The Retreat

by Patrick Rambaud

  ‘Sir, sir …’

  ‘Your report, you brute!’

  ‘Strolling players, they’re asking for shelter.’

  ‘No room for bohemians in my palace.’

  ‘They’re French, sir, they were living in the green villa opposite which our men have ransacked.’

  ‘Well, let them sleep on the ground, it’s very good for your back. Got to bring ‘em to heel, that sort.’

  ‘I thought …’

  ‘Who pays you to think, fool?’

  ‘There are young women …’

  ‘Pretty?’

  ‘Two or three.’

  ‘Bring them to me so I can choose.’ He twisted up his moustache. ‘Unless I take the whole batch.’

  The captain was splashing himself with an eau de cologne he’d rooted out from the countess’s bedroom when the batch, as he put it, entered behind Mme Aurore; her voice like thunder, she was pushing a dragoon in front of her and pummelling him in the kidneys. Brandishing a shawl with her other hand, she called out to the captain, ‘Are you the officer in charge of these good-for-nothings?’

  D’Herbigny opened his mouth but didn’t have time to answer the actress before she stormed on, ‘Will you explain to me why I found my shawl tied like a belt round his belly?’ She hit the sheepish dragoon harder in the stomach. ‘I know why! It was your soldiers who ransacked the house we’ve been living in for the last two months! I demand …’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said the captain, getting up from his chair. ‘You have no demands at all to make! The entire city belongs to us! Whoa there, you! What on earth are you up to?’

  The Great Vialatoux had put his centurion’s helmet down on a console table and was trying on the captain’s, which was too big for him.

  ‘Don’t touch my things!’ yelled d’Herbigny.

  ‘Did you have any scruples about ours?’ said Mme Aurore, not at all impressed by this sort of flashily dressed swaggerer.

  ‘We are members of the Emperor’s intimate circle,’ added Vialatoux. ‘By the offices of one of his private secretaries. He brought us here personally.’

  ‘A much more agreeable boy than you,’ said a redhead, accentuating the mocking tone of the soubrettes she was used to playing.

  The captain recovered his temper as he let his eye dwell on this young lass who he anticipated would not put up great resistance. ‘Well … You’ve got to understand how soldiers are, for a start, and then we can come to some agreement, can’t we … compatriots, what? There’s plenty of room here. Paulin! Put up our new friends. Mesdemoiselles, my room, where a count slept, is at your disposal.’

  ‘Do you come with it?’ Mlle Ornella asked ironically, knowing that she had been singled out.

  ‘Ah well, we’ll see …’

  D’Herbigny retrieved his helmet and Paulin led the rest of the band to the stairs, with a lamp; the two chosen ones sat on the edge of the big bed, whispering things and making each other laugh. The captain stayed stranded in the middle of the room; to interrupt the chorus of mockery, he asked them their Christian names.

  ‘Jeanne,’ said Mlle Ornella, who was called Jeanne Meaudre offstage. ‘She’s Catherine.’

  ‘Catherine? Ah hah, that rhymes with libertine! Not so?’

  The two girls burst out laughing again. ‘And what does Jeanne rhyme with?’

  ‘Now let’s see, let’s see …’

  Embarrassed by the question, the captain frowned to show he was thinking, unable as he was to come up on the spot with any rhyme other than ‘man’ or ‘handstand’.

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Catherine the redhead. ‘Your right hand.’

  ‘My right hand?’

  He raised his stump, which was trussed up in a shirt tail like a sausage.

  ‘My right hand has stayed somewhere in Russia, my pretty ones, but I often get the feeling that the fingers are moving.’

  Since his two guests had stopped giggling and were listening with new interest, the captain described the amputation. To show his courage and tease them by scaring them a little, he explained how Dr Larrey, Surgeon to the Guard, had applied fly larvae to the open wound, since he’d discovered that, in the process of breeding in colonies, maggots could prevent gangrene. Then he recited his wounds, each linked to a valiant feat of arms, which he listed at random, becoming more and more stirred. ‘At Wagram I was burnt when the artillery set fire to the crops. At Pratzen I had a horse disembowelled beneath me by a shell. I was almost swallowed up by a peat bog in Poland. With the English on my tail, I all but drowned swimming across a torrent near Benavente; at Saragossa my skull was split open by the butt of a musket and the day after that, a mined house fell on my head! I’ve often thought I was dead, I’ve seen blood bubbling out of my mouth, that was in the convent of San Francisco – and here, look, I was shot in the hip … Hey!’

