Napoleon's Exile

by Patrick Rambaud

  *

  In point of fact, the Count of Sémallé had just returned from a perilous mission with an Austrian passport that had led him along various byways to a hostelry in Vesoul where he had met up with Louis XVIII’s turbulent brother, ‘Monsieur', the Count of Artois, who had entrusted him with the royalist proclamations printed in Basle and a recommendation written in his own hand:

  Those who see this paper can and may place full trust in everything that Monsieur de Sémallé will tell them on my behalf

  Sémallé had drooping shoulders, a large head, and fair hair parted in the middle; he was wearing a dressing-gown, but with a tie twisted around his neck as though preparing at any moment to throw on a frock-coat to escape the merest hint of danger. For prudence’s sake, he was not living in his town house near the boulevards where his wife still dwelt, but in his old, more modest house at 55 rue de Lille. He was writing and drinking hot chocolate when a valet ushered La Grange and Octave into his office.

  ‘Empress Marie-Louise has left with her son, Cambacérès, and some members of the government.’

  ‘That changes nothing, La Grange. The foreign forces will be making their way towards Paris as we speak. Bonaparte is away in the East, the meagre troops of Mortier and Marmont are about to reach the tollgates, but they’re starving, and have no straw or wood. They won’t withstand this terrible advance.’

  ‘And what if the Parisians rise up?’ asked Octave.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Sémallé, who had until that point paid no attention to the Marquis’s companion.

  ‘The Chevalier de Blacé,’ replied La Grange. ‘On Wednesday he was still living in his house in Baker Street. He comes with Lady Salisbury’s recommendation.’

  ‘Fine.’ And then, to Octave: ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Via Brussels, your grace.’

  ‘He has a Belgian passport,’ added the Marquis, ‘and he’s registered as a lace trader.’

  ‘What’s the word in London?’

  ‘The English are inclined towards the Bourbons, my lord.’

  ‘I know that, Chevalier, but the Tsar has his eye on the King of Sweden, and the Austrians are looking to the King of Rome. In Rome, we failed to provoke an uprising in our favour. Last week the Prince of Hessen-Homburg, who is in charge of the city, had our partisans arrested for wearing white cockades: he saw it as sedition. In Bordeaux, Wellington is keeping the Duke of Angoulême at arm’s length; he has just joined him in Saint-Jean-de-Luz ... At any rate, the King mustn’t be imposed by the allies, but chosen by the French.’

  ‘Easier said than done,’ grumbled La Grange, disappointed by the Count’s revelations.

  ‘Everyone has forgotten the Bourbons,’ Sémallé went on. ‘What do they look like? Where are they? After their twenty years in exile, the people know nothing about them. But I do know one thing and one thing alone:We have two days to create a popular movement.’

  ‘With whom? With what?’

  ‘We have to simulate a vast royalist movement.’

  ‘Simulate?’ said Octave in astonishment.

  ‘We must persuade the allies to support the legitimate monarchy, and the people as a whole to accept it. La Grange, have our Committee assemble tomorrow. We should be able to see things more clearly by then.’

  In December, at the request of Louis XVIII, who had sought refuge in Hartwell, Sémallé had begun to put together a royalist Committee of about forty people. Having been rejected by the aristocrats, who were suspicious of police informers, he had recruited his partisans from officers, civil servants, the hardline bourgeoisie and businessmen craving peace. The committee met in the rue de l'Échiquier, in the town house of a certain Lemercier - a former banker who liked to think of himself as a man of letters - where they talked a lot, did little, and contented themselves with hoarding quantities of white cockades in all kinds of hidey-holes.

  As he led Octave back, Sémallé questioned him. ‘I knew a Blacé in the Tuileries, when I was one of Louis XVI’s pages.’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘You don’t look like him.’

  ‘I’ve been told that before, my lord.’

  ‘What became of your father?’

  ‘The last image I have of him is his head on the end of a pike.’

  *

  Claiming to be worn out after his journey from England to Paris, Octave declined the invitation of dinner at the Palais-Royal, where some establishments were keeping their back rooms open for regulars. La Grange did not press the point, but walked him to his room and immediately took his leave.

