Napoleon Symphony

by Anthony Burgess

“Ergh, what is it?” Elisa made a child’s vomity face. It was chicken sauteed in oil with crayfish and fried eggs bedded on croutons. “A horrible mixture, some soldier’s sort of muck.”

  “That,” the First Consul said with horrible sweetness, “was served at the battle of Marengo. That is already a great historical dish. Eat it” he cried. Lucien said:

  “Well, for my part, I have little appetite. I beg to be excused.”

  “Stay where you are, sir, I haven’t finished with you yet.”

  “Let me say this,” Lucien said, “before I have finished with you, your majesty or whatever you are. Love is not a thing to be dictated. You have no right to tell a man where to place the affections of his heart. You denounced Jerome’s marriage. Is it a crime to love?”

  “Oh, very tenderly put, sir. Very Rousseau and so on. Sentimental horse-dung. See here, puppy, I will not have your insolence.”

  “I will not be called puppy.”

  “Very well, not puppy then. Sit down, eat your dinner. But I will not have your insolence.”

  “You shall not have my presence, then. There is one member of the family that does not feel obliged to attend your sickening masquerade. We fought to eliminate the monarchy, not to bring it back in a debased and hypocritical form.” Being on his feet, he was ready to sail into a wide sound of oratory. The First Consul gaveled loudly with his knife-handle.

  “You did not do much fighting, sir. Retract what you said or get out instanter.”

  “It is my intention to get out if the mangy yappers you call your secret police will let me.”

  “Ah, over the border, eh? Join the plotters, eh? Well, let me tell you—” There were hard words while Joseph and Louis ate their chicken sadly and the ladies picked at it with tentative forks. Manigoldo—farabutto—mascalzone—ingrato—vigliacco—Lucien knocked one of the heavy dining chairs over as he blazed out.

  “Come back, sir! Pick up that chair, damn you!”

  But the double doors closed behind him and all eyes kept to the plates before them. Joseph’s plate was empty. To Louis the First Consul said:

  “Well, I have nothing to say against your marriage, brother. I could not be happier. I am glad, though, our sweet Hortense is not here. She is a sensitive girl. That was not an outburst I should have cared for her to—she knows some Italian, of course.”

  Louis waited dumbly, a sliver of egg-white on his fork.

  “It is, as you may have guessed, upon your dear son that I place my hopes. Scion of the two families most dear to me.” Caroline sniffed at that. “You, dear Louis, are, as we all know, not very well.”

  “I am well enough.”

  “No no, you are not at all well. You have these fainting fits, you stagger sometimes, it would hardly be seemly—Besides, to be brutal about it—”

  “Brutal, I would say, is the word.”

  “Oh, the whole of life is brutal.” He glowed with health and ate some chicken. “The point is, brutal or not, that you must be passed over. You will all, of course, be made princes or dukes or something. Don’t worry about that. But I have made up my mind that, in default of a legitimate child of my loins—” Julie, Joseph’s wife, made a sour though ladylike face at that legitimate. “I mean, is it not logical?”

  “I will not be passed over,” Louis said, looking very pale. “It is as good as to advertise to the world that I am a dying man. Well, I am not a dying man.”

  “At the moment, no. But we have to look to the future.”

  “This is intolerable.” And Louis began to cough into his napkin.

  “You see what I mean,” his brother said kindly.

  “You mentioned princes,” Elisa said. “You have said nothing about princesses.”

  “Well, naturally,” he said with great kindness and reasonableness, “Hortense and Julie here, as consorts of my brothers, must bear the honorific of highness. As for our mother, she will just be Madame the Mother of the Emperor or something. She has no ambition in that line. It is money she is chiefly after, showing her usual good sense.”

  “Why shouldn’t Elisa and I be princesses?” Caroline said.

  “Well, why should you?” he asked, ready to be stormy again. “Since when has a woman had a title conferred direct on her? Use your common sense, read your history.”

  “Look,” Louis said, having finished coughing, “I will not be passed over.”

  “Ah yes, you will.”

  “You cannot compel me to hand my son over to you as heir-presumptive or whatever the term is.”

  “You will do what I say.”

  “Ah no I will not.”

