The first curious villagers who had arrived to investigate didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic, in fact they seemed rather worried at the sight of the grenadier guards, even though they had thought at first, spying the ships through their telescopes, that they were Algerine corsairs who’d captured the boats of some Genoese fishermen, and were putting in at Juan les Pins to renew their supplies of water.
The men cleaned their weapons, ate soup and set up camp at the bottom of a creek. Peyrusse had given them two weeks’ wages, and they could hardly see two feet in front of them. At a loose end, Octave walked a few hundred yards along the road, to an inn that would not have been noticed from the shore, behind a clump of pines with grey foliage. On the sign, he read the strange name of the establishment: On the dot. He planned to improve his rations by allowing himself a chicken and some wine, and in he went. The main room was deserted, but a delicious smell of chicken soup drifted from a cauldron in the hearth. Octave called out. No one answered. He ventured further, pushing doors open, and found himself in a gloomy chamber where the innkeepers sat at the bedside of a little girl whose face was dotted with red spots, like flea-bites. A serving-wench he hadn’t noticed dragged him from the room. Carrying an empty cup that she was going to fill from the cauldron, she said crossly: ‘What d’you want? The inn’s shut.’
‘What about this soup?’
‘It’s for the girl.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘Very ill, Monsieur. She has measles.’
‘The Emperor has landed today ...’
‘What Emperor?’
‘What do you mean? We’ve only got one!’
‘So?’
‘I thought I could buy some food and wine from you . . .’
‘It’s shut, I told you.’
‘Aren’t you moved?’
‘Of course I am, measles is dangerous.’
‘I mean by Napoleon’s return.’
‘Whether he comes, whether he goes, whether he comes back, it doesn’t change anything for us, and I told you before, the girl has measles.’
‘Yes, I heard ...’
‘Heard but didn’t understand.’
‘What am I supposed to understand?’
‘As far as we’re concerned, there’s nothing more important in the world than that horrible measles.’
Disarmed by the situation, Octave thoughtfully set off again. He crossed the road amidst carts and horses: Cambronne’s detachment was returning from Cannes as night fell. The moon was bright, but the air was icy.
Octave turned up his collar and walked towards the bivouac, where piles of vine shoots were burning. The Emperor had pulled on a woollen jumper and was sleeping on his folding armchair, his boots on a chair, his grey frock-coat wrapped around him like a blanket. His face was peaceful. Napoleon was dreaming of Bonaparte.
On 20 March the Emperor returned to
the Tuileries, supported by a popular movement,
and one hundred days later came Waterloo.
Notes for the Curious
i. The Ancestor Cult: Conversation with Myself
'Another historical novel?’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, ‘no"?’
‘I don’t write historical novels.’
‘Are you joking?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Come on! I have the novel in front of me. You take us on a tour of 1814, or am I mistaken?’
‘Your definition’s at fault.’
‘What definition?’
‘The definition of the historical novel.’
‘Let’s have it!’
‘The term, certainly reductive, even contemptuous, refers to adventure stories telling timeless tales of love and revenge in exotic settings. The hooligan suddenly assumes nobility in his disguise as a medieval cut-purse, he lends colour to an ordinary yarn. This donning of gilded folderols is very contrived. Personally, it doesn’t interest me in the slightest: the chosen era serves as a backdrop, you can easily replace the fortified castle with a Florentine palace or an English building: it doesn’t change anything.’
‘An example, please.’
‘Take Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare sets his historic drama in Verona during the Renaissance, because he wants to stay close to the Italian story from which he drew his inspiration, written by Matteo Bandello in the sixteenth century. Bandello himself has taken it from a story by Luigi Da Porto. And in any case, love thwarted by parents was hardly a very new theme. You find it in Ovid, with the misfortunes of Pyramus and Thisbe. In this case, the age in which the action takes place is unimportant. Throw Romeo and Juliet into fifties New York and you get West Side Story’
‘I can see that, but nonetheless your novels are historical!’
