there not being space or air. The instant of impossible noise sealed his ears from the noises that followed—screams of women and children, a whole street turned to fuming rubble, that horse with its cart and cask commingling in the undifferentiability of chaos, splinters and bits of hot soft gut floating high in the smoke and reluctant to descend. He was firm, he noted, in his descending from the coach whose door had flown open, César miraculously unstruck, let me never preach against drunkenness again, to see much and hear nothing. The grenadiers were in their saddles still, pricking leaping mounts till the blood came. There was a woman alive screaming with a flat expanse of black blood where her breasts should be. The carriage behind was safe, thank God for the vanity that made women late, but the rabid horses had been released from their shafts and danced about the street as though it were a circus, soundless mouths whoaing them. She was dead, no, in a faint, unhurt, God bless and preserve her vanity. Hortense stared at blood welling from her hand. Caroline had then, at the last minute, joined them, big-bellied and near her time, pumping out sobs, holding her freight with desperation, think not only of the dead but of the yet unborn. Sound and control returned, the street bloomed into noise, he held out two unwavering arms to his wife, but then control was ousted by madness. He heard in great surprise his childhood dialect return and in that tongue he cursed and vowed with a terrible clarity. None understood yet all understood.
With a terrible clarity. Cambacérès and Lebrun listened. They knew it was the Corsican coming out, vendettas and so on, blood flowing anywhere so long as it flowed, terrible revenge, nine innocent dead, there must be nine known royalists or suspected royalists or known or suspected
enemies of the Permanent First Consul executed summarily. Lebrun said:
“In our righteous anger let us not forget the Constitution—”
“To hell with the Constitution. And I see few enough signs of righteous anger in your your your. Like puddings, you sit like puddings in a shop.”
“The courts will take care of the criminals,” Cambacérès said. “They will be tried and guillotined. That is what the courts are for.” Like puddings, indeed. “They,” he explained patiently, “are the judiciary while we are the executive. The executive has no power under the Constitution to—”
“This is war. This is the Bourbons hitting at the Republic. On the field of battle there is no invoking of the Constitution. And there are generals tied up in it. How about this swine Pichegru? How about Moreau, lapdog of that bluestocking bitch who keeps plotting against me? What are we going to do with them all, eh? Wait till they kill a few more innocent women and children? Wait till they blow my family to pieces?” His fellow-consuls both noted that he did not think in terms of himself actually being assassinated; there would always be someone else in the way.
“If I may say this,” Lebrun said, “there is a certain constitutional irregularity in your setting up what seems to be your own police force. One recognizes your anxiety—”
“Look, gentlemen—” He gave it to them fierce and hissing, swiveling his head from each to other, burning them each in rapid turn with his hot mad rational eyes. “The essence of a secret police organization is secrecy. They have to act fast without warrants. Call it irregularity if you wish, but what is that irregularity compared with the filthy murderous ingratitude of the Bourbons? I’ve done everything, everything. Forty thousand emigres welcomed back, given money, my own money, my wife’s money, anything for peace and amity. And what do they do? Look, gentlemen, I’ll meet any of them fair and square, but I won’t have this massacring of the innocents. I mean, I don’t mind dying, but not yet, not just yet, the clock hasn’t been properly wound yet. Five years, say, and they can have me if they want me. But not now”
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