The wanton princess rb-8

by Dennis Wheatley

  'It will not get out, unless you let it; for she travelled under a false name. You have but to endorse the statement she has already agreed to—that she spent seven weeks in a convent hearing Masses for the repose of her husband's soul. No one has cause to suspect she spent her time otherwise, and did some scribbler ferret out the truth he'd never dare publish it.’

  'My sister, running round France under a false name with a man like yourself. What a way to behave!'

  'Since she was determined to preserve her incognito, what else could she do? Had she travelled in your coach with a full escort she would have been harrowed by having to listen to addresses of condolence from the Mayors of every town through which she passed. On the other hand, had she not taken me with her she would have been pestered day and night by the unwelcome attentions of a score of gallants.'

  'True! True! But she should at least have taken a chaperone. A month ago I ordered Savary to use his police to locate her. What a story would have been made of it had they come upon the two of you unchaperoned.'

  'Where was she to find a chaperone, pray, at short notice in Bordeaux? I mean one who, entrusted with such an honour, would not have been so puffed up by her appoint­ment as to blab about it to all and sundry?'

  'You are so glib of tongue, Breuc, that you have an answer for everything. But I regard your conduct as most reprehen­sible.'

  'Then, First Consul, you do me a great injustice. You charged me with the care of Madame Leclerc, but you gave me no order that I should bring her direct to Paris. Your actual words to me were, "Do all you can to bring the smiles back to those bright eyes of hers". Well, I have done it.'

  'That, at least, I am glad to hear,' Napoleon grudgingly admitted.

  'Indeed, our tour of the ancient cities in the south worked wonders. Knowing something of their history I was not badly qualified to be her guide. She showed the greatest interest in many places that we visited, particularly in the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre at Nimes.'

  'Ruins!' Napoleon gave a harsh laugh. 'Pauline has never cared a fig for ruins! The sight of them wrought no change in her. I'll vow. 'Twas yourself and your sleeping with her.'

  Drawing himself up, Roger cried, 'First Consul, I protest 1 You have no right so to malign Madame Leclerc'

  'Nonsense, man! I know Pauline better than you will ever do, however many times you've tossed her between the sheets. She gave horns to Leclerc before they had been married three months, and during his absence on the Rhine I had to post a dozen officers to the provinces to prevent her scandalous affaires with them becoming the talk of Paris.'

  Roger was furious. Being in love with Pauline and having witnessed her terrible distress at Leclerc's death, he had gradually formed the belief that the tales of her immorality were untrue, and that she had done no more than flirt with her many admirers. Seething with anger, he snapped:

  'Were you not who you are I would call you out for that. You should be ashamed to believe such slanders about your sister.'

  With one of his amazing changes of mood, Napoleon sud­denly laughed, then pulled Roger's ear, 'My poor Breuc, you have completely given yourself away. No man issues a chal­lenge in defence of a woman's honour unless he is in love with her. For that I cannot blame you. She is so dazzling a creature that many times when she has entered a room a sudden silence has fallen and I've heard a dozen men catch their breath. But she is as licentious as she is beautiful, and if you did not seduce her I'd stake my life that she seduced you. I'll not now insist that you admit it; but I'll have to send you to the provinces.'

  Relieved as Roger was to have got through his ordeal, his heart sank, and he said, 'Mon General, as Madame Leclcrc has gone to live with her brother Joseph and his wife, we will have no opportunity to see one another except in public, and as no one but yourself knows of the journey we made together no scandal will link our names. It is above fourteen months since I had the honour to serve on your personal staff, and see something of Paris. Can you not possibly find some use for me that will allow me to remain here?'

  Napoleon, his big head bowed, took a few paces up and down before replying, 'Perhaps, yes. Now I think on it I may need you in a few months' time. The accursed English are playing me up most damnably. They have agreed to evacuate the Cape and Egypt, but most dishonourably refuse to carry out the terms of the Treaty by which our territories in India were to be restored to us, and they remain adamant about Malta. Not content with that, they continue to slander mc in their journals; yes, even to the vile extent of asserting that I seduced my step-daughter Hortense then, having got her with child, quickly married her off to my brother Louis.'

