Napoleon Symphony

by Anthony Burgess

  The nymphs, her serving ladies, who, also in almost total nudity, lay in smiling rose-strewn and rose-strewing languor all about her throne (whose arms were most intricately and really magnificently carved sphinxes), were the very rose-pink of beauty, and the rowing slaves whose black sweat gave off a delicious odor of concentrated rose could not keep their great rolling eyes off the not excessive opulence of their haunches and breasts.

  Rayers ray in rays,

  Paysied raises interpays

  That was the very refined voice of Edmée Renaudin, wonderfully transformed into a slim shapely odalisque but, like all the attendant nymphs, minimally flawed in deference to her nonpareil mistress. Her flaw was a rosy mole on the left shoulder blade out of which grew a tiny filament that trembled in the cinnamon-breathing breeze. And Thérèse Tallien herself, at whose utter loveliness even a lovely woman could catch her breath and stare, had the tiniest tiniest tiniest downy growth on her truly delicious upper lip which, when stained with ferrous wine, could glitter like a real mustache. And now, as to confirm her own divine perfection, a little dimple-bottomed boy brought up his ormolu mirror again. To her surprise and annoyance her face, for some reason known only to the gods of mirrors, did not show in the flashing blue metal; instead there appeared a text of utter and silly and impertinent meaninglessness: LA LUTTE ÉTAIT TERMINÉE. IL AVAIT REMPORTÉ LA VICTOIRE SUR LUI-MÊME. IL AIMAIT… But then it faded, and her face was there deliciously frowning. And here, at her right side, was a Silenus who looked like Talleyrand and, naked as he otherwise was, had a sort of silkweave bandolier about him to which a porcelain snuffbox was attached. He had taken a pinch, unseen by her and certainly without her permission (it was a dirty habit, the sight of snuff taking made her cross), and he now sneezed, spraying her right forearm so that she was ready to be really angry, then said, without apology: Une sorcière. Donnez-la au feu. She pouted prettily: Mais le feu ne me plaît point.

  At once she was lifted by her own delicious-smelling and smiling nymphs out of the imperial divine seat and, kicking and laughing and screaming, was thrust to the river. This, she saw as she plunged (and it was totally without fear), was the true elevation, despite what appeared to be its opposite! She could breathe quite easily in the lovely perfumed waters, and the fish that came to greet her all had the cold snout of poor little Fortuné. When she rose to the surface it was to find that everything had changed—no barge, no attendants, no spicy Egypt. But she had become Aphrodite. Her hair was a golden fire, and she felt that her body was now somehow so delectable that great pieces should be broken from it like cake and munched, since it would all grow again in a twinkling, she now being truly a goddess. She was poised on the surface of delicious iced champagne foam, and her lovely back was protected from the wind by a really beautiful shell-like pavilion which rested, miracle, on the wild but mild and cool but warm waters. From the shore, she saw, great-muscled men, their faces of a brilliantly intelligent somehow animality, were plunging in to swim avidly toward her, all to do her pleasure, that was to say worship. But a Triton came over the surface from behind the shell to blow a feeble ugly blast on his conch and then to sing raucously at her, while a beautiful white-robed choir got ready on the shore: ET À PROPOS PENDANT QUE NOUS SOMMES À CE SUJET VOICI UNE CHANDELLE POUR ALLER VOUS COUCHER VOICI UN COUPERET POUR COUPER VOTRE TÊTE. For all that, the shore choir sang to the flutes and oboes and trumpets and violins:

  See the re-

  Incarnate Aphrodite.

  Hail queen of love almighty!

  Flesh

  Fresher than a rose,

  And maddening that rose

  Twixt her nose and her toes!

  She awoke in Malmaison to see in the dimmed lamplight monsters creeping toward her, panting and whimpering. She strangled her scream before proper utterance: it was only the puppies that had got out of their basket while their (miniature German wolfhound) parents slept. Pretty dears, tumbling and loving but apt to be incontinent with excitement on the rose counterpane. She had come out of that quite pleasant dream with a slight headache and was not in consequence (she kissed each in apology) ready for puppy-play. Besides, it was the unearthly hour, so the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece said, of four-thirty in the morning, a winter morning too. Claire had, before retiring, fed the little fire with small coal, so that the room was warm still. She wondered whether to call Claire, bid her make a tisane and sit and chat, but that chat would lead to poor madame and so on. She poured the puppies back into their basket in armfuls, a task likely, she sighed, to be never-ending, but then their mother awoke and rushed to siphon them off with a horrible noise of relish, then lay on her side to feed them. Their father, how like a male, never awoke. Her parrot, under its night cover, squawked a gnomic syllable or two: lutte and couperet and something that sounded like pendantquenous, and then hahaha. The warmth of that dream water clung still to her limbs as she lay once more, the headache receding, in her silk. The pirogue from Les Trois-Îlets to Fort-Royal, the Convent of the Ladies of Providence, across the bay: how she had loved the journey. How she had loved the islands of perpetual summer, castles built on the shore with children’s screams and tired-runner panting of waves contending, paddling in the warm blue, native drums in the evening afar as they reclined on the veranda after spiced (heresy, that fat official from Paris had said at first, but later he succumbed as they all did) coq au vin. The island life, and what could be lovelier than the island life, except of course the dreamt of and as it were remembered from other people’s memories life of Paris? The sea had never been a big monstrous divider but rather a joiner of island and island, so it had seemed to her as a girl, and ultimately the sea, and the wind that rose from out of the sea, joined you to France, though not directly to Paris. To get to Paris meant that horrid jolting over land, somehow very male in its roughness. The sea, the warm spicy sea, she never feared the sea, the sea was her element, the sea was a woman, la mere la mer, and lapped round a man and enclosed him and made him yield, yes, yield all. And now the sea had failed her.

  The headache began to return, and she could almost foretaste its promised quiddity, that of a true migraine. It had been a migraine of spectacular almost majestic intensity that had struck that evening before dinner, and it had made its own strange poem, in which she was a sea that could feel pain from the plowing of the prow of an iron ship into her brow. Ah, those two horrid islands with a staircase between them, her boudoir, his study, and he never knocked, never never. At the sound of the dinner bell she had had one of her great white hats pinned and arranged to shade her sore eyes, and dinner had been a nightmare, only ten minutes but endless, neither of them had tasted more than a dribble of soup and a morsel of chicken, and then, when it had come to the coffee—

  Oh, he took his cup himself from the tray, roughly pushing her aside, not waiting as he had always done for her to put sugar in for him and then taste it to see if it was to his taste not tasting too sweet or not sweet enough not that he ever really had much of a sense of taste sometimes not seeming to know even whether it was sweet or not and then he.

  Waved the lackey out and Count de Bausset, who was prefect in attendance, went out too very quickly without being waved at, for he knew what was coming, everybody knew, and now here it was, coming. But it was not going to be easy for him either, as she could tell from the rattle of cup against saucer, like a sort of musical chattering of teeth she had thought madly, and now it came, and he trembled in front of the fire. Trembling he said:

  “Your daughter. That is to say. Hortense will have said something.”

  “No. No. Hortense? Nothing.”

  “You understand? You must understand. Do you think I want this? Can you honestly sit there and think I want it?” Trembling.

  “You mean. You are in love with. This. Christine de Mathis.”

  “No. No. No no no no no, whoever that is, who is that, oh yes, a friend of Pauline’s, no no no, that is not it. Oh foolish woman, could you think that, oh ridic, no no, it is nob
ody.”

  “You are not in love with anybody?”

  “With you, with you, woman, stupid bitch, owwwwww.” And he howled and beat his brow with his left forearm, his right hand being thrust into his tunic, rubbing heartburn or some such pain, but heartburn, in what is it, metaphor, would be all too right a thing to say.

  “Well then, if you are in love with me. All is well. But you should not call me what you.”

