The wanton princess rb-8

by Dennis Wheatley

  To Roger the implication was clear. Fouche suspected that his long sojourns on sick leave in the south of France might be, as indeed they often had been, cover for secret trips to England. But he had his answer ready, and said smoothly:

  'I am most fortunate in being here to receive you, for had you looked in to see me above ten days ago you would have found me absent—as you have no doubt already informed yourself by enquiries made of my servants or in the vill­age.’

  Fouché held up a long, bony hand in protest. lMon cher Colonel, how can you think that I would seek to ferret out particulars of the doings of my friends?'

  'Yet I came upon you going through my papers,' Roger replied a trifle tartly.

  'Oh, that!' Fouche waved the matter aside then smoothed down his long, grey frock coat. 'Alas, I have never been able to acquire the habit of idleness that our friend Talleyrand is so fortunate in possessing. Your man said you were to be expected back shortly and showed me in here. Such journals as I found on the table were hopelessly out of date, and I had to employ my accursedly active mind in some way, so it occurred to me to look through your desk.'

  A cynical little smile twisted Roger's lips, 'I suppose such a manner of passing the time must be second nature to a Police Chief. But I fear you were unfortunate if you hoped to come upon any secrets.'

  'No, no. You wrong me. I had no such thought. But I have always been fascinated by the way others live, and how much their households cost them. I did no more than look through your bills.'

  Confident that Fouche could have come upon nothing that could injure him, Roger said, 'But I forget myself. You must be in sad need of a glass of wine and I trust you will stay to dinner.'

  'You are most kind. I might even stay here overnight if that would not be trespassing too greatly on your hospitality; for I should much like the opportunity of discussing various matters with you at some length.'

  'About that there will be no difficulty. Indeed, I am honoured to have Monsieur le Ministre as my guest.'

  Fouche bowed, 'I thank you; but there is one—er—small point upon which I must put you right. The First Consul has recently dispensed with my services. I am no longer Minister of Police.'

  'You astound me,' Roger replied, raising his eyebrows. 'Have you then quarrelled with Bonaparte?'

  'No, no; I would not say that,' Fouché replied, looking away and blowing his nose. 'It is only that he thinks that he can now do without me. He is, of course, mistaken—that is, if he wishes to retain both his life and his power; but let us talk of such matters later.'

  Roger left the room to order a somewhat better dinner, and a bottle of wine to be brought to the library.

  Over dinner they talked of many things, and there were few about which Fouche did not have inside information.

  Roger had been absent from France for close on a year and a few weeks after he had left for England Hortense de Beauharnais had been married to Louis Bonaparte. She had been in love with the handsome Duroc, but he had not cared for her and had refused Bonaparte's offer of her hand. Josephine, meanwhile, perpetually harassed by the hatred of her Bonaparte relations, had been seeking some way to sow dissension among them. If she could marry off her daughter to Louis Bonaparte that should detach him from his family and make him her ally. With the arts she knew so well how „ to use she had persuaded her husband that it would be a most suitable match. Hortense had been very averse to it; but her mother had overruled her protests. Louis, too, had greatly disliked the idea, but he was a weakling and had tamely submitted to his brother's orders. So on January 7th these two young people, although hating one another, had been united in wedlock.

  In January, too, the renewal of the Legislative Bodies had become due. No provision for this had been laid down in the hastily composed Constitution; so Bonaparte had decreed that the Senate should name the Tribunes and Legislators who were to go or remain. As might have been expected, no member was left in cither Assembly who had the courage to oppose him violently.

