Napoleon Symphony

by Anthony Burgess

  Yorck, at a senior officers’ party in Riga, had spoken about three kinds of loyalty. There was, he said, soldier’s loyalty—very easy, just a matter of obeying orders, yes my captain, no my general. Then there was loyalty to the monarch which, in his own instance, was agreeing, though with inner reluctance, to being loyal to an army chief whose political aims he execrated. Finally there was the only kind of loyalty that mattered—a loyalty beyond kings and emperors.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Marshal MacDonald had said, shuddering on the local firewater they were drinking. “Loyalty to an idea. To a philosophy, to a constitution.”

  “No, no and again no. Mystical loyalty. To country unpersonified in any particular reigning monarch or political constitution. To country as language. To country as the country’s gods that dwell in the forests and rivers, in sunrise and sunset.”

  “A new idea, a dangerous idea.”

  “Dangerous? Dangerous to whom? Dangerous only to those foreign powers that would seek to diminish or deride or destroy the mysticism of a nation.”

  “You mean Prussia. You mean Prussia before the King of Prussia. You mean that God is with Prussia.”

  “Much depends on the meaning you give to that word God. It is hard to think of a God who is a God of the Prussians at the same time as he is a God of the French. Or of course a God of the Jews.”

  “It is your own Prussian Jehovah you are thinking of?”

  “Jehovah. You make a joke. And let us forget also this name Prussia. Let us think rather of the German Volk.”

  “The German what? Folque, you say?”

  “It is Prussia that will lead the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe to awareness of their special destiny.”

  “And what of the other peoples of Europe? Will you perhaps decide to lead them too?”

  Yorck’s long blue-eyed somewhat tipsily unfocused look. Thinking it over. “Make no mistake about it,” he said. “Some nations are men, others are dogs. If a nation can learn to glory in the unique mysteries of its blood and its gods and its language, then let it be so, but let it also beware of the Volk. Europe cannot be full of nations snarling at each other. There has to be peace and unity, and let the men impose this by kicking the dogs if need be. This is to be the age of the German Volk”

  “And the French are to be dogs?”

  “Do not talk of the French, you who are an Irishman. And being over there—” He stretched his left arm out suddenly and a couple of glasses smashed on to the hard floor. An orderly came running. “That’s right,” Yorck said, “whatever sort of dog you are, fulfill your destiny.” And he gave the orderly’s arse a gentle kick while he was gathering up the shards. “Over there, I say, a harmless island, get on with your own language and gods and sunsets and freeing yourselves from your English masters. The English are,” he hiccuped, “not dogs.”

  “They see themselves as bulldogs, big-chested snappers. They are a hateful people.”

  “They are not dogs, but let them not get in the way of the destiny of the Volk.”

  “Was it not peace and unity we tried to give to Europe?” MacDonald somewhat sadly said. “The Napoleonic ideal. For Ireland, too. The French are on the sea, says the Shan Van Vocht. And the Orange will decay.”

  “I do not know what you mean by an orange that will se délabrer. And let me say this, that your glorious Emperor is living in the past. He believes that Europe is full of feudal monarchs. Well, it is not so. Europe is moving towards the revelation of the destiny of the Volk.”

  His Grace the Duke of Tarentum sadly rode on the treacherous ice. Horses behind him slithered and were cursed and whoaed. He had taken the precaution of having his own horses shod against ice. The horse he now rode was an Irish horse, the finest country in the world for horses, and the green grass and the soft brogue and the rich butter. Uprooted, a sort of Frenchman, with estates at Tarentum, whereof he had the duchy. His loyalty had once been to a Catholic monarchy, since the Church itself had been an empire of the spirit, with Ireland as a well-beloved and ancient province. But no: had not an English pope handed Ireland over to an English monarch? Yet at least beneath it all, in the Reformation time, a common faith. Well, His Holiness was now a prisoner of the Emperor, and how did the Irish feel about that? He knew well enough how the Spanish felt. Was his allegiance to be only to a temporal monarch who hated the English? More important, how now was treachery to be defined? Yorck had neutralized, but not forever, a cadre of armed Prussian revolt. On behalf of the destiny of the folque. Yorck had ended the party by tipsily singing some nonsense about

