[Marianne 6] - Marianne and the Crown of Fire

by Juliette Benzoni

  But as she climbed the steps leading up to the doors the sound that met her ears was not the murmur of prayers but the neighing of horses and the cursing of their grooms. St Basil the Blessed had become a stable.

  This discovery came as such a violent shock to her that she turned on her heels and fled as if the place had been infected with the plague. Her heart was bursting with an anger and indignation that drove out all her private fears and alarms. They had no right to do such things! However little a Catholic like herself might think of the Orthodox faith, still its adherents worshipped the same God, and in a manner not so very different from her own. Moreover, lax though she might be in the practice of it, her faith was none the less deep and what she had just seen had touched her to the quick. So, not content with driving out the cardinals, making the Pope a prisoner and flouting the Church's laws by his divorce and remarriage, Napoleon was actually permitting his troops to profane God's house! For the first time it occurred to Marianne that his cause might after all be doomed to failure. Cardinal de Chazay's passionate words suddenly took on a strange, almost prophetic resonance.

  She paused for a moment, wondering what to do. Where, in all this confusion and sea of flames, could she go? The thought of her godfather, and the remembrance of the story she had told to Mere Tambouille a little while before came together in her mind. Why not do as she had said? The cardinal must have gone either to St Louis-des-Français or to Count Sheremetiev's house at Kuskovo, where he had arranged to meet her before. That was the answer, of course. In fact it was the only possible answer since Jolival and Gracchus were not to be found. Perhaps they had not even managed to leave the Kremlin. With only one good leg, the Vicomte was not exactly mobile and if he had failed to reach the Rostopchin Palace, how much less likely the posting house on the road to France, with that great conflagration barring the way on every side.

  Having made her decision, Marianne tucked up her skirt and pulled it over her head, like a peasant woman in the rain, to protect her hair from the sparks that were still flying through the air, and then set out to cross the square in the direction of the Lubianka district in which the French church stood.

  But in spite of all her efforts, she found it impossible to push her way through the solid mass of vehicles and men, all struggling to get to those few gates which the fire had not yet reached. She heard someone shouting in French that the Tver road was the only one still open but it meant nothing to her. She did not want to go with these people. She only wanted to find her godfather.

  Suddenly, she gave a joyful cry. The crowd had parted for a moment, thrust aside by a platoon of soldiers emerging from a side street, and she had caught a lightning glimpse of a figure that made her heart beat faster: a grey-haired man wrapped in a long, dark cloak, just such a cloak as she had thrown round the cardinal's shoulders a short while before. He was there, ahead of her.

  After that, instead of fighting against the tide, she let herself be carried along with it. In any case, to have tried to cut across it would have been to court certain death under the wheels of the carriages and the hooves of the maddened horses, many of which were barely under control. Instead, she directed all her efforts to catching up with the man in the black cloak.

  All at once, what had been a narrow street seemed to open out. They were crossing a wide boulevard lined with fine, large houses.

  Just then, the man in front stepped out of the main stream and hurried down the boulevard, although that, too, was blocked by fire at the far end. Marianne darted after him, calling at the top of her voice but without making herself heard above the roaring of the fire and the howling wind. She began to run, oblivious of everything about her and not even aware that all those gracious houses were at that moment given over to plunder by the drunken soldiery.

  The man ahead – she was sure that it was the cardinal when the wind blew aside a fold of his cloak and revealed the black soutane – was running now, like a man pursued, so fast that Marianne had the greatest difficulty in following.

  She was gaining on him, even so, when all of a sudden he vanished. At the place where she had last seen him there was nothing but a high, gilded iron gate and beyond it a bit of stunted shrubbery. Desperately, she hurled herself against it. It gave out a metallic clang but held as firm as if it had never been made to open. Catching sight of a bell, Marianne hung onto it with all her strength but there was no answer. No one came. The man had vanished as completely as if a trapdoor had opened suddenly and swallowed him up.

