The wanton princess rb-8

by Dennis Wheatley

  'Is Moreau still commanding on the Rhine?'

  'Yes. As a soldier he is rated second only to our little man; and since he must be regarded as a potential enemy it was a wise move to confirm him in his command. As long as he remains out of Paris 'tis unlikely that he will be persuaded to enter into any intrigue against the new Government. Massena, too, might have proved a danger. Only four months ago, just before Bonaparte's return from Egypt, he had been acclaimed a national hero owing to his great victory in Switzerland which saved France from invasion by the Russians. But at present he has more than enough to keep him busy defending the Ligurian Republic'

  'From what I heard in London I gathered that things are going far from well with our army in Italy.'

  Talleyrand nodded, 'That is so. Massena is several times outnumbered by the Austrians, so is hard-pressed to hold his own. 'Tis my opinion that, should Bonaparte decide to take the held in person again, it is to Massena's assistance that he will march in the Spring. But for the moment my instinct tells me that he is rather pleased than otherwise that his brother General should be taking some hard knocks.'

  After wiping his lips with a lace-edged napkin, Talleyrand went on:

  'And now, cher ami, you must excuse me. I'd willingly sit here gossiping with you all morning but, alas, to keep my position I must at times do a little work, and numerous people wait to sec me. No doubt we'll meet again at the Tuileries this evening.'

  'Is there a reception there then?'

  'Yes, for the First Consul to receive congratulations on the result of the plebiscite. I would advise you therefore, not to attempt to beard him in his den this morning, but to refrain from showing yourself until he is surrounded by smiling faces.'

  Roger bowed, 'Your Excellency's advice has always proved invaluable to mc, and I'll certainly take it now.'

  The Minister smiled and laid a beautifully-kept hand on his arm. ‘It will always be at your disposal. I'll never forget that you saved mc from being sent to the guillotine during tho Revolution.'

  At seven o'clock that evening Roger joined the throng of men, most of whom were in brilliant uniforms, and silk-clad bejewelled women, that was making its way slowly up the grand staircase in the Palais des Tuileries. The last time ho had done so was at Bonaparte's reception on Christmas Day, a date deliberately chosen by him to indicate that the Chris­tian festival was to be revived and the persecution of the Church to cease. Since Brumaire he had occupied the Luxembourg, but now that the plebiscite had confirmed him in power it was being said that he intended to take up his residence in the Tuileries permanently as from the following day.

  At length Roger came opposite him and made his bow. Bonaparte was then aged thirty, a little under medium height and still slim. His large head was finely shaped, his forehead superb, his eyes big and luminous, his nose and mouth well modelled, his jaw exceptionally powerful and his face pale. His reactions to what people said to him were as swift as lightning and conveyed instantly pleasure, doubt, sorrow or anger. He had beautiful hands of which he was very proud and while conversing would often glance at them with com­placency. When Roger had first met him at the siege of Toulon he had been an out-at-elbow Artillery officer with lank, ill-kept dark hair falling to his shoulders. He had since become fastidious in his dress, never wearing a shirt twice, and scrupulously clean in his person, frequently spending up to two hours a day in his bath while dictating to his secretary.

  'Ha, Breuc!' he exclaimed in his rasping voice with its heavy Italian accent. 'So those pig-headed fools have kicked you out of England. Talleyrand told me this evening of your return. You must be glad to be back in Paris after surviving two months of London fog. What a country! But one day that fog shall prove the undoing of those stubborn people. Under cover of it I'll land there with a hundred thousand men.'

  'My dearest hope is to be with you then. Consul,' Roger smiled.

  'You shall,' came the instant reply. 'You've proved yourself little good as a diplomat, but you are still le brave Breuc and speak their uncouth language.’

  ‘I thank you. General. Meantime I trust you will find me some suitable employment.'

  'Since you wield a pen as ably as a sword, I can. Bourrienne is up to his eyes in work. Report to him tomorrow.’