  Another innovation the First Consul had introduced was the splitting of the principal Ministries, so that their functions were divided under two equally responsible Chiefs. By this means he had cunningly deprived any single Minister of the power to thwart him and could check the activities of one Minister by the reports of another employed on more or less the same type of work. Fouche had found himself the opposite number to Savary, formerly one of Dcsaix's A.D.C.s, whom Bonaparte had found to be a useful man and had now made Chief of the Security Police. All this Fouche declared, was a clear indication of Bonaparte's intention to make himself Dictator. On May 8th another step had been taken by his succeeding in getting passed a measure that extended his First Consulship for a further ten years. Two months later he had followed that up by having a referendum put to the people, and such was his immense popularity that the voting had been only eight thousand odd against the three million five hundred thousand in favour of his becoming First Consul for life. He had at once introduced a new Constitu­tion, that he had ready in his pocket, which curtailed still further the liberties of the people who were so besotted about him, and from August 1st had decreed that henceforth he should be known as 'Napoleon'.

  Meanwhile he had forced through reform after reform, all aimed at restoring France to a monarchy in all but name. In April he had ratified the Concordat with Rome and, to celebrate it, had a spectacular Te Deum sung in Notre Dame, which he had compelled all the notables to attend. Those old die-hard Revolutionary Generals Augereau and Lannes had had to be virtually arrested and conveyed to the Cathedral under escort in a carriage. Throughout the service they had talked without restraint, using their habitual oaths. Augereau had spat on the floor and Lannes declared loudly, 'Just to think that a million Frenchmen gave their lives to get rid of all this nonsense, and now we are forced to submit to it again.'

  In an endeavour to win the allegiance of the Generals, Bonaparte had ignored the abolition during the Revolution of Orders of Chivalry and proposed to introduce a new one to be called the 'Legion of Honour'.

  This was announced in May and was to have several grades so that persons of all classes should receive the dis­tinction as a reward for their services to the State, and the highest rank of the Order was to be awarded both to the leading Generals and learned men of the Academy.

  Against considerable opposition Bonaparte had forced his project through the Senate and a great outcry from the old sans-culottes had resulted. Many of the Generals, too, had declared it contrary to the principles of the Revolu­tion.

  Lafayette, whom Bonaparte had compelled the Austrians to give up after having been for many years a prisoner of war, flatly refused to accept the new honour. Moreau, revolt­ing at this desecration of Revolutionary ideology, declared that he would hang the Cross of the Order he had been awarded to the collar of his dog.

  Fouché went on to say that, having crushed the Jacobins; Bonaparte had found a new threat to his ambitions in many of the Generals and the rank and file of the Army, which was still strongly Republican. Augereau. Brune, St. Cyr, Jourdan, Lannes, Oudinot, Macdonald, Massena, Moreau and Bernadotte all intensely resented his assumption of virtually monarchical powers.

  They had actually conspired against him and introduced a proposal to the Senate that his power should be curtailed by dividing France into a number of Military Governments. Bonaparte, of all people, had promptly assumed the role of the defender of the 'Liberties of the People' and, declaring Military Governments to be a most tyrannical form of rule, had the measure thrown out.

  Bernadotte, who positively hated him, had then had his Chief of Staff, General Simon, despatch in secret thousands of pamphlets for distribution among the troops, that began,

  'Soldiers! You no longer have a country; the Republic has ceased to exist. A tyrant has seized upon power; and that tyrant is Bonaparte'

  Fouché had, of course, known all about this and had Simon and a number of officers arrested. Bonaparte had again shown extreme astuteness. Instead of
ordering a purge that might have set half the army by the cars, he had had the arrested officers released without trial; one by one, quietly, got the recalcitrant Generals out of France to distant com­mands where they could do him no harm, and despatched all the most revolutionary-minded regiments on an expedition to San Domingo.

  This, the largest island in the West Indies, had been a source of enormous wealth to France in the days of the Monarchy but, early in the Revolution, fiery agitators had been despatched there to preach the doctrine of equality, with the result that the slaves had risen and massacred thousands of the white population.

  Out of this imbroglio a Negro General named Toussaint L’Ouverturc had arisen. He was a man of remarkable gifts and had succeeded in restoring a state approaching order in the island. In May 1801, following Bonaparte's example, he had given San Domingo a Constitution and appointed himself Governor for life. He had then written to the First Consul requesting that France should take the island under her pro­tection and defend it from the English. As at that time Bonaparte was already putting out peace feelers towards Britain he acted with extreme duplicity. Replying to Tous­saint in the most flattering terms, he said that he would send an army to protect San Domingo, while his real intention was to reconquer it.

