Mme Aurore rationed out the grain alcohol by the cup, the half cup, the quarter cup. They had to moisten their lips; at least the fumes allowed them to forget their plight or to distort it. Was it day? Was it night? A charcoal sky blocked out the rays of the sun and moon alike; only the restless orange light of the fire shone through the rose window, rearranging the shadows on the walls and wrought-silver icons. The candles had gone out. The actors were subsisting in a sallow half-light, drained of all their strength, lying on the ground. Curled up in a ball, hugging her knees to her chest, Ornella stared at the relief portrait of a heavily bearded saint; his face stood out against a background of precious stones; he had almond-shaped eyes, a stern expression. She thought she could see his lips moving, as if he was going to say something to her, a prayer, and then step out of his frame and take her away. The hallucinations were starting. She thought she was in hell. The ribs of the vault swayed like branches; the pillars rose like stacks of tree trunks. She caught sight of a black giant in a pale bearskin hat and a gilded coat with epaulettes that made him seem even broader-shouldered. The demon came closer, and closer, and picked her up without her reacting and carried her out, his heavy, resolute footsteps echoing down the nave. His name was Othello, this tall Negro who Murat had brought back from Egypt and taken into his service as a groom. In a landscape of embers and ashes, the King of Naples sat his horse on the smoke-filled square, a fine-looking figure with his long, curly hair under a plumed Polish hat, his green coat fringed with silver, the tiger skin under his seat and his yellow boots. The velites of his guard surrounded him.
Three
THE RUINS
‘In society, it is reason that gives way first. The most sensible people are often swayed by the most foolish and eccentric personage: they study his weaknesses, his temper, his whims, and accommodate themselves to them; they avoid thwarting him and everybody gives him his way; if his countenance shows any sign of serenity, he is heartily praised; he is given credit for not always being insufferable. He is feared, considered, obeyed and sometimes beloved.’
La Bruyère, The Characters
ON THE THIRD DAY, heavy rainfall checked the fire without dousing it completely; pockets sprang up again under the rubble. The Emperor often went up onto the terrace of the Petrovsky Palace, a hand under his waistcoat, clamped to his painful stomach. He meditated, staring at the devastation. He had abandoned the idea of throwing his army on St Petersburg, over three hundred leagues of bad road in the middle of marshes, which a handful of peasants could render impassable.
As soon as he was able, Sebastian attached himself to the Emperor’s immediate entourage. He had changed: the fire had made him more egotistical. In a catastrophe, everyone looks out for themselves; his death would not have affected anybody – even Baron Fain, whom he’d thought of as his protector, would have left him to cook in Moscow. He had no friends. The other clerks? Too silly, too ignorant. Monsieur Beyle? He hardly knew him, but what a wonderful idea, evoking classical history amidst a scene of modern desolation. In an age when death seemed the rule, people were easily moved to tears; an academic lecture, a counsel’s plea reduced the most hardened listeners to sobbing wrecks; Napoleon himself admitted to crying while reading The Trials of Sentiment by the bombastic Baculard d’Arnaud. Bucking fashion, Sebastian resolved to remain dry-eyed. He swore there would be no more reaching for his handkerchief while leafing through The New Héloïse; instead he would remain true to Rousseau’s disillusioned side: ‘I go with secret horror into the vast desert of the world …’
From then on, Sebastian cultivated a fabricated zeal. He wanted His Majesty to notice him – him, the scribbler, the valet who blended into the furniture. I lack substance, do I? he thought to himself. Well, let’s turn that to my advantage. With cold dedication, he applied himself to mastering the courtier’s profession, from which he hoped to acquire a more elevated position, an income, and even a title, an estate, his own box at the principal Parisian theatres – in other words, security and the kind of love that gold and fame arouse in young women.
