Napoleon's Exile

by Patrick Rambaud

  ‘They’ve attacked the Bois de Romainville.’

  ‘There’s only one column there.’

  ‘What’re you on about? There are whole armies, really there are!’

  ‘The King of Prussia’s been taken prisoner, I was told by a sergeant on his way back from Belleville, they’re going to parade him through the boulevards.’

  The cannon didn’t fall silent. Men on horseback circulated among the groups, distributing proclamations which they carried in packs on their saddles. La Grange took one and handed it to the Count. Sémallé put on his glasses and read in a loud voice:

  We will be pillaged!

  We will be burned!

  While the Emperor arrives

  on the arses of the enemy ...

  The appeal called the massive assault by the allies a ‘helping hand', but asked for the barricades to be raised, for trenches to be dug, for loopholes to be cut in the walls, for cobblestones to be carried into the houses to serve as projectiles and for the streets to be blocked by overturned vehicles.

  ‘A little later,’ smiled the Count.

  ‘Childish nonsense.’

  ‘Who’s going to tell us what’s really happening, La Grange?’

  ‘I only know one place in Paris, Your Lordship, where they know exactly what’s going on.’

  ‘You’re right, let’s go to the rue Saint-Florentin.’

  This was Talleyrand’s address.

  *

  The first floor of the unfinished Hôtel Saint-Florentin overlooked the rue de Rivoli. There, Monsieur de Talleyrand was at his toilet, following a ritual that no tragedy could alter. As ever, he had spent a large part of the night playing whist, before going to sleep in an almost seated position, wearing fourteen cotton hats for fear of falling on his head. When the clock chimed half-past eleven, he drank his camomile tea by the marble fireplace in his room, surrounded by a corps de ballet of valets in grey aprons, who hummed as they pomaded him, curled, combed and powdered his wig, and presented him with the silver bowl in which he dipped his fingers to wash himself. When this was done, he sucked several glasses of luke-warm water through his nostrils. He was sixty years old, with a turned-up nose, soft cheeks, clay-coloured skin and dead eyes; only his mouth was expressive, sometimes indicating irony, sometimes contempt.

  One valet slipped a shirt over the rags and flannels that swaddled him, while another, kneeling, slipped silk stockings over the woollen stockings that already concealed his atrophied legs.

  His entourage witnessed the spectacle.

  A member of the Regency Council, the former Bishop of Autun, Prince of Benevento, and prince of intrigue, Talleyrand surrounded himself with a coterie of unfrocked abbots who hated the Emperor and admitted as much. They included Monsieur de Pradt, a disgraced ambassador who distributed the Times and the Morning Chronicle which were sent to him by a lady in Brussels; the nonchalant Montesquiou; Jaucourt, Joseph Bonaparte’s chamberlain, who was very well informed about the movement of the troops; Baron Louis, now a banker, who had served mass at the Feast of the Federation during the Revolution - and others of similar stamp.

  Sémallé, emboldened by the sudden impunity conferred upon him by the proximity of the enemy cannon, had entrusted his horses to La Grange and fearlessly entered this den of conspirators. He approached Jaucourt, an acquaintance of his, and whispered in his ear so as not to disturb the ceremony, ‘What are Monseigneur’s plans for today?’

  Monseigneur Talleyrand had risen to his feet, and two valets were hoisting his black silk breeches up to his belly. Without looking at the Count, Jaucourt murmured like a ventriloquist, ‘That will depend on the battle currently being fought outside Paris.’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘The Russian grenadiers are in Pantin, the Prussians have occupied the plain of Romainville, the Austrians are attacking Bagnolet, having already taken Montreuil. Saint-Maur and Bondy have fallen ...’

  ‘What has Monseigneur decided?’

  ‘He has great respect for facts, so let us wait for the facts to speak to him.’

  ‘Does he predict a return of the Bourbons?’

  ‘His uncle, the former Archbishop of Reims, has become senior chaplain to King Louis XVIII, as you know, and they are in correspondence with one another ...’

  Sémallé was suspicious on principle, and his whispered exchange with Jaucourt continued. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘he has publicly asked the Empress to remain in Paris.’