  The expedition had sailed the previous December under the command of Pauline's husband, General Leclerc. Fouché, who rarely laughed, sniggered into his handkerchief as he told Roger of Pauline's fury when her brother had ordered her to accompany her husband. She adored the gaieties of Paris, visualized life in the West Indies as exile among savages, and believed it to be a plot hatched by her enemy, Josephine, to get her out of the way. But Bonaparte had proved adamant, so she had had to pack her many dresses and Paris had lost the most beautiful of all her beautiful girls.

  In May Bonaparte had shown his complete contempt for the doctrine that 'All men are equal' by a decree that slavery should be re-introduced in San Domingo. In June the unlucky Toussaint had been lured aboard a French ship, treacherously arrested and sent back to France as a prisoner.

  In European affairs the First Consul had been equally active. Having drafted a new Constitution for the Cisalpine

  Republic, early in the year he had summoned four hundred and fifty representatives from it to meet him in Lyons and there settle which of them should be appointed to the most important offices. Count Melzi was proposed for President and, as he was both the most important person in Lombardy and strongly pro-French, the Deputies naturally expected that this choice would please their overlord. To their surprise he had angrily refused to sanction the appointment. Thereupon, before the next session of the conference, Talleyrand had dropped a hint to a few of the right people that the First Consul was very hurt that no one had thought of proposing him for this honour. In consequence, next day he had been elected unanimously and with acclaim, President of the Republic, now to be styled that of Italy.

  In the summer, the British having withdrawn from Elba, he had promptly put a French garrison on the island, with the excuse that France was the Protecting Power of Italy. He had then annexed Piedmont and the Duchy of Parma.

  During the autumn he had busied himself mightily in negotiations for the redistribution of the German territories to various petty Princes who had been dispossessed during the war. And here he had been able to offset the annoyance of the Czar about his annexation of Piedmont and Parma by favouring several Princes who were relatives of Alexander's through his German wife and mother.

  He had, however, run into trouble over Switzerland. Although the independence of that country was supposed to be restored by the provisions of the Peace, he had demanded of the Swiss the cession of the Valais so that he could carry out one of his pet schemes; the building of a military road across the Simplon Pass. The Swiss had refused him the Canton and the English were encouraging them to stand firm.

  In fact, from Bonaparte's point of view the English were behaving altogether badly. They were seeking to wriggle out of numerous clauses in the Peace Treaty they had signed because, they now declared, they had been tricked over them. They had refused to restore Pondichcrry, the sphere of French influence in India, and were delaying the withdrawal of their garrisons from both the Cape and Malta on the pretext that Bonaparte had broken his word by interfering in the affairs of Switzerland.

  Roger knew well enough that Cornwallis had been made a complete fool of at Amiens but, however idiotic the conces­sions made there, it seemed that, affairs in Switzerland apart, the British Government had ample grounds for the attitude they were taking as retaliation for Bonaparte's seizure of Elba, Piedmont and Parma. But Fouche, his long bony fingers picking at a bunch of grapes, was going on:

  'So there, mon cher Colonel, matters rest at the moment. It has been another wonderful year for France and 'tis my opinion that "Napoleon" will go even further than has "Bonaparte". But now that I have put you au courant with great affairs, pray tell me about yourself, and how you have spent these past many months?'

  Roger was ready for the question and replied quietly, 'I spent a good part of them in prison.'

  'Prison!' Fouche exclaimed, his fish-like eyes for once meeting Roger's. 'You astound me. What can possibly have so bemused your mind that you failed to call on my good offices? Whatever you had done, I would have found a pretext to get you out.'

  'I thank you for your good intent,' Roger smiled, 'but it was beyond even your powers to do so, for 'twas in England that I was in gaol. On the signing of the peace I decided that I would go over there and visit some of my less unpleasant relatives.’