  Marianne sank down despondently on a stone block that stood beside the gate and looked about her. Everywhere were yelling voices, the crash of broken bottles and the strains of drunken singing. The city was burning, the flames coming closer every minute, and still there were men capable of breaking into cellars and revelling in their contents rather than flying for their lives.

  From two or three of the adjacent streets, small groups of scantily clad women and children were running out into the still empty boulevard, weeping and shrieking aloud with terror. It was at this point that Marianne first noticed a big woman, dressed in much the same fashion as the vivandière she had met earlier but with the difference that instead of a bearskin this one sported on her head a policeman's cap with a long red silken tassel. This creature's conduct was so revolting that it roused Marianne from her own misery. She was armed with a cavalryman's sabre and was using it to hold up the fugitives who were trying to make their way out of one of the side streets, letting them pass only when she had searched and stripped them of all that they were carrying. Already she had a heap of jewels and valises on the ground beside her, for the wretched people, terrified of the fire at their backs, suffered themselves to be robbed without protest.

  The next group to appear consisted of an old man leaning on a stick, a young girl, two children and two men bearing between them a stretcher on which was a woman, evidently very ill. Before any of them could make a move to stop her, the harpy had rushed at the stretcher and begun to search the sick woman with such unfeeling roughness that Marianne could bear it no longer.

  She sprang forward, spurred on by a fury that crystallized all her loathing and disgust, and fell upon the woman, grasping her by the grey hair that straggled from under her cap and jerking her backwards with a force that sent her sprawling on the ground, then throwing herself down on her and pummelling her with her fists. Never before had she felt such need to bite and rend and kill. She was ashamed, bitterly ashamed that people like this were her own fellow-countrymen and, somehow or other, she had to show them what she felt.

  The woman, meanwhile, was yelling like a stuck pig and in another moment three or four half-drunken soldiers came lurching to her rescue.

  'Hold on, Ma!' one of them bawled out. 'We're coming!' Marianne saw that she was lost. The party to whose aid she had so rashly gone had taken the opportunity to make good their escape as soon as their assailant was laid low. She was alone now, face to face with four angry men who were already dragging her bodily away from her victim. The woman herself had staggered to her feet, cursing venomously, with blood pouring from her nose. Reeling slightly, she made for the sword she had dropped.

  'Ta, lads,' she wheezed. 'Now you keep a 'old on 'er, acos I'm a goin' ter carve out one o' them there ogles. Jest to larn 'er!'

  Holding the sword unsteadily at arm's length, she was advancing on Marianne when she jerked and fell headlong at the feet of the startled girl. A long whiplash had curled around her knees and cut the legs from under her. At the same time a mocking, nasal voice spoke brusquely.

  'All right, my lads! That will do! Be off with you, unless you want a taste of my whip – or a noose! And take this doxy with you!'

  The men did not wait to be told twice and in another moment Marianne found herself alone with her rescuer, who was even then descending from a kind of open carriage which, at that instant, looked more like a removal van than a respectable conveyance.

  'You are not hurt?' the young man asked her as she began
automatically brushing down her skirts and pushing back her long, dishevelled hair.

  'No, I don't think so. I owe you my thanks, Sir. But for you—'

  'Please. It was the least I could do. It is bad enough to have been driven out of every successive refuge by this confounded fire without being forced to realize that one belongs to a race of savages into the bargain. But—' He broke off and, studying Marianne attentively, said suddenly: 'But I know you! Good Lord, this is certainly fated to be the most fantastic night of my whole life! Who would have thought that I should have the luck to run across one of the prettiest women in Paris amid the flames of Moscow?'

  'You know me?' Marianne said uneasily, thinking that this was the last thing she wanted after all that had happened at the Kremlin. 'You have the advantage of me, Sir.'

  'De Beyle, at your service, Princess. Auditor 1st Class, Council of State, at present attached to the staff of Comte Mathieu Dumas, Assistant Quartermaster-General of the Imperial Army. My name will mean nothing to you, of course, because I have never had the privilege of being introduced to you, but I saw you one night at the Comédie Française. The play was Britannicus and you were escorted by that damned scoundrel Chernychev. You were dressed all in red and looked like one of those flames there – only infinitely sweeter! But we must not stay here. The fire is gaining on us. Allow me to offer you – I can hardly call it a seat, but at least a perch in my carriage?'

  'The fact is – I don't know where I am going. I was making for St Louis-des-Français—'

  'Well, you will never get there. Indeed, one might say that none of us knows where he is going. What matters is to get out of the city through such roads as are still open to us.'

  As he spoke, Monsieur de Beyle was assisting Marianne to climb up on to the heap of baggage which included, in addition to a number of bottles, a small cask of wine and a prodigious quantity of books, for the most part very gorgeously bound. Sprawled among all these was also another passenger in the shape of a very fat man of pallid complexion who seemed within an inch of expiring altogether.

  This person turned his head and gazed at her with a complete lack of expression. When he had satisfied himself that she was undeniably about to take her place in the vehicle, he uttered a heartrending sigh and, releasing his clutch upon his stomach, made some effort to shift his ponderous body to one side to enable her to sit down. As he did so, he produced a travesty of a smile.

  'Monsieur de Bonnaire de Giff, auditor 2nd class,' Beyle introduced him. 'He is suffering,' he added in a sardonic tone devoid of all trace of sympathy or compassion, 'from a severe attack of dysentery.' It was evident that he found his passenger both irritating and repulsive. Marianne smiled, nevertheless, and murmured a few sympathetic expressions, to which the invalid responded with a groan.

  Monsieur de Beyle then climbed in after Marianne and instructed the driver to continue along the boulevard and join the queue of vehicles at its end. As she watched him, Marianne was aware of a vague recollection stirring deep down in her mind. She did remember having seen his face somewhere. It was a young face, not particularly handsome, even rather coarse, but powerful, with a high forehead made higher still by a receding hairline, lively, observant dark eyes and an ironical, almost bitter twist to the lips. He had spoken of that memorable performance of Britannicus and now she realized that that was where she had seen him. Fortunée Hamelin, who knew everybody, had commented somewhat slightingly on his presence among the occupants of Comte Daru's box.

  'No one in particular. A provincial young man with literary aspirations, I believe. Some kind of relation of the Comtesse – probably her lover as well. His name is – Beyle. Yes, that's it, Henri Beyle. Rather a ladies' man.'

  None of that was much comfort to Marianne. She began to feel that she was dogged by ill-luck. She was trying to find Jolival, her godfather, Gracchus – and instead she had to fall into the hands of someone on the Quartermaster-General's staff, and a man who knew her, at that! She would be lucky if she did not find herself face to face with Napoleon. But then, was there anyone in Moscow at that moment who was not, in some way, connected with him? And she really had no idea of where to go. By this time the only possible place was somewhere out of reach of the flames.

  Every bit as much at ease as if they had been conversing in a drawing-room, her companion was explaining to her that he had been obliged to interrupt a most enjoyable dinner in the Apraxin Palace when the flames threatened to engulf it.

  'We have already sought refuge in two or three places,' he told her, evidently enjoying himself enormously despite what seemed to be a heavy cold. 'But each time this blessed fire caught us up. That was how we came to visit the Soltikov Palace, an excellent club with a quite outstanding cellar and a library in which I came across a very rare edition of Voltaire's Facéties. Let me show you.' He pulled a small, richly bound book out of his pocket and stroked it lovingly. Then, hastily, he thrust it back again and leaning his arms on the wine cask muttered: 'Unhappily, I fear that all that remains to us now is the open country – supposing we can ever reach it. Look, everything seems to have stopped moving.'

  This was true and when they tried to edge into the endless procession of vehicles they were immediately thrust back by a cavalcade of horsemen and carriages which came charging out of a side street and literally plunged straight into the crowd.

  'The outriders of the King of Naples!' Beyle muttered. 'That is all we need! Where does the great Murat think he's going?' He spoke to the driver. 'Wait, François. I want to see.'

