“So I’m dull, now?” Women pick at words like a barrister.
“You’re radiant. I just meant my new life is pleasantly placid, without the bullets and hardship.”
“And the temptresses?” See what I mean about women forgetting nothing?
“How can a man be tempted, when he has Isis and Venus, Helen and Roxanne?” Yes, I was becoming quite the husband. “Here’s some more stackable stones, Harry-let’s build a castle on the shoreline!”
“And blow it up!” he cried. I was teaching him to be a boy, even though my wife sometimes frowned at our games.
So my family came to Paris. My plan was this: A precious gem is more portable, and easily hidden, than a sack of money. Accordingly, we’d wait to sell the emerald where I judged I’d get the best price. Only then would we set off for some safe and sleepy place in America, my homeland.
I’m afraid there was vanity in this schedule. I had, after all, recently found and destroyed the mirror of Archimedes, rescuing Harry and Astiza from pirates in the process. I couldn’t resist the possibility of hobnobbing with the first consul again in hopes of being told how brilliantly I’d performed. There was also the lingering question of the vast Louisiana Territory that France had acquired and which I now considered myself expert on, having been dragged there by a Norwegian lunatic. I’d already advised Jefferson to buy and Napoleon to sell, but the negotiations had stalled while the president sent a new diplomat named James Monroe to Paris. I was just the man, I thought, to hurry things along before I retired as a gentleman.
That’s the trouble with success. It makes you feel indispensable, which is a delusion. Pride exacts more trouble than love.
Accordingly, when my family arrived in Paris in mid-January of 1803, I was asked by American envoy Robert Livingston to lobby Napoleon about the fate of the wasteland west of the Mississippi River. Since Livingston offered to put us up in a hotel and was working with my friend Fulton on a new contraption called a steamboat, I persuaded Astiza we should enjoy Paris while I sought another audience with Bonaparte. The city was buzzing with talk of renewed conflict with England, which is always entertaining: war is perennially exciting to society people with little chance of having to actually fight it. Astiza was curious to explore the city’s famed libraries for texts on mystery religions.
So we lingered like gentry. I was proud that while we’d once been imprisoned in Paris, now we were invited to its salons.
What we both wouldn’t dare admit is that we were still treasure hunters at heart.
Which set the stage for disaster.
Chapter 3
I couldn’t resist auditioning for history when I finally obtained an audience with Napoleon. France’s first consul, who had replaced the incompetent Directory with his own dictatorship, had spent a million francs rehabilitating the dilapidated palace of Saint-Cloud outside Paris to serve as his latest home. It was a headquarters six miles from the stinking heart of the city, prudently distant from democratic mobs, and far bigger than Josephine’s Malmaison. This new pile had the room to house the first consul’s growing retinue of aides, servants, supplicants, and schemers. It could also properly impress visiting ministers of state with wasteful opulence, the standard by which the powerful rank one another.
Having first met Bonaparte on the uncomfortably crowded warship L’Orient in 1798, I reflected how much grander and more beautiful his homes were each time I saw him. In the brief period since he’d ascended to power, he’d collected more palaces than I had shoes. I still had no house at all, and the contrast in our careers couldn’t have been plainer when I crossed the Pont de Saint-Cloud across the Seine and turned up the walled gravel avenue that led to the Court of Honor. The U-shaped palace is an imposing five floors tall and enclosed a graveled yard where messengers dismounted, diplomatic coaches reined up, ministers loitered, footmen smoked, dogs barked, tradesmen delivered, and servants scurried, the entire arena dotted with horse droppings and overlooked by Josephine’s grand apartments. The gossip was that Napoleon’s long hours had prompted the couple to keep separate bedrooms, and that the new quarters were so confusing that when the first consul wanted to sleep with his wife, he’d change into his nightshirt and cap, ring for his secretary, and be led down the dark corridors by a single candle to her bed.
