The Rape of Venice

by Dennis Wheatley

  As Roger listened, he realised what such a declaration must have meant. Up till then, France had been fighting against a Monarchist coalition to save the Revolution—to defend herself from invasion and having a King put back on her throne by force of arms—and, where her legions had carried the war into other countries, Belgium, Holland and Piedmont, it had been with the proclaimed ideal of liberating these peoples from the tyranny of autocratic rulers. But Boneparte had thrown all that overboard. He had altered the whole policy of the war to one of open aggression, declaring it upon peaceful states that in no way threatened France, and inciting his troops to follow him by promises of a free hand to loot and pillage them.

  Roger’s face remained impassive, but he realised now that the small thin man, dressed so quietly in white breeches, tricolour sash and green coat, who ranted at him, was another Attila who, for his own glory, would stop at nothing and prove a terrible scourge to mankind. Meanwhile the tirade went on:

  ‘I marched them and fought them until they could no longer stand. In eleven days, I forced the Piedmontese out of the war. In a campaign of fourteen days I conquered the Milanese. In fifteen days I forced the Pope to sue for peace, Within thirty-six days of leaving Mantua I was only seventy miles from Vienna. Had I consulted my own interest, and the comfort of the army, I should have remained in Italy. But I threw myself into Germany to extricate the armies of the Rhine. I crossed the Julien and Nordic Alps in three feet of snow. I brought my artillery by roads where not even a cart had ever been and everyone said it was impossible. Had Moreau crossed the Rhine to meet me, we should be in a position to dictate the conditions of peace as masters. As it is, I am left to bluster and intrigue to hold the half of what I have won. Meanwhile, these gentlemen in Paris have the insolence to criticise my treatment of the Milanese and the Venetians. But I shall show them. Yes, I shall show them. I have sent Augereau to Paris and he will know how to deal with such traitors.’

  Suddenly he broke off, gave Roger a long stare and snapped, ‘And you? What have you been doing?’

  Roger told him that knowing that one of his greatest ambitions was to conquer England, he had in the spring of ’96 had himself smuggled over to renew his contacts there and to be the better able to report on the chances of a successful invasion.

  At first he seemed to be only half listening and thinking of something else; but when Roger went on to say that a chance had arisen for him to go to India, Boneparte’s large luminous eyes suddenly lit up.

  ‘India!’ he exclaimed. ‘The East has always fascinated me. You must tell me about it. Every detail. But not now. Tell them to lay a cover for you at my table. Over dinner I shall have time to please myself in listening to you.’

  Among Roger’s greatest assets was the ability both to write and talk well; so at dinner he was able to hold his audience enthralled by accounts of the wealth of Calcutta, fairy palaces, tiger shoots, temples, bazaars, and native Princes dripping with jewels. But Boneparte never took long over his meals; so afterwards he carried Roger off to a big room, the walls of which were covered with maps.

  At a large desk in it a man was working who had been pointed out to Roger as Fauvelet de Bourrienne. He had known Boneparte from the age of eight and been his only intimate friend while they were cadets together in the Military Academy at Brienne. Later he had held a diplomatic post in Germany and, as he was an aristocrat, had wisely refused to leave it when recalled to Paris during the Terror. In consequence, had been listed as an emigré and only after considerable pressure by Boneparte been granted permission to come to his headquarters. He had arrived on the day that the peace preliminaries at Leoben had been signed, and Boneparte, knowing his great abilities, had at once made him his Chef de Cabinet.

  The maps on the wall were all of Italy or Germany, but Bourrienne produced one of India and, knowing his master’s habits, spread it out on the floor. Boneparte flopped down in his favourite position at full length on his stomach and Roger knelt beside him.

  It was not until Roger began to trace his homeward journey that Boneparte realised that he had returned by way of the Red Sea and Egypt and, at this, his mood changed from that of interested listener to eager questioner.