  Once again, he jumped down from the carriage and darted into the crowd. Marianne saw him eagerly questioning three men in splendid livery lavishly adorned with gold braid who seemed to be trying to force a way through the traffic for their master's coaches. When he came back, he was white with anger.

  'Well, dear lady,' he said acidly. 'We must stay here to be roasted alive, I fear, so that Murat may save his wardrobe. Look there, the fire is creeping forward to overtake us. In a little while it will be threatening the Tver road also. True, the Emperor is coming this way before long.'

  Marianne gulped painfully.

  'The Emperor? Are you sure?'

  He stared at her in some surprise.

  'Why yes, the Emperor. Did you think he was going to stay and burn with the Kremlin? I must say, to judge from what I have just heard, there seems to have been some trouble but in the end his Majesty got out of the confounded place by way of a postern leading on to the river bank. He's going to withdraw to a country house outside the city – Petrovski or some such name. We'll wait for him to pass and then follow on after him – I say, where are you off to?'

  For Marianne had scrambled over the cask and slid to the ground.

  'I am grateful to you for all your kindness in rescuing me, Sir, but this is where I get down.'

  'Here? But this is nowhere near St Louis-des-Français. And I thought you told me you didn't know where to go? Princess, I beg of you—' His face was suddenly very serious. 'Do not do anything rash. This city is doomed and us with it. It may be that we shall not see the day out. Do not leave it on my conscience that I abandoned you in peril. I don't know what has made you change your mind but you are the Emperor's friend and I—'

  She fixed her green eyes on him squarely.

  'You are mistaken, Monsieur de Beyle. I am no longer the Emperor's friend. I cannot tell you the whole, but you could endanger your own position by helping me. Go to his Majesty. You have a right, even a duty to do so. But let me go my own way.'

  She turned and was beginning to walk away but he caught her firmly by the arm.

  'Madam,' he said, 'between women and politics I have never known a moment's hesitation. I will serve a lady before I serve the Empire. I have not so far had the privilege of being numbered among your friends. Permit me to take advantage of the unlooked-for opportunity which fate has put in my way today. If you do not wish to see the Emperor, you shall not see him.'

  'That is not quite enough, Sir,' Ma
rianne said with the shadow of a smile. 'Neither would I wish the Emperor to see me.'

  'Then I will arrange it so, only, I implore you, Princess, do not reject the hand I offer you. Do not deny me the happiness of being, if only briefly, your protector.'

  They looked at one another for a moment and Marianne had a sudden conviction that she could place complete trust in this stranger. There was something solid and rock-like about him, like the mountains of his own native Dauphiné. Impulsively, she put out her hand, partly that he might help her up again on to the pile of baggage and partly, also, in acknowledgement of a kind of pact between them.

  'Very well,' she said. 'I trust you. Let us be friends.'

  'Wonderful! This must be celebrated! The best way to pass the time when you've nothing else to do is to have a drink, and we've some excellent bottles here… Hey, Bonnaire, old fellow! Don't drink all of that!' he cried suddenly becoming aware that his passenger was engaged, with an air of unshakeable gloom, in getting through the contents of an ancient, crusted bottle.

  'It's not that I'm enjoying it,' the other returned with a hiccup, releasing the neck of the bottle for an instant. 'But a good wine is the best thing in the world for dysentery.'

  'Well I'm damned!' Beyle said indignantly. 'If you can equate Vosne-Romanée with laudanum, then you and I are going to fall out! Hand me a bottle and see if you can find a glass.'

  Marianne accepted a glass of wine but after that left her new friend to finish the bottle. Nor was he the only person drinking. All round her she could see people busy draining flasks and bottles, some even as they ran. Beyle himself paused briefly to heap curses on a group of three or four lackeys who came up with their carriage and tried, as well as their tottering legs would allow them, to scramble aboard. The whip was brought into play again, all the more vigorously because the men proved to be the young auditor's own servants.