  O Deutschland arise

  Light is rising in the echt Deutschlander

  skies

  Was he a traitor? In the narrowest sense, yes. He had broken his sacramentum or soldier’s oath. But was a man who loved his country properly to be called a traitor? MacDonald tried hard to see himself back in Ireland, training armies that were themselves institutes of political education, driving the English out, wave after wave of snapping bulldogs, until there were no bulldogs to unleash, or the kennel-masters grew weary. Peace, a treaty, an independent Ireland. He was too old, and the time was not yet. He would die with the Napoleonic time, at ease he hoped in his duchy. But he feared the year that lay ahead. Ahead, he saw in the first sprawl of suburbs, lay Kônigsberg. One step at a time, dangerous to look too far. He wished he did not feel so desperately depressed.

  Yorck,” N screamed, “is a traitor and a damned traitor. I will have the shooting of the traitor Yorck with my own hands.” He stamped about the playroom for a time, crying traitor traitor, and his little son, the King of Rome, laughed. “You do well to laugh, my angel child,” N said, eyes softening, “laugh indeed in your Eden of youthful innocence where there are no traitors. But the traitors will come, they come to us all, hissing in the green leaves, then striking, striking” He fisted the huge papier-mâché Europe he had had made and set up in the playroom and a group of lead cavalrymen fell over. Encouraged, the King of Rome fisted with both little fists, and grenadiers and infantrymen fell from the Tagus to the Urals.

  The Empress, Marie-Louise, sat placidly in an armchair eating from a box of creamy sweetmeats that had come recently all the way from Vienna. She smiled with her cat-eyes at the Emperor her husband and said: “Sweetheart, rest, you must rest, to bed and I will rest with you, and do not cry out all the time about traitors. In your sleep you do it, for I have heard.” Smiling winningly, winsomely, she put a big white powdery pepperminty sweet into her mouth. The family mouth, N thought, looking at it, the mouth that had been on a thousand portraits in Schönbrunn. N said:

  “And what would you say if I said there is plenty of treachery going on at this very moment in Vienna? That English money is finding its way there, a million pounds I hear, and your own father is humming and hahing about the advisability of this and the imprudence of that, which means he will attack his own son-in-law tomorrow if the price is right? What do you think of that, eh?”

  “Too fast sometimes you speak, beloved. If you are saying bad things about my father, then please do not say them.”

  “How in God’s name can I say good things about your father when he is saying bad things about me? And do please stop stuffing yourself with those horrible nauseating gobbets of Viennese treachery.”

  “Again you say treachery. But this time it is funny.”

  “Confectionery I said, I meant. Oh God God God.” His little son started going goggoggog. N turned tenderly towards him and the papier-mache Europe, complete with mountains and rivers and horrible eastern plains. “You see now, my dear little one, what they will try to do. The Czar or Tsar of all the Russias and the Germans and the Swedes and the Austrians will all move like that towards daddy, and they will have lots and lots of gold from the treacherous English to help them to do it, but daddy will knock them all back, kick, smash, bang.” And to his Empress he called in agony: “To whom are you loyal, to whom, to whom? I must know. What letters has your father been sending you, w
hat advice or orders has he been giving, what has he been telling you to do?”

  “Always my father says,” and another powdery sticky round went in, “that a vahf boofy boo her hooboo.”

  “What did you say then? Stop eating that damned muck. I couldn’t hear what you said, stuffing your gob like that.”

  “Gob? What is that word? It is funny. A wife’s duty is to her husband, my father says.”

  “I put it to you,” he said, one hand clutching his coattail, the other pointing forensically, his upper body hunched forward, “as a hypothesis. As a hypothesis only. If by any chance, and it won’t happen, make quite sure of that, if by any chance your imperial Austrian father rolled haughtily into Paris with victorious troops behind him and said Ach ja, dieser Napoleon muss ein prisoner sein—”

  “It is funny when you try to speak German.”

  “If, I say, they took your dear husband and sent him off somewhere out of harm’s way so as not to be a nuisance to poor poor Europe anymore—”

  “Too fast always you speak.”

