Napoleon's Exile

by Patrick Rambaud

  ‘Who is taking his place?’

  ‘The Secretary-General...’

  ‘Go and get him.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘We urgently need to speak to him.’

  ‘Who’s that making such a racket?’ said a stocky, short-legged individual emerging from a corridor?

  ‘Monsieur Walknaer,’ mumbled the clerk, ‘these gentlemen wanted to meet the Prefect...’

  ‘Are you the Secretary-General?’ asked La Grange.

  ‘Precisely so,’ said Monsieur Walknaer, alarmed by the intrusion and the appearance of these unshaven visitors.

  La Grange moved to stand in front of the Secretary-General, parting his frock-coat so that the latter could see the handles of the pistols sticking out of his belt: ‘How can the Prefect absent himself under such circumstances? It’s insane!’

  ‘Monsieur de Chabrol is in a meeting...’

  ‘In any case, he is no longer the Prefect of the Seine, he has been replaced.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘By Monsieur Morin here, who has come to take his post and occupy his office. Ha! Let us in! No? If you are not willing to serve your new Prefect, I can have you replaced as well.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was refusing...’

  ‘A fine idea, if I may say so, and much the better for you: the allied sovereigns have just recognized Louis XVIII as King of France.’

  ‘I didn’t know

  ‘Of course, you were here, either shut away or asleep! Here are the proclamations, and some white cockades which you will immediately distribute to your staff.’

  Morin held one of his baskets out to the Secretary-General, who ventured a question: ‘What if they don’t want to wear them?’

  ‘Then throw them out! Right now, we have work to do.’

  The three conspirators entered the Prefect’s office, shutting the door in the clerks’ faces.

  ‘Here is your office, Morin. Lovely location. First of all, reprint our appeal using the Prefecture’s services, and order them to be posted up in every district.’

  ‘If they obey me ...’

  ‘This pack of cowards is under your orders.’

  ‘But what if Monsieur de Chabrol comes back?’ asked Morin anxiously.

  ‘What? Are you going to give up on us now?’

  ‘No, no ...’

  ‘You’ve got plenty of time, those windbags from the councils and the ministries will go on endlessly nattering, they haven’t a clue where their interests lie, and anyway, as of this evening, Paris will have a Russian or Austrian governor.’

  Octave pricked up his ears:

  ‘Did you hear that? Sounds like horses, a whole troop of them.’

  ‘Here we go!’ said Morin gloomily. ‘The Prefect’s back.’

  Octave and La Grange opened one of the windows.

  A detachment of cavalrymen, in blue uniforms and black shakos, was coming from the quays, led by a general in a plumed cocked hat. ‘The Prussians!’ said the Marquis. These good people will help us.’ La Grange seized the second basket of cockades and dragged Octave over to the big staircase, where some terrified officials were holding hasty confabulations.

  Down below, Monsieur Walknaer was negotiating with anyone who still refused to wear a royalist cockade. When he saw La Grange and Octave slipping off towards the front steps, he joined them. They reached the courtyard together just as the dragoons of Brandenburg were marching in. At the sight of them, the General dismounted and introduced himself. He was a middle-aged man, covered with medals and gold badges, with a thin goatee and a smartly curled moustache.

  ‘I am General Baron Plotho, Chief of Staff to the King of Prussia ...’

  ‘Where are you going, General?’ asked the Marquis.

  ‘To see the Prefect.’

  ‘I am the Prefect.’

  ‘Sehr gut, Meuzieur! I have come to reach the agreement with you for the living places of the Emperors of Russia and Austria, my sovereign and some princes who are with them.’

  ‘Secretary General!’ cried La Grange.

  ‘I’m here, sir, there’s no need to shout,’ said poor Walknaer.

  ‘Who is in charge of the accommodation of the foreign sovereigns?’

  ‘Monsieur Monnet, the head of department.’

  ‘Drop your basket and call him this minute!’

  Walknaer ran off and came back almost immediately with a fat, maggot-like character who, adjusting his white tie, began to speak without waiting.

  ‘Everything has been sorted out. His Majesty the Emperor of Russia wants to live on the Champs-Elysées, the Emperor of Austria in the boulevards, the King of Prussia has demanded the Faubourg Saint-Germain ...’

  ‘Have the mairies of those arrondissements been warned of this?’

  ‘Not yet, but...’

  ‘But I am dealing with it myself,’ said La Grange, ‘along with the General.’ And the Marquis gestured to the coach-driver who was waiting on his box in the courtyard. The coach pulled in at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘You can’t take that carriage!’ Monsieur Walknaer protested, embarrassed.

  ‘And why not?’

  ‘It’s Monsieur de Chabrol’s...’

  ‘He is nothing now!’ And then, to the Prussian: ‘Get in, General, together we must go and recognize the residences of our liberators.’

  ‘This is a very good idea, I think,’ said Baron Plotho, climbing into the berlin.

  Octave joined him with the cockades, and La Grange issued an order to the coachman: ‘Rue de l’Echiquier, number 36!’

  *

  'My friends, I have been successful! Morin is in the Hôtel de Ville, in the Prefect’s chair!’

  ‘Bravo!’

  ‘I have with me a Prussian general who believes I am a higher authority: he is going to serve as guarantor!’

  ‘Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!’

  The Committee members still present at Lemercier’s had risen to their feet, and they applauded as one might applaud a resolute deed in a play, La Grange, in a state of boundless jubilation, continued.

  ‘I am going to the mairies of the arrondissements with our Prussian friend, to prepare the accommodation of the sovereigns and their retinues. Come with me, let us announce that the allies have recognized Louis XVIII!’

  There were more volunteers than would fit in the carriage (from which the conspirators were to throw handfuls of royalist cockades at passers-by), and Octave seized upon this as an excuse: he would go to the Count of Sémallé and tell him about their dawn raid. La Grange approved; he climbed into the real Prefect’s berlin, pressing against Baron Plotho, and the two set off, escorted by sky-blue dragoons, who were surprised by being thus welcomed into a conquered capital. Octave set off in the other direction, towards the boulevard.

  It was almost ten o’clock, and the smarter districts had very quickly reassumed their normal appearance once the Parisians had learned of the capitulation. They had dreaded the possibility that the city might be put to the torch: over the past few days, La Gazette de France and Les Débats had recounted so many horrors that, since the worst had failed to materialize, there was a great sense of relief. Yesterday, the walls of the houses had been bare and black with soot; today they were covered with gaudy posters, advertisements for music-halls, for concerts, lotteries, hotels and magic potions, but also with insults against Napoleon, jubilantly scribbled caricatures (one showed the Emperor on all fours, with his buttocks in a broken drum, and a Russian general beating the march with a birch whip). All of a sudden life was reborn, light and muddled. The boulevard once again filled with people. Fear had fled.

  Octave approached a crowd who were laughing delightedly at two bourgeois in threadbare suits being manhandled by members of the National Guard armed with picks. ‘Let me go!’ screeched one of the bourgeois; held firmly by the collar, he was wiggling and waving his arms around, but they were too short to reach the stout, uniformed fellow who was holding him. Octave recognized a conspirator from the r
oyalist Committee, and he remained apart, hidden by the growing crowd. As he watched, one of the guards tore the white cockade from the hat of the other bourgeois, threw it on the ground and stamped on it; as his victim protested, another guard picked up the posters the royalist had been carrying, plunged them into his bucket of glue and smeared the man’s face with them. Octave quietly removed the cockade that Morin had pinned on his hat, and sloped off.

  Over by the Madeleine he noticed a white flag flapping, as predicted, from one of the balconies of Sémallé's house. If the passers-by did happen to look up, no one complained, no one saluted - and it looked as though they were getting away with it. The flags no longer made the Parisians tremble, either with shame or joy; they were waking from an improbable dream, the air was sweet, and they wanted to dance. The shopkeepers imagined that business would pick up, that the invaders would make their fortunes for them by buying huge quantities of fabrics, necklaces and wine; others were convinced they would fill their theatres or their taverns: the foreign officers would distribute gold pieces without counting them, they were so pleased with their victory after such rough treatment throughout the winter.

  Not far from the Count’s house, a group of about twenty young people in white scarves were waving handkerchiefs on the ends of their canes, shouting, ‘Down with the tyrant! Long live the Bourbons!’ In the suburbs they would have been soundly thrashed, but here, in the elegant part of the boulevards, the indifferent crowd simply opened up so they could pass. These excited folk, Octave thought, had never known kings. They didn’t even understand their own slogans, which they were barking out as though issuing commands, inspired by hatred of the Imperial order.

  Behind the youngsters he saw Marquis de Maubreuil - recognizing him by his plum-coloured silk clothes: he had tied his Cross of the Légion d’honneur to the tail of his horse, and was singing in a tenor voice, ‘Vive le roi!’

  *

  The allied armies had entered Paris by the Pantin tollgate at eleven o’clock. They had passed beneath the Porte Saint-Denis, now cleared of its pitiful barricade. In the suburbs, the people had watched the impeccable squadrons passing by without much of a murmur, but in the capital the National Guard was acting as a police force, its officers holding back those who wanted to spit and curse at the young soldiers in their bright uniforms. There were even some cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ which were barely drowned out by the military fanfares. Then, though, as the armies passed through different districts, the nature of the crowd had changed: from the boulevard des Italiens onwards, the windows were covered with bed-sheets or white towels, elegant ladies waved handkerchiefs, and cheers rose by several tones as the marching men approached the Place de la Concorde.

  ‘They’re coming!’ said the young Countess of Sémallé at her balcony. Deeply moved, she brushed a tear from her made-up cheek with a fingertip. Heralded by an impressive brass band playing an unfamiliar anthem, the red Cossacks of the Guard came first, followed by cuirassiers with gleaming boots, then the hussars, and the pearl-grey regiments of the King of Prussia.

  ‘Eleven, twelve . . .’ murmured Octave.

  ‘How comforting they are!’ remarked the dazzled Countess, beside him.

  ‘Fourteen, fifteen ...’ said Octave.

  ‘Fifteen what?’ asked the Countess, clapping her hands.

  ‘The cavalrymen, madam, fifteen deep.’

  ‘How handsome they are!’

  ‘Control yourself, my dear,’ the Count rebuked her.

  ‘We’ve been waiting so long for this liberation!’

  ‘Of course we have, Zoé, but a countess doesn’t hop up and down.’

  The Count is right,’ hazarded Octave. ‘All the same, it’s the first time since the Hundred Years War that foreign armies have defiled our capital...’

  ‘But they aren’t foreigners, Monsieur, they are our European cousins! Isn’t that so, Jean-René?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the Count. Then, to Octave: ‘They won’t stay, Blacé, they will restore power to us and then they will go home again. The people of Paris understand that, look at them.’

  Down below, in the boulevard de la Madeleine, the crowd was surging in the direction of the procession, shouting: ‘Long live our liberators!’ Among the keenest of them, Octave thought he recognized the apothecary who had been so patriotic on the Saint-Denis barricade. His neighbour in that potential battle was now raising his hat, mouth open wide, to acclaim the very men whom he would cheerfully have massacred with his hunting rifle the day before. Meanwhile some hysterical women dashed towards the orderly ranks of the marching Russian cavalrymen, grabbing their boots, kissing their gloves and calling them ‘saviours’ and similar extravagant names.

  Octave was not at all surprised to see a population turning in the blink of an eye to kneel before its conqueror. He was accustomed to the fickle feelings of his contemporaries, but one thing still intrigued him: the enemy soldiers were all wearing white armbands on their sleeves, as though parading for Louis XVIII. Octave leaned towards the Count and yelled loudly in his ear, for it was not easy to be heard among all the commotion:

  ‘How did you persuade them to wear the symbol of our royal family?’

  ‘Pure chance, my dear friend,’ replied Sémallé in the same tone, ‘a happy coincidence, a sign of Heaven, a misunderstanding that’s bloody useful to us!’

  Count de Langeron, who served the Tsar, had just told him the reason for the armbands. The other morning an English officer had been wounded by a Cossack who mistook him for one of Napoleon’s grenadiers - because the allied soldiers had trouble telling French uniforms from Austrian, Russian, Prussian, English and German - so the staff had decided that they would wear armbands to avoid killing each other. However, the Parisians actually believed that the occupying forces were supporting the King of France and, lest they be importuned at a later date by this invading army, more and more were themselves wearing armbands, scarves, and the white cockades that Sémallé's men were now distributing without fear of harm. The Count had won his wager - the allied sovereigns would be convinced that the French were, in chorus, reclaiming their legitimate king. And he threw great handfuls of cockades like grain to pigeons.

  A valet appeared on the balcony and whispered a few words to the Count, whose face lit up: ‘My dear Blacé, the miracle continues! The blind can see, the deaf can hear!’

  The heads of the aristocratic party had disdained or rejected Sémallé's overtures, but as events had progressed they were now jostling in his antechamber, aware of his connections with the Count d’Artois, the King’s brother. Octave couldn’t get over it: harebrained the day before yesterday, the Count’s calculations had proved correct, and his far-fetched ideas were fast becoming reality.

  *

  Count Ferrand, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, Doudeauville and Chateaubriand were all in the drawing-room. They wanted to take Sémallé to Mme de Mortefontaine’s house, where they had just set up a second Committee of members of the senior aristocracy. Standing apart from the rest, Octave watched and listened to them chirruping, especially Chateaubriand, feverish, pale as a winding-sheet, his head a mass of crazed little curls. Everyone knew that he was writing a pamphlet against Bonaparte, that he hid the manuscript under his pillow and went to sleep every night with a pistol close at hand: he could breathe at last, and had joined the others to request an audience with Tsar Alexander and the King of Prussia, to persuade the two sovereigns to recall Louis XVIII from exile.

  The Count listened to the group with sardonic detachment, tempering their recent ardour, and hoping all the while that La Grange, who had been out and about since dawn, would soon return to tell him how the situation was changing, what attitude to adopt, and when. In the meantime he dragged the interview out as long as possible, asking endless questions, and giving evasive answers to those questions asked of him. Exhausted by the endless waffle, one of the emissaries of the aristocratic party left the group to chat to Octave, under the impression that the latter kne
w the Count’s secrets. The man had the face of a little bird, lost amid the lace of his jabot, and a solemn voice that was at odds with his appearance. He introduced himself.

  ‘Champcenetz. You must have heard of me, Monsieur de Blacé.’

  ‘Champcenetz, you say?’

  ‘But of course, in London!’

  ‘In London? Ah, yes, how silly of me!’

  ‘Lady Salisbury, I was told, recommended you to our precious Sémallé, and indeed, she is a great friend: it is to her that I owe my life and my good fortune.’

  Champcenetz did not look especially sly, but Octave’s interest was kindled when he mentioned his career as an emigrant in England. This irritating character was all thumbs, but by observing his cooks he had learned how to toss a salad in the correct manner - by hand - and that was enough to establish his reputation. Brought into society by the Countess of Salisbury, he’d been in demand at the big houses, where he was asked to mix lettuce or cress in public, and he was invited to the upper-crust circles and restaurants that were then so fashionable. He’d trained up a number of pupils and returned to France, in around 1802, with an income of 150,000 francs.

  ‘You’re too young,’ he said to Octave, ‘to have known those times, when we arrived with nothing, driven out by the Jacobins who wanted to cut our throats.’

  ‘To be fair, I was eight years old!’

  ‘We were ruined, we became door-to-door salesmen, acrobats, water-carriers like Madame de Montmorency. You remember? Countesses sang in cafés, they sold fish from the Thames...’

  ‘My mother made straw hats.’

  ‘Terrible times, weren’t they? But over there they have no guillotines - only sash windows!’

  Champcenetz hiccuped at this quip, which he had repeated a thousand times, and then, with a sniff, asked Octave, ‘And incidentally, how is that dear woman?’

  ‘The Countess of Salisbury? Well, goodness me, she’s quite well.’

  ‘I assume she received you in her lovely house in Kensington

  Octave didn’t need to reply, as the Count of Sémallé, who had abandoned the gentlemen he had been speaking to, took him by the arm and dragged him into a little office nearby, where La Grange was waiting for them.