The Death of Napoleon

by Simon Leys

  However, he will not be there alone.

  On the side of the road stands a makeshift little hut which also bears a notice announcing:

  EDMOND, VETERAN OF NAPOLEON’S OLD GUARD, SURVIVOR OF THE LAST BATTLE SQUARE. GUIDED TOURS OF THE BATTLEFIELD.

  BY APPOINTMENT.

  The owner of the premises, with his unkempt beard, squats on the doorstep, waiting for appointments.

  As Napoleon passes in front of him, he gets up—or more precisely, he gathers together the remains of his person, for it then becomes apparent that one leg is missing, one arm is withered and twisted like a dead twig, and he has lost half an ear and perhaps an eye, unless he is just cross-eyed. He hauls himself up on a crutch, clumsily mended with string, and tries to follow. Taking pity on his efforts, Napoleon slows down to allow this heroic but gruesome physical wreck to follow with less difficulty.

  And thus they climb the hill—the pale little man and the broken-down scarecrow—an odd couple born of the same dream of glory. As they make their progress across the plowed fields, flocks of partridges take flight in front of them. A cuckoo is singing in the wood nearby.

  When they reach the lookout point that dominates the whole plain, Edmond the Veteran automatically launches into his set piece without waiting to be asked. He has trotted it out so often that he knows his monologue by heart, and points out the historical landmarks in the surrounding countryside—La Papelotte, the Caillou farm, the Holy Hedge, the Sunken Lane—without even bothering to look at them, so well does he know where to find these permanent buoys in the ocean of fields and meadows. On the plain, the only movement—if you can call it that—comes from groups of sleepy cows. A plow drawn by three horses that move so slowly they seem to be standing still knits new black furrows, one after the other, into the gray and yellow surface of a fallow field.

  Although the words of Edmond the Veteran betray the effects of constant repetition to tourists, behind the hackneyed expressions and affected rhetoric, the attentive listener can detect an authentic ring in the evocation of the epic battle that this simple man must have lived through, body and soul. As if hypnotized by the deathly pale little man, the guide finds himself departing imperceptibly from his prepared speech. Closing his eyes, he abandons himself to the flow of his memories, and begins to relive the whole ordeal, as it happened, from dawn to dusk. “It was raining on that day, it was pissing down . . .” And in spite of the peaceful sunshine and the pure song of an invisible lark piercing higher and higher into the blue sky, like a medium in a trance he summons up and brings to life the real spirit of the plain. Before Napoleon’s very eyes, the false decor of pastoral calm, with its fields and cows and plow on the horizon, parts like a naïvely painted country scene on a theater curtain, revealing the somber truth that is always there, hidden behind the veil of appearances.

  . . . In a murky twilight, under a low sky, men, horses, and cannon are once more bogged down in the mud. Across the sodden fields comes the loud rumble of regiments on the move, while the muffled boom of cannon can be heard in the distance. The men have been marching all night to meet their fate, weary as beasts of burden; here and there in the grass, a few are already dead, their eyes wide open with astonishment.

  Yet when did this vision, which at first seemed so overwhelmingly true in every detail, suddenly become confused and begin to fall apart? Napoleon again experiences the same dizziness that he had felt in the unfamiliar bedroom. Edmond the Veteran foams at the mouth and screams and whirls around on his crutch like one possessed, as he goes through all the torments of that incredible day. Under this hail of words, Napoleon is horrified to discover the image of ANOTHER Waterloo, which is more and more difficult to reconcile with his own memory and sense of logic. He can no longer find a single landmark on the plain; even as he stares at it, the scene becomes weirdly distorted. Edmond the Veteran’s incantation is drawing him into a whirlwind where his reason falters and is about to be swallowed up. He struggles to break free; with one final effort, he suddenly resists and interrupts his relentless guide: “No, no! It’s not the grenadiers who are holding Belle-Alliance, it’s the dragoons! . . .”

  Edmond the Veteran stops short. In the sudden silence, the song of the lark fills the air again.

  Now there are only two men walking in the sun, deep in an interminable and petty argument about the positions of the Grand Army. Neither will give in. Edmond the Veteran with a sly sideways glance has the last word: “I should know. I was there.”

  Napoleon changes the subject. “Have you ever seen the Emperor?” he asks point-blank.

  Mollified, but with a hint of mockery, Edmond the Veteran stares at him, narrowing his crafty eye. “Why, he was as close to me as you are! . . .”

  Then he starts off again, suddenly quite aggressive, as if he wanted to express his complete contempt for this puny tourist who, a few minutes ago, had had the impudence to contradict him. “The Emperor was young and handsome like a god. You have no idea.” He raises his eyes, contemplating a heavenly vision. Against the sky, between the clouds, he can see him once again on his white horse, reviewing the front line of his troops, while the long row of busbies and rifles begins to waver and sway like a wheatfield under the wind, and a thousand voices, hoarse with fever and smoke, roar in unison, “Long live the Emperor!”

  But he quickly looks down again; his mobile features become almost repulsive as he adds, scarcely moving his lips, “Between you and me, Napoleon was a vampire. It was our blood that kept him going. You should have seen him in the evenings after a battle. The toughest veterans of the Guard were crying from sheer exhaustion, but there he was, passing among us, fresh as a daisy; he would look at the dead and wounded, wading through the blood. That’s where his energy came from. Take me, for instance—he’s gouged out my eye and bitten off my leg. Look, I can see that you are a man of the world. You, you’re not one of those tourists full of warm tea and gherkin sandwiches. Perhaps you’ve been a soldier, too? Well then, I’ll show you my war wounds! I don’t show them to just anyone, you know! There are always English tourists who would gladly pay extra, just to have a look, but they haven’t got a hope! It’s none of their business! But between the two of us, it’s quite different. You and I, we speak the same language—no need to stand on ceremony.”

  As he finishes his patter, he begins to unwrap his stump from the empty trouser leg, which was furled around itself and secured with a large rusty safety pin. He performs the unswaddling like a professional, with quick, precise gestures. The whole routine has something ritualistic and vaguely obscene about it. But at the end of it, when he raises his head, he realizes that his customer has already left some time ago and is heading downhill toward the village. “Hey, friend! Don’t go yet! Wait a minute!”

  Hopping on his crutch, he immediately gives chase. Napoleon has nearly reached the village when he finally catches up with him, grabbing him by his coattails in a last desperate lunge.

  Napoleon turns around and looks at him, stony-faced. The small pale man is now livid with a cold fury that would make anyone else beat a hasty retreat. Not so Edmond the Veteran, who withstands his stare without twitching a muscle, then moves into the attack. “Well? . . .” he drawls, drawing out the syllable with a sort of crapulous familiarity.

  “Well what?” Napoleon replies tersely, a little taken aback by his aplomb.

  “Well, are you going off like that, without leaving something for the guide?”

  Napoleon throws him a five-sou coin. With arrogant nonchalance, the cripple slips it into his belt, turns around on his crutch, and, without so much as a backward glance, makes his exit from the scene.

  NAPOLEON FEELS very thirsty. He goes and sits on the terrace of the Café de la Grande Armée.

  The girl who had spoken to him that morning comes to serve him.

  She has the indefinable feeling that this man is somewhat different from the customers she usually sees here. When ordering his beer, he scarcely looks at her. His whole demeanor pos
sesses a sort of haughty courtesy that both intimidates and delights her.

  He is eating a bread roll that he has taken out of his pocket, like a pauper. And yet—she is sure of it—this man has nothing in common with the penny-pinching tourists who bring their own food to save the price of a meal. Ordinarily she can’t stand such people, but this time it’s different, quite different—but she can’t really say why. He absentmindedly breaks his bread with his plump white hands. His gestures have the unctuous solemnity of a clergyman.

  She brings him a plate and a knife, so that he can eat his bread properly. She hovers around his table, wanting to start up a conversation.

