Napoleon Symphony

by Anthony Burgess

  “We must cultivate our garden. You know who said that, little one? The great Voltaire said that.”

  “Voltaire?” said she, flushing in shock at the mention of a horrid name, yet intrigued, in a young girl’s manner, at the naughtiness of it. “But Papa says he was a man without faith in the Supreme Being and was, moreover, the cause of all our troubles.”

  “What troubles?” he smiled with a touch of wryness.

  “Oh, you know,” she said, her eyes lowered in embarrassment. “The trouble in France and with France.” She too frequently forgot that her kindly plump uncle in the garden here, staying indeed at the Briars until Longwood should be ready to accommodate him, was one with Nero and King Henry the Eighth and other fascinating horrors out of schoolroom history books. It was comical, and yet it was not comical, rather it was unbelievable, as if a picture had animated itself and stepped down from the wall, and it seemed to her possible, since she was still little more than a child, that the learned men who wrote history books could be mistaken in their judgments and presentations of the evil great, being in their way ignorant, never having left Oxford or Cambridge and certainly never having, as she had, dwelt in an outlandish zone such as these South Seas. Might it not be that Richard Crookback and the Emperor Caligula and Alexander the Great himself had been, in truth, kind avuncular men like her Uncle Bonaparte, and that they had been presented as historical ogres by men jealous of their incapacity to become themselves great tyrants and conquerors? These thoughts certainly passed through her young mind as she observed one held to be the greatest tyrant and conqueror of them all, now sitting at his ease in a wicker chair in the garden at the Briars, sipping lemonade and hitting at a fly that persisted in buzzing about his well, it was the correct word, was it not?, however little ladylike—perspiring nose. He was the nicest and most interesting of men and was, moreover, eminently teasable. It would appear that tyrants were, and she used the French word to herself, recognizing that there was no English word so apt, more sympathique than schoolmasters and clergymen, at least, for she was aware of the limitations of her childish experience, those she herself had any acquaintance of. She now smiled at him a little wickedly and said:

  “Have you yet seen the new toy that Jane got in Jamestown? And do you promise not to be offended?”

  “Goodness, must I answer both questions at once? Very well then: no, I have not and yes, I do. There. And what toy is this?”

  “Wait,” said she. She scampered up to the house, a pert English miss in white muslin over the lawn, wearing dancing slippers stained by the recently watered grass. She had come to see her Uncle Nap or Bony straight from practicing her waltz-steps. Tonight was her first ball.

  The beautiful lady of seventeen, dressed for the midsummer Christmas ball, came out of the house and glided, her grotesquely elongated shadow truckling all the way as she went, a stately young queen, as fair as any he had known gracing the courts of Europe, towards her fat old uncle, who appeared to be not very well, since that stupid Sir Hudson had now forbidden him the healthful exercise of horse-riding, and she had neither a toy nor a word for him. He greeted her with courtly gravity.

  “You are very beautiful, my dear,” he said, and she flushed somewhat at the compliment, though her mirror had told her it was not undeserved. “It is, I think, Monsieur Montez-chez-nous who is causing all the trouble.”

  “What trouble? I know of no trouble.”

  “Ah, how our French Commissioner loves gossip and intrigue. He is still a part of those old wigged and scented days when, in high places, there was little else to beguile the idle hours. Our poor Montchenu refuses to accept in his heart of hearts that King Louis the Seventeenth was in truth guillotined, he seems to believe he is back there on the throne of France, having had that venerable seat thoroughly disinfested. Corsican fleas, you know. My dear sweet little Betsy, do you not know that you are in all the journals of the world, even your own English Morning Chronicle?”

  Her flush now was deep and unhappy. “It is all a great stupidity,” she said with some heat. “They are all being most silly.”

  “Ah,” he said, shaking his great round head in humorous sadness. “They are talking of the fat dirty old Corsican adventurer. What they are saying is that he always had an eye for a pretty girl. That, dear Betsy, is your reward for being kind to the terrible tyrant Bonaparte. Keep away from tyrants, my dear, since good rarely comes from them.”

  “Papa,” she said stoutly, “has said to take no notice. It is all French bétises, he says. He says it is a stupid game, with all their talk of l’amour”

  He knew the English word, though he could not well pronounce it. The word love seemed to him to be a strange and cool word, much different in tone and meaning from the French, signifying also in tennis a score of nothing as well as a kind of game of euchre. No, it appeared that love and l’amour were far from being the same thing, a whole insulating channel flowing between them.

  He smiled and said: “Cut off Monsieur Montez-chez-nous’s pigtail. That will teach him a lesson.” He made a snipping motion with his fingers, though at true tail-level, knowing that she was ever ready to pardon in him small coarsenesses of behavior, which she regarded as the harmless marks of foreigners who knew no better. And now she said:

  “He will have to find someone else for his gossip. We are going back to England.”

  The pain he felt at that moment within him stabbed with a surprise for which he was not fully prepared, yet he knew well enough that such an event must sometime come and that it would entail an attendant emotion of loss; it was his prescience of the severity of the emotion that occasioned the surprise. Nor was there any real need for him to ask the question why?