‘Because history isn’t the setting but the theme. In actual fact, I’m trying to stage little fragments from our past.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a matter of personal taste, first of all, then curiosity, and finally the desire to communicate what I think I’ve understood, as best I can. It’s the European version of the ancestor cult. I feel quite close to those Indonesian villagers, on certain islands, who take it in turns, day and night, to protect the wooden effigies of their dead against antiquarian tomb-raiders. The ancestors are part of our lives, as in Asia, as in the Rome of the Caesars.’
‘Let’s run through that again. You said ‘personal taste’ ...’
‘In the fifties, children were immersed in history. Comics taught us about it every week. Thanks to things like Tintin and Spirou, by the age of seven we were familiar with Soucouf, Vauban, the Boxer Uprising, Marco Polo. We knew Samarkand, Babylon and Shanghai. L’Oncle Paul and Alix extended our Latin classes. That was when I learned the names of the seven hills of Rome, which I’ve never managed to forget ... And then there were books like Salammbô, the works of Dumas ...’
‘Dumas, exactly! The cycle of the Three Musketeers, that’s the historical novel in its pure state!’
‘No, I don’t think so. His characters can’t be transposed in time. You can’t imagine them in our own time, or in ancient Greece, during the crusades or among the pirates of the Caribbean. They tell us of the transition, in France, from the Baroque to the Classical age.’
‘I don’t see ...’
‘At the beginning we’re in the reign of Louis XIII, an age damaged by feudalism, and Richelieu knows it, he fights the feudal lords. You have a sense of bravado, of sworn oaths, emotional outbursts and decent food. You have panache. Twenty years later, it’s all changed. Under Mazarin, our musketeers are out of step: honour has been replaced by cunning, negotiation and politics. With the accession of the young Louis XIV, in the novel Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, the state wins the day, the aristocracy makes way for the bourgeoisie, and Colbert installs centralized power. You have to adapt or go under. Our musketeers pass through that precise age, when society is being transformed around them. They are nostalgic, they have plenty of regret but no remorse. By the end they have lost their illusions. It’s the finest novel of passing time.’
‘Like Proust? Are you joking?’
‘I’m not joking at all. And anyway, Proust was thinking about Dumas when he wrote the Recherche.’
‘Really?’
‘One day he revealed his project to his friends. To help them understand, he said, ‘You see, it’s like Vingt Ans Après’ Léon Daudet was there, and he corrected him: ‘No, it’s more like Bragelonne."’
‘Whatever. Go on. You say you write to learn, as well.’
‘Of course! It seems quite clear that when you set about reconstructing the past, with a bit of imagination thrown in, you make discoveries, you move from one surprise to the next. The reality, seen from close up, by eye-witnesses, is more complex, more unexpected, funnier or harsher. Each book, for me, is based on questions. What’s a battle? What was Moscow like before the fire? Was Berezina really a defeat? How can a man who governed Europe end up on a little island with the power of a sub-prefect?’
/> ‘And those are the curiosities that you hope to pass on?’
‘I want to imagine where we come from. Roots aren’t innocent. And yet ignorance is manifest these days. One Saturday evening, on an Antenne 2 radio broadcast, a former Culture Minister revealed his ignorance of the fact that 4 September celebrates the birth of the 3rd Republic. On a television quiz, the contestant was asked: ‘What tribe did Vercingetorix command?’ He replied without hesitation: ‘The Romans.’ We ‘old Europeans’ are ending up like the American students quoted in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2001. When they were being welcomed on to a campus, some young Germans were startled by the things the students wanted to know: ‘Is Hitler still your president?’ or: ‘Are there problems on the border between Germany and China?"’
‘It’s a long way from there to sacrificing at the altar of the ancestor cult.’
‘Not at all: it’s a good perspective. And the further we go in life, the more we are surrounded by the dead. There even comes a time when we know more dead people than living. Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by this procession of familiar phantoms, and books can awaken them. When I leave my Paris street, near Les Halles, I know that Victor Hugo, in 1832, when he was at work on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, saw with his own eyes the barricade in the rue des Petits-Carreaux that he would use in Les Misérables. I also know that on the quay, there, opposite the Tour de l’Horloge, during the Terror there were people who sold the hair of the beheaded to be made into wigs. The walls of our cities, the hills, the villages, are impregnated with very strong memories.’