  'How infamous!' Roger exclaimed with genuine indigna­tion, for he felt convinced that there was not an atom of truth in such an accusation.

  'Yes. What minds they must have! But in that, at least, I proved them to be liars. I had a poet write some verses praising Hortense's dancing, then gave a ball at Malmaison. There, to her great annoyance, and much as I dislike the sight of pregnant women, I made her do a few pirouettes in front of me. She was then seven months gone and her state plain for all to sec. As she had been married to Louis for over nine months that made it as clear as crystal to everyone that she could not have conceived by me before her marriage.'

  For a moment he was silent, then changed the subject, 'But about yourself. Although I wish the peace to continue and am being very patient with the English, their attitude is so unfriendly that I can only regard the present state of things as a short armistice. I am convinced, too, that to make war upon them again would be ultimately to our advantage. Therefore I am already preparing to resume hostilities. When the peace was made I allowed our activities on the coast to be slowed down, but recently I've given orders that they are to be increased. You can report to Berthier and take up again with him your previous role as my liaison officer in all matters concerning the invasion of England.'

  Having expressed his gratitude Roger withdrew, marvelling now at the narrowness of his escape. After he and Pauline had left Arcachon no one could have had any idea whether they had gone north, south or east and France had many cities, but as Savary's police had been on the lookout for them during the past month, they were lucky not to have been identified as Captain and Madame Printemps in one of the towns where they had passed a night on their way up from St. Maxime to Paris. Still luckier, he felt, was the fact that Savary had replaced the astute Fouche as Chief of Police; for the latter, with his unerring instinct for assessing possibilities, would have sent one of his agents straight to St. Maxime, and God alone knew what would have happened when the First Consul learned that his A.D.C. had taken his sister there to live openly as Madame Breuc.

  As Roger descended the grand staircase he saw Duroc coming up. After Duroc's mission to Russia he had been transferred as Ambassador to Prussia and was still in Berlin when, some fifteen months earlier, Roger left Paris to go secretly to England. Since then Roger had spent only two days in the capital early in December, during which they had not chanced to run into one another; so this was the first time they had met since they had come face to face in St, Peters­burg.

  As old friends they exchanged hearty greetings and swapped news of their more recent doings. Duroc, it tran­spired, was no longer being used as a diplomat and for over a year past had re-occupied his old post as Comptroller of the Palace. After they had talked for some minutes he said;

  'You know, Breuc, I would have taken an oath that I saw you in St. Petersburg at a reception given by the new Czar. Those blue eyes, straight nose and firm chin of yours seemed to me unmistakable. The man I took for you turned out to be an Englishman who spoke the most atrocious French; but the two of you were as alike as two peas.'

  Roger laughed, 'Yes, Talleyrand told me that you had written to him about the encounter. But at that time I was at my chateau in the south of France, and a week later here in Paris. There's no great mystery to the matter though. It was my Scottish cousin, Robert McElfic, now Lord Kildonan, whom you me
t. We are much of an age and when young were often taken for twins.'

  After another few minutes of lively talk, they agreed on an evening to dine together and parted. As Roger made his way back to La Belle Etoile, he again had good reason to thank his stars that, when Count Muriavieff had introduced Duroc to him, he had addressed him only as 'Monsieur' and omitted to mention his name.

  When Roger reported to Berthier next morning they natu­rally discussed the worsening of Anglo-French relations, and the ugly little Chief-of-Staff was of the opinion that if the First Consul really wanted to keep the peace he was going the wrong way about it. In the autumn he had sent a Colonel Sabastiani on a tour to Algiers, Egypt, Syria and the Ionian Isles. The Colonel had returned to France late in January and, to everyone's amazement, the First Consul had ordered his report to be printed in Le Moniteur on the 30th.

  It had been undisguisedly an intelligence appreciation of France's prospects in the Mediterranean and Near East should she again go to war with Britain. The report described the British Army in Egypt as being in a very poor state and that of the Turks as beyond contempt, so that an army of six thousand French should have little difficulty in re-conquering the country. It barely disguised the fact that Sabastiani had gone there for the purpose of contacting Ibrahim Bey and inducing him to lead his Mamelukes in a revolt against the English. It also stated that the people of Corfu would declare themselves for France immediately they received French support.

  Naturally the English had been greatly incensed and now flatly declined even to discuss withdrawing their troops from Malta. They had gone further and brought a measure before Parliament for an increase in the armed forces. But the Government was weak, with Pitt still in retirement and Grenville and Dundas now in opposition. Fox, too, had attacked the measure furiously in one of his great orations and this violent dissension in Parliament had led Napoleon to believe that Britain had become so impotent that he could ignore any protests she might make about his doing what he liked on the Continent.

  So confident was he of this that on February 18th he had had a violent scene with the British Ambassador, Lord Whitworth, using the old trick of carrying the war into the enemy's camp by declaring that Britain had been guilty of the basest perfidy, while he was doing no more than assist countries adjacent to France in maintaining stable govern­ments.

  His assistance to the Swiss had consisted in sending in his two German-speaking Generals, Ney and Rapp, with an army at their backs to make known his wishes about Swit­zerland and to insist on the Valais being handed over to France. This also had led to heated protests by the British, but he had brushed them contemptuously aside and declared his intention of becoming the sole arbitrator between the Federals and the Unionists who had long been disputing the way in which Switzerland should be governed.

  Roger was sufficiently broadminded to appreciate that there were faults on both sides. The British had failed to honour numerous clauses in the miserable treaty they had signed, while Napoleon had ignored the limitations it had set to the aggrandisement of France on the Continent; so there was justification for the re-opening of hostilities by either. Berthier's view was that, recognizing the immense power now at the disposal of France, the British would accede to the First Consul's demands without a fight. But .Roger was not so certain. Although the weakness of Addington's govern­ment was deplorable and the nation evidently divided, he knew the streak of obstinacy in his countrymen that had led to their defying the might of Spain and wresting the control of the seas from the Dutch; so that if pressed too far they might yet sink their differences and, weak though they were by comparison, again challenge France.

  Among Berthier's activities, Roger learned, was the sending over to Britain of Consuls and Vice-Consuls who were in fact military engineers with orders to make plans of the harbours and coasts; but there was nothing he could do about that.

  For the moment he was much more concerned with his private affairs. His eight weeks with Pauline, far from having decreased their desire for one another, had made its satisfac­tion nearly a necessity. After their first hectic weeks together there had naturally followed a decline in their amorous propensities. But it had not lasted. There had followed a more temperate intimacy that had soon become a habit to which they both looked forward with unflagging delight. Both of them were highly experienced in the art of love and physically each was the perfect counterpart of the other. Pauline had declared frankly that never in a life-time would she find a lover who satisfied her more fully, while Roger remained entranced by the perfection of her beauty and thought himself the luckiest man in the world every time he took her.

  Now she was living in Joseph's new house, the splendid Hotel Marbeuf in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore, and it was impossible for them to continue spending their nights together but, fortunately, they had the willing Aimee as a go-between; so on every afternoon that Pauline had no commitment she changed into clothes belonging to her maid, slipped out from the garden door of her brother's house and came to La Belle Etoile, there to make love with Roger in his bedroom.

  Hating her black garments as she did, they served as an excuse for her to refuse to participate in her sister-in-law Julie's charitable or social activities; but there were after­noons when a visit from her mother, or an old friend such as Laure Permon, now the wife of General Junot, prevented her from leaving the house, so that Roger waited for her at La Belle Etoile in vain. And there were others when she arrived at the inn to find that he had not been able to keep their rendezvous owing to some call of duty. Thus, to their intense annoyance, their plans to be together were quite frequently frustrated.