  “Caroline and I demand to be made princesses,” Elisa said.

  “Listen,” he hissed, “little sisters. My own dear wife, who is prostrate at this moment with a headache—”

  “With whom?” Caroline said pertly. The First Consul gave her a long glare and wondered whether to get up, go round, slap her. He decided instead to ignore her stupidity, saying:

  “My own dear wife, alone among all others, has no desire for this imperial honor to be conferred on me. Bless her sweet heart, she is totally without ambition. She does not go around trying out terms like your majesty and Empress of France”

  “I regard the whole business as an intolerable affront,” Louis was saying.

  “Well, she is to be Empress of France, and she is to be crowned by my own hand in Notre Dame. Will you be quiet,” he shouted at his brother, “about intolerable affronts? Very well, then, I will have no heir, do you hear me, no heir? As for you,” he turned back to his sisters, “you shall be princesses, for all the good it will do you. And my dear Hortense will teach you how to behave like princesses, and the four of you will carry the Empress’s train. There, will that satisfy you?”

  “You mean,” Julie said, a fat purse-lipped homekeeping little body, “that I am to help carry the, your wife’s train?”

  “You have to have an heir,” Louis said. “That is what the whole thing is about, what they call the hereditary principle.”

  “Well,” he shouted, “I will think about it, do you hear me, think about it at leisure when I do not have a family of pouting sulking ingrates baying about me. But it won’t be you, sir, or you, sir, so get that into your thick skulls.”

  “I shall find it somewhat painful,” Julie said. “I mean, I have always been a virtuous woman. To carry the train. Well.”

  The First Consul bayed to the ceiling.

  “Ah yes,” Pius said. “A thoughtful touch, my son. It is as if I had not left the Quirinal at all. Why, when I woke this morning I was quite bewildered. I remembered a journey to France but could remember no journey back to Rome.” He laughed somewhat sillily, a decent holy sort of cleric. “Every detail of the room exactly the same. Even some of the books. Though I noticed the Zadig of Voltaire there. Perhaps that was an oversight. My dear daughter,” he said vaguely to the First Consul’s consort.

  “I am delighted Your Holiness is pleased,” the First Consul said. There were a lot of cardinals about the luncheon table and they were disposed, in the Roman manner, to linger over their meal, asking for refills of the various monkish liqueurs that had been provided. One or two grumbled about the quality of the coffee. “I take it Your Holiness had time to look over the order of the service.”

  “It is a very mixed sort of service. I have, of course, taken advice. I have no lack of advisers.” The First Consul nodded kindly. There were about a hundred of these advisers crawling over the Tuileries. “It is so strange a fusion of new and old, of religious and secular, my dear son. Strictly, I cannot be expected to crown an emperor who then proceeds to swear to maintain what is called, ha, freedom of worship.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about the crowning, Holy Father. I’ll do that myself. First me and then her,” pointing with his thumb towards his consort.

  “No no no, my point was, is—”

  “Yes, I see your point so well. How do you think I feel,” and he opened up large sincere eyes
on to Pius, “as a son of the True Church, forced, yes forced, by this rabble of deists and so on to allow tin chapels and wooden tabernacles and, yes, synagogues to subsist along with our traditional faith and the temples of our faith?”

  “It means, in effect, that you swear to uphold the right to atheism.”

  “Yes, that too, unfortunately. I am not in your position, Holy Father. I am a mere man, a very ordinary and sinful one, charged with the thankless task of holding together a ramshackle empire. As for atheism, it has been presented to me as a sincere species of negative faith.”

  “Of neg of neg.”

  “It requires a certain devoutness, a kind of theological toughness, to hold, unseduced by the siren voices of doubt, to a belief that God does not exist. For my part—” He lowered his eyes in modesty, and Pius felt that the sun had been temporarily clouded. “—I see it as a divinely bestowed state of utter emptiness, a sort of dark night of the soul, into which the ultimate effulgence will rush unaware, and the unfaith become faith. I see it so, so I see it. Therefore, I consider in all humility, Holy Father, that it would be on your part an act of holy import if you would—”

  But wary hard-eyed cardinals were quick to thrust themselves in. They feared that this Bonaparte would talk His Holiness into giving a coronation sermon on the virtues of tolerance, the advantages of Protestantism, the essential holiness of atheism. When Bonaparte later was heard discoursing to Pius in the Tuileries gardens on the aspective approach to the Trinity, they knew that, given time, Pius would innocently declare himself a Sabellian. Popes, they sighed, so rarely became popes because of their eminence in theology.