On occasion Sebastian left the palace. Since the downpour, the encampments on the plain were awash with mud and he always returned begrimed, but it gave him a chance to see d’Herbigny again, his neighbour from Normandy. Following army practice, the effects of missing soldiers were put up for auction for the benefit of their wives and children, or their regiment if they were unmarried, and not having been paid yet, the soldiers indulged in the most anarchic forms of bartering. On one of Sebastian’s visits, d’Herbigny was auctioning off the belongings Sergeant Martinon had strapped to his horse: nothing really, a tobacco pouch made out of a pig’s bladder, a hatchet for chicken, a grain sack which he’d used instead of a hooded greatcoat when in bivouac.
‘And a tinplate mess kettle!’ the captain announced, waving the object. ‘Any takers for this nearly new mess kettle?’
‘All right,’ said a pudgy fellow in a blue suit.
‘A barrel of beer?’
‘It’s not worth that much. A sack of peas – for the lot.’
The bidding did not go higher. It seemed a fair enough trade, and the buyer went off to fetch his side of the bargain.
‘Who is that?’ Sebastian asked the captain.
‘Don’t you know Poissonnard? He’s an old fox who’s getting rich out of all this.’
‘How’s that?’
‘He hoards things, sells them on – he’s well placed for it, the sly dog!’
Poissonnard worked in the provisioning section of the general administration; he was one of six comptrollers in the commissariat service in charge of meats, and never hesitated to take advantage of his position. When shops near the Kremlin were going up in flames, he had pulled out sacks of rye, nuts and peas, barrels of beer and Malaga, sugar, coffee, and candles. He had taken his cut, which he was now openly hawking. Sebastian gave him one of his waistcoats for a long Russian sabre that he would take home as a souvenir and prop for invented deeds of derring-do.
He hadn’t forgotten Mme Aurore’s troupe but he dismissed Ornella’s image from his mind; he would have been upset, or anxious, he would have pined for her, and that didn’t correspond to the new role he saw himself playing at court. Although Napoleon preferred military men to civilians, Sebastian was racking his brains for ways to win him over, without thus far coming up with the slightest self-evident or reasonable idea of how to qualify for his favours.
*
Before the end of the week, the equinoctial gale had stopped rekindling the embers of the fire and it was possible to re-enter the destroyed city. Everything was black and grey in the ruins of Moscow. Black, the smoke that hung motionless overhead, the squalling ravens that hovered in dense clouds, the charred trees that stretched out their branches like arms, the broken peristyles, the brick chimneys emerging here and there like towers from the wreckage of fourteen thousand houses. Grey, the ashes covering the ground, the shattered walls, the misshapen furniture, the remnants of carts and belongings scattered through the rubble; grey, too, the wolves that had come out in packs to tear at the human and animal carcasses.
The Imperial Guard, in a clinging smell of burning, had the sinister honour of being the first to discover this inhuman landscape. The band led the way; the fifes, the drums, and the bells flourished on their handle by a tall, sad African, echoed around, like anachronisms, their music only partly drowning out wolves’ howls and birds of prey’s cries. Every ten metres a grenadier detached himself to take up a position on the road the Emperor would take to the Kremlin, which had been saved by its walls. General Saint-Sulpice rode in front of his four bizarrely-uniformed, dysentery-depleted squadrons; he bowed his head and slouched forward in the saddle, overwhelmed by fate. D’Herbigny cast a sidelong glance at his general’s black horse, a Turkish mare with its tail braided with ribbons and secured by a gold-tipped pin. Ruins didn’t make an impression on him anymore, not since the capture of Saragossa.