  Octave hurried to bolt the door as soon as he heard the Marquis heading down the stairs. Then he stood at the window and watched him disappear from view. There was no one else in the street, but he had some lingering doubts. The Marquis was too amiable, too confiding: a letter of recommendation had sufficed, along with some twaddle about emigrant life in London. Was he being left to his own devices so that he might more easily be kept under surveillance? If he went out again, would one or other of the members of this great: Committee take advantage of the fact to tail him?

  Octave threw his wig on to the table and changed his clothes; from his case he took a black tie and a long blue frock-coat which he buttoned across his chest; he put on a high, broad hat. Then, carrying a cane as thick as a cudgel under his arm, he unlocked the big wardrobe: he opened a hidden door in its base and dashed down a spiral staircase that led to the antique shop at 14 rue Saint-Sauveur. (Before the Revolution, the building had been a house of assignation run by a tobacconist’s wife, and this secret exit, through the chamber that was in those days called ‘the changing-room', enabled frolicking noblewomen and worthies to avoid the front door and leave the house disguised as grisettes or respectable clergymen.)

  Octave walked with the quick, resolute pace of a man familiar with the district’s network of alleyways. Half an hour later, at the rue de la Culture-Sainte-Cathérine, he passed through the porch of the Renaissance town-house of M. de Pommereul, the director of the library, and thus of the Imperial censors. In the sentry-box, a corporal with a wooden leg was smoking his pipe; he didn’t ask any questions, as though the new arrival had an entrée into the building. Octave climbed to the first floor and found himself in a room in which files stacked on shelves rose to the ceiling, perched in chairs and tilted in unstable piles on the tile floor. Three men were busy throwing bundles of these documents into a fireplace wide and deep enough to roast an ox. One of the three men, Sebastian Roque - until recently the Baron d’Herbigny - glaced up. He was drenched in sweat, his sleeves were rolled up, and black curls stuck to his forehead. He looked very surprised to see Octave.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to deliver my report.’

  ‘It’s over, it’s over!’

  ‘You’re my official contact with the Duke of Bassano.’

  ‘I don’t know where he’s hiding, and I’m getting out of the city like everyone else! I’ve bought an estate in Normandy, and I’m retreating to it.’

  ‘Listen, my lord, I’ve infiltrated a group of royalists ...’

  ‘Nothing to do with me any more.’

  ‘I have their names, their addresses, they’re going to meet tomorrow evening. The most active of them, a marquis, is staying with a man called Morin, former secretary to Masséna, and as to the Count of Sémallé . . .’

  ‘I want nothing to do with him!’

  The Baron put a pile of files down on a sofa and stood in front of Octave. ‘Go and tell all that to the Duke of Rovigo.’

  ‘I’m not involved with the police,’ said Octave.

  ‘Tell that to Prefect Pasquier.’

  ‘The loyalty of civil servants sways with the wind.’

  ‘You must admit it’s an ill wind for us!’

  Octave took his heavy cane in both hands and addressed the servants who were still feeding the flames while pretending not to hear anything:

  ‘You two, out!’

 
‘Hang on a moment!’ said the Baron, ‘since when have you been issuing orders?’

  ‘Since a minute ago.’

  By what right?’

  ‘I’m the last person here to represent His Majesty.’

  Baron d’Herbigny gave a hollow laugh.

  ‘The last person, you’re right!’

  ‘I’m going to finish what I’ve started.’

  ‘Bravo! Bravissimo!’ said the Baron, bellowing with laughter until a stout blow in the stomach from Octave’s cane bent him double over a sofa. He regained his breath with difficulty. The office boys had fled, knocking against the shelves as they passed and causing an avalanche of stacks of files. Wheezing, d’Herbigny rose to his feet, but Octave pushed him back into the papers and cushions with the tip of his cane.

  ‘Imagine the Emperor coming back on a forced march ...’

  ‘You have too much imagination.’

  ‘That’s what I’m paid for, my little baron.’

  ‘Don’t adopt that tone with me!’

  ‘You’re nothing but a draper’s son!’ said Octave, prodding him with his cane.

  ‘And you of a valet and a washerwoman.’

