The Barbed Crown

by William Dietrich

  I fastened her as well as I could. “Silliness is why you don’t like me, I suppose.”

  “But I do like you.” She turned and grasped my hands. “I worry about you and your young family. You were gone the entire night recently, little Harry so exhausted that he fell asleep in your arms. Such labors that infant must have endured! He and I have become quite close, you know. I am like a second mother.”

  “I wouldn’t call them labors, exactly. He got some candy.”

  “But I could have helped.” She stepped close, breathing hard enough to have me following things up and down. “I want to help. We’re allies, no? Spies against the tyrant Bonaparte? A partnership for royalist restoration? And yet you’re slipping away on missions without my knowledge.”

  “To protect your pretty neck.”

  She cocked her head. “Do you think it is pretty?”

  “Our missions are about the coronation, Catherine.”

  “Then it’s about me! I’m the coronation! I mean, I’m laboring to help Josephine plan it. She cares more about the dress than the crown, and her sisters-in-law are even shallower, so all have benefitted from my advice. What jealousies I referee! Men have swords for their duels, and women, tongues.”

  I hesitated. Did Catherine belong in our plan? And yet, how, exactly, were we to substitute the Crown of Thorns for the one Napoleon intended to be crowned under? Now a comtesse was running her hand up my sleeve and throwing off more warmth than a Franklin stove. How women manage that on demand I don’t know, but it’s the rare man who doesn’t want to cozy to the fire.

  “I need to enlist you,” I allowed. “It’s terribly dangerous.”

  “I landed in France to embrace danger.”

  “We’ve an idea to spoil the entire coronation.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “To embarrass Napoleon, we’re considering slipping a substitute crown into whatever container the pope plans to use for the real one, meaning that someone has to risk her life by mixing things up.”

  “Mon Dieu! So daring. A substitute crown?” She looked intrigued. I hesitated to let her share our scheme—Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead, Franklin had said—but she was lovely as the devil. Shouldn’t beauty imply character? She lifted on tiptoes, smelling of perfume, licking the air near my ear. “I love a secret.”

  I struggled to remember that I am married, sensible, and reformed. She was a golden-haired angel, half dressed, ripe, and adoring as a doll. Men are so used to women swerving to avoid us that it’s captivating, and startling, to be paid attention by one. I swallowed. “I’ll discuss it with Astiza.”

  “Ethan, we were partners before your wife appeared. These past months have only made us more intimate, and frankly I’ve trembled to resist temptation. You don’t realize your virile charm.”

  Actually I do, and frequently overestimate it.

  “Do you mind frankness?” she went on. “I confess to infatuation. Should we not consummate our alliance, just this once, while we’re alone?”

  By Franklin’s kite, she had a charge like a battery. “We can do that with a handshake,” I said uncertainly.

  She laughed and kissed me instead, lips warm, hands clutching, her body squirreling against mine. “How droll you are!” I groped to get her off me, but admit I took my time about it. She rubbed long enough to be positive I was truly interested, and gave a wicked grin. “So you like me as I like you.”

  “Comtesse, this isn’t proper.”

  She pouted, delectably. “You must call me Catherine. I’m only trying to be friends. Tell me our conspiracy, Ethan, and I’ll leave you alone.”

  I didn’t entirely trust her. She had the morals of a minx and, despite her royalist pretensions, had signed on to help with the usurper’s coronation. But we also needed her. We were on the same side, I needed her help, and if I hesitated any more, we’d be thrashing on her bed. I took breath. “You must swear to hold the secret. We’ve risked our lives already to obtain the substitute, and if we’re caught with it, we’ll have police and priests arguing over who gets to draw and quarter us first.”

  “It sounds so daring!”

  I allowed a dramatic pause. Then, “We have the Crown of Thorns.”

  She looked blank. “The what?”

  “There aren’t any thorns left; those were shared out centuries ago. But it’s the crown forced on Jesus’s head by the Romans. We stole it from Cardinal Belloy. Harry helped.”

  “Oh my.” She blanched.

  “It’s been kept for centuries. Were the pope to lift that as Napoleon’s intended crown on coronation day, the blasphemy would be so profound as to make him a pariah in all Christendom. He’d be mocked and scorned by every head of state. People might start muttering for the return of the Bourbons.”

  She blinked, shocked, and considered. Then she began to smile. “That’s a magnificent idea! How clever of you to think of it.”

  “It was suggested by a scholar whom Astiza found. And it’s clever only if it works. Can you help insert the holy relic into the coronation and take everyone by surprise, while not endangering yourself or us?”

  She stood straighter. “I pledge to try. You must trust me, Ethan.”

  “I just have.”

  “Let me think how to do so. Thanks to my wit and charm, they’ve taken my advice at the Tuileries. They’ll listen enough to make this possible, too.” She pondered. “However, I’m searched when entering and leaving the royal apartments. You must bring it to the coronation, and we’ll exchange it there.”

  “Exchange?”

  “Napoleon’s crown is a simple golden laurel wreath that will be kept in a ceremonial box until the critical moment so that it will evoke maximum awe when lifted and displayed. I’ll find a way to insert your crown of straw and take the gold one. Stealing it would be just payment for our troubles, don’t you think?”

  “We’d be guillotined if we tried to sell it.”

  “Not if we melt it.” Her face was lit with practical greed and vengeance, and I had to admire her ruthlessness. “You must bring me a loaded pistol, too. If things go awry, I may have to fight. A gun gives me a chance with a guard.”

  “I’m sure guests will be searched.”

  “Then put it in a bag with the crown. I’ll furnish an imperial seal.”

  “The goal is to embarrass the emperor, not start a battle or make ourselves rich.”

  She hugged me. “The goal is to let everyone get what they deserve. I’m so happy we’re partners.”

  I limped from our conversation with relief and regret, happy I’d stayed vaguely faithful to my vows and worried that I’d let too much slip by enlisting Catherine. I had entrusted her not just with our mission but with the fate of my family. In this final test I needed her to be the steely royalist warrior, not a flighty and flirtatious socialite.

  I sat down to ponder how much of this to tell my wife.

  Astiza reluctantly agreed to the inclusion of the comtesse in our plot, since getting close to the crowns of the coronation seemed impossible without Catherine. “She can finally make herself useful,” my wife allowed, “though frankly I don’t rely on her to manage more than a table setting.”

  “She’s risked her life to return to France for what she believes in,” I said with more hope than conviction.

  “I just don’t want her to risk ours. I don’t trust her.”

  “With the Crown of Thorns?”

  “With you. But let’s finish what we’ve started and make a home far away.”

  “Amen,” and I meant it. Astiza was justified in being suspicious. The French say one escapes temptation by succumbing to it.

  And why did Napoleon, who didn’t seem to believe in anything but himself, want the pope’s consecration for a rule the people and Senate had already granted? Because to have Pius VII at the ceremony meant being anointed
by God. It would mimic the crowning of Charlemagne. It would grant what Bonaparte craved most, legitimacy. It would reinforce his intention to pass his crown to his heir, should he father one. Thus far, Josephine had been barren since the birth of two children by her first husband. Yet Napoleon, who truly loved her, planned to crown her, too, a glory no French queen had been granted in two hundred years.

  The Invalides, which had sufficed for the Legion of Honor, was too small for the coronation. Bonaparte wanted Notre Dame jammed with twenty thousand admirers. His spurs would be golden, his scepter made of unicorn horn, and his ushers would carry silver pikes. No French notable could resist such a show, and by Coronation Day, December 2, 1804, Paris was jammed with two million people—four times its normal population—and prices had soared. A simple meal cost a ridiculous three francs. I was thankful I’d been put on the French payroll, but my purse was still so light that I wondered if Catherine borrowed from it without telling me. I couldn’t ask her because she spent Coronation Eve with the ladies waiting on Josephine, assuring me that the substitution would be made once we were all in the cathedral.

  “I’ll meet you at the pavilion entrance at nine that morning very precisely,” Catherine told me before she left our apartment for the last time.

  “Which means what time, again?”

  “Nine, very precisely.” She’d looked at me as if I were slow-witted.

  So we hoped for the best. We’d arrive at Notre Dame as minor dignitaries, our rank with Napoleon gaining us modest tickets. With luck we’d watch chaos play out. Then we’d slip off in a plan I’d devised.

  In considering the morrow, I took one other precaution, too.

  Like all of Paris, Astiza, Harry, and I slept restlessly the night before the ceremony. The streets were noisy as carnival. Cannons thudded in celebratory salutes. Theaters had been made free and were jammed. Military bands and minstrels marched up and down the avenues, people dancing drunkenly in their wake. So many lanterns, candles, and bonfires were lit that the city glowed orange. Our coppersmith neighbors tramped home at four in the morning singing the “Marseillaise.”

  My wife and I discovered each other awake and made restless, rather desperate love in the middle of the night, grateful that our royalist lodger was absent. The tension gave our congress sweet urgency, but afterward we snuggled, Astiza shivering slightly from anticipation. I’ve felt such tension only before battle, a crucial card game, shooting matches, or boyhood athletic contests.

  We groggily rose before dawn, our apartment cold and our souls restless. I opened the kitchen window and held my palm outside. Snowflakes stuck.

  “Be sure to dress warmly. Whether things go badly or well, we’ll likely flee Paris.”

  “The streets will be choked,” Astiza said.

  “All the easier to melt into the crowds, and why my proposed escape makes sense. I’ve hidden rifle, powder, food, and clothing, experienced adventurer that I am. I’m trying to think ahead for once.”

  “What about Catherine?”

  “What about her?”

  “Will she also flee with us?”

  I guiltily remembered our recent encounter. “If she’s willing. I don’t want her to lose her nerve by plotting escape, but if she succeeds, we owe her what help we can. It also means she won’t be captured and betray us under torture.”

  “I’d prefer she seek shelter with royalists here in Paris. She’s been a trial.”

  “Agreed. But if we do leave France together, she’ll go her own way in London.” I didn’t know if this was true, but it was my intention.

  Astiza nodded curtly, the good soldier. “Then we should take a cloak for her, just in case. Boots as well.”

  “We can leave a bundle stashed somewhere. Can you pick what a woman would take? I’ll finish dressing Harry.”

  Ten minutes later my son was ready, but my wife was not. When Astiza emerged from Catherine’s chamber, she looked troubled.

  “You have her things?”

  “Most are missing.”

  “She’d take some to the Tuileries if staying overnight. And maybe she has her own plan for fleeing. She’s smart in her own haughty way.”

  “It would be helpful if she confided such smartness.”

  “We didn’t tell her all our preparations, either.”

  “We’re still not a company.” She bit her lip.

  “Yet inextricable allies. Without Catherine, our scheme falls apart. And she can’t accomplish anything unless we deliver the Crown of Thorns.”

  “I don’t trust her.”

  “Women never trust women.”

  She glanced at our grimy windows and the gray winter light, listening to thudding guns like heralding thunder. Napoleon, the new Prometheus. “A storm is coming.” She didn’t mean the weather, but something vast and far off.

  It was the worst time to panic. “No, it’s getting light. We’re going to help France regain its sanity, Astiza, and be the heralds of a new dawn.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Cathedral of Notre Dame was a brisk mile from our apartment. As we hurried and daylight grew, the snow stopped and clouds began to lift. Eight months had passed since Catherine and I had first landed on the Channel coast, and the entire world seemed to have changed. All of Paris was congregating either on the Île de la Cité, where the church was located, or along the avenues on the Right Bank where the coronation coaches would roll in procession from the Tuileries. The massive, drifting crowds reminded me of migrating buffalo I’d seen in America.