  “Have you seen the bedroom . . .?” she begins, but suddenly remembers that she already made this suggestion when he first passed by, and she fears that he may misunderstand her and suspect that she wants to make him spend more or that she is indirectly trying to make him ashamed of ordering so little. She blushes violently at the very thought that he could misjudge her in that way and corrects herself at once. “Have you seen the battlefield?”

  “I’ve just come from there.”

  “Oh, if I’d only known, I could have been your guide!”

  “Thank you. To tell the truth, I did come across a sort of guide, an army veteran who . . .”

  “Oh no! You don’t mean Edmond? . . . But Edmond’s a charlatan! And did he make you pay? How much did the old crook get out of you? I hate to tell you this, but he’s always trying to impress the tourists with tales of his missing leg. His famous leg! He tells people that it was shot off by a cannonball, and he even shows them a rusty old piece of shot—purple with his blood, so he says—which he keeps in his hut. He probably showed it to you, eh? You mustn’t believe him. Everything he says is a pack of lies, but he can’t fool us. The truth is that one night, when he was dead drunk, he tumbled into a ditch and gashed his leg so badly that in the end the maggots got into it and he had to go to the bone setter in Maransart, who cut it off. And ever since, he tells the visitors that he lost it in the battle. Edmond the Veteran of Waterloo! Ha! ha!” (she bursts out laughing like a schoolgirl, with her hand over her mouth). “He’s an awful liar, you know!”

  “I gathered as much,” Napoleon replies, quite composed. Changing the subject, he inquires about ways of getting to France. She informs him that the mail coach to Charleroi is due at about four o’clock. He can quite comfortably spend the night in Charleroi and from there take the old bone shaker to the border.

  After finishing his second bread roll, he stretches out his legs and closes his eyes. He still has plenty of time to take a nap in the shade.

  He muses. He has always had the unshakable conviction that all the setbacks that have happened in his life, even those that seemed the most painful and futile, must in some way or another actively contribute to the working out of his destiny. There is no doubt in his mind that the bizarre pilgrimage he made that morning was also part of that mysterious grand design, but for the moment he gives up any attempt at exploring its obscure significance. Perhaps it was necessary to stir up the shadows of a vanished past in order to realize more clearly that, from now on, the only true Napoleon is the one who belongs to the future—a future that awaits him in Paris!

  III. AN INCIDENT AT THE BORDER

  THE OLD COACH has been traveling for many hours. It was already on its way by the early morning, when the birds began to call; it has rumbled through the calm of noon, allowing the passengers only twenty minutes’ rest in an empty inn, silent and full of flies. It has traveled throughout the afternoon, until the sudden chill at dusk reminds the travelers that the warmth of the day has merely been the caprice of an early spring.

  The hustle and bustle of the journey surges around Napoleon, who sits rock-like, calm and concentrated. His traveling companions have been busy lighting cigars, striking up conversations, unfolding newspapers, uncorking bottles, peeling hard-boiled eggs, slicing sausages, taking off overcoats, untying scarves, unbuttoning waistcoats, shedding flannel underwear, exchanging confidences, telling bawdy jokes, criticizing the government, and providing physiological details about their state of health. Eventually the cool of the evening has made them progressively button up again. Some are already nodding, their noses buried in their overcoats, while dusk, creeping over the fields, deepens into night.

  Impervious to heat and cold, to the pleasures of tobacco and conversation, Napoleon has stuck stoically to his diet of dry bread and daydreams. His imagination is galloping far ahead of the four horses whose hooves monotonously pound the highway for hours on end—toward Paris, toward Paris!

  “FLEURUS! Royal Gendarmerie patrol! Passport check!”

  Under the light of the coach lamp, in a halo of mist, a gendarme’s busby covered in tiny droplets of rain appears framed in the window. Only his face, red with cold, and the golden glow of the button on his collar stand out in the blackness of the night that has covered the whole countryside like the lid on a cauldron.

  The travelers stretch, shake themselves, and shiver, hunching their shoulders under this sudden intrusion of cold and silence. They feel as though they are lost on another planet. The only sounds to be heard are the peaceful breathing of the team of horses, the clinking of a bit, the scraping of a horseshoe.