‘All the same, the contemporary world has little in common with those revolutionary centuries ...’
‘Wrong again. The fundamentals haven’t changed, and we’ve barely evolved since Homer. If formidable technical advances change the brains of future generations in due course, it’s always worth mentioning that Cicero predicted the harmful employment of screens.’
‘Could we be serious for five minutes? Cicero lived in the first century of the common era, and I can’t imagine him sitting in front of the TV!’
‘He could, though. In The Pursuit of Unhappiness, by the excellent Paul Watzlawick of Palo Alto University, I read this short and rather disturbing text from Cicero: ‘If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate of us of all respect for humanity.'"
‘Are you sure your professor hasn’t been tinkering with his translation?’
‘That wouldn’t be like him.’
‘Fine. But what about now?’
‘Journalism deals with the question. I like Dos Passos’s reportage better than his novels.’
‘What if I’m not convinced?’
‘I’m not trying to convince you.’
‘Really?’
‘I couldn’t care less, I couldn’t give a fig, I couldn’t give a tinker’s curse. Time travel is a gourmet delight.’
2. What Became of Them?
Count Jean-René Pierre de SÉMALLÉ left the court with some haste, and his plot remained a secret. Extracts from his memoirs were published in 1826, and used in notes in a volume on Talleyrand published in 1853 by the printer Michaud. He died in Versailles, in Madame de Pompadour’s old home, at the age of ninety-one: he had caught a cold at mass. His grandson finally published his Souvenirs in 1898.
In 1815 Desfieux-Beaujeu, Marquis de la Grange, was given the task of whipping up a number of départements in favour of the King, but never received his travel expenses. Neither did he receive his pension as a royal commissioner.
Morin became head of the 1st division in the Ministry of Police. He died in poverty.
Marie Armand de Guéry de Maubreuil settled in England after his release from prison. He denounced the Tsar of Russia, the King of Prussia and the Bourbons to exculpate himself of the planned assassination attempt on Napoleon.
The Chevalier Guérin de Bruslart was appointed camp marshal in 1816 by Louis XVIII, but given nothing to do. His past as a conspirator was too compromising. He died in Paris on 10 December 1829, in his home at 74 rue Saint-Dominique. He was not considered worthy of a funeral oration.
Hugues-Bernard Maret, Duke of Bassano, was given back his job as Secretary of State during the Hundred Days. After Waterloo he was exiled to Austria, where he stayed until 1820. Louis-Philippe made him a peer of France in 1831. He died in Paris eight years later.
Andre Pons de L'Hérault was appointed Prefect of the Rhône during the Hundred Days. He asked to go with the Emperor into his exile on St Helena, but his request was refused. He himself lived in exile until 1830, when Louis-Philippe granted him the Jura Prefecture. He was soon fired from the post because of his poor character, and he died in 1853 after refusing to recognize Napoleon III.
Marie Walewska married the Count of Ornano. She died in childbirth in 1817.
Contrary to legend, Cambronne never said ‘Merde!’ at Waterloo. The story was made up in 1830 by the bohemian Genty, in the Café des Variétés, as a trap for Charles Nodier, who duly passed it on.
Antoine Drouot, the day after Waterloo, where he was in charge of the Guard, refused to be reintegrated into the royal army. He retired to Lorraine, where he died in 1847 after rejecting all kinds of honours.
Henri Gatien Bertrand followed Napoleon to St Helena. In 1830 he was appointed rector of the École Polytechnique. He died in 1844. Four years before that, he organized the return of the Emperor’s ashes.
Michel Ney had promised Louis XVIII that he would bring Napoleon back in an iron cage. He fell into the Emperor’s arms upon his return from Elba, pushed, it is true, by his troops. At Waterloo, he behaved in a hot-headed fashion and contributed to the defeat. He was shot upon the King’s return, at the emplacement where his statue stands today, in front of the Closerie des Lilas, near the Paris Observatory.
Louis Alexandre Berthier accompanied Louis XVIII when Napoleon returned. He fell from a window in Bamberg Castle in Bavaria, in 1815. He is thought to have been pushed.