  The wind bit, but the mood was festive and preparations precise. Vendors were already selling sausages and mulled wine. Cartloads of river sand had been spread for traction. Regiments of soldiers rose before dawn and marched to line the procession route three ranks deep. Ten thousand cavalry would sandwich the carriages of the elite. Power was to be confirmed by both might and God, and Bonaparte and his ministers had done all they could to avoid humiliation. It remained to us to turn coronation into fiasco.

  I carried the Crown of Thorns in a bag on my shoulder, clasped with the imperial seal that would allow the baggage inside Notre Dame. Harry walked between us, scuffing happily at the light snow. He had his bag of marbles in his pocket. I knew he was likely leaving his toys behind, and those would be slight consolation.

  I brooded. Would Catherine succeed? French police had followed us from the beginning. Napoleon manipulated us. I’m always nervous when things are going well.

  “Whatever happens, we must stay together,” I said.

  Astiza squeezed my hand.

  The new plazas created by demolition of the old medieval houses were already crowded—the ordinary hoping for glimpses of the famous, and the elite of Napoleonic France grumbling good-naturedly as they were forced into snaking lines to show tickets. The weather-stained cathedral was in sad disrepair. Many of its statues had been “beheaded” during the revolution because rioting peasants had mistaken saintly figures for royalty and took hammers to them in a fit of patriotic vandalism. Political fanatics had subsequently turned Notre Dame into an atheistic “Temple of Reason,” a classical temple temporarily displacing the altar. Later the church served as a food warehouse. Now it was a cathedral again, but one temporarily paneled and painted on the outside with symbols of temporal glory.

  The coronation committees had erected a false Gothic facade at the front of the church, covering real stones with fake ones that framed painted scenes of French heroes and battles. The temporary gallery and tent along its north side were used to muster dignitaries and keep the mob at bay. Long pennant flags flew from poles like a medieval tournament, and atop the Gothic towers of the cathedral itself, imperial banners the size of mainsails hung like gargantuan proclamations. A wooden “Roman temple” had been erected to sell snacks and souvenirs; a carousel turned in circles to amuse children; and velvet-clothed pages threaded through the crowds to giv
e away tens of thousands of bronze coronation medallions engraved with images of Napoleon and Josephine.

  Skepticism was forbidden. The playwright Marie-Joseph Chenier had opened a play called Cyrus in the Opéra-Comique, but when the actors urged tyrants to be democratic, the performances were promptly shut down.

  Even such attempted criticism was rare. Everyone who was anyone wanted to watch the crowning. Women in fashionably low-cut dresses shivered as they shuffled forward, pulling furs onto their shoulders but not quite ready to cover their décolletage. A lucky few dismounted from coaches near the Palais de Justice just as magistrates were marching from the Court of Cassation. The judges gave ladies shelter from the chill with their flame-colored togas, scurrying for Notre Dame like scarlet birds with chicks under one wing.

  Commoners buzzed like an agitated hive. People sensed that history had turned a page and something glorious and terrible was about to be commemorated. They would tell their neighbors, in the momentous years to come, that they’d witnessed the beginning. Hawkers sold coffee and rolls. Enterprising merchants nearby charged two francs to use their privies. The most tireless prostitutes assembled, at nine in the morning under paper Chinese lanterns strung along an arcade, to advertise their wares. Farmers from the countryside gawked.

  We pushed to the temporary reception tent at the rear of the church, remembering from Catherine that acting important is nearly the equivalent of being so. There was confusion as sentries denied entry to some and pulled others forward, so I took my boy on my shoulders, wife by the arm, and squirted our way to the front. Catherine was waiting, a good sign, and waved frantically from inside. When a sentry moved to block us, she intercepted and spoke sharply. He obeyed because the comtesse wore an artificial flower dyed the French tricolor to signify her authority. She was also wearing a white silk dress I’d never seen before, making her as dazzling as a marble statue. Did the imperial household provide the gown? She ushered us into the circular tent. When she grabbed to take the bag with the crown, I found myself clutching for a moment. A guard was approaching, and Catherine tugged impatiently, her eyes flashing warning. I let it go, and she swept it up to reveal the imperial seal. It warded off the curious gendarme.