  ‘I make no secret of it, my little baron.’

  *

  It was a clear night. Columns of bare-handed workmen drifted by in silence. Octave learned that they were heading towards the Place Vendôme to ask for weapons from General Hulin, the Governor of Paris; they would get nothing and would fly into a fury, Octave knew it: the reserve muskets had been distributed to the line infantry, because the Empire was suspicious of the suburbs, where unrest is traditionally born. As to the peasants, not all of them had taken the westward road, which was still open. They were camped along the streets in their thousands, in their carts, in stable doorways, and had lit fires on the pavement to keep themselves warm and cook poultry. Octave bought a charred pigeon at twice the going rate, and set off nibbling to the end of the rue Saint-Antoine. Just before the Charonne barrier, he turned into the rue de la Planchette, an avenue lined with low-roofed houses, gardens, railings and little walls on the edge of the fields.

  With the pommel of his cane, Octave knocked at a wooden door. The sound of dragging feet came from inside, and a shrewish-looking woman appeared in the doorway, holding her lantern level with her flabby face.

  ‘How is he?’ asked Octave.

  ‘He’s asleep, sir, but he’s breathing well.’

  Octave took the lantern from the old woman. At the rear of the little house, in a hidden room, a fair-haired man, his shirt open, snored on a mattress. The old woman put some kindling in the stove.

  ‘Wake him, Jeanne, I’ll take him off your hands.’

  ‘Will he be able to stand up, Monsieur Octave?’

  ‘I’ll help him. Find him a coat or a cape.’

  Octave shook the sleeping man’s shoulder. With a start, he opened his eyes and murmured thickly, ‘Oh ... It’s you ...’ He propped himself up on his elbows and, after a moment he said, ‘The other evening...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You didn’t say ...’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you’d seen the man who attacked me ...’

  ‘No, sadly, just his back. I turned up just as he was attacking you from behind. He ran off while I was picking up your bags.’

  ‘Did I look so rich that someone would want to rob me?’

  ‘You must have been too loose-tongued with the other people at the table. In France, Monsieur de Blacé, there are policemen or rogues everywhere you look. The minute you left that wretched inn, you became their prey.’

  ‘I never thought. . .’

  ‘Did you mention London?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘No doubt you did. And you drew attention to yourself by paying the landlord with your gold coins. That would have done it.’

  Old Jeanne fetched a grey guardsman’s coat, with three red woollen stripes on the sleeve.

  ‘Put it on, Monsieur de Blacé,’ said Octave.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To see some royalists you mentioned to me the day before yesterday.’

  ‘I was given their address in London . . .’

  ‘So you really don’t know anyone in Paris?’

  ‘No one. You asked me that before.’

  ‘No relatives, not even distant ones?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘What about your family?’

  ‘I saw my father’s head on the end of a pike ...’

  ‘I know, you told me that before.’

  ‘My mother died of tuberculosis in Soho.’

  ‘So I’m all you’ve got?’

  ‘For the time being.’

  Blacé pulled on his coat, rubbed the back of his neck and suddenly came to his senses: ‘Where are my clothes and my wig?’

  ‘With your royalist friends, who are waiting for you.’

  ‘My letter of recommendation?’

  ‘They’ve got it.’

  ‘What about my money? The money I was going to send to their Committee?’

  ‘In safe hands.’

  ‘Wasn’t it in safe hands in this house?’

  ‘Are you suspicious of me?’

  ‘Not at all, but I don’t even know who you are.’

  ‘Your saviour.’

  They headed outside. Blacé was still weak, his attacker had hit him hard. Octave supported him as they walked, chatting, along the moonlit avenue.

  ‘Will we pass by the Tuileries?’

  ‘It’s on our way,’ replied Octave.

  ‘That’s where I have my last memories of Paris...’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I was eight years old. It was August, and the people were attacking the Tuileries. The King and his family slipped off through the gardens. My mother and the ladies of the court had locked themselves away with the children in a candle-lit room. I remember a lot of noise, shouting, window-panes broken by cannon-fire. Why were we spared? I can’t remember. Even now I can see buildings on fire, slaughtered Swiss Guards, down by the flowerbeds, in a cloud of flies. The rioters slit eiderdowns open and shook them from the windows like snow ... What’s that noise?’