  ‘If I ever go to India, that is the road I shall take,’ he declared after a while. ‘The Revolution played the very devil with our fleet, and sailors cannot be made like soldiers in a few months of hard campaigning. It will take years yet before the new officers of our Navy become expert at their business and discipline among the seamen is fully restored. Meanwhile, at sea the British will continue to have the advantage of us. It would be suicide to try to transport an army round the Cape. Besides, there are no lands on which we could live on the way.’

  As Roger talked on about Cairo, the Pyramids and the Nile, it emerged that the young conqueror’s mind had already been moving in that direction, for he said, ‘The Austrians thought themselves clever when in June they anticipated one of the proposals for a peace, by occupying the Venetian territories on the Dalmatian coast; but that gave me just the excuse I needed for seizing Corfu and the Ionian Isles. We took them by clever stratagem, too. I sent General Gentilli to tell the Venetians in the forts that, as the friend and protector of Venice, I was sending French troops to strengthen their garrisons. The fools believed him and admitted our men. We collected most of the Venetian Navy, five hundred cannon and immense stores. But I’d meant to have the Islands anyhow, because they are the first stepping-stone should we decide to go East.’

  ‘Now that you have become of such importance to France, surely the Directory would not agree to your leaving Europe?’ Roger hazarded, to draw him out.

  ‘What, those fellows!’ He gave a quick laugh. They would give an eye apiece to see me go. And they have often toyed with schemes for getting back our lost foothold in India. It must be that next or the conquest of England, and if the English make peace we will go to Egypt. I’ll not see my soldiers disbanded or starving. I owe it to them to find them fresh employment.’

  After a moment he went on, ‘And whichever it is, you must come with us. Your antecedents, and the knowledge you have acquired of places, will prove most useful. Bourrienne—Bourrienne; do you hear me?’

  The Chef de Cabinet had all this time been writing letter after letter at incredible speed. Now he looked up and asked, ‘What is it mon General?’

  Boneparte got to his feet, dusted his bony knees, and said, ‘Breuc, here, is half an Englishman and can pass as one anywhere. If we had invaded the island in ’96, I should have taken him with me. I shall do so if fate assigns that to us as our next task. But I find now that he has spent the past year in the East, and has added Persian and Arabic to the several European tongues he speaks; so he could prove equally valuable to us on the Nile. Besides, he was with me at Toulon, and on 13th Vendémiaire, and I like to have about me faces I know. I shall make him an extra A.D.C., but at one time he was a journalist; so while we have no fighting to do, he could help you.’

  Bourrienne stood up, bowed and said, as he and Roger cordially shook hands, ‘I have work enough here for ten, and most of the staff are more able at handling a sword than a pen; so I shall be delighted to have Monsieur Breuc’s assistance.’

  Thus it transpired that, without any striving on Roger’s part, the long chain of his previous activities opened wide to him all Boneparte’s secrets.

  The Corsican’s reference to the possibility of England making peace led Roger to take an early opportunity next day of questioning Bourrienne on the subject. He then learnt that despite their humiliation in December, the British Government had again opened negotiations. Of their last attempt, owing to the severe winter weather, Lord Malmesbury’s progress to Paris had been so exceptionally slow that Edmund Burke had caustically remarked that ‘he must have gone all the way on his knees’. This malicious jibe had been printed in all the Whig news-sheets and so reached France, where it had caused much delighted laughter. Nevertheless, in spite, so French intelligence reported, of strong
opposition from King George and a threat by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, to resign, Mr. Pitt had decided to eat humble-pie and try again.

  The Directors, fearing that, if Malmesbury came to Paris, now that the Right had become so strong it might be strengthened by him to overthrow them, had decreed that the negotiations should be conducted in Lille. Malmesbury had arrived there in July and the key man among those sent to treat with him was Hugues Bernard Maret, a gifted diplomat who was anxious to agree a peace, as also were the French Constitutionalists, who now formed the great bulk of the Deputies. Owing to the wretched conditions that prevailed in the interior of France, they would have even met Britain half-way. Carnot and Barthélemy were also strongly of the opinion that now that France could negotiate from strength, owing to her victories in Italy, she should seize the opportunity to get good terms and bring an end to the war. But they were outvoted by their three die-hard Republican colleagues. These insisted that Britain should not be left even a rag to cover the shame of her surrender.

