Napoleon's Exile

by Patrick Rambaud

  ‘What was the point of this little game?’

  ‘Monseigneur wants to give guarantees to all parties, even Bonaparte’s. You know how prudent he is.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Octave butted in. ‘That might mean that he envisages the Emperor’s possible return, and is covering his back.’

  ‘Do not say the Emperor, my dear Blacé, say Bonaparte as we do. Whatever else may be the case, we have Talleyrand nearby, surrounded by the partisans of our cause . . .’

  Sémallé, horrified by Octave’s sadly accurate remark, chose to move straight to the agenda. Jaucourt had assured him that the allies were currently talking to Mortier and Marmont with a view to negotiating a cessation of hostilities and the retreat of their troops, who were now threatened with extermination. Joseph Bonaparte in person had ordered his marshals to sign an armistice, before galloping away. That was why the cannon had fallen silent. The remnants of the French armies would pass through Paris that night, and they would take the Rennes road to avoid running into Napoleon’s troops, who were known to be to the east. Then the Count of Sémallé outlined everyone’s role for the crucial hours of the following day.

  ‘The capitulation needs to be signed,’ he said, looking at the clock. Tomorrow the allies will enter Paris. It is up to us to prepare our best welcome for their sovereigns. Our demonstration must impress them. La Grange, you will take command of the Hotel de Ville and the mairies of the arrondissements, and take with you some men who will distribute proclamations and white cockades ...’

  ‘Some Jacobins still dream of a republic,’ said La Grange. ‘The local councils could mobilize the National Guard to foil our movement.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we’ll have to do: we must be able to anticipate the kind of order that any over-zealous functionary might launch.’

  ‘There are so few of us,’ Morin began.

  ‘Remember the Malet conspiracy,’ Sémallé cut in. ‘Two years ago, how many of them were involved in the seizure of power? Five? Six? You were one of them, La Grange.’

  ‘And we failed.’

  ‘But only just! This time circumstances are on our side. Confusion works to the advantage of resolute men.’

  ‘The Parisians have already read so many proclamations, will they believe ours?’

  ‘It isn’t a matter of telling the truth, my friend, but of creating a situation. Here is the text. Morin, see that it is printed. You will accompany him, La Grange, with whoever else you think you might need.’

  Morin took the piece of paper and rolled it up. The Count continued:

  ‘The others must keep themselves ready in the places assigned to them. They will have cockades, and the proclamations that they will collect from the printers. I will give the signal to hand them out; early in the morning, I will drape two white flags on each side of my house, one on the rue Saint-Honoré, the other on the boulevard de la Madeleine . . .’

  La Grange and Morin rose to their feet and put on their coats. Octave was about to go with them when the Count stopped them.

  ‘Langeron is in command of the Russian infantry. He is camped on the top of Montmartre. I need someone dedicated to warn him of the great royalist demonstration that is about to explode.’

  ‘Me!’ cried the Count of Douhet, a young man in a waistcoat, puffing out his chest.

  ‘It’s a dangerous mission,’ Sémallé warned him.

  ‘That’s fine!’

  ‘Here’s a note I’ve written for Langeron. I want you to give it to him. Try to find out what the sovereigns have in mind, and what their plans are for entering Paris.’

  Someone drummed on the door of the house. The conspirators froze. Clutching a pistol, and with the Count following close behind him, Lemercier stealthily approached the door. The Count opened it abruptly, crashing it into a stout little man, liveried and breathless.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Lemercier.

  ‘I know him,’ said the Count, ‘he’s one of Monsieur Jaucourt’s valets. What’s wrong, Ernest?’

  ‘Monsieur Jaucourt sent me ...’

  ‘Catch your breath.’

  ‘To warn you . . .’

  ‘Get on with it!’

  ‘The Emperor ...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He is . . .’

  ‘Where, in God’s name?’

  ‘In Fontainebleau . . .’

  The others had drawn closer. Because they had not heard what Ernest the valet had been mumbling, the Count of Sémallé repeated very calmly: ‘Bonaparte is in Fontainebleau.’