  ‘No doubt, but the Empress hates him. If he asks her to do anything, she does the opposite.’

  ‘A deliberate strategy?’

  ‘Are you surprised?’

  The Count saw Talleyrand as a regicide, and was as angry with him as the emigrants were when, like them, he fled the Terror to Kensington Square: the man deserved to be broken on the wheel. Sémalle believed that Talleyrand had played a crucial part in the abduction of the Duke of Enghien in Ettenheim, and blamed him for the Duke’s execution in the ditches of Vincennes, because in order to consolidate the Consulate he’d had to give a pledge to the Jacobins by killing a Bourbon. Certainly - and this was heard abroad among the royalists - it was Talleyrand who had, in a coded message, incited the hesitant allies to charge on Paris. In short, the important thing was not to trust, but to use this character, since he had such influence in the Senate.

  Talleyrand stepped towards his minions on his bandy legs, his feet skating on the waxed parquet, his shirt floating over his breeches.

  ‘My carriage? My bags?’

  ‘They await you, Monseigneur.’

  Some of those present smiled complicitly, while the others, dumbfounded, looked mutely at one another. Was Talleyrand going to visit the Imperial court and the government, now installed in Blois? If he left Paris as battle commenced, that could mean that he had been weighing up the likelihood of the Emperor’s return; perhaps he had personal information on the matter. Had he ceased to believe that the monarchy would be restored? What was he playing at? Sémallé took advantage of some movement among the courtiers - fussing around their master - to leave the room. He briefly summed up the situation to La Grange, who was holding their horses by the bridle.

  ‘So the sly dog really has decided to leave?’ asked the Marquis.

  ‘And,’ said Sémallé, ‘is that not a sign?’

  A carriage stood by the steps, harnessed to four white horses; the lackeys were piling trunks into the van that would follow it.

  ‘Those valets are hardly strong men,’ La Grange continued.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Take a look for yourself.’

  A valet, thin as a rake, was carrying a large trunk by the handles all by himself. He hoisted it effortlessly, at arm’s length, on to the van.

  ‘So that means...’ muttered Sémallé with a frown.

  ‘I sense a ruse.’

  La Grange caught sight of a liveried child carrying a large suitcase on his shoulder. He casually approached the boy and, pretending to be distracted, bumped into him. The lad dropped his case.

  ‘Clumsy!’ said the Marquis.

  ‘Hang on, monsieur, you were the one who ...’

  ‘Who dropped the case? Enough!’ La Grange furiously bent down and picked up the case in question, which was so light that he was able to lift it with one hand.

  ‘But sir ...’

  ‘Silence, rascal, or I’ll tell them to throw you into the street for damaging the Prince of Benevento’s luggage ...’

  ‘Not that...’

  ‘Then keep your trap shut!’

  The Marquis pressed the catch, half-opened the suitcase and glanced inside, then returned to Sémallé and the horses.

  ‘The cases are empty.’

  *

  During wars, as during revolutions, when everything else is closed in the city, the cafés stay open; rakes and braggarts strut about the terraces exchanging their views on the way of the world. On this particular afternoon, a clutch of writers and out-of-work actors were getting drunk
on words and punch in the Café des Variétés on the boulevard Montmartre. The establishment was next door to the new Passage des Panoramas, and the rotunda of the same name, a stone’s throw from their theatre with its Greek temple façade. Preparing to interpret a tragedy of Racine bowdlerized by the censors, they ignored the sound of the cannon and the throng of concerned or curious people milling around them, in small groups that quickly formed and then dissolved again, heading off suddenly in different directions. Commandeered fiacres pushed their way through these crowds; marked with black flags that could be seen from a long distance away, they were lugging piles of blood-drenched soldiers to the hospitals.

  The thespians, meanwhile, whose number included both gentlemen and several young ladies in furbelows, saw the situation as an opportunity. Their work had been badly treated by a government mistrustful of the theatre, which it considered too popular and thus too dangerous. If the Empire were to fall today, they could finally put on an unexpurgated Britannicus.