  “Oh, I meant by that that, and it is I who am being stupid now, made stupid by the pain of it, you should have been a Russian princess or an Austrian one, and you should have given me a son. The stupidity lies in in, where does the stupidity lie? Fate? Destiny? The force of history?” Those big words which were abstract were making him tremble less. “I had best say the word, had I not? Well, the word is, the word is. Oh my God. Divorce.

  A terrible word. All the two of them could now do was to taste the word, like coffee to see if it was sweet enough, taste it to see what it tasted like. Divorce. It did not really taste too badly, for all that it was the most dreadful word in the world. Perhaps the dreadful thing was that it had a kissing sound in it if you lengthened it enough, as her Creole way of speaking made her do. Divoooorce. On him it had a strange effect, like an aphro aphrodis, for he began to move towards her, right arm released from tunic, both arms out, eyes flaring. His words belied.

  “The national interest alliance attempt on my life at Schônbrunn a male heir you understand you must under.”

  And then it had seemed to her the proper thing to do, though her migraine had miraculously cleared and she felt madly in control, like the sea, to scream for the whole of the Tuileries to hear and then, with grace, everything with grace, very important, to collapse to the carpet. You must under. So she undered, eyes closed, hearing everything, hearing the whole of the Tuileries startled to movement like a flurry of bats in a cave if one screams by her scream. She could see his boots, very clean though agitated, then they flashed out of her sightline as he went, as its opening and his words then attested, to the door that led to the salon and she heard him say quite calmly:

  “Come in, Bausset. Shut the door as you.” With Bausset there (his sharp intake of breath) she now had to cry:

  “No! No! I cannot! I will not!”

  “Carry her. Her majesty. To her.” He did not have much breath.

  “Yes Sire I will.” She went totally limp, eyelids fluttered to a close, as he grunted, lifting her, should have taken his sword off first. And, while she was being carried, Bausset kept grunting Sire in reply to what he was stiffly saying: “National welfare, Bausset, violence to my true feelings, considerations of state versus the dictates of the heart, Bausset, divorce a political necessity, dreadful but true, I had not realized quite, must confess, that the Empress would react so strongly, Bausset, I had assumed, falsely as it has turned out, that she had already been prepared for the news by her daughter, Bausset.” Sire. Sire. Relishing the prospect of tattling it all, despite the difficulty of. He did not seem to have had much experience of carrying a woman. N must have been mad to entrust all this to a hypocrite and eavesdropper and tattletale, as he had always called Bausset, but the whole world would know it soon enough. She wondered whether to sigh deeply, but there was trouble in getting her down the narrow stairway and Bausset was evidently, she risked a glance, going to trip over his stupid sword, because he tightened his hold, in fright it must be, on her. She said quietly in his ear:

  “Crushing me.”

  And then she was on her ottoman in her bedroom and Hortense was there, and then Hortense was there again, having been summoned to him and now bringing it all back while it was still fresh.

  “Yes yes dear, what did he say?”

  “Oh mother, he was very stiff at first and said something about the irrevocability of his decision, big words, you know, and that neither tears nor entreaties nor threats would make him change his mind.”

  “What do you suppose he meant by threats?”

  “That you might, I suppose, you know, do something—”

  “Desperate? But that would be a terrible sin. Me do something desperate? He must have been extremely agitated.”

  “Oh he was. Anyway, I was very stiff back to him, saying that he was the master Sire, calling him Sire all the time, but reminding him that he had been very very cruel, all those parties which only really began when you had gone to bed, and his sister Pauline bringing women all the time like a—”

  “Brothel. Let us not mince words. And she herself is precisely a.”

  “What I said was that the whole of France would see him as a heartless tyrant but that the Bonaparte family would be hugging itself with joy, and then tears came to his eyes.”

  “Ah.”

  “I said you would do what he and the Bonapartes wanted and what he thought France wanted, and that when we left him—you and me and Eugène I meant of course—we would take with us the memory of all the kindness he had shown us.”

  “And then I suppose he really wept.”