The infantry of the Guard was go
ing to be quartered in the citadel, but what about the others? The cavalry’s senior officers were to join Marshal Bessières, who ordered them into a wing of the Kremlin; it was up to the squadrons to fend for themselves. So d’Herbigny set off amongst the ruins with a hundred or so dragoons. They passed houses without roofs, doors, or windows; the first habitable palace had already been occupied by Captain Coti’s moustachioed chevaux-légers. They had to push on further into the livid landscape; they could spot intact buildings a long way off, their walls only blackened by smoke and their statues fused into strange blocks, a head, a marble hand, the pleats of a friable coat. The Muscovites who had gone to earth were emerging from their cellars now, darting out from between piles of fallen masonry; they were collecting twisted sheets of iron to construct shelters and scrabbling with their fingers for wilted roots in what used to be vegetable gardens. They were in rags, leaden-skinned, fearful. Groups of them kneeled, mumbling prayers at the foot of gallows spared by the fire; they devoutly kissed the dirty rags covering the incendiaries’ legs and sang hymns of an unbearable melancholy, believing that the hanged men would rise again on the third day. Other Russians dived into the river where the barges with cargoes of grain had sunk; they crawled out onto the bank on all fours, dripping and skidding in the muck as they hauled out waterlogged sacks of fermented wheat. Oh yes, thought the captain, I’d better feed my rascals as well.
At that moment the dragoons met a resupply team led by Comptroller Poissonnard. Piled on the platforms of their drays, which were drawn by old plough horses with withers as broad as oaks, were carcasses, in varying stages of disintegration, of horses, cats, jaundiced dogs, swans with tousled feathers and rotting crows.
‘Where are you going to bury that carrion, you old swindler?’ the captain called.
‘Carrion? My meat?’ bristled Poissonnard. ‘You’ll be happy enough when it’s simmering in front of you, you freebooter! Get a good fire going and the maggots’ll hold their peace.’
‘And you keep the best bits for yourself, is that it?’
‘Everything’s negotiable, Captain, everything …’
The comptroller was setting up his butcher’s shop in the Church of St Vladimir. He pointed out, in the vicinity, the Convent of the Nativity, which the flames had merely grazed; a few hundred metres on they could see its pinnacle turrets, cracked but standing, the verdigrised dome of its chapel and its surrounding wall, on which the ivy had shrivelled and its leaves turned a charcoal grey. The dragoons rode there at a slow trot. The charred gate stood open; a push and it would have come away from its casing. Inside, a rough stone well with a rusty iron coping stood in the middle of a grassy court surrounded by a vaulted arcade; under this portico with rounded pillars, a flock of nuns in brown habits were taking to their heels.
‘Bonet!’ the captain laughed. ‘You go and catch me those angels from heaven, seeing as you can’t be parted from your soutane!’
Bending his neck so as not to scrape his head on the arch, Bonet urged his mount under the gallery and grabbed one of the runaways by the sleeve. Her companions scattered, chirping, into the low rooms to reappear as clusters of faces at the barred windows. The nun who Bonet brought back to his captain had her cheeks smeared with soot to spoil her looks and keep men away, an idea of the Mother Superior’s, a sour-tempered old matron with a nose and chin that almost touched. Other dragoons had dismounted and were holding her in the courtyard; she spat scornfully on the ground, yelling incomprehensible words, cursing the strangers.
‘Chantelouve! Durtal!’ ordered d’Herbigny. ‘Draw some water from this well and wash these pretty little faces!’
It became a game, without cruelty, to catch the young nuns, pull off their veils and rub their little faces with cloths; some of them were excited by this unprecedented experience, the men could tell by their hot cheeks. The bucket made a muffled splash as it landed at the bottom of the well, but troopers Durtal and Chantelouve had trouble bringing it back up; the rope stretched to breaking point, they pulled, their faces turning purple, their boot heels digging into the grass.
‘Can’t you get that flipping bucket back up?’ shouted the captain.
‘Oh, I see,’ Trooper Durtal said, leaning over the curb stone.
D’Herbigny got off his horse and bent over. Down below, the bucket had caught on a body lying face down, a French soldier pushed down the well.