I, of course, arrived in daylight, and was ushered by his new valet Constant Wairy, an unctuous functionary with well-fed face and muttonchop whiskers who sniffed at my clothes as if I were a private standing for inspection. I congratulated him with a goad, “What a grand place to be a lackey.”
“If anyone has experience with that,” he gave right back, “I understand it to be you, Monsieur Gage.”
Our mutual snobbery established, we ascended a grand staircase and strode down a paneled hallway, entering a library the size of a barn.
Napoleon was wolfing down the dejeuner being served in this study, since there was no designated room in his palace (or any other palace, for that matter) for regular meals. He occupied a settee covered with green taffeta, eating his lunch from a portable campaign table. He’d already bathed-despite the skepticism of his doctors, Napoleon had embraced the modern French fashion of scrubbing every day, now that he had servants to heat the water-and was dressed in a simple blue military coat with red collar, white breeches, and silk stockings. I thought he might offer coffee and a roll, not to mention some soup or chicken, but he ignored my hunger and gestured me to an upholstered chair.
I looked about. There was a large writing table Napoleon had designed in the shape of a kidney or viol so he could squeeze into its middle and have incoming and outgoing correspondence flank him. It was heaped with papers and had legs carved like griffins.
A smaller table was assigned to his new secretary, Claude-Francois de Meneval, who had abruptly replaced Bourienne when the latter became embroiled in speculation over military supplies. Young and handsome, Meneval glanced at me now, reminding me that we’d met at Mortefontaine when celebrating the American treaty. I nodded, though I had no memory of him.
Behind this scribe, clifflike bookcases covered the walls from floor to ceiling, helping insulate the cavernous office from winter’s chill. Bronze busts of the ancient antagonists Hannibal and Scipio eyed each other on the mantel as if wishing for more war elephants. The last time I’d discussed Hannibal with Napoleon I found myself guiding his army over the Alps, so this time I vowed to stay entirely away from military history.
“Gage,” Bonaparte greeted me matter-of-factly, as if we’d just conferred yesterday instead of nearly a year ago, “I thought the pirates might have finally extinguished you, but here you are again, like a misfire you can’t pry loose from a muzzle. The naturalist Cuvier tells me you actually succeeded in accomplishing something.”
“Not just destroying a dangerous ancient weapon, First Consul, but finding a wife and son.”
“Remarkable that someone would have you.” He took a drink of his favorite Chambertin, a pinot wine with a rich, fruity flavor. It reminded me I was thirsty, too. There was, alas, only one goblet.
“But then I spied merit in you as well,” he said with his usual bluntness. “The secret to rule is to find the natural talent of each man and woman. Yours, it seems, is to perform odd errands in peculiar places.”
“But now I’m retiring,” I said, lest he get the wrong idea. “I had some luck in Tripoli and plan to settle down with my bride Astiza, whom you’ll remember from the Egyptian campaign.”
“Yes, the one helping shoot at me.”
He had a memory as long as a woman’s.
“She’s more agreeable now,” I said.
“Be wary of wives, Gage, and I say that as a man mad about the one I have. There’s no greater misfortune for a man than to be governed by his wife. In such a case he is a perfect nonentity.”
Napoleon’s disdain for women beyond their sexual charms was well known. “We’re partners,” I said, a concept I wasn’t sure he could comprehend.
“Ba
h. Be careful how much you love her.” He took another bite. “The guilt of many men can be traced to overaffection for their wives.”
“Are you guilty because of your affection for Josephine?”
“She’s as guilty as me, as you know from Paris’s tiresome gossip. But all that trouble is in the past. As rulers, we’re models of rectitude now.”
I knew better than to express my doubt of that claim.
“Our difference is that I regulate my emotions, Gage. You cannot. I’m a man of reason, you of impulse. I like you, but let’s not pretend we’re equal.”
That was obvious enough. “Each time I see you, First Consul, you seem to have done better for yourself.”