  Greatly relieved, Roger passed on and made his bow to Josephine. She was a few years older than her husband, an alluring brunette with a strikingly voluptuous figure. Her looks were marred only by her bad teeth and, from habit, she kept her lips closed as she smiled at Roger. In more than one crisis in their lives they had rendered one another invaluable services; so she spoke to him most kindly.

  Ranged in a semi-circle behind the First Consul and his wife stood the Bonaparte family. The mother, a tall, lean, handsome, commanding presence, whose expression showed a suggestion of disapproval at the adulation being showered on her amazing son. On her right her other sons: Joseph, a year older than Napoleon—an amiable man now becoming a little portly—with his wife Julie, already regarded as an angel of charity; Lucien, a short-sighted man with thin, gangling limbs—the firebrand of the family whose fervour for the Revolution had caused him in his teens to rename himself Brutus, but who had now, as the recently-appointed Minister of the Interior, become respectable—with his simple, sweet-natured, ex-barmaid wife Catherine; Louis, a handsome young man whom Bonaparte, while still a poor cadet at the Military Academy in Paris, had personally brought up; and Jerome, as yet only a youngster of sixteen.

  On Madame Letizia Bonaparte's left were her daughters. Eliza most closely resembled Napoleon but, having heavy masculine features redeemed only by flashing black eyes, was the plainest of the girls. Beside her was her Corsican hus­band, a dolt named Pascal Bacciocchi. Caroline came next; a shrewd, ambitious, clever girl, good-looking and with a beautiful complexion but a bust and hips too large for her dumpy body. With her was Joachim Murat, Bonaparte's crack cavalry General, to marry whom she had only lately left Madame Campan's Academy for Young Ladies. Pauline stood alone, as her husband General Leclerc had been given command of a Division on the Rhine. She was such a ravishing young creature that she had been nicknamed 'La Belle des Belles'.

  Roger knew them all, and that they were a grasping, scheming crew who thought of little but feathering their nests out of the pocket of their now rich and powerful brother. They were also bitterly jealous of one another and united only in one thing—their hatred of his wife. It was on Pauline that Roger's glance lingered, for he had long admired her; and, to his delight, she gave him a charming smile.

  To the left of Bonaparte's sisters stood Josephine's two children by her earlier marriage to the Vicomte de Bcauharnais: Eugene, a pleasant, round-faced young man whom, while still in his teens. Bonaparte had taken with him as an A.D.C. in both his Italian and Egyptian campaigns; and Hortense, a pretty girl with a mop of fair curls. Their step­father was extremely fond of them and treated them as his own children.

  The assembly was an extraordinarily mixed one. Men who had been responsible for massacres during the Terror, but who had been clever enough to save themselves from the reaction after the fall of Robespierre, rubbed shoulders with ci-devant nobles who had succeeded in getting permission to return from exile There were financiers like Ouverard who had made vast fortunes out of supplying the Armies, eminent lawyers with Liberal principles who had lived in hiding throughout the worst years of the Revolution, learned men who were members of the Institute, the diplomatic represen­tatives of a score of nations and many soldiers whose exploits had caused their names to become household words.

  The looks of the women were much above the average for such a gathering because in recent years blue blood had become a liability rather than an asset and rich families had been deprived of their possessions; so, instead of seeking a wife who could bring them a coat-of-arms or a big dowry, most of the men who were carving careers for themselves had chosen brides solely for their beauty.

  This was particularly the case with the soldiers. Several of the most di
stinguished were absent: Moreau and St. Cyr were on the Rhine, Massena, Soult, Suchet and Oudinot were in Italy, Kleber, Dcsaix and Junot had been left by Bonaparte marooned in Egypt; but among those present were:

  Berthier, Bonaparte's ugly, ill-formed little Chief of Staff in whose overbig head everything to do with the Army was filed like a vast card index; Marmont, the brilliant young Artilleryman who, at the siege of Toulon, had been Bonaparte's first A.D.C; Brune, who despite his very limited abilities, being opposed only to the hopelessly incompetent Duke of York, had, the previous autumn, destroyed the Allied armies in Holland; Davoust, clever, taciturn, the harshest disciplinarian of them all, whom Bonaparte had discovered in Egypt; Bessieres. another discovery in the same campaign and, although still only a dashing young Colonel, now charged with making the Consular Guard into what was to become the finest dike Corps in the world; Ney, the red-headed son of a cooper, whose sole ambition was to win glory, with beside him the loveliest wife of them all; Augereau, the tall, terrible swashbuckler, who had saved the day for Bonaparte at Castiglione; Moncey, the hero of the Battle of the Pyramids; Lannes, the foul-mouthed little Gascon who, as a Brigadier in Italy in '96 and later at the siege of Acre, had won fame by his indomitable courage, and who also had an exquisitely beautiful wife; Bernadotte, another Gascon, still wearing his black hair long, who hated Bonaparte. He had, when Minister of War, proposed to arrest him for having deserted his Army in Egypt and, alone among the Generals, had refused to support him in the coup d'etat of Brumaire.

  Besides these there were the veterans of the Revolutionary wars; Carnot, once a member of the dread Committee of Public Safety, never a General but, from having created seven armies out of a rabble and kept them supplied, christened 'The Organiser of Victories'; Kellerman of Valmy fame; Jourdan, the victor of Fleuras; Sérurier, Perignon and old Lefebvre—still looking like a tough Sergeant-Major—whose wife had once taken in and washed on credit young Lieu­tenant Bonaparte's patched underclothes.

  Chatting with them and their ladies were scores of Briga­diers, Colonels, Adjutants and A.D.Cs. All were wearing their smartest uniforms; the plumed hats they carried under their arms, their tunics and their sabretaches glittered with gold lace, and jewels sparkled in the sword hilts of the senior officers as they strutted, their spurs jingling, across the polished floors.

  Roger was acquainted with at least half the civilians and soldiers there and. having served with most of the latter in Italy and Egypt, looked on many of them as well-tried friends. As he moved from group to group it was borne in on him that whereas he knew well comparatively few people in England, here lie was hailed on all sides as a gallant comrade of the wars; so he felt more than ever that his decision to return permanently to France had been sound, and that few lives could be better than one lived among these gay, brave men and lovely women.

  At one of the long buffet supper tables he ran into Joseph Fouche. The Minister of Police was the very antithesis of Talleyrand. He was tall and lean, his face looked like that of a corpse warmed up, his shifty eyes, with which he never gazed at anyone direct, reminded one of those of a dead fish. He was untidily dressed, his waistcoat was stained with snuff and, as usual, he was snivelling from the cold in the head that never left him.

  He had been a Terrorist on the grand scale. As the conven­tion's Commissioner in Nevers he had sacked all the churches and cowed the citizens by his murderous ferocity. In Lyons he had had hundreds of Liberals lined up—men, women and children—turned a battery of cannon on them and mowed them down with grape shot. When the reaction came he had been lucky to escape with only banishment from Paris, and nobody had ever expected to hear of him again. But, after for a while scraping a living breeding pigs, he had somehow managed to make money as an Army contractor then, by intrigue and blackmail, miraculously emerged as a high official of the corrupt Directory. Owing to his unscrupulousncss. cold, calculating mind and immense capacity for work, he had now become, after Bonaparte, the most power­ful man in France. With him was his dowdy, pathetically ugly wife to whom he had always been completely faithful.

  While respecting Fouche for his great ability. Roger regarded him with distrust and dislike but. as the principal enforcer of law and order, he was now on the side of the angels; so for a while they talked amicably together.He was rescued from this unprepossessing couple by Duroc and Hortense de Beauharnais, who had been dancing together. The former, a puritanical but charming man, had ' been Bonaparte's A.D.C.-in-Chief, and was one of Roger's closest friends. Now, after greeting him with delight, Duroc told him that he had just been given a new appointment as Controller of the Palace. From Hortense's starry-eyed expres­sion as she gazed at the handsome Duroc, Roger guessed her to be madly in love with him; but he did not appear to be particularly interested in her and, pleading duty as an excuse, soon left her with Roger.

  After dancing with her and returning her to her mother Roger caught sight of Talleyrand. Immaculate as ever, his hair powdered just as it would have been had his hostess been Queen Marie Antoinette instead of Josephine Bona­parte, he was limping gracefully away from the ballroom. Catching him up, Roger thanked him for having broken the news of his return to Bonaparte.