  The girls had fallen asleep during the catalogue, snuggled up together.

  ‘Ah no, my darlings, that would be too easy!’ grumbled the captain, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist to show his glorious, pinkish scars, and going closer, he listened to the girls’ rhythmical breathing. With a knife he slit the laces of Mlle Ornella’s half-boots, who did not wake up, and he was working his way through all the little flibbertigibbets’ buttons, braids and ribbons when a knocking disturbed him. He ran to the door in a fury, tore it open and bumped into Paulin, who was red in the face, with dragoons holding lanterns standing behind him.

  ‘Paulin! I want to be left in peace! What is it? Our travelling circus’s bothering you, is it? Well, they can go to hell!’

  ‘They’re fine, sir …’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You should come and see, sir,’ said one of the dragoons.

  ‘It’s serious,’ Paulin added to convince his master, who glanced at the sleeping women, both of whom were snoring gently, before shutting the door behind him and letting himself be guided by the intruders to another staircase, at the back of the Kalitzin house. At the bottom, Paulin showed him oil on the steps.

  ‘It smells of camphor; at least, it did smell of camphor, your eau de Cologne is rather overpowering …’

  ‘Is it camphor?’

  ‘Spike oil, sir, look …’

  The glistening trail continued and further on a wick was floating in it; the wick went out into the street through a hole in a low, double-glazed window which, the captain could have sworn, had been made by a pistol ball.

  ‘Someone was planning to light this wick, sir and roast us alive.’

  ‘Someone? The major-domo, you mean! That Russian, where is that Russian? Search the house and bring him to me so I can blow his brains out!’

  *

  A hand brusquely kneaded his shoulder; Sebastian opened his eyes on a floral-patterned sleeve and heard Baron Fain saying, ‘It’s all very well having such a beatific smile on your face, Mr Roque, but up you get, His Majesty won’t be long now.’ Sebastian realized that he had fallen asleep in the Kremlin: a moment earlier he had been smiling as he dreamed that he was in Rouen with Mlle Ornella; through a window in his father’s house in rue Saint-Romain, he was showing her Saint-Maclou’s gothic spire, and then he was putting horses to the charabanc to take her for a drive to the Forêt-Verte … He got up from the sofa, mechanically buttoning up his waistcoats, gathered up his black overcoat and his cockaded hat, which he kept in his hand, and then, eyes silted over with sleep, joined the Baron who was leaning his elbows on a window, looking out. The Guard’s camps were lit by a white light coppered by the glow of the fires that hadn’t yet been brought under control. The shadows of soldiers were moving in the courtyards, smoking around bivouacs or stretched out on the ground wrapped in blankets; some, squatting on their heels, were lighting their long pipes with brands picked from the embers; others could be seen staggering about, looking for their muskets or saddle cloths, and the empty bottles strewn everywhere accounted for their state.

  Baron Fain turned away, catching hold of Sebastian by the arm. ‘Show me the arrangements
.’

  ‘This way, my lord, is His Majesty’s chamber, our desks could go in this reception room …’

  Overnight, the apartments and their annexes had been refurbished. Valets had fitted Napoleon’s bed with lilac sheets; the portrait of the King of Rome, his son, painted by Gérard and received from Paris a week before, hung in place of that of the Tsar. Baron Fain stopped in front of the painting. In his crib, the heir to the Bonaparte dynasty was playing with a sceptre as if it was a rattle. On the eve of Borodino, which the Emperor in his bulletins preferred to call Moskova to emphasize that it had been fought before the holy city, the painting had been exhibited on a chair outside the imperial tent; the army had paid it homage before the battle.