  Now that the Austrians were negotiating separately, Mr. Pitt was no longer under any obligation to insist on the return to them of their Belgian territories. He was even willing to give up all the West Indian islands that Britain had taken from the French, and to assist them in suppressing the negro revolt in the richest of all their old colonies—San Domingo. But the Jacobin Directors were now sticking out for the return of colonies lost to their allies. They demanded back Trinidad for Spain and the Cape for Holland, knowing that if these were conceded they could make them their own. Realising this, Mr. Pitt had dug his toes in about the Cape, since without it the British route to India would no longer be secure. There the matter rested.

  As a by-product of this discussion, Roger learned that Talleyrand had returned from exile in America and, owing to the influence of that brilliant intriguer, his old friend Madame de Staël, the French wife of the Swedish Ambassador, been given the Foreign Office. At that Roger was delighted, for he knew Talleyrand always to have favoured an alliance with England against the growing power of Prussia. Moreover, although Talleyrand was one of the only two Frenchmen who knew that Roger was the son of an English Admiral, he owed to him both his life and the preservation of his house from confiscation during the Terror, and he was not the man to betray a friend who had rendered him such services.

  The other, who knew Roger for a true Englishman, was Joseph Fouché, a most dangerous and vindictive Terrorist who, to save his own skin, had assisted in bringing about Robespierre’s downfall. But the reaction had caught up with him and, by tactful enquiry, Roger learnt that for a long time past nothing had been heard of him; so, presumably, he had submerged himself in the masses from fear that he might yet be called to account for his many crimes.

  Very soon, too, Roger was able to get a firm grasp of the situation in Paris. The Royalists there had practically come out into the open. They were few, but very active, and well supplied with money. All their resources were applied to rousing the Constitutionalists, who had not only a majority in both Chambers, but now represented the greater part of the French people, to action. General Pichegru was the man upon whom they relied to lead them; but although already secretly sold, as Roger knew, to the Royalist cause, he was too cautious to risk an attempt to overthrow the Directory until he could be certain of strong military backing.

  Despairing of him, the Clichyans, as the Royalists were termed from having a Club where they brewed these plots up in Clichy, had turned to Carnot. But he and his respectable colleague, the diplomat Barthélemy, would have no truck with any movement for a restoration, although they were for peace and a new era of justice and toleration, which the moderates wanted.

  Opposed to them stood the remnant of the Terrorists who still controlled the executive power: Rewbell, the German-born apostle of equality through the murder of the whole of the upper class; Larevellière-Lepeaux, who would have liked to see every priest crucified; and Barras, brave, dissolute and utterly corrupt, who cared only for women and gold; together with all the minor Jacobins who had succeeded in keeping their heads after the fall of Robespierre and feared that they still might lose them should the reaction triumph.

  Each week, motions were now being passed by large majorities in the Chamber of the Five Hundred that favoured such measures as the resumption of ringing of church bells, that the relatives of emigrés should no longer be debarred from holding Government appointments, and that certain categories of emigrés should be allowed to return. Above all, they agitated for the re-establishment of the Paris National Guard; and on this hinged everything. By far the greater part of the National Guard was drawn from the bourgeois, who were heart and soul with the moderates. It was their attempt to assert themselves that Barras, with the aid of Boneparte, had crushed on 13th Vendémiaire and after it the National Guard had been disbanded. Under the Constitution no troops, other than the 1,500 guards of the two Chambers, were allowed within twelve leagues of Paris; therefore, if the National Guard was recreated and armed, it would have Paris at its mercy, and could be used to overthrow the Directory. It was for that Pichegru was waiting.

