It was late before Beyle returned. Marianne ran to meet him when she heard his footsteps on the stairs but hope was snuffed out like a candle when she saw his face. He was looking so unhappy that it could only mean bad news.
The news was certainly not good. The Vicomte de Jolival and his servant had not left the Kremlin where, on Napoleon's orders, they had been kept under guard ever since the cardinal's escape.
'They have never left the Kremlin, do you say?' Marianne demanded incredulously. 'Do you mean to tell me the Emperor left them there when he went to Petrovskoi himself? But that's dreadful! They might have been burned to death!'
'I don't think so. Plenty of people stayed there. A good half of the imperial household and all the troops detailed to try and save it from the fire. Napoleon only left in response to the united entreaties of his whole staff who felt they could not guarantee his safety, that was all.'
"Were you able to speak to them?'
'Lord, no! They're closely confined. No one is allowed to communicate with them on any pretext whatever.'
'Did you see Constant? Does anyone know where they are being held? Are they in their rooms or have they been put in prison?'
'I don't know. Even Constant, who sends you his respects, by the way, knows nothing concerning them. When he dared to mention your name to the Emperor, he was told that he had much too great a weakness for the rebellious Princess Sant'Anna, and that if you wanted to know what had become of them, you had only to give yourself up.'
There was a short silence. Then Marianne shrugged despondently.
'Then that is that. He has won. I know what I must do now.'
Instantly, Beyle was between her and the door, barring the way with outstretched arms.
'You are going to give yourself up?'
'I don't see what else I can do. They may be in danger. How do you know the Emperor isn't planning to have them tried and condemned in order to force me to go back?'
'It has not come to that yet. If their fate had been decided, Constant would have known. He would have been told, if only so that he might try and communicate with you. In any case, it will do no good for you to give yourself up. You did not let me finish what I was saying. If you want to secure the release of your friends, you must not only go yourself but also take with you the man whom you helped to escape. Only then will Napoleon forgive you.'
Marianne sat down abruptly on a chair and stared up at him with drowned eyes.
'Then what can I do, my friend? I don't know where to find my godfather even if I wanted to, which I do not. I've no idea whether he went back to St Louis-des-Français—'
'No,' Beyle told her. 'I went there after I left the Kremlin. The Abbé Surugue has not set eyes on him since the day of the fire. He doesn't even know where he might have gone to.'
'To Kuskovo, I expect, to Count Sheremetiev's house.'
'Kuskovo has been burned and our troops are encamped in what remains of it. No, Marianne, you must not look for anything in that direction. In any case, there is nothing you can do that will satisfy the Emperor and your own heart.'
'But I can't just abandon Jolival and Gracchus! The Emperor must be mad to vent his spleen on them. He is so angry with me that he is quite capable of putting them to death!'
She was crying hopelessly, the tears running down her cheeks. She had so much the look of a trapped doe that Beyle, overcome with pity, came and sat by her, putting a brotherly arm round her.
'There, there, my little one, don't cry! You are making a great to-do about nothing, you know. You've a good friend in the Kremlin, for Constant won't betray you, bless him, neither for love nor money. In his opinion, the Emperor has the whole affair out of proportion. I did not tell him where you were to be found, of course, but if there should be any danger he will send word to me at my office and then it will be time enough to consider what to do.'
'But, you don't understand! The Emperor will be obliged to do something. He can't clutter himself with prisoners on the road back to Paris.'
'And what makes you think he is going back to Paris?'
Marianne was so startled that she stopped crying and stared at her friend with disbelieving eyes.
'Isn't he?'
'Certainly not. His Majesty has decided to winter here. Count Dumas and your humble servant have precise instructions concerning the victualling of the army. General Durosnel has his for the movement of troops and Marshal Mortier is settling into his role as governor. Even the company of actors who were here when we came are to hold themselves in readiness to perform, as a means of maintaining French morale.'
'But he can't! Spend the winter here? I'd like to know what his Majesty's staff think of it.'
'Nothing good. I never saw so many long faces. None of them have ever wintered out of France except during the Polish campaign. According to what I've been told, the Emperor has two opposite ideas in mind. Either Alexander will agree to discuss terms and we'll think about going home as soon as the peace treaty is signed, or else we'll spend the winter here, bring the army up to strength with the reinforcements that have been sent for and then, in the spring, we march on Petersburg.'
"What? Another campaign – after the disasters of this one?'
'It may not happen. An envoy has been sent to the Tsar. He is carrying a letter from General Tutolmin, the director of the Foundling Hospital, witnessing that the French did their utmost to save Moscow, and another from the Emperor to the Tsar, assuring him of his goodwill and brotherly feelings.'
'Brotherly feelings! But this is absurd! It cannot work!'
'That is Caulaincourt's opinion and he knows Alexander. But the Emperor, thinks he's being unduly pessimistic and won't speak to him. The fact is that Murat is still flirting with Platov's cossacks and doing his best to persuade Napoleon that the Tsar will be only too happy to fall into his arms. Oh, it's a bad business altogether! I don't know what the outcome of it all will be, but I do know one thing – I've no hope of seeing Milan this year!'