  “Papa received a letter from East India House in London. They require him to be back there. Nobody stays here forever.”

  “Except,” he sighed, “your lonely old ogre.”

  “Oh,” she said, “you will not stay here forever, for that would be too cruel.” Somewhat heartless was the casualness of the tone in which she added: “Anyway, I shall think of you. And when anybody in England says that you are a cruel tyrant and a terrible ogre, then I shall shout at them and pinch them and perhaps even kick them.”

  “That would be not very ladylike behavior. But I thank you for being my only lady defender.”

  “Well,” said she, and something of the old roguishness of the pert miss of fifteen appeared in her smile, “you have a Polish lady, do you not? She has great cause to be your defender, or so they say.”

  “Yes, yes, there is indeed she, and a very beautiful lady, though perhaps not so beautiful as my English lady dressed for the ball. You are my only friend among the enemy,” he said, “and that is something to rejoice in and to wonder at.”

  “Oh, enemy, enemy,” she cried. “It is all nonsense. Everybody is really your friend and loves you. It is only the stupid people who do not. Such as silly Sir Hudson and the men of politics and the rich people whom you have made a little poorer, which serves them right.” And then she disclosed something she had hidden in her hand in the folds of her silk foulard. “See,” she said, “I have this for you.” And into his hand she placed a little snuffbox, a thing of cheap metal in blue and yellow, doubtless bought in Jamestown out of her scant spending money.

  He took it with a grave bow and said: “Thank you. I will start to take snuff again, if Sir Hudson will allow me the indulgence.”

  “No, no, silly, you are to open it. I should really give it to you later, but I fear I may lose it first.”

  He opened it and found therein a lock of her hair. He was greatly touched and said, over and over: “Thank you, I thank you, I most sincerely thank you. Yes yes, we must exchange boucles. Alas, I have little enough to cut now, so I must cut it for you quickly. And then sometime you will find it and think of me. You will find it and think of me, if you do not lose it or give it away.”

  She stamped with her satin slipper on the lawn, but the soft sward yielded no noise. “Oh,
fiddle on your stupidity,” she cried. “I shall never forget you.”

  The tone was of a schoolmistress’s firmness, and the promise seemed to hold the strength of a threat.

  “I shall never forget you,” she said again.

  In his hand he held, not yet, a lock of her hair and a snuffbox.

  In his hand he held the toy she had come running out with, the pert miss of fifteen years only. It was not, he considered, smiling and yet sighing over it, a toy in the best of taste: the toymakers, then, had reduced him to a monster merely meet for the play of infantile derision. For it consisted in a gross carven caricature of himself with characterizing military hat but the form else, and even the tail, of a monkey, clinging to a pole which the pulling of a string enabled his simian mock-majesty to climb to the top, whence he tumbled to a flat green-painted bed inscribed with the name St. Helena.

  “Ah, yes,” he sighed, working the silly model to see dourly the ridiculous parody of his rise and descent. “So then I am come to this.”

  “Do you not think it droll?” she asked, for certainly the little romp herself thought it comical enough. “Is not that really to be known and famous, to be turned into a toy, do you not think so?”

  Before he could answer, or indeed even think of something wherewith to answer, there was a great commotion and certain loud angry cries from the direction of the house. It was Betsy’s mother who had appeared, a trim English lady of the mercantile class, evidently wroth with her daughter and crying words which he could not well comprehend, though their import was lucid enough. Soon she was boxing the child’s ears and poor Betsy was emitting cries of her own.

  “Come,” said he, “I am not offended. It is but the foolishness of children who know no better. Oh, is not this punishment too hard for so trivial a breach of courtesy?”

  Mrs. Bascombe did not understand all his words, but in her halting French she made him to understand that the girl must grow up and out of her rudeness, Mr. Bonaparte being a guest when all was said and done, and that she must now be shut up in a room and go supperless while she meditated on her inexcusable behavior.

  And so it was that, later in the day, Uncle Napoleon the Great Monster and Tyrant and Libertine of Europe stood outside the door of the room wherein blubbering Betsy was locked, and spoke soft words to her.

  “You see to what it is come,” he said to the door. “I liberated all Europe but you I cannot liberate. There is a great lesson in all this. It is for my sake, it would seem, that you are incarcerated thus, and yet I do not wish your incarceration. With all of us there are forces hardly to be controlled, whether with spade or spada. None of us is really free.”

  She could, as a mere child, not be expected to comprehend the deeper drift of his words, but she said: “I have said I am sorry and I can say no more,” in a voice muffled both by the salt of her tears and by the intervening oak. “Except,” she added, “once more to say that I am sorry.”

  “You are not to say you are sorry to me,” he rejoined kindly. “Rather it is to some ancient law or tradition of what is due to a guest to which your good mother and father strictly adhere. Well, perhaps it is better to be made a prisoner for a breach of such than to be like myself, who am become a prisoner because of the greater guns and cavalry of envious kingdoms. And transformed also, as you have shown, into a monkey.” This renewed her blubbering, though he swiftly quietened it with a paraphrase, with only the locked door as apparent listener, of the tale of Gerusalemme Liberata.