  ‘We won’t be around when he mounts the throne, Monsieur Roque.’

  ‘If he mounts the throne, my lord.’

  ‘You doubt it?’

  ‘We are so used to the improbable that one can’t foresee a week ahead …’

  ‘Keep your sentiments to yourself, my lad.’

  ‘We are devoted to the Empire but the Empire should protect us, Jean-Jacques said …’

  ‘Spare us your Rousseau for one moment! The Emperor no longer shares his thinking and you were only a brat under Robespierre! As for the classical authors whose volumes you lug around in your bag, they lived in a saner age. If you wish to grow old and make your fortune, keep your peace, Monsieur Roque.’

  The commotion redoubled around them, heralding the Emperor’s arrival. News spread about his mood; he had slept poorly, not enough, Constant had burnt aloes-wood and vinegar all night to purify his room, he had hardly been able to breathe; in the morning the coat he had slept in had been infested with lice. Chattering away, clerks were bringing in ill-assorted desks and chairs, paper, sharpened pencils, crow’s feather quills and ink wells and setting them out according to an unvarying ritual when trumpet calls answered one another from courtyard to courtyard: Napoleon strode past the columns of comatose grenadiers without giving them a glance. He slowly climbed the monumental staircase between the major general and Caulaincourt, his aides-de-camp following. Contrary to his entourage’s pessimistic expectations, he was delighted by his Moscow apartments; the fact that on his way to them he hadn’t encountered anyone apart from his army didn’t seem to trouble him. He grew voluble gazing at the tall column of Ivan’s tower with its cupola and giant cross. ‘Make a note that the Invalides’s dome needs regilding,’ he said to Berthier. Then, to everyone else, he declared, ‘We have arrived at last. Here I will sign the peace.’ As he spoke, he was thinking, ‘Charles XII wanted to sign peace with Peter the Great in Moscow as well.’ Satisfied, he turned towards the church where the Tsars had their tombs and barely reacted when he heard that the treasures in the Arsenal had been removed, the crowns of the kingdoms of Kazan, Siberia and Astrakhan which it would have amused him to wear, the diamonds, the emeralds and the equerries’ silver axes which he would gladly have squeezed into his bags.

  In a corner of the reception room crowded with officers and uniformed administrators, his hands behind his back, he then listened to reports. He learnt that two nights previously, Governor Rostopchin had had horses put to all the fire engines, a hundred or so, to take them out of the city. The wind was spreading the fire, and water was in short supply.

  ‘Find the wells, divert the river, draw water from the lakes!’ the Emperor ordered. ‘I’ve come from the Foundling Hospital which I visited with Dr Larrey and what was there in the main courtyard? A fountain with a storage tank that supplied water from the river to the whole building! What else?’

  ‘From foreign merchants, sire, we know that a chemist, a Dutchman, or an Englishman …’

  ‘An Englishman, if the aim is do me harm!’

  ‘An Englishman then, Smidt or Schmitt, was preparing an incendiary balloon …’

  ‘Oh, what rot!’

  ‘On board, a crew of fifty people would launch projectiles at Your Majesty’s tent …’

  ‘What utter bloody rot!’

  ‘An Italian, a dentist in Moscow, has informed us of the whereabouts of Smidt’s hideout, six versts from the city.’

  ‘Well, go and have a look! What else?’

  ‘It appears that the Russian nobility would like to stop the war,’ said a Polish colonel. ‘And Rostopchin and Kutuzov loathe one another.’

  ‘That’s more like it!’

  ‘This is what Russian prisoners claim, sire; we don’t know it for certain.’

  ‘Berthier! Killjoy! I tell you that Alexander will sign the peace!’

  ‘Otherwise?’

  ‘Our quarters are secure. When the fires have been put out, we will winter in this capital, surrounded by enemies, like a ship caught in the ice, and we will wait for the summer months to resume the war. To our rear, in Poland, in Lithuania, we have left more than two hundred and fifty thousand men in garrison who will resupply us and secure communications with Paris; this winter we will levy fresh contingents to reinforce us and then we will march on St Petersburg.’ Napoleon closed his eyes and added, ‘Or India.’