That night, Marianne could not sleep. She lay searching feverishly for some way of reaching her friends but, short of finding the cardinal and giving herself up, there was none. There could be no thought of entering the Kremlin unofficially. The old fortress had been placed on a war footing. Regiments of the Old Guard, under the command of Generals Michel, Gros and Tindal, were on duty night and day, with a hundred men at each of the five gates still in use, while the remaining four were stoutly barricaded and watched by a sergeant and eight men. Entry into that stronghold, bristling with arms, was out of the question. She must wait, then, but for how long? Until when? If Napoleon was determined to spend the winter in Moscow, that might mean six months locked up in the house. It was enough to drive her mad.
True, there was also Constant's theory, as reported by Beyle, that they should allow time for the Emperor's anger to calm down and then he, Constant, would undertake gently to plead the rebels' cause. But Marianne put little faith in this. Napoleon's rage might be short-lived, but he was more than capable of bearing a grudge.
The days that followed were gloomy ones for Marianne, in spite of the lovely weather prevailing out of doors. She gazed out at it despairingly, killing time by sharing Barbe's sewing, but she lived entirely for the hour when her companion in misfortune would come home, bringing with him the day's news.
For the most part, it was dismally monotonous. Nothing had come from St Petersburg and preparations were still going ahead for going into winter quarters. The Emperor was delighted with his courier service, which was working wonderfully, thanks to the brilliant organization of the director of Posts, the Comte de la Valette. The mail arrived every day, with the regularity of clockwork, after a journey of fifteen days and fourteen hours. It had reached the point where the Emperor grew anxious and displayed a degree of tetchiness if one of the couriers was an hour after his time. This apart, he was in high good humour, amusing himself frequently at the expense of the wretched Caulaincourt and his dire pictures of the Russian winter
, and for ever remarking that, in autumn at any rate, it was finer than at Fontainebleau.
This imperial jollity found no echo in Marianne, nor indeed in Beyle, who was spending exhausting days inventorying the victuals which were still coming to light in the cellars of the ruined houses.
Beyle, too, was depressed. He had met a man in Moscow, one Auguste Fecel, a harpist by profession, from whom he had at last been able to get news of his old flame, Melanie de Barcoff. What he heard had distressed him greatly. According to the harpist, the lady had left Moscow for St Petersburg some days before the fire, among the last fugitives to leave the city, and against the wishes of her husband, with whom she was on the point of separating, although about to bear his child. She was, moreover, wholly without money.
This unhappy tale sent the young man into something of a frenzy. He was trying desperately to find some way of reaching his former mistress and taking her back to France with him. He talked about her endlessly to Marianne, for comfort, praising her virtues so incessantly that Marianne found herself beginning to take the unknown Melanie in strong dislike. She grew almost as sick of his present mistress, Angelina Bereyter, although what Beyle had to say about her was more concerned with her charms than her virtues, which seemed to be non-existent. Poor Beyle seemed to have an incorrigible predilection for impossible women.
Only his sister, Pauline, won Marianne's approval. When he was not writing interminable letters to her – to be sent by the postal service the Emperor had been in such haste to re-establish – he was talking about her with an affection that touched Marianne because it was completely unselfconscious. Moreover, he would discuss her in French whereas, whenever he mentioned either of his two loves, he felt obliged to dot his conversation with snatches of English or Italian, a trick which Marianne soon found maddening.
It was only with Barbe that she felt able to relax at all. The Polish woman was comfortingly stolid and tranquil, while the plaintive songs she was in the way of singing as she worked seemed to Marianne to form an agreeable echo of her own melancholy mood. There was one she liked particularly:
Pace gently ere you leave these fields of ours,
My own bay steed, you will not come again,
Your hooves are treading our plains for the last time.
The mere mention of a steed was enough to set her pulses trembling. Oh, to be able to mount a horse and gallop away into the distance until the trees of France came into sight again! She had begun to hate the vastness of Russia. It had closed on her like a fist. She was stifling in the cramped house, with its wood-panelled walls and the ceiling pressing down on her, and in the daily round of life that went on inside it. Soon, she knew, the snow would begin to fall and bury them, herself and Beyle and all the others who were bound in that place by the will of one man only. The will to leave was becoming a palpable thing in all of them – all save Napoleon, who continued to believe that all was well.
By the end of September, however, the news was not so good. Some of the couriers were seriously delayed and one actually failed to arrive at all. Worse still, a convoy of artillery wagons coming from Smolensk with an escort of two squadrons of cavalry was ambushed, only twenty versts from Moscow, by a band of cossacks and the escort taken prisoner. Two days after that, eighty Dragoons of the Guard were taken at Prince Galitzine's estate of Malo Wiasma. But Napoleon continued to review his Guard on the parade ground at the Kremlin, every day precisely at twelve noon.
Beyle grew increasingly depressed as the news continued to come in and, although he did his best, his jokes became fewer and fewer.