  Octave turned pale, and the Count noticed.

  ‘Don’t worry, Monsieur de Blacé, that does not conflict with our plans.’

  *

  La Grange and Morin set off to the printers, and Octave accompanied them. They filed along the narrow streets, twisting their ankles between the cobbles, and getting their shoes dirty because not even the bright sun could dry the black and sticky mud after weeks of rain. Instinctively they hugged the walls to avoid getting the contents of a chamber-pot on their heads, but they need not have worried: the people had locked themselves away in their houses. No one was brave enough to open the shutters; closeted indoors every sound became suspicious. The inhabitants of the houses trembled at the sound of echoing footsteps, they waited for the battle to resume - this time inside the city - because no one had told them about the surrender negotiated at the Petit Jardinet, a tavern in La Villette.

  With a great wave of his arm, La Grange indicated the closed façades.

  ‘They’re about to have their last night of fear.’

  ‘The war is over!’ cried Morin.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Octave.

  ‘Perhaps?’ said the Marquis, astonished.

  ‘I’m thinking about what might happen, something that we haven’t allowed for ...’

  ‘This is a time for deeds, my dear fellow, not doubts!’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Morin.

  The previous day, Octave had consulted the dossier on Claude Marie Morin that he had taken from a police file at Pommereul’s house, and learned that he straddled the worlds of the bourgeoisie and the artistic milieu: Masséna’s secretary during the siege of Genoa, he had written epic poems to the glory of the Emperor, sung the crossing of the St Bernard Pass, composed an elegy on the burning of Copenhagen and penned an ode to Empress Marie-Louise - all published by the printer Michaud, to whose establishment they were now setting off on a quite different mission. Despite Morin’s literary achievements, the sly dog was now gloating over the fall of his god, joyfully repeating over and over again, ‘Twenty years of war and it’s over!’

  Octave wasn’t sure about that. What was the Emperor doing in Fontainebleau? He was going to assemble a motley but ferocious army, and everything was still to play for.

  Taking a right turn in front of the Théâtre Feydeau, the three men heard wheels creaking over by the rue Montmartre, and could even see thin horses pulling crates. Grenadiers, heads bowed, slipped by like ghosts. To avoid these retreating regiments, the three took to the alleyways, which gave them a head start to the Place des Victoires.

  There were soldiers everywhere, lying on the ground, sitting against the pyramid, some of them reminiscing about the Egyptian Campaign. Others strolled among the lounging groups, their uniforms torn, blackened with dust and soil, sad and silent, their bones frozen by the cool of evening, their stomachs empty. Some tirailleurs, perched on ladders and wielding bayonets or axes, attacked the structure concealing the statue of General Desaix, who had fallen at Marengo. It was a colossal monument, standing nearly twenty feet tall in the middle of the square, and the local prudes had asked for it to be veiled because it showed the hero entirely naked, like an ancient Greek. As the soldiers chopped away the horizontal planks to use them as firewood, the statue reappeared, first the face and the flowing hair, then the torso, and now they were down to the hips. La Grange and the others walked around the square, which was now illuminated by the fires of twenty bivouacs. They arrived ne
ar the Palais-Royal, at the corner of the rue des Bons-Enfants; it was there that Michaud kept his printing-works.

  Michaud ushered them in wearing a leather apron, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He led them into his studio in the half-cellar, a vaulted room that smelled of ink and was lit by oil lamps, which he hurried to turn up.

  ‘The text?’ he asked Michaud.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Morin, unrolling Sémallé's sheet, which he took from his pocket.

  ‘There’s no time to lose.’

  ‘How many could you print off in an hour?’

  ‘About four hundred.’

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Octave.

  ‘What? I haven’t got a steam-driven machine like they have in London, Monsieur! I’m a simple craftsman, and I can’t afford to go any faster.’

  ‘I know,’ replied Morin.

  ‘Have you had any cause to complain of my services?’

  ‘Come now! Let’s have no bickering,’ La Grange interrupted impatiently.

  While Octave kept watch on the street through a grilled basement window, the printer began to set the text, taking the characters one by one from their wooden boxes.

  ‘Is there anything we can do to help?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ grunted Michaud. ‘It’s a craft.’

  He inked the letters with a brush, and sheet by sheet he worked his machine, its noise amplified beneath the vaulted ceiling in the calm of dusk. La Grange picked up the first poster and read it in a murmur by the light of a lamp:

  People of Paris, the hour of your deliverance has come.

  May a feeling stifled for many years find voice in the cry,

  repeated a thousand times over: Long live the King!

  Long live Louis XVIII! Long live our glorious liberators!

  ‘Shut up!’ Octave said suddenly, nose still pressed to the basement window.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Be quiet, I tell you, I can see a pair of gaiters approaching.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Michaud, pushing down on his manual press. ‘We’re behind the Banque de France, and the National Guard are just patrolling as normal.’

  ‘This isn’t a normal evening,’ insisted Octave, and they’ve stopped by the door, they’re talking to each other ...’

  The sound of a musket-butt striking the door finally made them fall silent and Michaud sighed:

  ‘Don’t move, I’ll go. I know the local Guards.’

  He climbed the three steps, leaving the communicating door half open so that the conspirators below could follow his conversation with the officer of the National Guard, formerly a fashionable tailor.

  ‘There’s a lot of noise going on for the time of night!’

  ‘I’m late with a piece of work.’

  ‘In spite of events?’

  ‘Because of them. I haven’t got an assistant, so I’m doing it myself, and I’m up against it.’

  ‘All on your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Surely not,’ said another voice, ‘I’m convinced there was an unusual amount of activity in here, I saw it with my own eyes.’

  ‘I was having some paper delivered.’

  ‘Can I take a look at your studio?’

  ‘Of course, but why would you want to? Come on, I’ll give you a bottle to help you get through the night!’

  There was laughter, the sound of backs being slapped and then footsteps, followed by the front door closing. Michaud returned to his press: ‘They’ll be back, I’m sure of it, you should leave discreetly . . .’

  ‘But what about our posters?’ asked Morin.

  ‘There are about thirty already printed,’ Michaud told him. ‘Take those, I’ll go on working and everything will be ready for our bill-stickers tomorrow morning.’

  ‘But if the guards come back,’ said Octave, ‘they’ll read our prose.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell them I’m doing some printing for a theatre that’s about to reopen. I’ll put older posters on top of what we’ve printed ...’

  He showed them a pile of posters announcing a vaudeville by Désaugiers and Gentil, The Ogress, in which the comic actor Tiercelin had triumphed the previous year.

  *

  Octave rested his elbows against the guard-rail of an open window beneath the roofs. By leaning forward he could make out the pinnacles of the Hôtel de Ville that they were about to commandeer. Behind him, La Grange and Morin had finished a quick meal, drinking a mixture of water and vinegar in order to stay sober. The Marquis rose to his feet, stretching himself.

  ‘Let’s go and get some sleep,’ he said, ‘even if it’s only for a couple of hours. We’ll need our strength at dawn.’ La Grange withdrew into the adjacent room, and Morin into his bedroom, at the end of a corridor; Octave would make do with a sofa.

  Left alone in the drawing-room, he fetched his binoculars from the pocket of his frock-coat, unfolded them and trained his gaze on the army encampments. Very early in the morning those men would be re-forming into columns and leaving Paris for the west, but it was also possible that their officers would lead them to Fontainebleau to place them under the Emperor’s orders. Octave wondered what his own fate would be. If the royalists, with their manoeuvring and collusion, succeeded in installing Louis XVIII on the throne, then emigrants would be returning from London, people who had known the real Blacé, and when that happened Octave would have to flee the capital. Why didn’t he leave that very night? He had just enough time to run along the rue Saint-Sauveur, change his clothes and his hairstyle, and pocket the gold packed away in the luggage of the cavalryman whose name and wig he had borrowed.

  Octave was determined to get to Fontainebleau and meet the Duke of Bassano, his employer, but first he could scupper part of the royalist plan by eliminating two of the most active conspirators: La Grange and Morin were sleeping sweetly a few metres away from him; if he killed them, they wouldn’t be able to stir up any more trouble among the functionaries of the Hôtel de Ville and the town halls. Octave took his cane in one hand, a candlestick in the other, and crept carefully into the office where the Marquis lay like a recumbent figure on a tomb, his mouth open and his hands on his belly. Setting the candlestick on a chest of drawers, and gripping his cane in both hands, he was about to bring the latter crashing down when the Marquis opened an eye and said in a cool and sonorous voice, ‘Were you looking for a blanket?’

  ‘Yes...’

  ‘Can’t you get to sleep?’

  ‘Neither can you.’

  ‘I’m resting, and I suggest you do the same: we have a hard day ahead of us.’

  ‘I know ...’

  ‘And I know what your problem is, Blacé, you think too much.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Don’t worry, my friend, everything will come to pass as we have decided it should. God will protect us.’

  Discountenanced by La Grange’s natural manner and naïve trust, Octave abandoned his murderous project. Why had he failed? With one well-aimed blow he could have split the Marquis’s head open, without giving him a chance to utter a cry and alert his accomplice; after that Octave could have executed Morin. But he felt tired, and perhaps he really was thinking too much; he no longer had the killer instinct his profession required.

  Yawning, Octave decided to delay his departure - anticipating the muddle of the next few days, he would wait for, and seize, the next opportunity - and looked back down at the Seine. Firelight, far away on the left bank, past the Faubourg Saint-Denis: had some irregular Cossacks taken advantage of the truce to enter the city unimpeded?

  Octave was mistaken about the nature of the flames that licked the court of the Imperial residence in the Invalides. In actual fact, Marshal Sérurier, the commander of the Parisian National Guard, had ordered the trophies stored in the chapel to be burned on a gigantic pyre; the 1,800 colours captured during the wars of the Revolution and the Empire were on no account to fall into the hands of the enemy - not the flags themselves, nor the metal o
f the staffs, nor even the ashes, which would be consigned to the river in the morning.

  *

  Octave woke before dawn. Curled up on the sofa, he had slept little and badly. Now he sat up with a stupid expression, his wig perched at an angle. Morin had filled two baskets with the white cockades that he had kept in his wood-chest, and he was pinning them to their hats. La Grange was busy loading his pistols. ‘Hurry up,’ he said to Octave, ‘we’re off’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘It’s six o’clock.’

  ‘A quick wash and I’ll be with you . . .’

  ‘No time. We must surprise the rabble at the crack of dawn.’

  Outside, the army had disappeared. Octave crossed the Place de Grève, flanked by the two royalists. Bah, he said to himself, I’ll jot down a few names, and make a note of any about-turns and hesitations. That’ll be useful to the Emperor, who likes weak people. They’re more manageable than hotheads.

  The three men walked through the main porch of the Hôtel de Ville (the National Guards on sentry duty didn’t even think of stopping them - you don’t check people who walk with such a determined stride) and climbed the large stone staircase on the right, which led to the single upper storey. A bald clerk, dressed in black, raised his hands to block their way: ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen! Where are you going?’

  They did not reply; Octave pushed the clerk aside with his cane, like a walker bending back a branch in his way.

  ‘Messieurs!’ cried the man, gawping and staggering in their wake.

  A second clerk tried to obstruct their path by pressing himself against both wings of a large door:

  ‘No one comes in here, this is the Prefect’s office!’

  ‘But he’s the man we’ve come to see,’ said La Grange.

  ‘Our of the question!’

  ‘I beg to differ,’ said Octave, catching the man by the lapels.

  ‘The Prefect is not in his office!’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s at the Ministry of the Interior, where the mayors of the arrondissements are meeting at this very moment.’