  The ci'devant Bishop smiled, 'Think nothing of it, cher ami. You are too useful a man for him to have vented his displeasure on for long. I did no more than prevent him from cutting off his nose to spite his face by depriving himself of your services for a few months.'

  An hour or so later Roger left the Palace having enjoyed a thoroughly happy evening, and entirely content with the future that he had chosen for himself.

  Next morning he found Fauvelet de Bourrienne installed in his new office in the Tuileries—now rechristened 'The Palace of the Government'—and duly reported to him. De Bourri­enne was the same age as Bonaparte and had been one of his few friends when they had been students together at the Military College at Brienne. Later he had entered the diplo­matic service and during the early days of the revolution had been en poste in Germany. On the mounting of the Terror he had been recalled but, realizing that as an aristocrat a return to Paris meant for him the guillotine, he had wisely remained in voluntary exile. Then, after Bonaparte's victorious cam­paign in Italy, the General had written to him and invited him to become his Chef-de-Cabinet, De Bourrienne had accepted and neither had since had cause to regret this arrangement. Bonaparte found Bourrienne's swift grasp of affairs invaluable, Bourrienne delighted in enjoying the great man's complete confidence, and their intimacy was now such that he could go in and talk to the General even when he had just retired to bed with his wife.

  It was towards the end of the Italian campaign that, owing to his having recently returned from Egypt and India. Roger had first attracted Bonaparte's special notice, for he was already dreaming of becoming another Alexander and making himself the Emperor of the East. These countries held such a fascination for him that, while an armistice with Austria was being negotiated, he had spent many evenings conversing with Roger about them. As a result, he had dis­covered that, unlike his other A.D.Cs, Roger was not only a beau sabreur, but also a well-educated young man with an extensive knowledge of international affairs. In consequence, as for the time being there was no fighting to be done, he had made him Bourrienne's assistant.

  Roger resumed this work with interest and enthusiasm. It now consisted of drafting reports on the suitability of individuals for new civil appointments and making precis from a mass of information on the matters in which the First Consul was interesting himself, and they were innumerable.

  There was the question of religion. In '97, when Bonaparte had overrun middle Italy, the Directory had ordered him to depose the Pope. Realizing that, regardless of the official enforcement of atheism since '93, the great majority of the French people were still believers in Christianity, he had been shrewd enough to avoid the act which would have per­manently damaged his popularity, ignored the order and, instead, only extracted from His Holiness a huge indemnity. Now, appreciating t
hat religion was a discipline of value in maintaining a stable government, he initiated measures to protect from further persecution such Roman Catholic priests as still remained in France, decreed that those willing to subscribe to the National Church should no longer be required to take an oath to the Constitution, but only give a promise of fidelity to it; and, having reclaimed a number of churches in Paris that were being used as dance halls and gaming hells, permitted again in them the public celebration of the Mass.

  Another matter in which he showed concern was the situa­tion of the emigres. Since the fall of Robespierre some three hundred thousand ci-devant nobles and others had secretly returned to France, but under the laws of the Convention they were still liable to arrest. Now they were to be given security of tenure and. although he did not yet feel himself strong enough to defy the Jacobins and permit the return of the exiles still abroad, he passed a law that there should be no further proscriptions.

  In order to reunite further the two factions that had torn France apart he was anxious to put an end to the insurrec­tions in La Vendee. In '94 he had himself been nominated for this task; but again, foreseeing that the shedding of French blood would harm his future popularity, he had skilfully evaded being sent to Brittany. In January, favouring the methods of Generals Hoch and D'Hedouville, both of whom had in the past used conciliation to bring about temporary cessations of hostilities, he had sent General Brune to open negotiations with the rebels. The Count d'Artois had promised to support them by landing from England with a " Royalist Army but, on his failing to do so. a village priest named Bernier had offered himself as a negotiator and, spite of the violent protests of the fiery insurgent leaders, had persuaded the others to agree a pacification.