The Wanton Princess

by Dennis Wheatley

  After a further session of long kisses, he tore himself away and went out into the town. At a military outfitters’ he bought the shako and sabretache of an officer in a regiment of Curassiers and the rank badges of a Captain. Then, his Colonel’s rank badges hidden under the long cloak he was wearing against the cold, he went to a hostelry some distance from that in which he was staying and, as Captain Printemps, hired a comfortable coach to be ready for him at one o’clock the following day, giving his destination as Toulon.

  Returning to his own inn he went in search of Aimée and when he found her learned that her mistress had already informed her that they were to set out next day on a secret journey. He told her to pack only the clothes that ‘Madame’ insisted on taking and have them ready by midday. The rest, and the mass of impedimenta she had brought with her from San Domingo, were to go in the coach to Paris. He then took Aimée up to his room, gave her his spare uniform coat and asked her to change the Colonel’s badges on it for the Captain’s.

  Next, he sat down to write two letters. The first was a brief despatch to Napoleon, reporting Pauline’s safe arrival and that, being in a sad state of depression, she desired to spend a few weeks before returning to Paris among people who did not know her, and of her tragic loss, and that, anticipating it to be the wish of the First Consul, he had agreed to remain with her until she felt capable of facing the world again.

  His second letter was to the Defours at the château, informing them that he had recently married and, soon after the arrival of the letter, would be bringing his wife to St. Maxime. There were to be flowers in every room, and no expense was to be spared on local purchases that would make the house more pleasant as a residence for ‘Madame’.

  Having finished his letters he had time only to clean himself up before joining Pauline for supper.

  Tonight she had cast aside not only her veil but all her black garments and was wearing a blue velvet dress embroidered with gold flowers, that set off to perfection her tanned arms, neck and face. It was another gay meal and afterwards there was no question of his leaving her. Carrying a magnum of champagne he accompanied her into her bedroom and there undressed her. Neither did he creep away in the small hours. When Aimée came in she found them still together in bed sound asleep.

  An hour and a half later Pauline gave her orders to Dermid’s nurse, and a letter for her mother. Roger gave the two letters for Napoleon to his sergeant and told his servant to return to Paris in the coach with the nurse. The good-byes were said and at eleven o’clock the little cavalcade moved away on the road to the capital.

  When paying the bill, Roger told the landlord of the inn that Madame Leclerc had decided to stay for a few days at the little seaside village of Arcachon, but first wished to drive down to the port and thank again the Captain of the frigate that had brought her from San Domingo. He then asked for a coach and a carriage to be summoned.

  When they arrived at the door he had the luggage put into the coach and, when Aimée had settled herself in it, told the coachman to drive her to Arcachon. Returning upstairs he escorted Pauline, now again draped in black from top to toe, down to the carriage and handed her in.

  Outside the dock gates he called on the driver to halt, told him that Madame wished to take a little exercise by walking along the quay to the ship, and paid him off. After half an hour’s stroll round the docks they came out, picked up another carriage and drove to the inn at which Roger, in the name of Captain Printemps, had ordered a travelling coach to be ready for him. Leaving the carriage for the coach, they drove the forty miles to Arcachon, arriving there soon after dark. Aimée had reached the village half an hour earlier and had taken the best rooms at the only inn for Captain and Madame Printemps. Hungry from having missed their dinner they made an excellent early supper off freshly caught lobsters and the local cheese, then went happily to bed as man and wife.

  Next morning, with Roger wearing his Curassier shako and uniform with a Captain’s badges, they took the road south to Dax, Madame Leclerc and le brave Breuc having disappeared into the blue.

  By way of Pau and Tabres they drove through the lovely scenery of Navarre, then on through Toulouse, Béziers and Montpellier to Nimes with its fascinating Roman ruins, Avignon with the Palace of the Popes, and charming Aix-en-Provence, to Toulon. They travelled by easy stages because, owing to her early pregnancy, Pauline was afflicted with an internal trouble that plagued her if she rode for too long over bumpy roads. But, like many women who suffer from ill health, when she was happy minor ailments never seemed to bother her.