  IN such encounters may ive find

  RIght contact betiveen mind and mind.

  INhuman to the larger sense,

  RIch, though, in human innocence,

  INto the little zone of light

  RIdes the Archruler of the Night.

  Those of our readers who are prepared to seek occasional diversion in what may, for want of a more learned term, be described as literal magic, will perhaps be encouraged to ponder on the signification of the letter W in the truncated career of our incarcerated Corsican. We refer, naturally, to our own W, to W as a right English letter, that brief kissing melody that parts lips for the omission of a right English vowel, ignoring for the nonce the silent tombstone of earlier and barbarous modes of Saxon speech in wrath and wreath and the like, as also the ghost of an owl-call that terminates such words as now and know. For names like Warsaw and Wagram, extinguished stars in the sped constellation of his triumphs, carry the Continental V, and the vivving and vowing and vuvving that are attached in the tongues of Europe to our special and characteristic and, may we say, patriotic English letter are but a known part of the jibber jabber of his customary garlic-laden Gallic and coarse-grained Corsican speech.

  He has had time enough to ponder on Wellington and Waterloo, and now, lo, he is presented with the empire of Longwood. We doubt not, also, that, finding in these three W’s three coffin-nails for his boxed and buried reputation, and wondering at the lethal trinity in his Corsican superstitious way (for this propensity of his nature, as of his nation’s, is well enough known), he will have made certain enquiries as to the meanings of the words so terrifyingly double-yewed. His downfall was as much water as land, for the British Navy deterred his huddle of a Channel army from the temerity of a foredoomed essay at crossing the narrow seas, save for a piteous ketchload that ran screaming for dear life from the scarlet shawls of Welsh fishwives, believing these to be doubtless a sort of Amazonian redcoats, just as the same undefeatable force made the world’s oceans serve him in the office of a national prison wall. Nay, even in the fateful Leipzig encounter with the Allies, it was the waters of an inconsiderable river that indirectly spoke the word Defeat, when a scared pressed fledgling of a sapper blew the bridge with premature haste. He must know too by now, however unwilling to learn the tongue of exile, that Water comes from Wells and is ever Welling forth from the natural springs by the very Ton—and, for good measure, may we not add that his own Leau was in orthographic bo-peep hiding in the Loo? But what now will our jailed general be making of Longwood? Nothing of a watery grave offers there, and we are happy that he is afforded that small onomastical comfort.

  Yet if he avoids the blasphemous ring of one signification (and there are some of the Whig faction all too ready to apotheotize him to a degree that makes the sacrilege sufficiently explicit), he will be unavoidably confronted by the dire prolepsis of another, since a trio (we will not suggest another blasphemy) of Longwoods will escort him to his last end: one Longwood will creak beneath his extreme groans, on another Longwood will he be borne away, and in a subterranean casket of Longwood will his body at last disintegrate to its component atomies, what time his soul is experiencing the awfulness of the condign sentence. Meanwhile, each day at Longwood he will be reminded, in the name of his illustrious and gallant keeper Sir Hudson, that he has indeed been brought most Lowe, and find too, though humbly disposed in that cognomen, the persistent letter of his downfall, a Cassiopeia of retribution whose fiery original, by a strange irony, he will never see blazing in the southern firmament of his confinement.

  The mutual frown with which the antagonists confronted each other was a kind of ocular thunder, while their eyes flashed levin enough. The British knight was no whit abashed by the eminence of rank of his opponent, nor of the terrific reputation which his exploits in arms had earned throughout the world. As for his imperial crown, this, following the dictate of his masters, he saw as a mere impudent and pretentious fiction; here was but a soldier and a captive one, and wholly at the mercy of Sir Hud, in whom, nevertheless, the chivalric blood ran strong and rendered him ill disposed to assume the vindictiveness of the captor. For all that, he was hard put to it to drive from his warrior’s memory his previous encounters with the forces of his prisoner, whether in Egypt, Germany or France, and he smarted yet from the ignominy of his dislodgement of Capri. Nor did his intimate knowledge of the race, language and very birthplace of his captive dispose him to a compensative sympathy. In his eyes, then, shone the fire of one who would
willingly dispense justice but in no wise admit the tempering of mercy; while the orbs of the other bespoke a grievous resentment above the common lot.

  “So, Sir Knight,” cried Lion of the Valley, “I am at last granted the overlong deferred favor of an interview with my jailor. I have much to say, and you will please to listen.”

  “I am not so bound,” frowned the other. “My duty is fulfilled in overseeing the provision of what is meet, by the laws of my commission, for a captive taken fairly in war, and that duty I have been officious to perform. You have nothing further to ask and I nothing further to grant.”

  “Yet,” said Lion of the Valley, “do I not descry in a gaze otherwise obdurate odd rays of misgiving, and is this granting of a parley between us itself not a concession beyond what you term your duty?”

  “I perform a courtesy,” the other replied, “and I satisfy myself that all goes as well as may be expected to. That you are in health I am able to observe, as also the adequacy of your lodging and of such other amenity as is fitting. And so, Sir General, there is no more to be either said or done.”