  His audience stiffened, some were open-mouthed with astonishment, but no one dared heave a sigh.

  *

  There wasn’t a street at the back of the Kalitzin residence, as d’Herbigny had thought, but a high-walled courtyard of stables, without straw or horses, and outhouses where the carriages were kept. The captain posted himself there after discovering the wick hanging from a hole in the low window; he planned to catch the incendiary in the act, make him talk, and then kill him. His troopers had gone through the house room by room, or so they said, but no luck; the major-domo had vanished. There must be nooks, hiding places, secret compartments in the walls like in Paris, in the days of Fouquier-Tinville’s tribunal, those double partition walls behind which aristos and their spies used to escape the Terror.

  When day broke, d’Herbigny continued his surveillance hiding in the shadow of the stables. Worn out by an agitated, watchful night, he sat on a stone corner post by the gate; he hadn’t taken off his red fox-fur-lined coat. All of a sudden he saw a parish priest in a soutane coming out of the house, very calm, his face hidden by a woman’s mantilla, and a second, taller figure whom he thought he recognized as the famous major-domo by the powdered wig and livery. He gripped one of the pistols stuck in his sword-belt. The gawky pair were casually strolling about, passing a bottle back and forth between them and drinking from it in turn: one of them must be about to produce his tinderbox and light the wick snaking across the ground, mustn’t he? But no. They walked past it without paying it any attention; they didn’t even look down, just carried on pacing up and down the courtyard, chatting away and taking swigs from the bottle. The captain may have been one-armed but his eyesight was excellent; he could see boots and spurs under the soutane. What then? An officer of the Tsar’s disguised as a priest? He raised his pistol, stepped out into the yard and, in order not to shoot his enemy in the back, called out, ‘Show yourself!’

  The major-domo turned round. It was Sergeant Martinon; his eyes had a glazed look. The captain stamped on the cobbles. ‘You inbred idiots! I could have killed you!’

  ‘Me too?’ asked the bogus curate, pushing back his mantilla.

  ‘You too, Bonet!’

  ‘Sir, as you can see, we’ve laid our hands on this Russian’s clothes …’

  ‘An entire wardrobe,’ added Trooper Bonet, shaking out the skirts of his soutane.

  ‘The major-domo?’

  ‘Nothing to fear on that score, sir,’ said Martinon. ‘He’s been asleep all this time in the apartments on the second floor with the troupe of actors, that’s why we couldn’t find him.’

  ‘Take off that tawdry finery and follow me, you utter incompetents! Do you think you’re at a masked ball?’

  The captain tucked his pistol back in his belt and grabbed the bottle of brandy, which he finished in a single draught. Then the three troopers set off up the main staircase, almost at a run, but in the mid
dle of the first landing the captain gestured at them to slow down: a couch had been dragged up the steps and a Russian cuirassier was sprawled on it, muttering incomprehensibly in his sleep.

  ‘No danger, sir, he’s no more Russian than we are and he’s drunk.’

  ‘Maillard!’ roared the captain, hoisting the sleeper like a sack of grain.

  Maillard didn’t wake up either when d’Herbigny tore off his white tunic with its black facings or when he dropped him back onto the tiles. In a fury, the captain urged on his dragoons, still dressed as a parish priest and a servant; on the next floor he kicked open the reception room’s double doors and discovered the actors’ dormitory. Each of them had made a bed with furniture from the other rooms. Mme Aurore, the manageress, had been entitled to the softest sofa, the others had unhooked curtains and pushed chairs together. They woke up together, squealing; amongst them, a tall, shaven-headed figure in a collarless linen tunic, who was propping himself up on one elbow when the cuirassier’s wig and uniform hit him in the face. ‘Get up,’ cried the captain. ‘And confess!’

  ‘Confess what, sir?’

  ‘That you’re no more a major-domo than I am!’

  ‘I have been in Count Kalitzin’s service for fifteen years.’

  ‘False! You’ve got the cropped hair of the Tsar’s soldiers!’

  ‘To make my wig easier to wear.’