  At Toulon Roger paid off the coach and, next day, hired another at an inn some way from that in which they had passed the night. With him once more a Colonel wearing his A.D.C. sash, they covered the last stage of their journey to St. Maxime.

  On the morning after their arrival, touched by the compliment but considerably perturbed, he learned that the villagers intended that afternoon to present an address of welcome to Madame, his wife. He had brought this on himself owing to his generosity to local charities and there was no escaping it. With considerable anxiety he and Pauline awaited the ceremony.

  To their relief it passed off without incident. The Mayor and the Curé both made fulsome speeches, there were cheers and everyone was given plenty of wine in which to drink the health of the newly-weds. To account for Pauline’s golden-bronze skin, Roger had given out that she was the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner in Guadeloupe and had only recently arrived in France. No one recognised her and she enjoyed enormously assuming her new role as the lady of the manor.

  The last days of December and the first week in January 1803 had been occupied by their journey from Bordeaux. For a month they revelled in being alone together in the winter sunshine by the sea.

  Roger found that Pauline had only a very small knowledge of great affairs and little interest in them. She was extremely self-centred, concerning herself only with love, her personal appearance and frivolous amusements. But she was straightforward, generous, easily pleased and spontaneously gay.

  At times he still thought with bitterness of the terrible ending to his life-long bond with Georgina, but Pauline’s ardent passion for him and his delight in her loveliness had restored his zest for life, just as his unflagging desire for her had restored hers. With no single duty or commitment to observe they lived entirely as they pleased, sometimes lying in bed until well on in the afternoon, at others getting up at dawn to go fishing. On some nights they went on moonlight rambles and made love in the woods or on the beach. They never saw a journal and cared nothing for what might be happening in the world outside their own little Paradise. Like Venus and Adonis, they thought only of their love and of pleasing one another.

  Yet, as with all mortals, there had to come an end to this dispensation from all care that the kind gods had granted them. One night towards the middle of February Roger said to the radiant goddess who faced him across the supper table:

  ‘Beloved, my heart is heavy with the thought, but soon now we must return to Paris. It is more than seven weeks since we disappeared from Bordeaux. However great the preoccupations of your brilliant brother, he must at times wonder what has become of his favourite sister. If he has not already done so it cannot be long now before he sets his police on to discover your whereabouts. Should they find you here, living as Madame Breuc, that would be disastrous. It would mean for me at least several years’ imprisonment for having abused his confidence, and for you, with your husband only four months dead, a scandal that would besmirch your name through France.’

  ‘Oh, must we go!’ she cried in protest. ‘I have been happier here with you Rojé, than ever in my life before. I cannot bear the thought of returning to that dreary round of behaving like a great lady and being pleasant to scores of people, most of whom are atrocious bores. Can we not stay here for another month, or a fortnight at the least?’

  He shook his head, ‘No, dear goddess. I dare not risk it, for your sake even more than my own. We
will have one more week here but not a day longer. On that my mind is set, and with all your wondrous wiles you will not move it.’

  So, one week later, their stolen honeymoon ended. On February 20th, sad but resigned, they took the road to Paris.

  17

  Of Love and War

  Napoleon’s face was black with anger, his broad jaw stuck out and his eyebrows were drawn down. In his harsh, Italian-accented voice, he rasped, ‘Two months! Two whole months and not one word from you!’

  Roger raised his eyebrows, ‘I would have thought, First Consul, that you had enough anxieties to occupy you without worrying about your family.’

  ‘My family! Sacré Nom! They are the cause of half my worries. My brothers do me more harm than I can do them good. And now Madame Leclerc must get herself lost in southern France for eight weeks.’

  ‘But, mon Général, you knew that I was with her, so could be certain that she would come to no harm.’

  ‘You, and who else? No one but a serving wench! And Leclerc but four months dead! If this gets out, ‘twill be the scandal of the year.’