‘By the colour of his jacket, sir,’ Chantelouve declared knowledgeably, ‘that must be one of our friends from the artillery …’
*
Stretching along the Kremlin’s corridors in single file, servants in periwigs, gloves and white stockings were carrying buckets of steaming water which they spilled a little each time they shifted under their weight. They were going to refill the bathtub in which the Emperor had been steaming for over an hour, yelling that the water was never hot enough, even though Constant, who was scrubbing his back with a brush as stiff as a currycomb, was drenched in sweat, the long room was so full of steam that visibility was reduced to three paces and beads of condensation were streaming down its panelling. Doctors Yvan and Mestivier, who recommended His Majesty take hot baths to relieve his bladder problems, couldn’t understand why he wasn’t boiling alive, and they mopped their foreheads with already damp handkerchiefs that they then wrung out on the parquet floor. Berthier chose the worst moment to appear; choking, he stepped into that Egyptian hammam, wiped his gleaming face with the back of an embroidered sleeve, approached the bathtub and was immediately insulted.
‘What disaster has he come to inform us of now, this scourge of our bathing?’
The Emperor splashed the major general with a gush of hot water, soaking his impeccable uniform from top to bottom.
‘We’ve found the messenger, sire …’
‘What messenger?’
‘The man who can take your dispatch to the Tsar in person.’
‘Who?’
‘A Russian officer. He is called …’
Berthier put on his misted-up spectacles, which he rubbed with his finger to read the name scribbled on a piece of paper. ‘He is called Jakovlev. We’ve taken him out of the military hospital where he’s been lucky not to roast like so many other wounded.’
‘Where is he, your Jacob?’
‘In the column room, sire. He is waiting.’
‘Let him wait.’
‘He is a brother of one of the Tsar’s ministers at Cassel.’
‘Well, go and keep him company, then, he’ll adore your refined conversation. Is that hot water coming? Did I tell you to stop scrubbing, Monsieur Constant? Go on! Harder! Like a horse!’
The meeting with the envoy chosen by Berthier took place that evening. The Emperor smelled strongly of eau de Cologne and grumbled to himself, clasping his hands behind his back under the turnbacks of his colonel’s coat. Jakovlev got to his feet, leaning on a cane; his full moustache hid his lips; with his puce trousers and white spencer, he presented a rather curious, half-military and half-civilian appearance. Napoleon began on a conciliatory, sorrowful note before flying into a rage against Rostopchin and the English, whose baleful influence he denounced.
‘Let Alexander ask to negotiate and I will sign the treaty of peace in Moscow as I did before in Vienna and before that in Berlin. I didn’t come here to stay. I shouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been forced! The English, it is their fault! The English have dealt Russia a blow she will suffer from for a long time. Is this patriotism, these cities in flames? No – it is a maddened frenzy! And Moscow? Rostopchin’s fever has cost you more than ten battles! What is the good of this fire? I’m still in the Kremlin, aren’t I? If Alexander had said a single word I would have declared Moscow a neutral city, Ah, how I waited for that word, how I longed for it! And look what we have come to. So much bloodshed!’
‘Your Majesty,’ Jakovlev replied, sensing that the monologue was finished, ‘perhaps it would be for you, the victor, to speak of peace.’
The Emper
or reflected, walked round the room, and then returned to the Russian’s side with a bound. ‘Do you have direct access to the Tsar?’
‘Yes.’
‘If I write to him, will you take my letter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will he receive it in person?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘I give you my word.’
All that remained was to compose the letter. In what terms? Anger, no; supplication, no, even less so. How to get through to Alexander? How to make him yield? How to move him? Napoleon went out alone onto the terrace from where he towered over the decimated city. Through his theatre glasses he saw, sparkling in the night, church chandeliers hanging in the few palaces still standing, which were serving as barracks; bivouacs in the palace courtyards, bivouacs in the plain, points of light, echoes of drinking songs. He went back inside to sleep, got up in the middle of the night and sent for his secretaries. Pacing up and down the large salon, he mumbled his way through his missive to the Tsar. The secretaries took notes of the snatches they could hear and stifled their yawns.
The Retreat Page 9