  The Directory had behaved far from well to Boneparte. Jealous of the name he was making for himself they had, until almost the end of his campaign, starved him of reinforcements, and it was largely their withholding funds from General Moreau which had rendered him unable to set his army in motion across the Rhine to make a junction with that of Italy.

  Boneparte, on the other hand, had ignored their instructions in so flagrant a manner that it would have cost any less successful General his command. To start with, he had been told to turn Piedmont into a Republic; instead he had, on his own authority, signed a peace with the old King Victor Amadeus. Then he had been ordered to march his army south through Central Italy so that it might, in turn, crush the Kingdom of Naples; instead, he had risked it in the north against an Austrian Army of far greater numbers.

  His policy had been right. The Austrians were the only major land-power in arms against France. If they could be defeated, all the lesser enemies must collapse like a house of cards. By making a quick peace with Piedmont, he had freed his army so that it might be turned swiftly against the Austrians before they could become still stronger. Their defeats had led in turn to the fall of Parma, Modena, Milan, Mantua, the disintegration of the Supreme Republic, and Naples abandoning the Coalition to become neutral.

  Again, the Directory had urged him to have no mercy on Rome and to abolish the Papacy. He had thrown that order away, too, and dealt with the matter in a way about which they could not complain but also enormously to his own personal advantage. He had deprived the Pope of the greater part of his territories, exacted from him a huge indemnity and robbed him of many great works of art; but he had left Rome free and not interfered in any way with His Holiness’s spiritual authority. Such restraint by the representative of a Government of anarchists and atheists had been so unexpected that the Pope had written to him as ‘my dear son’, the Cardinals had blessed him while handing over their gold plate, and he had enormously enhanced his own popularity in France, where there were millions of Catholics still practising their religion in secret, who now began to look on him as a possible champion of their faith.

  The Directory had, too, given him a Political Commissar—one General Clarke—without whose sanction he was not supposed to enter into any negotiations with the enemies of the Republic, let alone agree terms of peace. But this Franco-Irish diplomat-soldier proved no match for the wily Corsican. On plausible pretexts Clarke was always got out of the way to handle small matters in distant cities, to find on his return that Boneparte had already settled some big one according to his own fancy. When the Directors protested, he pretended surprise, wrote that he was tired and ill, and offered to resign his Command. They fumed with rage but dared not recall him because of his obvious ability and ever-increasing popularity.

  Nevertheless, his own interests demanded that he should support them against the Clichya
ns, and early in the summer he had sent his personal Adjutant, the ci-devant Count de Lavalette, off to Paris to keep him secretly informed of the situation. Lavalette had reported that unless some drastic step was taken, the Directory was almost certain to be overthrown: but he had advised against Boneparte himself coming to Paris if it could possibly be avoided, because the moderates formed such a high proportion of the population that if he took any direct action against them his own popularity was bound to suffer.

  With his usual cunning, he had got round that by making Augereau his cat’s-paw. The Army of Italy was rabidly republican and on July 14th it had celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille with tremendous enthusiasm. Boneparte had issued a stirring proclamation calling on it to demonstrate its adherence to the principles of the Revolution by loyal addresses to the Government. Each Division had done so in no uncertain manner. Augereau’s men, the reddest of the reds, had, in referring to the new measures for moderation being advocated in the two Chambers, even gone to the length of including a passage which read:

  Tremble, O conspirators! From the Adige and the Rhine to the Seine is but a step. Tremble! Your iniquities are numbered, and the price of them is at the point of our bayonets!’

  These were open threats against the legally elected Legislature that should it go too far the troops would march on Paris and bring about a renewal of the Terror. On the pretext of sending a number of captured enemy flags to Paris, Boneparte had then sent Augereau there with instructions to see to it that the loyal addresses from the Army of Italy were published. He was now sitting back, quietly confident that the fierce swashbuckling General would take any steps necessary to pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him.