  “Would you go with him—me, that is? Your husband. Through thick and thin, till death do us—Would you be faithful?”

  “Faithful, oh yes. To you, beloved, always faithful. And to my little precious son too, always faithful.” She radiantly but somehow mindlessly beamed at the King of Rome, making at the same time kissing and sucking noises. The King of Rome stared at her, fascinated.

  “I don’t believe it,” N muttered to himself, marching over to the western flank of Europe and seeing the Iberian peninsula full of redcoats and treacherous Iberian mountain fighters. “I don’t believe that anyone is really faithful.”

  “What do you say, beloved?”

  “There’s a lot of nonsense going round,” he said, marching back to her, “about German self-determination. Do you understand that phrase? About the German destiny and all the German-speaking peoples banding together and down with Bonaparte and France. Do you hear such things?”

  “I hear nothing, sweetheart.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do. Tell me this now—do you love Austria? A simple question even you ought to be able to understand. Do you love Austria? Liebst du Austria?”

  She forgot about her Viennese sweetmeats and put her hands demurely in her green silk lap. “It is not like France. When I was a little girl we would run shouting through the green woods calling to each other, and there would be old songs when the sun was going down over the mountains. It was a beautiful time. The French people are very cold.” N now saw tears in her cat-eyes. He groaned at that bit about the sunset and the mountains. He went back to his little son, the King of Rome, far too young to conceive of treachery, and saw him trying to drown the entire French army in the Atlantic.

  “No,” he said kindly, “no, my dear little boy. They must all go there, see, on land. Those there at that place there, you see, which is called Leipzig. It will be at Leipzig, yes, Leipzig, when the time comes.” He became totally absorbed in working out on this juvenile Europe the basic plan of the ultimate punitive battle, each leaden soldier standing for a whole army corps. The King of Rome kept pulling at his sleeve for attention but the Emperor of France was too absorbed. The Empress sniveled out delicious Heimweh from her chair: Schloss—Jagd—Morgenrot—wunder-schbön. The King began to scream and then the Emperor (not too happy about that particular enfilade, frowning) ceased playing his solitary game. The King hit out and the Emperor took the child in his arms and kissed him again and again furiously. “They forgot you. Forgot to. Rally round. My little boy. King of Rome. When the bad wicked silly man. Said papa was dead. But we’ll. Beat them all. Yet. The bastards.”

  Coffee and cakes were now brought in for the Empress by two liveried flunkies—delicate Meissen and steaming silver and a doilied dish of creamy Kuchenbacker. There was also Schlagsahne or Schlagobers in a separate silver crock, and she took a ravening fingerful of it before the tray had properly been set down on her chairside table. N sniffed and sniffed, as for approaching battle-fire. “That smells like real coffee,” he sniffed. “Where did it come from?”

  “From Wien. My father sent.”

  N took the lid off the pot and stuck his sniffing nose into the heady steam. Delicious. “Your father,” he started to rave, “had no right. This coffee is real coffee. Hasn’t he heard of the Continental System? Doesn’t he know the law? Wasn’t that the whole object of the whole damned punitive expedition? To make all the Germanic swine follow the Continental System?”

  “Of my father you should not so speak.”

  “Hasn’t he heard of it? By God, he’ll have heard of it by the time I’ve done with him.”

  “You must not speak so of my dear father.”

  “I’ll speak of him in any way I choose, madam. There’s a damned hard day coming for the lot of them, I promise you.” To the servants, who listened, making mental notes for memoirs, he said: “Take that aromatic muck out and bring some of the imitation stuff. And don’t you drink it, because I’ll know. Oh, here, nobody’s to be trusted.” He took the coffeepot and strode over to a potted palm, degging the soil with the hot rich brew. The Empress cried.

  “You are cruel. A cruel man. Always my father said.”

  “Ach du bist gehässig.” Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, formerly Bishop of Autun, now Prince of Benevento, Minister of Foreign Affairs till his master’s Tilsit euphoria spoke, in some hardly audible upper partial, of the prudence of resignation, at present merely Grand Chamberlain of the Empire, made his little group roar with laughter as he improvised one of his famous parodies of the Emperor’s domestic life. He did the gurgling Empress very well: “Ach, du hast genug gesagt” and so on. He did not normally perform this act in the presence of the discarded Empress, his present hostess, but she was at the moment showing the Polish princess round the gardens. Women too, it appeared, were not averse to comparing notes about a common lover.

