The Barbed Crown

by William Dietrich

  Was this a trap or test? For all I knew, this woman was Réal’s agent, not Smith’s. “That’s rather vague.”

  “Second, your mission may someday require you to escape from Paris and France in a hurry. If you do so, go to the Inn of the Three Boars in Argenteuil and ask for the cook. Without anyone seeing, present him with a rose. A dried one will do. I will come, and I will help.”

  “But how do I know to trust you?”

  “When desperate, you have no choice. Don’t worry, monsieur, I’ve helped many travelers before you. Play along with the Bonapartists, but strike for Louis.” She clicked her tongue to beckon her horse and swung back into the saddle.

  “Wait, please. Have some cheese. Let’s start a friendship, at least.”

  “Friends are dangerous, and lovers can be deadly. You’ll not see me again until you have great need. But I was told to tell you one more thing in case you doubted my sincerity.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Chiswicks have filed suit against your money.” And with that, this “Rose” gave a little kick and trotted off.

  Damnation. Which side was I on, again?

  Napoleon understood that men are led by example and inspiration, and so the ceremony of August 16 was designed to restore the mantle of invincibility that had been dented by the drownings. The day picked was the anniversary of the repulsion of British Admiral Horatio Nelson from Boulogne three years before. The place was a natural amphitheater, a swale near the town that swooped down to low bluffs and the sea. At cliff’s edge, a stage was built to hold throne and banners, the emperor facing France but so near the precipice that British captains could watch from spyglasses offshore.

  Streamers bearing the names of French victories fluttered, flags flapped, and new regimental standards topped by polished brass eagles shone like torches. A loose phalanx of several hundred opulently uniformed officers surrounded Napoleon. His Imperial Guard in imposing bearskin hats was drawn up around this assembly, the ranks taut as a bowstring and their bayonets a silver picket fence. To one side regimental bands combined to create blaring music, banging away at anthems such as “La Victoire Est à Nous,” and “Veillons au Salut de l’Empire.” On the other, two thousand drums provided a thunderous roll. How little Harry would have loved this show! From his perch Napoleon could turn right to see the neat avenues of his vast camps and Boulogne harbor. To his left he could look up the coast and across the Channel to England.

  One hundred thousand infantry in full dress uniform jammed the amphitheater’s bowl, with tens of thousands of cavalry poised in the wings to clop by on cue. Field guns were parked hub to hub, barrels gleaming. Uphill of the soldiers were tens of thousands of civilian spectators like myself. The men smoked, drank, and played amateur general from camp chairs. Ladies sipped cider in shady white tents or strolled the perimeter with parasols.

  I looked for flame-haired Rose but didn’t see her.

  The ceremony began at midday with a thunderous salute from the coastal batteries. As the shots echoed away the Corsican was lent celestial help by the skies parting to let down beams of light, as if God were stage lighting the army. The Channel wind rose to make banners snap and whitecaps dance. “Napoleon weather,” men whispered, forgetting the storm of a few weeks before. A choreographed review of regiments began.

  All of us gasped and murmured; even I, the jaded Ethan, understood again the dangerous allure of war. It gives men an excuse to dress up, to carouse as boys, and to make friends through shared hardship. The brilliant splendor gives pathos to the inevitable destruction and turns the plod of life to poignant tragedy. Men will kill and be killed to escape boredom. War is also a way to arrest the tendency of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer; the looting redistributes wealth to the ruffians of the infantry. Gambling does the same, both more efficiently than taxes.

  Napoleon stood, two thousand drums beat a charge, and the columns marched and reformed with mechanical precision. I didn’t detect a single misstep. Then the noise and marching stopped, noise grumbling away, and Bonaparte began speaking. I couldn’t hear his words but was told the emperor was reciting the oath of the Legion. When he finished, there was a roar of “Vive l’empereur!” so volcanic that it hurt my ears.