Étienne Jacques Macdonald led Louis XVIII to the border, and became an ordinary grenadier in the National Guard. On his return, the King appointed him Minister of State. He died in 1840, near the Loire.
Armand Augustin Louis, Marquis de Caulaincourt, became Minister of Foreign Affairs once again during the Hundred Days, before retiring to die in Paris in 1827 - after writing memoirs that would only be published long afterwards.
Auguste Daniel Belliard died of apoplexy in Brussels, where Louis-Philippe had made him ambassador. That was in 1832.
Charles Pierre François Augereau did not live long enough to enjoy his vast fortune: he died in 1816.
Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont because a peer of France under Louis XVIII, then Minister of State and Governor of Paris. As Duke of Ragusa, he was stuck with his reputation of having betrayed the Emperor, and the word raguser was invented, to mean betray. In 1830 he followed King Charles X into exile and died in Venice in 1852.
AndPauline? Dear Pauline brought a legal case against the Prince Borghese, her husband, who was living with a certain Duchess Lanta della Rovere, moved to Rome for a while, made up with the Prince and perished of languor in the Villa Strozzi in Florence, in June 1825, four years after her brother, whose name she uttered with her final breath.
3. Useful Bibliography
Most of the characters in this novel bear their real names, except for the main character, whom I use to articulate the story. I called him Octave Sénécal for two reasons. Octave was the part played by Jean Renoir himself in his film La régle du jeu. Sénécal I took from Sentimental Education, where Flaubert turns him into a troubled extra in the 1848 Revolution, half cop and half member of the secret societies. Otherwise, as usual, I have sought out the witnesses of the adventure. There are many of them. They allowed me to put in Napoleon’s mouth remarks that he is really supposed to have made, or at least those that have been passed down to us. I should also like to thank the C
lavreuil Historical Bookshop in the rue Saint-André-des-Arts in Paris, for the treasures that it offers manic devotees of French history. Come on! It’s better to lose your fortune in a bookshop than in a casino. So I have reconstructed this episode, this dead period in Napoleon’s life, with the help of the following books.
General Works
Henry Houssaye, 1814, Librairie Académique Perrin, 1925.
Henry Houssaye, 1815, same publisher, 1900. These two volumes seem to be the most complete and the most vivid books on the period.
Fain, Mémoires, republished by Arléa in 2000.
Fain, Manuscrit de 1814, Paris, Bossange frères, 1825.
Méneval, Napoleon et Marie-Louise, Vol. II, Librairie d’Amyot, 1844, and 1845 for Vol. III.
Caulaincourt, Mémoires, Vol. Ill, Plon, 1933.
Marcel Dupont, Napoléon et la trahison des maréchaux, Hachette, 1939.
Louis Chardigny, Les Maréchaux de Napoléon, Flammarion, 1946.
Lamartine, Histoire de la Restauration, Vols. 17 and 18 of his complete works, published in Paris by the author, 43 rue de la Ville-l’Evêque, in 1861. It is not sublime, like L’Histoire des Girondins, but intelligent and lively despite a number of minor mistakes. Thus the inn of La Calade becomes the inn of l’Accolade, but Lamartine was short of money at the time, and writing at great speed.
Philippe de Ségur, Du Rhin à Fontainebleau, Édition Nelson (undated).
Jean Thiry, La Chute de Napoléon, Vol. II, Berger-Levrault, 1939.
Henri d’Alméras, La Vie parisienne sous le Consulat et l’Empire, another volume about the Restoration, Albin-Michel, undated.
The Napoléon presented by Jacques Godechot (Albin-Michel 1969) includes a text about Paris, in March 1814 written by an eye-witness, Julian Antonio Rodriguez.
Amédée Pichot, Chronique des événements de 1814 et 1815, Dentu, 1873.
Macdonald, Souvenirs, Plon, 1892.
Frédéric Masson, Napoléon chez lui, Fayard, 1951.
In the July—August 1922 issue of the Revue d'études napoléoniennes (librairie Félix Alcan) one may read a Napoléon à Fontainebleau en 1814 by G. Lacour-Gayet and San Martino et le muse napoléonien de l'île d’Elbe by Ch. Saunier.
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