  He stood in a corner of the great salon at Malmaison, enjoying the enjoyment of the ladies and the smiling crumb-spluttering of Cardinal Maury. “They do one very well here,” Talleyrand said. “Far far better than one has ever been done at the Tuileries. Only a potentate with no palate could conceive of a perpetual Lent and call it a Continental System.” Cardinal Maury, crammed with Ruccieri’s gâteaux, sketched a sort of blessing over the exquisite buffet table, a work of art in itself, a shame really so to ravage it, full of succulent exotica from the Malmaison hothouses. At length he said, accepting an ice from a bowing flunky:

  “Her Ruccieri is a great genius. Laguipière was a genius too but wasted. I coveted his services at one time. Poor man, one of the more regrettable casualties of the retreat from Moscow. Requiescat, and so on.”

  “Let us say Requiescant,” Talleyrand said, “while we are so comfortably praying.” He used a tone he had sometimes employed episcopally. “And the future tense may be made to cover the morituri as well as the mortui” The ladies, not much caring for this switch to piety—food or the fallen—were glad to be able to rush over and coo greetings at Henri de Guennec, handsome hero of Berezina, who had just arrived, left arm cleanly and somehow erotically bandaged. He was destined never to be one of the mortui—not, anyway, in bello.

  “The morituri” Cardinal Maury said, “are as eager to salute their Caesar as ever. How much longer, my prince?”

  “Not long, your eminence. When I saw him crown himself and our delightful hostess in 1804, I said to myself: Ten years is enough. And ten years, indeed, may be accounted more than enough for so bizarre an adventure. I remember—it was just after the Marengo victory—saying to poor Germaine de Staël—she must now, I should think, be preparing an end to her exile—saying, I say, that I could not visualize an Emperor Napoleon grown old. His imminent death in battle was a very large aspect of his glamour. I feared, at one time, a sempiternal martyrdom that would have shoved any number of fat and talentless Bonapartes on the throne, but I think the Bourbons will soon be back with us. Nay, I know. And I can
see a comic Bonaparte gibbering behind bars, desperately wishing to die but unable to effect his own quietus. The reign is going to end in a mixture of absurdity and shame.”

  “Shame?”

  “It will be a kind of shame to many to have to defer to victorious foreigners in the capital—Prussians, Cossacks and so forth. Perhaps the English too. But it is a kind of shame that his stubbornness and pride will ironically bring about. He will not accept compromise treaties and old boundaries. Everything or nothing. And so—the frog-dance and the goose-step in Paris. In the streets, not the cabarets.” He grinned at Cardinal Maury, even while repeating: “Absurdity and shame.”

  “There was a time when you did not speak your treason so publicly.” Cardinal Maury smiled, saying it. The term treason had ceased to have deadly harmonics. Once it had been applied to the hirelings of the Bourbons, but now the Bourbons evidently, logically, had to come back. Then one could start making treason clang like a dangerous bell again. For treason had to do only with the Lord’s true anointed.

  “I have never deviated, your eminence, from my initial loyalties. But a man must survive. Your eminence, if I may say so without disrespect, has practiced the art of survival as assiduously as I. It is the only art worth studying. Where,” he grinned wickedly and with the shocking descent to sudden insolence for which he was becoming well-known, “has his holy squirrelship stowed his nuts? Has he, like so many patriots, a pseudonymous gold deposit in the central bank of the archenemy?”

  “Ah—so you too? Well, the churchman, like the diplomatist, has to be a kind of international creature. Like those gray squirrels out there.” He looked out to the garden, where a deposed Empress and the princess of a grand duchy were talking in womanly animation. Autumn was on its way. Cardinal Maury smiled at Talleyrand and then sketched a toast in ice cream. His Grace the Duke of Parma came over to join them, patting a belly well-satisfied, Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, formerly Minister of Justice, still President of the Senate—Jean-Jacques Cambacérès, hale and chronically overfed. He said: