“The honey-hued hair of the Walewska lady—positively esculent. And our dear hostess so amical towards her: see, they practically eat each other. Women are strange creatures.” He stared at them through the open window as though wondering how best they might be cooked.
“Women,” Talleyrand said, “are permanent creatures.”
“Eh?” Cambacérès did not understand but did not mind not understanding. “The strangeness, I would have thought, in this particular connection that is, lies in the fact that the Walewska lady provided the very tangible and visible proof of the fact that the—The root and occasion, in other ways, of—may we call it divorce, your eminence, or does Holy Church prefer some more er euphemistic, some more ecclesiastically acceptable er—”
“It’s been called an annulment,” Talleyrand said, the old bishop peeping out, “but I think most of us regard it as divorce, full-cream, undiluted. You refer, your grace, to the Walewska by-blow.”
“One way of putting it, I wouldn’t myself use that sort of—Well, yes, she is the golden-haired banner which proclaimed our poor Josephine’s lamentable sterility.”
“There had been others,” the Cardinal said, in a worldly manner. “Hole-in-the-corner others. I still maintain that it is the hardest task in the world to prove paternity. There are people, I know,” he primly worldlily added, “who would say Deo gratias to that.”
“You say poor” Talleyrand said to Cambacérès. “Poor is what you said. I too, God help me, have said poor often enough—”
“Pardon me, I don’t quite follow your reference—Oh, I see, yes, I see—” He nodded with vigor and his jowls shook like puddings. “Our poor—Yes.”
“But where has our permanency lain? She has been the abiding myth, the goddess invoked by frozen soldiers limping back from Russia. She is the core of a whole national superstition. There is a very worrying quality about that family—”
“Worrying?”
“Yes yes, with her daughter Hortense the one shining genuinely aristocratic light at the Tuileries. With her son Eugène the only competent and loyal marshal he has left—well, very nearly. They will survive, and through no trickery. There is something in the blood.”
“The Beauharnais blood was good blood,” Cardinal Maury said. “Is, I should say. I was thinking of General Beauharnais, one of the nonsurvivors. Fifty heads a day at the Carmes.” He shuddered. “Well, the days of Robespierre are far, thank God. We’ll never see anything like that again.”
“There is something in the blood,” Talleyrand repeated. “I used to deride the notion of inheritable qualities of that kind. But now we are hearing a lot about the superiority of one kind of blood over another. The aristocratic principle has been expanded from the family to the nation. Not our nation. We have never spoken of great qualities in the French—only in particular Frenchmen.”
“Including honorary ones,” Cambacérès said. “A Frenchman is somebody who speaks French and lives in France. Like, say, poor tortured MacDonald.”
“Tortured?” said Cardinal Maury in alarm. “Oh, I see. Mentally—”
“It was not his fault if Yorck made special arrangements with the Prussians. And it is, I think, my prince, the Prussians you have in mind when you talk of the new principle—what did you call it?”
“I had not yet got down to calling it anything,” Talleyrand smiled, “but, since you press me, I will launch the term master race. It is the whole race, you see, and not just its exceptional representatives, that is to prevail. We may, in our post-Napoleonic crapula, be unable to meet the mad challenge of so preposterous a religion. But the German people, under the Prussians, are ready to shout its slogans. You’ll be hearing them in Paris before long.”
“Ah,” Cambacérès said, “you too have suffered from this nightmare. I wake with it myself—often after stewed pike, for some reason—and it stays in the bedroom with me. Coarse sausage and beer by the kilo mug and national songs. There is a sobbing quality about the German language—the very lilt of the L in a word like, let me see, kalt or alt is an anthem of sentimental conviction. Gentlemen, I have eaten and eaten well—she does you very well here—but I am impelled to sample a few of those biscuits glacés. Her man Ruccieri is a genius of the lighter order.”
“And your own genius?” the Cardinal smiled.