  ‘It will not get out, unless you let it; for she travelled under a false name. You have but to endorse the statement she has already agreed to—that she spent seven weeks in a convent hearing Masses for the repose of her husband’s soul. No one has cause to suspect she spent her time otherwise, and did some scribbler ferret out the truth he’d never dare publish it.’

  ‘My sister, running round France under a false name with a man like yourself. What a way to behave!’

  ‘Since she was determined to preserve her incognito, what else could she do? Had she travelled in your coach with a full escort she would have been harrowed by having to listen to addresses of condolence from the Mayors of every town through which she passed. On the other hand, had she not taken me with her she would have been pestered day and night by the unwelcome attentions of a score of gallants.’

  ‘True! True! But she should at least have taken a chaperone. A month ago I ordered Savary to use his police to locate her. What a story would have been made of it had they come upon the two of you unchaperoned.’

  ‘Where was she to find a chaperone, pray, at short notice in Bordeaux? I mean one who, entrusted with such an honour, would not have been so puffed up by her appointment as to blab about it to all and sundry?’

  ‘You are so glib of tongue, Breuc, that you have an answer for everything. But I regard your conduct as most reprehensible.’

  ‘Then, First Consul, you do me a great injustice. You charged me with the care of Madame Leclerc, but you gave me no order that I should bring her direct to Paris. Your actual words to me were, “Do all you can to bring the smiles back to those bright eyes of hers”. Well, I have done it.’

  ‘That, at least, I am glad to hear,’ Napoleon grudgingly admitted.

  ‘Indeed, our tour of the ancient cities in the south worked wonders. Knowing something of their history I was not badly qualified to be her guide. She showed the greatest interest in many places that we visited, particularly in the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre at Nîmes.’

  ‘Ruins!’ Napoleon gave a harsh laugh. ‘Pauline has never cared a fig for ruins! The sight of them wrought no change in her, I’ll vow. ‘Twas yourself and your sleeping with her.’

  Drawing himself up, Roger cried, ‘First Consul, I protest! You have no right so to malign Madame Leclerc.’

  ‘Nonsense, man! I know Pauline better than you will ever do, however many times you’ve tossed her between the sheets. She gave horns to Leclerc before they had been married three months, and during his absence on the Rhine I had to post a dozen officers to the provinces to prevent her scandalous affaires with them becoming the talk of Paris.’

  Roger was furious. Being in love with Pauline and having witnessed her terrible distress at Leclerc’s death, he had gradually formed the belief that the tales of her immorality were untrue, and that she had done no more than flirt with her many admirers. Seething with anger, he snapped:

  ‘Were you not who you are I would call you out for that. You should be ashamed to believe such slanders about your sister.’

  With one of his amazing changes of mood, Napoleon suddenly laughed, then pulled Roger’s ear, ‘My poor Breuc, you have completely given yourself away. No man issues a challenge in defence of a woman’s honour unless he is in love with her. For that I cannot blame you. She is so dazzling a creature that many times when she has entered a room a sudden silence has fallen and I’ve heard a dozen men catch their breath. But she is as licentious as she is beautiful, and if you did not seduce her I’d stake my life that she seduced you. I’ll not now insist that you admit it; but I’ll have to send you to the provinces.’

  Relieved as Roger was to have got through his ordeal, his heart sank, and he said, ‘Mon Général, as Madame Leclerc has gone to live with her brother Joseph and his wife, we will have no opportunity to see one another except in public, and as no one but yourself knows of the journey we made together no scandal will link our names. It is above fourteen months since I had the honour to serve on your personal staff, and see something of Paris. Can you not possibly find some use for me that will allow me to remain here?’

  Napoleon, his big head bowed, took a few paces up and down before replying, ‘Perhaps, yes. Now I think on it I may need you in a few months’ time. The accursed English are playing me up most damnably. They have agreed to evacuate the Cape and Egypt, but most dishonourably refuse to carry out the terms of the Treaty by which our territories in India were to be restored to us, and they remain adamant about Malta. Not content with that, they continue to slander me in their journals; yes, even to the vile extent of asserting that I seduced my step-daughter Hortense then, having got her with child, quickly married her off to my brother Louis.’