  ‘The drums of the National Guard. Our Russian friends can’t be far off. Come over this way, let’s stay out of the centre of the city.’

  They walked along the grassy Quai du Mail as it sloped to the Seine. In the darkness, Octave guided the chevalier, holding him firmly by the arm.

  ‘Where are we going now?’ asked Blacé anxiously.

  ‘You’ve told me what I wanted to know. I’m going to show you something in return. What do you see, at the bottom of the hill?’

  ‘Without a lantern?’

  ‘Without a lantern.’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘No, take a closer look. Lean over.’

  Intrigued, the chevalier obeyed. Octave took his cane in both hands, lifted it quickly, and then brought it crashing down on the back of his companion’s neck. Blacé crumpled against the embankment, his nose in the soil. Octave rolled the body down to the water with the heel of his boot, and tipped it in with his cane. The corpse floated on the surface and was carried away by the current, swifter in this part of the river, between the Île Saint-Louis and the Île Louvier. When the body had disappeared into the night, Octave went back home to bed.

  *

  The drums had beaten the call to arms all night and in all parts of the city. From dawn, the sound of cannon and heavy gunfire could be heard from behind the hills of Belleville, Montmartre and the Butte Chaumont, which could be seen from the upper floors of the Sémallé townhouse. The sky was dark and leaden. Nervous and corseted, the young Countess de Sémallé left the window and let her maid buckle a curious belt around her waist. At that moment the Count slipped into the room. The Countess glimpsed him in the mirror above the fireplace and uttered a little cry.

  ‘Jean-René, you’ll give us away if you come here!’

  ‘It’s my hou
se.’

  ‘The police are keeping watch on the house, you know that, they’ll have recognized you, they’ll put you under arrest!’

  ‘Have no fear, my dear Zoe, events are keeping them far too busy, and their masters are already confused about who they’re supposed to be serving. The cannon has its charms, you see - but tell me, what’s the purpose of that padded belt, which puts pounds on you?’

  ‘I’d rather keep my diamonds with me if we have to flee.’ The Countess pointed at her maid. ‘Louise is wearing a belt of the same model, with my jewels and my pearls.’

  ‘The allies are our allies.’

  ‘And what about the hairy Cossacks who are just dying to pillage us?’

  ‘The moment I leave, our valets will take the forage cart that I ordered yesterday and push it against the gate.’

  ‘Will that stop the barbarians?’

  ‘Pillagers, my dear Zoé, I know from experience, give up at the first obstacle they encounter, and go off to pillage somewhere else. In Paris, they have plenty of choice.’

  ‘Where will you be?’

  The Count kissed the hand that the Countess held out to him.

  ‘We’re going to keep a close eye on the situation before we do anything.’

  ‘You will be careful!’

  ‘Don’t fret so, we’re finally going to defeat the lackeys of the Empire.’

  ‘May God help you!’ said the Countess, crossing herself.

  ‘God and the mandate of the Count of Artois.’

  Sémallé turned on his heels, put on his big black hat and went out to meet his friend La Grange in the courtyard. They took two horses from the stable and, once mounted, set off slowly down the boulevard de la Madeleine, picking their way through an anxious and various crowd gathered beneath the lime trees. At the barrier of the Faubourg Montmartre the Parisians were preparing their defences, such as they were: chevaux-de-frise that had been rolled out during the night on the roads and alleyways. There were no fortifications, just a dismantled tollgate, a cannon with no gunners, and palisades manned by university students in new clothes and workers in overalls armed with sticks and carving knives. National Guardsmen were turning up as reinforcements, loaves and fat brioches impaled on their bayonets. Many of them carried picks with tricolour banners for want of muskets. They wore a few scraps of uniform, chalk-whitened shoulder straps over their frock-coats. A notary wore yellow leggings, and a grocer had his trousers tied with string at his ankles. These were the workmen, the property-owners, the shopkeepers ruined by the ceaseless war who had been enlisted to defend the city. They had little idea of the danger that faced them, and came out with a jumble of truth and wild rumour when Sémallé questioned them.