“Yes yes, it is time you came,” munched Cambacérès. “It has been a long time since you honored my table. Tomorrow—why not? You too, my prince, if you can spare the time from weightier matters. I have a dinner for—no matter—somewhat complicated—a faceless gentleman from St. Petersburg. But ah, there is a fascinating problem. I have two really huge sturgeon—giants—brought live, in immense vats, now swimming in blissful nescience of their impending ah quietus. A gift, a gift but, a somewhat embarrassing one, since one fish is some fifty pounds—or ah twenty-three kilograms as we must say now, ridiculous really—bigger than the other. I may not serve the two at the one dinner, since the greater must shame the less. And how could I commit the solecism of serving two fish of identical breed on two successive days? I look to you, Prince Talleyrand, for a diplomatic solution.”
“Hm.” Talleyrand thought awhile. While he was thinking, his hostess and the Princess Walewska came in from the gardens. A little chilly, Josephine seemed to indicate by her delicate shoulder-rotating, her arms across her bosom. She said, smiling a radiant smile that hid her teeth and yet still left that traditional afterimage of a margaric effulgence, “My apologies for being a neglectful hostess. But Her Highness really had to see the disposition of the beds before dark. And tomorrow she leaves early.”
“Such displays,” the honey-haired princess enthused, with a charming Slavic inflection. “Such richness and variety. It is something that Her Majesty has given to the whole world—this art of breeding the perfect rose.”
“They are overblown, most of them,” Josephine said. “You must come back in June, bringing your son with you.” No whit embarrassed, the perfect rose, art of breeding. “Your Grace,” she said to Cambacérès, “must find my buffet somewhat primitive—”
“It is a civilized innovation,” the Arch-Chancellor bowed and bowed. “To talk and walk and pick such delicacies from this comestible Eden, counterpart of your bird-haunted paradise without.” Smiles and smiles and bows and then she said, seeing the handsome wounded warrior:
“My dear Henri—”
The Arch-Chancellor had swept the dish clear of biscuits glacés. Talleyrand said: “Try this, sir. Bring in the lesser sturgeon. Bring it in in triumph, to the strains of flutes and strings. Make all exclaim on the majesty of it. Then arrange for a clumsy bearer of the dish to stumble. The lesser sturgeon will then go sliding to the floor in a flaky fishwreck. Ichtyofrage—may one use such a neologism? No matter. Cries of woe and distress. Then lo—the greater one is borne in in even larger triumph, with trumpets and drums. Imagine the rapture, the applause.”
“You were always bound to go far,” Cambacérès said, nodding in great gravity, as though Talleyrand had confessed to a major sin. “You always had this ingenuity, a kind of artistry of destruction. I admire you, sir. I cannot emulate you, not in a general way. But your ichtyofrage—brilliant, truly so.”
“Are they Baltic sturgeon, sir?” the Cardinal asked.
“Yes, indeed. Sent overland in their huge vats, fresh now as the day they left their native waters.”
“Do I descry, may I tentatively imagine, that the Czar or Tsar of all the Russias,” Talleyrand said, “has been in, shall I say, a certain delicacy of communication? Do not answer if you choose not to do so.” He smiled with immense charm.
“A certain gentleman—not one of these sausage-eating—or how might one neologize it—panticivore—Teuton beer-swillers—though his immediate destiny is bound up with theirs—a certain Slavonic gentleman—Do you follow me? Do you?”
“When the time comes,” Talleyrand said, “it will be a civilized enough encounter. He has expressed a strong desire to come here to Malmaison.
Here, you see, is a flavor of permanency. I wonder—a Romanoff-Beauharnais alliance—an interesting possibility, one involving annulments.” He looked at the Cardinal, who shrugged comically. And then Talleyrand smiled and said: “Cossacks dancing among the late autumnal blooms.”
“Charming.” Cambacérès drank off a flute of exquisitely chilled champagne. “Exquisitely chilled,” he said, “that champagne. There is much of interest lying ahead. After the slaughter. Poor young men. Poor poor young men. It is a pity that the Bourbons—well—”
“Oh, the quality of life,” Talleyrand said, “is not to be legislated by the mere head of the executive. That is one thing we have learned. We must contrive our own patterns of existence. There are some most delicate tea-buds in Ceylon. I should prefer to have a London tailor. How one longs to drain a real cup of coffee, without guilt.”
“How very right,” Cambacérès said with large sincerity. “That is a really astonishingly brilliant method of dealing with the sturgeon problem. I am deeply grateful. Ichtyofrage, indeed. You will see how it works out tomorrow.”
There were sudden cries of rapture and amusement, the ladies especially going “Ah, too sweet.”
“Charming, charming,” Cardinal Maury said, squinting at the three little figures coming in from the garden. “I do not think,” he said, very myopic, “I recognize that very peculiar—the one in the middle, I mean—now who would that—”
Talleyrand laughed. Napoleon-Louis and Charles-Louis-Napoleon, the young princes, children of Hortense, were bringing in an especial favorite from their grandmother’s private menagerie. It was a young orangutan, neatly dressed in muslin. “Oh really, my sweethearts,” Josephine went, running toward them, not really annoyed, there was really something so very sweet about the tiny group. But the mawas saw the exotic display of fruit on the buffet table. It whimpered, half-barked a kind of apology to the little princes, then broke vigorously away from their little hands. Before any could prevent it, it had leapt onto the buffet table and was now swiftly plucking pineapples from the artificial tree. The servants, smiling, grasped at it vainly. It took a couple of hothouse peaches and then bounced away. It surveyed the chandelier, judged it too high, so went and sat placidly with its spoils on one of the Turkish sofas. Too sweet, really. The hostess did not have the heart to put it out. “Naughty Bobo,” she kept laughing.
“Regard the massivity of that chest,” Cambacérès said, almost like a poulterer. “And the eyes are remarkable—fierce, yet patient, closely watchful yet as though surveying great distances.”
“The copious oxygen it inhales,” Talleyrand said, “feeds no great engine of organization. The subhuman and the superhuman are alike in that neither is human.”
Indulgently they all smiled at the charming bizarre tableau—a jungle exile in a pink and gold eminently civilized ambience.
Clop clop. Clop clop. Inside the plain unliveried one-horse carriage that jaunted down the immensely long drive of the Tuileries sat a solitary civilian—without title, without identity, without any name but a temporary and invented one: Monsieur Léon Laval. He was dressed in drab brown and the brim of a nondescript hat shaded his brow and eyes. In his hand he held a large red-spotted handkerchief which would serve, if need arose, to cover temporarily his lower features, turning him into a man with toothache. Clop clop. At the great gate the carriage stopped and a sentry had the temerity to look in. “It’s me, you idiot,” said M. Laval. “And I’m getting out here.” The sentry, nearly dropping his rifle, opening the door for him, spluttering. M. Laval got out. He nodded at the solitary coachman and appraised the horse once again. No good horses left. The age of good horses was over. She had eight still, good ones, Arabs, to draw her imperial carriage out there at Malmaison. A terrible, terrible waste. Needed all the horses they could get. “I shall be away,” he said, “for an hour or two. If anyone,” he said to the captain of the guard, who now came spluttering and mustache-wiping out of the guardroom, “tries to follow me, from the Palace that is, stop them. I want to be alone. Everything perfectly clear?”
“Sire.”
“Sire.”
“All right then.” And, brim well down over eyes and brow, handkerchief stuffed in backpocket, a few francs jingling in a side breeches-pocket, he made his way left right left right toward the Place de la Concorde. He noted the Seine to his left, his river, and watched unamiably ladies and gentlemen on foot, tasting the late afternoon’s fraîcheur, coming over the Pont Royal. He saw inly sappers blowing it up, enemy flesh and rags going boom crack up into the air. He invented, for some reason, a stupid sapper ordered to blow up the bridge after the French had got across but, the fucking idiot, getting nervous and blowing it while they were still crossing. The army was not what it was. Too many young untrained idiots, rightly called Marie-Louises, meaning well but getting nervous.
Formations of the right wing. He walked, hands locked behind him, towards the Place de la Concorde. Third Corps. Fifteen thousand infantry, Eighth Division. Lefol? Thousand cavalry, the Tenth. Habert, yes. One hundred and fifty sappers, thirty-eight guns.
He had once regularly, as First Consul, made these quietly listening and incognito ventures into the life of demotic Paris, finding out what was going on, good leadership, hear the voice of the people. Once he had gone without money, ordered coffee and been unable to pay for it. Hell of a row, holding on to his incognito. This is my city. I showed the bastards how to number the houses, for instance. Make your starting-point the river, everything springs from the river. Public fountains. Names. And yet it was possible, just about, that he would never see Paris again. Tomorrow into battle, not incognito then. Decisive campaign, ultimate campaign. By God, there would have to be brilliance, by Christ, there would, as never before. German-speaking bastards of Europe, unite against your common foe. There he goes, ensanguinated tyrant. O bloody bloody. He frowned over to his left at the Pont de la Concorde, a smart carriage coming across, two well-groomed prancers. He packed the charges, ordered ignition, stood back and waited. Rags and flesh and whalebone corset going up crash boom into the air.
Left right left right. He attracted no attention, though he had the impression that a lieutenant on crutches with half a leg looked with the sharpness of sudden recognition of somebody, don’t quite know who, met him somewhere. M. Laval had a sudden spasm of toothache. He sat at a table outside a café called the Saint Dizier, strange name for a café, perhaps the owner was born there, and waited till someone should come to ask him his pleasure, which would be a small black coffee, no real pleasure. Meanwhile he listened and watched from great shadowed eyes. There were two rather silly youths lounging together at a table over eau sucrée, playing a stupid idle game which consisted of trying to slap each other’s right hand as soon as it came down to the table before it flew off again. Idle young sods, why weren’t they in the army, every man, every young imbecile even needed. A fat woman in black sat weeping over a large tumbler of red and a plate of cakes. Widow, war, probably. No, too old, if bereavement was recent, probably lost son. M. Laval was surprised to hear the woman say to herself:
“Wretched man, wretched wretched butcher of a man.”
She said it though, though with wet eyes, with a kind of contentment, scoffing away. The waiter came up to M. Laval and asked him what his pleasure was. A small black coffee.
“A small cup of diarrhée noire for the gentleman, certainly.”
So that’s what they were calling it. M. Laval could not resist holding the waiter back by his dirty shirtsleeve and saying: “The Continental System, my friend. The filthy British and their filthy control of the seas.” The waiter said:
“The Continental Arsehole, sir, if you will pardon the scatology. I would gladly give my left testicle for a cup of reasonable mocha.”
Go and visit my wife, M. Laval felt like gloomily saying, and join her in a drop of illegal Viennese in one of the locked toilets of the Tuileries. “I will have instead,” he said instead, “a glass of water and a small measu
re of red wine to mix with it.” The waiter frowned at him, staring, M. Laval had a new twinge of toothache and warmed it against the mild winter with his spotted handkerchief, the waiter went off. M. Laval, his pain abated, saw with softening eyes a couple of scarred veterans totter to the table next to his. They waved at the departing waiter and one of them called hoarsely:
“Two balloons of blood.” M. Laval said:
“Gentlemen, allow me to pay. It will be an inadequate but sincere expression of the heartfelt pride and gratitude any loyal Frenchman must feel in respect of your heroism, suffering and achievement.”
“Well now, that’s kind, sir,” said the one with more nicotine on his moustache. “Make it two large cognacs instead,” he called, but the waiter had already gone in. “And as for what we’ve done, sir, why, we’d be happy to do it again if we weren’t all hacked to pieces like you see.”
“That’s right, sir,” said the other hoarsely. “What battle, gentlemen?” M. Laval asked. “It was the battle of Borodino in Russia,” the more nicotined one said, “and a right bastard it was, wasn’t it, Jules, what with the Cossack horsemen hacking men’s balls off for the joke of it. And we were frozen with the snow and the whole battlefield was like all smoked up with the frozen breaths of the men. It was a terrible occasion, sir, and lucky you were to be safe and sound here in Paris while we were protecting the Emperor, God bless him, from his fierce Russian foes, more like beasts than men, isn’t that right, Jules?”
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