  Fouché nodded his long, thin, skull-like head, 'I recall now that you long since quarrelled bitterly with your immediate family. But what was the trouble in which you landed your­self?'

  'A duel was forced upon me, and in regard to such affairs the attitude of the English is still barbarous. Here in France, from time to time, the monarchs issued Edicts forbidding duelling, but they were sufficiently civilized to appreciate that there are occasions on which a man has no alternative but to defend his honour. Provided the accepted code of duelling was observed, no serious action was ever taken. The treat­ment I received in the country of my forebears made me more than ever disgusted with it; so as soon as I was freed I returned to France.' 'And what do you plan to do now?'

  'Remain here, I think, at least for some months. Now that France is at peace Bonaparte, or Napoleon as we must now call him, can have little use for me. And I'm told that Paris swarms with Englishmen. So incensed am I about their having imprisoned me, did I get into an argument with one of them I'd like as not have another duel on my hands.'

  With a shrug of his lean shoulders Fouche remarked, ' 'Tis true that throughout the summer and autumn there were thousands of them in Paris, but now the winter has come all but a few are gone home. As for remaining here, this is a charming retreat you have but, if you would permit me to advise, I would advocate your return to Paris.'

  'Why so?' Roger asked.

  'Upon two counts. With Peace France is prospering as never before, so 'tis my view that everything possible should be done to maintain this happy state of things. But there is a grave danger that it will not last. Napoleon is so disgusted with the English that he is already contemplating again making war on them. Should he do so, now that Italy is completely ours and we have naught to fear from Austria, Prussia or Russia, 'tis certain that he will revive his long-cherished plan for invading England. I am of the opinion that such a venture would prove a great disaster. You are one of the few people who might persuade him of that, and so stay his hand.'

  'He may well refuse to give me back my place,' Roger demurred. ‘I should have reported to him again last Spring, or at least have asked his leave before proceeding to England. My failure to do so may have angered him exceedingly and cost me his good will.'

  Fouche shook his narrow head, 'Nay. He has ever a soft spot for his old friends and will forgive them much. In spite of your long, unauthorized absence I feel confident that h
e will take you back into his good graces. Then, if you regained his ear, your knowledge of England and the dangers involved in a cross-Channel expedition might prove the fly on the chariot wheel.'

  Putting his bloodless lips to his glass Fouché drank a little wine, then went on, 'The other side of the picture is that, should his ambition overrule sane judgment, you would again be one of his immediate entourage and so be in a position to promote the career that you told me, upon our settling our old differences, you meant to make for yourself in France.'

  For a moment Roger studied the lean, corpse-like man seated opposite him. He could see no trap in the advice offered and recalled Fouché's having once said to him that his policy was, whenever possible, to have friends rather than enemies. It could, therefore, be assumed that his present object was to induce Roger to return to Paris for their mutual good, in the belief that Roger would himself benefit and, at the same time, prove a friend for him near Napoleon.

  'I thank you,' he replied gravely. 'I agree that everything possible should be done to preserve the peace. Should I decide to go to Paris, my reception by Napoleon would depend much on the mood in which he happened to be, but were it good I'd not forget the generous interest that you have shown in my affairs. I'll think the matter over and let you know my decision tomorrow morning.'

  That night both his sense of duty and his inclination prompted him to take Fouche's advice. However bad the bargain Britain might have made at Amiens, there was no reason whatever to suppose that, should the war be renewed, she would get a better one a year or two hence; in fact, since she had no single ally left on die Continent, it might prove very much worse. Talleyrand, Roger felt sure, would do everything possible to hold Napoleon back, and some occasion might arise in which he could be of help in that. It would mean denying himself the winter sunshine, the azure skies, the mimosa and carnations, the oranges and tangerines of the South of France, that he had been looking forward to in January and February; but little Jeanne Meuralt was no longer there to give him her companionship, along that part of the coast there was no society and the longer he remained outside Napoleon's orbit the less chance he would have of regaining his old position as a confidant of secrets that might change the destinies of nations.