  “Well,” the First Consul smiled, at dinner on the eve of the coronation, “we are ready.”

  “Yes yes, ready,” Pius said doubtfully.

  “Nothing that has to be done has been left undone.”

  The wary cardinals nodded over their pasta. Pius said to the First Consul’s consort:

  “Are you nervous, my dear daughter?”

  “I have a little headache, nothing more.” She smiled sweetly in the ingenious way she had: hiding all her teeth but leaving the smiled-on with an after-image of a warm pearly flash.

  “You’ll have a big headache when the crown goes on those chestnut curls tomorrow, ha ha,” the First Consul said with heavy humor. “The weight of imperial responsibility.”

  “Oh, but I understood that—”

  “Yes yes yes, my little joke. Laurel wreaths in gold, very tasteful, good Parisian workmanship. Ah yes,” he beamed round at all, “we’re back to richness, to ceremony, and a good thing too. A nation needs ceremony, it needs the mystical, a ritual of dedication to the glories of its past, prefiguring the glories of its future.” A fat cardinal paused, pasta writhing on his fork, to consider the possible meaning of that, if any.

  “It is the sincere hope of us all,” Pius said, “that a little prince, a future emperor—I pray,” he added simply. A palpable cloud passed over the First Consul’s chewing features. “How long is it now, my dear daughter, that you have been married?”

  “Germinal, Year Four,” the First Consul said. “I began badly. I was late. Kept them all waiting—the registrar, Tallien, Barras, that lawyer of yours, angel. And you, of course, my treasure. Still, we wasted no time once I was there. Got it over in a couple of minutes. Two squeaks of a pen—done.”

  Mouths began to open all down the long table, some showing unchewed food. Pius began to tremble. “I cannot,” he said. “I cannot. A secular contract. You are not married. You are living in sin. Why,” he asked the table, “did nobody think of this?”

  Nobody knew why not. They had assumed. It was naturally taken for granted. Nobody had actually considered the possibility that. A natural actual considered assumption.

  “The coronation ceremony,” Pius said. “A sacrament. My participation. Unblessed by Mother Church.”

  The First Consul ate the few morsels left on his plate, considered his plate, wiped up what was left with bread, swallowed the bread, said:

  “If you will excuse my wife and myself, Your Holiness, Your Eminences—”

  He and she talked it all out in her boudoir. He lay on a sofa from Constantinople, she sat at her dressing-table mirror, all gilt putti. “You realize,” she said, “that there can be no turning back once we have done it.”

  “Divorce, you mean, divorce. Yes yes, immense legal problems, the papal disaffection, the people.”

  “I have no wish to bind you further if you do not wish to be bound. I think it totally unlikely now that we will have children.”

  “The flaw is in me, the fault, but suppose it is not—”

  “Be honest with me on that. This Italian woman, that little Egyptian kitten, others, I know there are others—”

  “Not many. No. I am always honest, I think. I think I am always honest.”

  “The question should be a question of love, no more.”

  “Yes,” he said with great firmness, “yes,” getting up from the sofa. “Can you doubt that, eh? I love you. I adore you. You are my empress.”

  “Being empress is not the point.”

  “Love love love. Can you doubt it? Tomorrow the whole world shall be sure. It has never before been done in our age—except for Marie de Medicis I believe it was. I place the crown on your delicious head. It is a sanctified and solemn embrace.” He attempted an embrace less solemn, certainly not sanctified. “We shall be married tonight, just before bedtime. Cardinal Fesch can do it.”

  “Don’t we have to go to confession first?” She disengaged herself, a woman’s sense of propriety.

  “If you wish. It may be a relief for you to get those things off your conscience.”

  “Oh my God. And you?”

  “My conscience is clear, I think. I think my conscience is clear. Venial sins, perhaps. No more.”