“Yes, it surprises even me.” He glanced about. “My ambition doesn’t hurry, it simply keeps pace with circumstances. I feel as if I’m being driven to an unknown goal. All life is a stage set, playing out as the seers promised.”
He’d told me of his visions in the Great Pyramid and prophecy from a legendary gnome called the Little Red Man. “You still believe in destiny?”
“How else to explain where I am? I was laughed at for my Corsican accent in military school. Now we’re putting the finishing touches on the Code Napoleon, which will remake the laws of France. I started too penniless to buy my own uniform, and now I accumulate palaces. And how but destiny to explain an American like you, with more lives than a cat? The policeman Fouche was right not to trust you, because your survival is so inexplicable. And I was right not to trust Fouche. Police invent more lies than they ever discover truth.”
I’d heard that the minister of police who’d arrested me the year before had since been dismissed and become a mere senator, just as Sir Sidney Smith had gone from Near East warlord to the relative obscurity of the British Parliament. I was relieved at both events; lawmakers do great mischief, but seldom do they personally throw you in jail. “Do you wish to get my impressions of the Mediterranean?” I offered.
Bonaparte poured himself a coffee and picked up a pastry, still offering me nothing. “Forget the Mediterranean. Your young nation is keeping the Tripoli pirates occupied with its little war, and I’m drifting toward a big war with the perfidious British. They’ve refused to depart Malta as they promised in the Treaty of Amiens.”
“France hasn’t upheld its obligations, either.”
He ignored this. “The British, Gage, are evil. No man is more peace loving than me, a general who has seen the horror of war. Yet the Lobsters have sent threescore assassins to stalk me, stirred Europe with spies paid by English gold, and scheme to take back all of North America. Our two nations, America and France, must unite against them. I received you in order to talk about Louisiana.”
My impression of that huge territory had been of black flies and bad weather, but I knew Thomas Jefferson was eager to get hold of a property several times bigger than France. American negotiators had hoped to buy New Orleans to assure trading access to the Gulf of Mexico. I’d suggested a bigger bargain. “I hope our two countries can come to agreement on that wilderness,” I agreed. “But I thought you were sending an army to create an empire there.”
“I had an army, until yellow fever took it in Saint-Domingue. As well as my brother-in-law General Charles Leclerc, leaving my poor sister Pauline a widow.” He eyed me as he chewed his pastry. I’m pretty sure he knew I’d tupped his sister when helping with another treaty at Mortefontaine. The tryst had really been the girl’s idea, and it was a romp I paid dearly for, since it forced me into temporary exile on the American frontier. But brothers view such flings through a particular prism; my history with Bonaparte was complicated, and Pauline was one of the complications. I tried not to show my relief that her husband was safely dead.
“What a tragedy,” I said.
“My imbecile sister cut her beautiful hair to show her grief. She hardly liked the man, and certainly wasn’t faithful to him, but appearances are all.” He sighed and picked up a letter. “She also took the first boat back to France. She has the hardheaded practicality of a Bonaparte.”
“Beauty, too.”
“This is a communication from Leclerc last October, just weeks before he died.” He read: “ ‘Here is my opinion on this country. We must destroy all the negroes in the mountains, men and women, and keep only children under twelve years old, destroy half of those on the plain, and not leave in the colony a single man of color who has worn an epaulette. Otherwise, the colony will never be quiet. If you wish to be the master of Saint-Domingue, you must send me twelve thousand men without wasting a single day.’ ” He put the letter down. “What does that sound like to you, Gage?”
“Futility.”
He grimly nodded. “I keep you in my service for your honesty, don’t I? Saint-Domingue is tormented by longing for freedom in a place where freedom can never work. In trying to make all men equal, the blacks have succeeded only in making them equally miserable, and I’m left to put things back as they were. I’ve captured the leading rebel L’Ouverture and locked him up in the mountains, but the Negroes don’t know when to quit. The war is eating whole regiments. I have no twelve thousand troops for Haiti, let alone men to send to Louisiana.”