  Meanwhile, Roger had been back in Paris for ten days before he had a chance to talk alone with his old friend Talleyrand. He found the Foreign Minister far from happy about the way things were going. Talleyrand agreed that, if driven too far, the English would again resort to war; and, in spite of all his endeavours, France's relations with Russia had steadily deteriorated. Napoleon had refused to compen­sate the King of Sardinia for the loss of his kingdom of Piedmont by more than offering him the small territory of Siena, or a slice of Greece, should France and Russia con­tinue to dismember the Turkish Empire. The Czar, as a fervent upholder of the rights of hereditary monarchs, had been greatly incensed by this and once again it looked as though armies might clash and thousands of soldiers die on account of the claims of King Victor Emanuel. Roger con­sidered such a cause for going to war utterly unreasonable, but consoled himself with the thought that in this case it would at least lead to Russia becoming the ally of England.

  Another matter that had given Talleyrand grave concern was the French claim to Louisiana. The previous autumn Napoleon had organized an expedition which, under General Victor, was to cross the Atlantic and take over this territory from the Spaniards. The plan had been for it to be sent out on the pretext that it was a reinforcement for General Leclerc in San Domingo. But two factors had led to its sailing orders being postponed. Firstly, the French forces in San Domingo had been reduced by casualties and yellow fever from twenty thousand to two thousand effectives and these appalling losses had caused Napoleon to hesitate to send more troops to a country in which they would be exposed to the same disease. Secondly, the ex-British Colonists in the northern states of America had declared that they would oppose any nation that claimed suzerainty of the territories that lay to the south of those of the Union.

  Jefferson had instructed Monroe, the Ambassador of the States in Paris, to make a deal if he could. Talleyrand had foreseen that to refuse it would be to throw the new Power, with its considerable number of warships, into the arms of the British, whereas a reasonable settlement with the Americans could make them the ally of France. In consequence, he had wisely negotiated a treaty with them by which France ceded her rights to Louisiana for a payment of fifty million dollars.

  As March advanced, relations between Britain and France grew still more strained. On the 13th there occurred a most unseemly scene during a re
ception at the Tuileries, of which Roger was a witness. In front of the assembled Ambassadors Napoleon, without warning, violently attacked Lord Whitworth.

  'It is you,' he rasped, 'who are determined to make war upon us. If, for the sake of preserving peace, I should yield on a single point, the English would become more treacher­ous and insolent. Were we to yield now, England would next prohibit our navigation in certain parts of the world, and I am not the man to brook such indignities. Your government wishes to drive me to war, but France will lose nothing by it. In a very short time I can have two million men at my disposal. You will be the first to draw the sword; I shall be the last to sheath it. Woe to those who show no respect for treaties.'

  Lord Whitworth was a cold, hard man and an aristocrat who had difficulty in concealing his dislike for the upstart Corsican. Later he told his friends, 'The fellow is beyond the pale. Before the assembled Corps Diplomatique he abused me in the language of the barrack square. From the glare in his eyes I thought he was about to hit me. Had he done so I would have knocked him down without regard to the conse­quences.' As it was, with true British phlegm he had merely raised his eyebrows, turned on his heel and walked quietly from the room.

  His report of the episode to the British government led, after considerable hesitation, to their sending him orders on April 23rd that, if Napoleon continued to refuse to satisfy their requirements about Switzerland and on other matters, the Ambassador was to demand his passports.

  On May 11th a conference was held at St. Cloud. The three Consuls, Talleyrand, Joseph Bonaparte, the Secretary of State, Maret and numerous other dignitaries were present. Roger, with several other A.D.C.s and secretaries, was in attendance and later learned what had taken place. Joseph had pleaded hard that his Peace of Amiens should be kept and Talleyrand had supported him. The others, fearing to displease the First Consul, cautiously hedged when giving their opinions.

  Napoleon admitted that he had not wanted to engage the English again until the autumn of the following year, by which time his ship-building programme should ensure France a fleet of equal power to that of the British. But he declared that he would not give way over Switzerland or Malta, and that if the English wanted war they should have it. When a vote was taken all but Joseph and Talleyrand voted for the rejection of the British demands.