  ‘How infamous!’ Roger exclaimed with genuine indignation, for he felt convinced that there was not an atom of truth in such an accusation.

  ‘Yes. What minds they must have! But in that, at least, I proved them to be liars. I had a poet write some verses praising Hortense’s dancing, then gave a ball at Malmaison. There, to her great annoyance, and much as I dislike the sight of pregnant women, I made her do a few pirouettes in front of me. She was then seven months gone and her state plain for all to see. As she had been married to Louis for over nine months that made it as clear as crystal to everyone that she could not have conceived by me before her marriage.’

  For a moment he was silent, then changed the subject, ‘But about yourself. Although I wish the peace to continue and am being very patient with the English, their attitude is so unfriendly that I can only regard the present state of things as a short armistice. I am convinced, too, that to make war upon them again would be ultimately to our advantage. Therefore I am already preparing to resume hostilities. When the peace was made I allowed our activities on the coast to be slowed down, but recently I’ve given orders that they are to be increased. You can report to Berthier and take up again with him your previous rôle as my liaison officer in all matters concerning the invasion of England.’

  Having expressed his gratitude Roger withdrew, marvelling now at the narrowness of his escape. After he and Pauline had left Arcachon no one could have had any idea whether they had gone north, south or east and France had many cities, but as Savary’s police had been on the lookout for them during the past month, they were lucky not to have been identified as Captain and Madame Printemps in one of the towns where they had passed a night on their way up from St. Maxime to Paris. Still luckier, he felt, was the fact that Savary had replaced the astute Fouché as Chief of Police; for the latter, with his unerring instinct for assessing possibilities, would have sent one of his agents straight to St. Maxime, and God alone knew what would have happened when the First Consul learned that his A.D.C. had taken his sister there to live openly as Madame Breuc.

  As Roger descended the grand staircase he saw Duroc coming up. After Duroc’s mission to Russia he had been transferred
as Ambassador to Prussia and was still in Berlin when, some fifteen months earlier, Roger left Paris to go secretly to England. Since then Roger had spent only two days in the capital early in December, during which they had not chanced to run into one another; so this was the first time they had met since they had come face to face in St. Petersburg.

  As old friends they exchanged hearty greetings and swapped news of their more recent doings. Duroc, it transpired, was no longer being used as a diplomat and for over a year past had re-occupied his old post as Comptroller of the Palace. After they had talked for some minutes he said:

  ‘You know, Breuc, I would have taken an oath that I saw you in St. Petersburg at a reception given by the new Czar,: Those blue eyes, straight nose and firm chin of yours seemed to me unmistakable. The man I took for you turned out to be an Englishman who spoke the most atrocious French; but the two of you were as alike as two peas.’

  Roger laughed, ‘Yes, Talleyrand told me that you had written to him about the encounter. But at that time I was at my château in the south of France, and a week later here in Paris. There’s no great mystery to the matter though. It was my Scottish cousin, Robert McElfic, now Lord Kildonan, whom you met. We are much of an age and when young were often taken for twins.’

  After another few minutes of lively talk, they agreed on an evening to dine together and parted. As Roger made his way back to La Belle Etoile, he again had good reason to thank his stars that, when Count Muriavieff had introduced Duroc to him, he had addressed him only as ‘Monsieur’ and omitted to mention his name.

  When Roger reported to Berthier next morning they naturally discussed the worsening of Anglo-French relations, and the ugly little Chief-of-Staff was of the opinion that if the First Consul really wanted to keep the peace he was going the wrong way about it. In the autumn he had sent a Colonel Sabastiani on a tour to Algiers, Egypt, Syria and the Ionian Isles. The Colonel had returned to France late in January and, to everyone’s amazement, the First Consul had ordered his report to be printed in Le Mortiteur on the 30th.