  Next, thousands of new medals with Napoleon’s image were carried out for presentation. They were heaped on the medieval shields and helmets of French heroes like shoals of Spanish doubloons. The recipients filed forward, hundreds and hundreds of them, to receive the honor individually from his hand. I was told he greeted each by name and achievement in a procession that took hours.

  How easily are we seduced by pomp and glory! Women wept, civilians lifted their hats, and soldiers roared themselves hoarse. To complete the triumph, the rising wind forced the English ships to beat farther offshore, providing an opening for a sailing convoy of supply from Le Havre that was six months overdue. The weather that had betrayed Napoleon before was his ally this day.

  I found myself unexpectedly invited to his Pavilion for the celebratory banquet when the columns finally marched away. I was seated at the smallest and farthest of the tables. Men looked curiously at me, and there were murmurs that I was a great and ruthless spy, an idea I did nothing to discourage. The room was set with linen, silver, flowers, and paper regimental flags. Toasts were raised so often that all of us got drunk. The coastal artillery continued to boom salutes, the setting sun ducked in and out of clouds, and fireworks came at dusk, the exploding stars promising eventual victory. The scent of gunpowder blew back over the beaches and filled the room with its smell.

  How odd to celebrate a man whom I knew believed in gnomes, shot at his wife’s swans, pinched ears like his Corsican mother, and whom I’d seen in his bath and in bed with his wife. So ordinary, so extraordinary! The writer Goethe had put to poetry last year the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and now France followed its own piper like those German children. Maybe all future kings will be in Napoleon’s mold, rising from obscurity to make their ambition that of their nation. Stature will come not from birth but from pageantry, men staking their lives on political opera. Truth will be defined by illusion. People will rally around lies.

  We filed to go out, congratulating the emperor, and I gave him my hand in a daze of wonderment, apprehension, and calculation. This Brazen Head: did it really exist and, if so, was it something we should find and control to keep it from misuse, like the Book of Thoth from my earlier adventures? Could Rose be trusted? Did I belong with France or England?

  “My star is ascending, Ethan,” Napoleon told me quietly, grasping my hand in both of his own. “Do not betray me.” His bright gray eyes had seduced every man in the room.

  “I’m dazzled, Your Majesty.” This was true, though that didn’t mean I wanted him to succeed. “I’ll return to Paris to consult with your savants.”

  “Listen. You are ever the outsider, so become part of France. Surrender to history. The feeling is electric.”

  He meant surrender to him. “I envy your rise.”

  He nodded, and then suddenly flashed that soldierly smile. He could be as earthy as his soldiers. “Don’t envy me too much. The worst thing about these ceremonies is that you can’t break for a piss, and I have had to hold my bladder for four hours!”

  CHAPTER 14

  So I returned to Paris as a dubious double agent, armed with the Jaeger rifle and ancient crossbow. Both fascinated Harry. I continued to leave reports for Smith in the Saint-Sulpice confessional without police interference. It was unlikely that anything I reported would frighten the British to sue for peace, but my cooperation with Napoleon allowed me to stay in the capital until the emperor’s formal coronation. As usual I got no reply from my English spymasters, and no money, either. Réal’s police had destroyed royalist communication,

  allowing my missives to go out but nothing to come in.

  As compensation, we now had a French stipen
d. My wife plunged more deeply into her studies in the archives. And Catherine, our ardent royalist dedicated to Napoleon’s overthrow, seemed more than willing to help with the winter’s coronation, since I’d persuaded her we had no choice. She came back from a meeting with Josephine positively giddy at her brush with celebrity. “I can spy from inside their family!” she justified.

  The latest gossip was that Napoleon’s sisters had refused to carry Josephine’s coronation train and didn’t relent until their brother threatened to cut them off. More than pride was at stake; the coronation would put Josephine ahead of the emperor’s blood relatives in honor and inheritance. Napoleon was also replacing the fleur-de-lis, the lily symbol of French royalty, with the bee, emblematic of his own industry and hive-like order.