  ‘What can you see?’ one of them asked his neighbour, a thin tow-headed man who was directing his telescope towards the hills.

  ‘I see troops mounting an assault on the windmills of Montmartre, coming up through the vines.’

  ‘Bad luck on the vines, but it’s all undrinkable anyway!’ thundered a fat man whose face was a mass of broken veins.

  ‘Russians?’ ventured an ingénue in a feathered hat.

  ‘Blue jackets, fur hats ...’

  ‘Mounted grenadiers à cheval of the Guard, probably General Belliard’s men,’ said Octave, who was listening at the next table.

  ‘Come and join us, Mr Know-it-all,’ suggested the red-faced man, pointing to a free chair.

  ‘You don’t look awfully military,’ said the ingénue.

  ‘I’m not, but I’ve learned to identify the different armies,’ replied Octave, sitting down among the actors, glass in hand.

  He had donned Blacé's wig and tapered frock-coat, but kept his own cane. He turned to the thin man. ‘May I borrow your opera-glasses?’

  ‘Of course, and then you can give us a commentary on the battle.’

  Putting his eye to the opera-glasses, Octave could make out the seven cannons of Belleville being used by the artillery of the Guard. Some troopers were in fact climbing the hill, stumbling over the vine shoots, to liberate the gunners from a flood of Russians who were coming up from the opposite direction amid white smoke and exploding shells.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You’d have to be there,’ said Octave, folding up the opera-glasses, which he stuffed in his pocket.

  He got up, gave a slight bow and was about to disappear into the agitated crowd when the thin actor tried to hold him back by the sleeve.

  ‘My opera-glasses!’

  ‘I’m confiscating them; they’re of no use to you.’

  ‘Thief!’

  ‘Spy!’ added the red-faced man.

  ‘Fink!’ cried the ingénue.

  Octave swept the table with his cane, knocking scalding punch over their knees. They yelled, but amid all the commotion no one paid the slightest attention. Once outside - although jostled, harried and dragged along by the opposing currents of the crowd - Octave managed to force his way back along the boulevards until he found himself behind the derisory barricade of the Porte Saint-Denis, far from the barriers.

  The local people were at their windows or on their roofs. For want of coaches, those who had fled had left their many possessions behind, piled up on the pavement, and the National Guard were carting furniture away to reinforce their defences. Planks from a building site supported wardrobes, bed-frames and chairs, all weighted down with cobble-stones. The monumental arch, whose pillars were, ironically, sculpted with royal victories, the crossing of the Rhine and the taking of Maastricht, was obstructed by carts. Skirmishers lay in wait, their eyes fixed on the long road leading from the buildings of the suburb to the gardens of the enclosure of Saint Lazare and the square buildings of the royal mail-coach service, before passing through the fallow fields scattered with farms, hamlets and hedges. The noise of the cannon was constant, louder now, and closer.

  Octave perched on a tree-trunk that had been thrown across the road, and rested his elbows on the sandbags crowning the barricade. At his side, a toff was firing harmless duelling-pistols; his neighbour, a top-hatted apothecary, shouldered his hunting rifle, grunting, ‘They’ll taste my potion, the bastards!’ In the distance, pillars of black smoke rose from bombed-out villages at the foot of the hills. A troop of men came up the road, wearing scorched uniforms filthy with mud, ash and gunpowder, their foreheads wrapped with bloody cloths. They were carrying dying men on stretchers, a blanket, a coat tied to some branches.

  Octave and some volunteers leapt down from their barricade and helped the soldiers climb over it, holding the moaning casualties in their arms. The most seriously injured were immediately laid on an ammunition wagon pulled by some strong men, to be taken to a hospital if one able to admit them could be found; the remainder lay in improvised ambulances below the gates. Octave carried down a corporal with a big moustache, a gold ring in his ear and a vacant expression on his face, and entrusted him to some women who tore their aprons and headscarves into strips to serve as compresses or bandages.

  ‘There are too many,’ said the corporal, over and over again.

  ‘The Prussians? The Russians?’

  ‘There are too many. The more you kill, the more there are ...’

  At that moment a cavalryman emerged from the boulevard Poissonnière. He had lost his helmet, but Octave recognized him as a cheveau-léger by his green jacket and the red-and-white pennon on his lance. The man rode his mount into the crowd, knocking men and women over as he passed. He was drunk and shouting, ‘Run for your lives!’ This unleashed a movement of panic, a retreat into the streets running down to the Seine. Shortly afterwards, a shell crashed into the middle of the road and all the women and unarmed onlookers charged off in search of shelter. They ran hither and thither, bellowing at the tops of their voices; fresh casualties, civilians this time, crowded the paths of the houses. Octave unfolded the opera-glasses. On the Butte Montmartre, among the windmills, he saw cavalrymen with stovepipe hats and impossibly long lances: the Cossacks were turning their cannon on the capital. He saw others, a cloud of them, charging down the hills towards the blazing houses of Belleville.

  *

  At about four o’clock in the afternoon, a terrible silence followed the roar of battle. The injured men revealed that the Army of Silesia had occupied the banks of the Ourcq, that Marmont had forced his way through with cold steel, to retreat to the Belleville tollgate with decimated battalions. In considerable numbers, the enemy had taken Ménilmontant, La Villette, Clichy. In Paris, the shutters were going up. The crowd, once so noisy, was now scattering in silence, hoping for a truce, fearful of the even more dreadful Prussian and Russian troops. Impoverished gangs emerging from the slummiest parts of the city would lead them to the homes of the wealthy, to make off with a share of the booty.

  Octave was in a hurry. He had a meeting at 36 rue de l’Echiquier, with this man Lemercier who was receiving the royalist Committee. He knocked at the door of the house, and La Grange in person opened it.

  ‘You had no difficulty finding us, I see.’

  ‘Thanks to the map you drew me,’ replied lying Octave.

  ‘Gracious! You have blood on your sleeve!’

  ‘I helped carry the wounded.’

  ‘Such self-denial, my dear man!’

  ‘Had I refused, I would have drawn attention to myself.’

  ‘That’s true ...’

  Most of the Committee members had arrived, and sat astride tapestried chairs or lolled in gothic armchairs. The sun filtered through the little yellow window-panes. La Grange introduced Octave as Blacé, and identified his associates, Morin, Davaray, Poisson, Brigard, Laporte, Gourbillon, Imperial functionaries prepared to commit acts of treason, merchants, a couple of noblemen. They b
egan asking Octave some questions about the mood in London, but he did not need to recite the lesson he had learned from the real Blacé, because at that moment Sémallé came into the room, rubbing his hands. One of the conspirators took his coat and hat, another offered the newcomer the comfortable armchair in which he had been sitting - but Sémallé preferred to dominate the assembly from a standing position:

  ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘we have cause to be cheerful, but we are the only ones who can turn a stroke of luck into a triumph. Let me explain ...’

  Intrigued by the vanload of empty suitcases, Sémallé had, from a distance, followed the carriage that was supposedly to take Talleyrand to Blois, where he would be close to the still lawful government and the Empress. The carriage had driven very slowly to the tollgate at Faubourg de la Conférence, just short of Chaillot.

  ‘Monseigneur clearly wanted as many people as possible to see him leave.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘To demonstrate, by Jove, that he had obeyed the orders of the Regency Council, because in reality, I can assure you, he did not leave. At this very moment, I would guess that he is plotting in his house in the rue Saint-Florentin.’

  ‘A fake farewell...’

  ‘All a pretence, yes. At the La Conférence tollgate, the sentry stopped him and asked for his passport, and he shouted, outraged, “Good heavens, don’t you know who I am?” The performance was well orchestrated. The chief sentry, Monsieur de Rémusat, was in on it. He gave strict orders to prevent Talleyrand from getting through. Furthermore, when some guards intervened on his behalf to let him get away, Monseigneur was furious, he shrieked in his reedy voice, “That’s enough! One insult is quite enough! I am prevented from fulfilling my duty, well, too bad, I shall stay!” I was on horseback, a little further along the quay, I witnessed the scene. Later on I learned the details from our indispensable Jaucourt...’