  “Sobbed and sobbed and went on sobbing about were we all going to abandon him and did no one love him anymore and if it had been just a matter of his own happiness he would have sacrificed it—”

  “What did he mean by that I wonder?”

  “But the happiness and security of France were at stake and then we all ought to feel sorry for him because he was going to give up all that meant most to him in the whole world. Then I said that we’d need courage too because we’d have to stop being his stepchildren—I changed that to just children—but that we’d never stand in the way of whatever plans he had.”

  “Oh Hortense, this is really sad, this is heartbreaking. Oh Hortense, pass me that handkerchief, girl, no, the big one. You take the little one. Oh Hortense.”

  “He said that I mustn’t leave him and that I had an obligation to my own children as well as to him, but I said my first obligation was to my mother who will need me so badly. He went on sobbing and I sobbed too.”

  “Oh, it really is too utterly sad, my poor child. Come and cry on your poor mother’s shoulder.” And then, later: “Why does he have to make things so difficult for himself? All men are the same, but he is worse than most.”

  “It’s about France and alliances and so on. Even Monsieur Talleyrand is said to have said something earlier about it being a sad day for France when the time came for him to do what he seemed to have in mind.”

  “You mean they’ve discussed all this before?”

  “They had to, mother, I suppose. It’s a matter of the state and so on. After all, they told me, but I couldn’t bring myself to to—”

  “Without having the decency to breathe a word to me.” And then: “Talleyrand said that? I never thought that Talleyrand liked me. I’m sure I put myself out to try and please him, but he was always so stern or so sarcastic.”

  “It comes of his having been a bishop, mother.”

  “Ah.” And she dried her eyes, then, having the handkerchief in her hand, dried one of Hortense’s. “I’m glad you mentioned that. There can’t be a divorce, can there? The Pope wouldn’t allow it.”

  “But isn’t the Pope his prisoner or something?”

  “That may be so, I don’t follow these things closely, so much happening all the time and so much of it vindictive and silly, but I should have thought that it wouldn’t make any difference to the rights and wrongs of it whether he’s a prisoner now, since he wasn’t a prisoner then. And, in any event, taking the Pope prisoner can’t mean changing a truth to an untruth, it’s like saying that if one of these chemists who proved that water is oxygen and that other thing mixed up together is put into prison, then water is no longer what he proved it was. Do you see what I mean, dear?”

  “What he said to me was about the parish priest not being there, which he has to be according to law.”

  “Ah. So you asked him, did you? Well, there was a cardinal there, and the Pope himself was not very far away, but just because there’s no parish priest?
I see, and they’ll all nod and say that’s right, men sticking together. I suppose we could fight it.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good, mother.”

  “And I loved him, Hortense, loved him, surely you must know that? I gave him my whole heart, but I see now it was only to break.”

  “You didn’t give him. You know what you didn’t give him, mother.”

  “What fault of mine was that? These things cannot be ordered, Hortense, as you know full well. You cannot order nature. The question is: what’s to happen to us now?”

  Later, when she was lying alone in bed, he himself came in, having knocked humbly. He was wearing a dressing gown and his great eyes brimmed. He stumbled over to the bed like a disabled veteran and sat heavily on it. “The horror of the whole thing,” he began to sob. “And none of my purposing.”

  She was determined to be dry-eyed now. She had spent an hour of appalled cosmesis on her face’s ravagement, all his fault. She was not going to let him make her cry again. For a man it was different, but of course everything was: crying just made them look younger. “If a man,” she said, “loves his wife, he does not go looking for an excuse to leave her.”

  “It is no excuse, no excuse, oh God God God, God knows it is no excuse. It is urgent necessity, it is the future of France.”

  “Who,” she said, “are you proposing to marry?”

  “It isn’t certain yet. It’s a question of either Russia or Austria. And one or the other has to give me a son, an heir, a successor. They tried to kill me, damn it. Meanwhile, it’s all to be a sort of limbo. It can’t be announced yet, all we can do is to let the rumors circulate, see how the people take it. And we have the victory celebrations in a couple of days—”

  “Am I supposed to join in the celebrating of a victory?”