“Sorry to hear of your difficulty,” I said, even though I wasn’t sorry at all. It wasn’t like the first consul deserved another million square miles. He’d bullied Spain into giving Louisiana back to France a couple years before, but the Spanish flag still flew in New Orleans because Napoleon hadn’t bothered to put anyone there to take possession. He was busy trying to hang on to France’s richest colony, the sugar isle of Saint-Domingue, by reinstating slavery to make its sugar competitive on the world market. As a result, that onetime paradise had become a charnel house. His policy was a complete betrayal of the ideals of the French Revolution, and stupid as well. It baffles me why people believe they can force on others what they’d never tolerate themselves.
Meanwhile, Tom Jefferson was the only one in the world crazy enough to actually want Louisiana. Having not seen the hell that is the American West, he believed it heaven, and mused about sending his secretary Meriwether Lewis to explore it. Promising to persuade Bonaparte to sell the place had won me a good bottle of wine with the president. Jefferson, like Franklin, was genius enough that he’d spent his diplomatic days in France learning to properly eat and drink. He later bought so much wine on credit that he’d assembled the best cellar, and worst debt, in America. The Virginian is also a far better conversationalist than the brusque Bonaparte, and by the time we got to the bottom of our bottle, I’d decided to vote him another term, if I lived to get the chance.
Napoleon had less patience for life’s pleasantries. He waved, and servants materialized to take his silver serving dishes away. Whether it was palace cuisine or infantry biscuits, he ate at lightning speed.
“So your nation, Gage, can benefit from European folly. I need you to go to the American negotiators and convince them that buying all of Louisiana is their idea. It will set the United States as a counterweight to Britain in Canada, and give me money to fight the English in the coming war. If I can’t control Saint-Domingue, Britain shall not control the Mississippi Valley. The United States will block English ambitions for France like a prodigal son.”
That’s not how my nation thought of itself, but I did see a deal could be to everyone’s benefit, including mine. I’d played a small role in ending an undeclared naval war between America and France back in 1800, and now I was go-between again. Napoleon wanted to unload an expanse he’d acquired with a stroke of a pen, before England’s navy took it from him. It appeared I could make everyone happy, except Britain.
“I’ll make my countrymen think in grand terms,” I promised. “Why purchase a mere city, New Orleans, when you could buy an empire?” My stomach growled from hunger. “What do you want for the dustbin, anyway?”
“Fifty million francs. Suggest double that, and they can take pleasure in bargaining me down. When I conquer London and put an end to the British navy,
your country and mine will become the greatest trading partners in the world. Louisiana is a first step. This is an opportunity as significant as our revolutionary victory at Yorktown. I’ll fire every American dollar I receive at the English from the mouth of my cannons, and all of us can enjoy the spectacle.”
“Agreed. But after this service I’m determined to retire.”
“On what pension?”
“I acquired something of value in Tripoli I intend to sell.”
He eyed me with shrewd curiosity. “What is it?”
“No concern of the French government. A trifle, but enough to set my family for life.”
“That’s a remarkable trifle.”
“I’ve finally had remarkable luck.”
“You’ve been quite valuable at times, Gage, if annoying at others.” Napoleon had almost had me shot two or three times. “Realize that one doesn’t resign from destiny at will. Yes, you’re American, but when your interests coincide with France’s, then you become French. Do you understand?”
“I understand that’s exactly what I wish to retire from. I’m working very hard at being useless. Except for Louisiana, of course.”
“It’s important we complete this sale, Gage. You must stay in Paris until it’s concluded.”
“I understand. But given that I haven’t actually sold my trifle yet, I wonder if an appointment could come from all my hard work? Especially if you’re about to gain fifty million francs.” It’s always smart to look for crumbs from the diplomatic table. “A salary will convince American negotiators I truly represent your thinking.”
“Ha! If you wish to pretend partnership with me, you should adopt the habit of my most trusted agents.”
“Which is?”
“A discreet tattoo, signifying their loyalty.”
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