'We've enough to feed the army for six months,' he told Marianne, 'but I find these new tactics of the Russians very alarming. How much longer will we be able to keep our line of retreat open? They say there are bands of armed peasants roaming the countryside around Moscow. The cossacks, too, seem to be getting bolder. If the Emperor continues to be obstinate we shall soon find ourselves cut off, with our communications cut, at the mercy of the Russian army, which is presumably refitting somewhere, since Alexander has not deigned to give a sign of life.'
'But can't anyone make the Emperor see sense?'
'Berthier and Davout have both tried but Napoleon promptly began working out a plan to march on St Petersburg at once, so that they climbed down smartly. As for Caulaincourt, he no longer dares to open his mouth. The rest go to the theatre. A stage has been fitted up in the Pozniakoff Palace and Madame Bursay's company are performing Le jeu de l'amour et du Hasard and L'Amant auteur et valet – when everyone is not listening to an effeminate fellow called Tarquinio warbling love songs! Really, I can't believe that any army ever committed suicide with a lighter heart.'
Early in October, Beyle fell ill of a bilious fever. Marianne was obliged to nurse him and found herself very soon out of patience with her patient. Like a great many men, he was a horrid invalid, moaning and grumbling, pleased with nothing, least of all his food. He lay in bed, looking as yellow as a quince and never opening his mouth except to complain, either of their treatment of him or his own intolerable sufferings. For in addition to the trouble with his liver, he was also a martyr to toothache. Marianne sat by him, finding it harder and harder to control the urge to dot him over the head with one of the innumerable pots of herb tea that Barbe concocted for him. Beyle's illness tried her hard, for in spite of his temporary absence from duty, news continued to arrive from the Kremlin, brought by the kindly Bonnaire, who was now recovered and came every evening to keep his colleague up to date with events.
In this way, they learned that the couriers were having more trouble than ever in getting through, and that Prince Schwarzenberg, in East Prussia, was complaining that his position was already awkward and threatening to become worse. The Prince of Neufchatel had tried once again to persuade Napoleon to leave Moscow and fall back towards Poland in order to avoid being cut off from his army. He had earned himself an acid rejoinder.
'You want to go to Grosbois, do you, to see the Visconti?'
When he heard that, the invalid was beside himself with fury.
'Mad! He's run mad! He'll get us all killed! It only needs Marshal Victor, Oudinot and Gouvion-Saint-Cyr to suffer a reverse on the Dvina and we are trapped without a hope of getting out alive. The Russians are getting bolder every day.'
The situation in Moscow certainly seemed to be deteriorating. Count Daru, the Minister in charge of Supplies, came one evening to call on his young relative – obliging Marianne to make herself scarce – and made no secret of his fears.
'The Russians have got to the stage of picking off men and horses foraging for food in the outskirts of the city itself. We have to give them massive escorts. The mails are getting worse every day. Half the couriers never arrive.'
Every night there seemed to be another piece of bad news to listen to, another stone added to the burden that lay on Marianne's heart. She was almost physically aware of the trap that was closing on her and those with her, so that when, one morning, she saw the Emperor himself ride past beneath her window, it was all she could do not to fling herself at his feet, crying to him to go and leave his insane obstinacy before he condemned them all to a lingering death from fear and the endless northern night that would soon descend. But he seemed to be wholly indifferent to his surroundings. He rode on calmly on Turcoman, one of his favourite mounts, one hand thrust into his waistcoat, smiling at the unusual autumnal sunshine that seemed to follow him and justify him in his stubborn determination.
'We'll never get out of here,' Marianne thought desperately. And now her sleep began to be troubled by nightmares.
On the twelfth of October, however, a somewhat better piece of news arrived. It took the form of a letter, addressed to Beyle from the Quartermaster's office and brought by the indefatigable Bonnaire.
Beyle read it and then handed the unfolded sheet to Marianne.
'Here, this concerns you.'
The letter was unsigned but there was no doubt who it came from. It was from Constant.
'There is now thought to be no hope of recovering the vanished lady,' he wrote. 'Consequently, certain persons are no longer useful. They were instructed to join the train of wounded leaving Moscow the day before yesterday, under the command of General Nansouty, although they will not be released until they reach France.'
Marianne screwed the letter into a ball and dropped it into the brick stove which took up a good half of the end wall of the room. Then she came back to where Beyle lay in bed, clasping her hands tightly together to keep them from trembling with excitement.
'Then my mind, too, is made up,' she said. 'There is no need for me to be a burden to you any longer, my friend, or to go on staying here. My friends have left and I must go too. With good horses, I should be able to catch them up. No convoy can travel fast if there are wounded.'
The sick man uttered a croak of laughter that ended in a fit of nervous coughing and a whole series of moans. He wiped his lips with his handkerchief and lay with his chin in his hands for a moment before he explained.
'Without a signed order from the Kremlin it is absolutely impossible to obtain so much as a donkey. The army has barely enough for its own needs, not counting remounts. Moreover, such animals as we have got are virtually on their last legs, however much we nurse them. And you need not tell me we have only to steal a pair because that, too, is impossible – unless you're tired of life!'
[Marianne 6] - Marianne and the Crown of Fire Page 24