  December Sunday, clear and cold, saw them enter, Mars and Venus, in shining mantles, borne up by cheers and bell-clangor, the cathedral of Our Lady, he in purple adorned with his letter, an N embraced with branching oak and olive and laurel. Thirty-five years of age, he had come a long way in a short time (a long way? Ridiculous, all the way) and the best of life was yet to come. Citizens Carné, Thiriet, Blondy, Tireux, Hubert, Fossard, Teisseire, Carrère (Jacques), Carrère (Alexandre), Trauner, Barsacq, Gabutti, Mayo, Bonin, Borderie, Verne, Chaillot, Barrault, Brasseur, Dupont, Salou and their wives and children or widows and orphans or quiet or unquiet ghosts, and thousands upon thousands more, had waited from dawn to see it all. Inside the vast forest of the cathedral the officers of the new empire waited, some with unquiet bladders, in the glory of a myriad candles that dissolved the Gothic shadows. Talleyrand, magnificent in his chamberlain’s ermine, seeing N coming down the aisle, aware of hours of tedious magnificence to come, thought: his dysuria will serve him well. N saw them all, old companions-in-arms, now transmuted to a mythology glorious in plush, silk, satin, silver, gold, sky-blue, sea-blue, with palms and eagles and bees and doves and dogs and lions and leopards as emblems and mystic riddles, seeing too Corporal Gallimard in the crowd, who must really be told to do something about his drinking, and Sergeant Pichou, who he had intended should be promoted but things had got in the way (he made a note of it, advancing up the nave to where His Holiness waited among swords and ivories of office). To his consort, who shone like a goddess and walked with the pace of a goddess and would not be hurried up to the more martial step that seemed to him, imperator, more appropriate, he said:

  “You remember that notary, Raguideau? The one who told you not to marry me?”

  “What?” The coronation march, played on brass and drums and clarinets, was very loud. “Oh, Raguideau.”

  “Said I’d never own more than my cape and sword. I had him in this morning.”

  “What?”

  “Asked him what he thought about that now. Eh? Eh?” Seeing N so merry, everybody smiled. A one-legged discharged sapper cried: “That’s right, laugh, you little bugger,” but it wa
s drowned in shouts of “Long live the Emperor.” And so N and J approached the high altar. It was the first Sunday in Advent, but the mass was a votive mass of the Blessed Virgin. Talleyrand said to the officer next to him:

  “The feminine theme, you see. France is to be regarded as a sort of Blessed Virgin. La patrie. Fathermotherland. The Blessed Virgin,” he chuckled, admiring the magnificent satiny J. “The spirit of the chevaliers. Poor Germaine would have loved all this.” And then he saw that nobody, however emancipated or clever, really had room any more for laughter, unless initiated by N. A Corsican nothing had turned himself into a greater than Charlemagne.

  N and his almost empress were bowed to golden thrones by a beaky cleric not unlike the custodian of the Louvre who (his brain had filed the fact away) opened twenty minutes late the day before yesterday.

  “That parrot of yours. It has to go.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t have it shrieking Bonaparte all the time.” Her tears gushed. “There there, angel. It can live in the servants’ quarters.”

  “I was thinking,” she sniffed, “of poor little Fortuné.”

  The Carolingian ghosts attend him now.1

  And hover o’er the new nobility.

  Great Pepin’s glory2 shines upon his brow

  And shining trumpets seek the vaulted sky.

  Then Vivat imperator is the3 cry,

  The organ4 bids the massy5 columns shake6

  While drums thud deep and martial flutes shriek high.7

  An age is dead, a new age doth awake,9.

  See night roll back and see a glorious morning break.9

  1. His Holiness blesses the imperial regalia then hands to N the sword, scepter, hand of justice, orb.

  2. His Holiness prepares to crown him but N places on his own head the golden laurel.

  3. J with hands joined proceeds to the steps of the altar but her trainbearers (Madame Julie replaced by Pauline) seem in deliberate clumsiness to seek to hobble her steps and make her trip. N frowns and whispers something harsh. They are subdued, with grace J kneels.

  4. N crowns her with care, setting the featherweight gold on her curls with the deliberation of a Paris coiffeur.