  The gendarme buries his nose in the crumpled papers that have been handed to him. A stubborn smoker lights up his old cigar again, filling the coach with its acrid stench.

  “Lenormand, Eugène Lenormand. Which one of you is he?” the gendarme asks, waving a passport in his hand.

  The passengers start looking at each other suspiciously.

  “Well, where’s Lenormand?” the gendarme repeats, growing impatient.

  The inconspicuous passenger in the gray coat suddenly gives a start, like someone who has just woken up. This slight shiver is a sufficient clue for the anxious and surly bourgeois who are traveling with him; in fact, they have identified him even before he can do so himself. “Come on, can’t you hear Monsieur le Gendarme calling you? What are you waiting for?” All these peremptory looks in his direction: they must be right.

  “Get down,” says the gendarme. “Follow me.”

  His legs are stiff and he has difficulty making his way to the door between two rows of hostile whispering passengers. The gendarme helps him down.

  The old coach has started off again. The yellow lamp that dangles on its rear jumps each time it goes over a bump in the road. Then the light disappears, suddenly snuffed out by a bend in the road.

  Napoleon allows himself to be led like a blind man to the guardhouse, a cottage by the side of the road, half hidden behind a fence. A dog barks in the dark. His chain can be heard grating against a wooden post.

  Inside the guardhouse, two gendarmes are smoking their pipes in front of a cast-iron stove. A sergeant in his shirtsleeves is sitting behind a kitchen table. He looks rather like a balding bailiff. His boots are lying in a corner and he is wearing slippers. The usual pot of geraniums sits on the windowsill. Apart from the smell of tobacco and old socks, the atmosphere in the room, all things considered, is more like a cozy bourgeois interior than a police station.

  “Sergeant, we’ve got the man!” the gendarme announces, looking pleased with himself.

  The Man! This is what all the crowned heads of Europe used to call him, in fear and trembling, as though the four syllables of his Christian name were a thunderbolt that could topple their thrones at the first distant rumble . . .

  “Eugène Lenormand, wanted for failure to pay a bill. You left the hotel Au Rendezvous des Namurois, at the wooden clock in the rue du Théâtre in Brussels . . .” The sergeant was reading from a document in front of him, as though giving evidence. He placed his finger on the last word and looked up at the accused. Meanwhile, the gendarme who had detained him went over to the stove and, with a look of utter contentment, stood with the tails of his jacket lifted, warming his back.

  The offense was trivial and the offender unimportant. The other gendarmes yawne
d. Only the sergeant went on looking at Napoleon closely and thoughtfully. The two men stared at each other in silence for quite some time.

  “You’ll be taken back to Charleroi tomorrow morning,” the sergeant said at last in his toneless voice. He slipped into the table drawer the offender’s papers, which the gendarme had handed over when he came in. “For tonight, you can put him with Louis,” the sergeant added, turning to the gendarme.

  Napoleon had not uttered a single word. The gendarme indicated that he wanted him to follow, and they found themselves once more out in the cold night air. As they walked around the cottage, they passed behind the fence. A big dog bounded out of its kennel, pulling on its chain. It was about to give another series of barks, but at the gendarme’s command growled and curled up in its shelter.

  They crossed the vegetable garden and arrived at a sort of outhouse—probably an old toolshed. The gendarme unbolted the door and guided Napoleon inside. In the dark, he pointed out his bed: a bed made of wooden planks on which Napoleon could feel the rough thickness of a folded blanket.

  The gendarme went out, and Napoleon heard him put a padlock on the outside.

  Napoleon sat down on the bed while his eyes got accustomed to the dark, but he could make out only the vague, pale shape of a tiny skylight above his head.

  It was relatively warm in the confined space of the hut, and a faint smell of cattle hung in the air.

  He was getting ready to explore the place by groping around in the dark, when he suddenly became aware of an unknown presence in the room. A few yards away, in the opposite corner, there was a noise like a heavy body turning over in its sleep on a bed of straw. The other occupant of the shed kept on tossing about on his straw, exhaling very loudly two or three times like a surfacing whale, then seemed to sink back into the depths of silent sleep.