  “He says the Invalides presentation in July was entirely inadequate, and that he wants a coronation more magnificent than any in history,” Catherine reported. “No expense is being spared. The coronation costumes for the royal couple will each exceed one hundred thousand francs. The jeweler for the crowns is Marguerite, with Nitot jealous he’s contracted for lesser ornaments. There are companies and platoons of costumers, tailors, and embroiderers. Nuremburg, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Saint-Denis all offered what they claimed was Charlemagne’s original sword, so to avoid choosing one and insulting the others, Napoleon is having a new one made. The planned music consumes 17,738 pages, and if every oath, prayer, and hymn that people propose is offered, the coronation will last until the Second Coming.”

  She gave these breathless reports with censor and envy. “Napoleon has had dolls made of the invited dignitaries, and he and his wife move them around on a plan of Notre Dame like toy soldiers.”

  “Astiza and I kept our shipboard wedding simple. A scrap of sail for a bridal train and ‘Yankee Doodle’ as wedding march.”

  The comtesse shuddered. “I’d seek annulment. Or stab you in your sleep.”

  Both women were so busy that more of Harry’s care fell to me. I was proud that even at four he could puzzle out some words in books, convinced that his genius reflected the supple seed of his father. All parents hope their children will prove, in the face of contradictory evidence, the brilliance of themselves.

  I met again the mathematician Gaspard Monge, who’d made himself an expert on cannon and who lightened and simplified the French artillery train. Monge was one of many savants employed in state service. While Fulton’s experimental steamboat sat abandoned on the Seine and his submarine rested at the bottom of Tripoli harbor, resulting in the American decamping for England, different French schemes were being pushed to dig tunnels under the Channel or lay a pontoon bridge across it. Another proposal was to drift in vast “floating forts” that would fight off English ships with stupendous batteries of artillery. I was directed to contact Jean-Charles Thilorier, who proposed balloons that could lift three thousand men and horses.

  It was at the end of September that I introduced myself to Thilorier with a letter from Napoleon’s staff that described me as a Franklin protégé, expert in electricity, military consultant, and scholar of Aztec flying machines. I showed him the gold model.

  “It clearly shows the ancients were masters of the air,” he told me. He turned it about. “Unless this is merely one of their gods, like a winged Mercury. Or a bird. Or an insect. Or a child’s toy. Or something entirely else altogether.”

  “The ancients did do a poor job of leaving explanatory notes.”

  “Was the past more advanced than the present, in your opinion, Monsieur Gage?”

  “One would hope so. And that the future is not even further downhill.”

  “You and I are men of tomorrow, so we must invent devices to make life better, not worse.”

  “I’m not sure aerial machines will accomplish that.”

  “Perhaps your electricity?”

  “It will get hair to stand on end, and can make a magnet out of a spike wrapped with electrical wire. I invented an electric sword, but it was the devil to keep powered. It’s difficult to see how electricity will ever be practical, though it’s great fun at dinner parties. I smack the ladies with an electric kiss.”

  He looked at me warily. “Perhaps we’ll have more practical success with balloons. Here’s my idea: why spend hundreds of million of francs trying to defeat the English navy when we might fly over it? If we simply scale up existing hydrogen balloons, I calculate we could transport a regiment at a time. Wait for a favorable wind, hoist them aloft, and descend on London.”

  “So long as the wind doesn’t shift and carry them out into the Atlantic.”

  “If they landed anywhere in Britain, they’d cause chaos. The first step, of course, is to test the idea with smaller models. Can you help?”

  “My son can load them with lead soldiers.”

  I learned that an aeronautical device that looks logical on paper can prove maddeningly difficult in practice. Even on calm days our experiments tended to drift unpredictably. One ran into a church tower, and another exploded in a bright ball of flame from a cause we never discovered. A line broke on a third balloon, its basket tilted, and Harry’s toy soldiers tumbled out in a distressing dribble that extended across three cow pastures. I spent an afternoon helping him look for his little army. He still cried when seven stayed missing. Astiza decided she didn’t want my son around eccentric inventors and kept him with her.

  Next, Thilorier and I built a one-third-scale mock-up, a project still so vast that it required a silk bag twice as big as those usually sewn. To test its lifting capacity, we invited cadets from the École Militaire to climb aboard, but their professors wouldn’t let us risk them. Instead, we flew ourselves with two hobbled donkeys, a pig, and fifty bags of millet. The combination was a poor choice because the animals kept trying to get at the grain.

  It was a fine October day, the last leaves turning, and initially I found it fun to drift over farmyards and wave at pretty milkmaids below. But the sun on dark harvested fields created a thermal of rising air that lifted us higher than we planned, and when the savant released gas to bring us down, we plunged once we drifted out of the updraft. We eventually crashed into trees and had to hire three farm laborers to help lower the terrified animals with a rope. The bag was ruined.

  When Thilorier asked for more money to try a full-scale version, he was turned down. “We do not believe your experiments are sufficiently advanced to chance the fortunes of a regiment,” the War Ministry informed us.

  I was relieved. I’m happy to lend ingenuity, but Thilorier was balmy.

  Astiza was having better luck.

  A peculiarity of Paris, and a sight that added to the nervous edge of the times, was the constant cortege of funeral wagons taking exhumed bones from city cemeteries and dumping them into new catacombs. These underground ossuaries were established in the tunnels of limestone quarries that ran under the capital. More than a millennia of burials had crammed city churchyards so full of remains that there was no room for either the dead to sleep or the living to redevelop, so more than a million corpses had already been dug up, dusted off, and wheeled through the streets for quick reinternment, the skulls anonymous as cobblestones. Authorities said there were famous people in the bunch, but you couldn’t tell their notoriety now.

  Harry asked about the funeral wagons with detached fascination; while he understood in theory that he would someday die, at age four the prospect is an abstraction. He liked the way men doffed their hats as the big black dray horses plodded by, and the rattle of their cargo.

  One day my wife proposed that we descend to this bizarre new crypt.

  “All in good time,” I tried to joke.

  “The catacombs are deserted at night. Even after the rationality of the revolution, men fear spirits. But that gives us privacy. A chemist asked that we meet him there.”

  “A chemist? Do we need drugs?”

  “We need his guidance, a
nd it was mere chance I stumbled upon him. In the Bibliothèque Nationale I finally got access to some archives from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, as you know, were the height of religious conflict and philosophic speculation in Europe.”

  “I didn’t know, but go on.” People are always fighting and always speculating, it seems to me, and I’m not certain why historians bother to keep track.

  “From those books in the Mazarine Gallery I descended to the library’s crypt, a warren of shelves stuffed under low Roman arches. Candles dimly light it, the shelves are dark oak, and the heavy leather-bound volumes have the scent of age and lost wisdom. It’s called the Saint-Denis scriptorium, named for the patron saint of Paris, the early Christian martyr.”

  “The stink of lost wisdom,” I corrected. “Mildew.”

  “I was searching for histories of the monk Albertus Magnus, looking for references to this Brazen Head. One tome had mention of an automaton, calling it no more than a legend, but said it was part of a wider quest for physical and spiritual alchemy. Wizards of the time didn’t just want to make lead into gold, they wanted to lift the soul into heaven. As such they were trespassing on church prerogative and were hunted down as heretics. But

  curiously pressed on that page, as if left as a message, was this.” She held up a dried rose, stem and thorns squashed flat. It was brown as paper.

  Rose, the name of the redheaded spy and the symbol she’d said to use to signal her. Odd coincidence. “What does a flower have to do with the catacombs?”

  “Why would it be left in a book of ancient wisdom? No lover would be likely to find it there. No, it was a message for someone seeking knowledge. I took the stem with hope and foreboding.”

  “You stole this from the library?” She was so virtuous that this act of thievery surprised me.

  “This was left as a sign. For a week or more I pondered what it might mean, and then one day I acted on the name of the scriptorium and walked the length of the rue Saint-Denis.”