The Price of Glory

by Seth Hunter

  “Welcome,” said Ouvrard dryly, “to chez Beauharnais.”

  Stone steps led up to the pavilion where their hostess awaited them in a little semi-circular antechamber. She was dressed, as before, in the Greek fashion but this time the muslin covered her entirely from her neck to her ankles, though her nipples were readily discernible through the thin, close-fitting fabric. She wore her hair en chignon, with that thin little blood red ribbon at her throat. Nathan kissed her hands, complimented her on her appearance, expressed delight at her charming abode. Such a surprise, tucked away in the centre of the city.

  It was very small, she confided, but she was in love with it; she had not long moved in. It was just about adequate to her needs but everything fitted in like a little doll’s house, with a kitchen below ground and attic rooms for the children and the servants. The children? Nathan looked about him warily, lest he step on them but they were not in evidence: tucked neatly away in the attic, probably, row upon row of them on mattresses.

  There was but one little bedroom, she continued, but that was enough, was it not, for one little girl? With a roguish chuckle, taking his hand and leading him into the salon.

  He walked into a blaze of golden sunlight from two large French windows on the opposite wall and took a moment to adjust his eyes to the glare. Then he saw that the room contained five people: two men and three women. Thérésa was one of them: dressed more decorously than before, in a long muslin gown not unlike that of her hostess but in flaming red, her long black hair unbound and falling freely about her shoulders. She was so stunningly beautiful that Nathan felt a constriction about his chest and throat, even while he made the conventional noises of greeting. The others were introduced. Madame Hamelin, the pug with the body of Venus; another woman called Madame de Coligny who would have been ravishing enough if not cast in the shade of La Tallien. And the two men—a dashing officer of Chasseurs with a startling mass of black curls who was introduced as Lieutenant Murat, and an older man with a long patrician nose and a haughty air, introduced simply as Talma; he turned out to be an actor. An intimate little party, as Madame de Beauharnais described it, with a giggle.

  There was, Nathan thought, altogether too much giggling for his comfort. Something of the school-girlish, even conspiratorial, in the manner of the four women, as if they were not used to the company of men, which was ridiculous. Ouvrard detected it, he could tell, and was slightly puzzled by it. He looked about him now and again, as if someone might jump out from behind the curtains. Only Talma seemed entirely at his ease, telling a lengthy story about his part in a play: Voltaire’s Brutus now running at the Théâtre Français. Naturally he was playing the lead, and during the assassination scene, when he had been about to plunge his knife into Caesar’s back, he had tripped over his toga and driven the weapon home with far more power than he had intended, causing his victim to cry out “Jesus Christ!” in a loud voice that had the audience howling with laughter and turned the entire tragedy into farce.

  The Hamelin looked a little puzzled at this until it was pointed out to her that Jesus Christ had not been born at the time, at which she went into paroxysms of mirth, as if to make up for her ignorance.

  Altogether, Nathan thought, he had spent more relaxed evenings as a junior midshipman in the company of his superiors, though lacking the heady proximity of four gorgeous women in thin cheesecloth. He could barely take his gaze from Thérésa, the tautness of the scarlet fabric drawing his eyes like moths to the flame and with almost as perilous an effect. He ate the first two courses with no clear idea of what they were, spoke nonsense in what seemed to him a stranger’s voice and drank far too much wine.

  Suddenly he became aware that the four women were standing up.

  “And now the surprise,” said Madame de Beauharnais.

  Was this where they began to dance upon the table? But no, they were leaving the room. Was dinner over? He was sure he had only had two courses and light ones at that. He tried to catch Ouvrard’s eye but he was gazing studiously into his glass. Talma began to hold forth again, another long theatrical anecdote, and then he stopped dead and stared towards the door. Nathan followed his glance and he felt his heart leap into his throat and jam there, choking him.

  “Tra la!” Thérésa stood there, quite nude, except for her little red ankle boots and the blood-red ribbon about her throat. She waltzed into the room, twisting round to show that she was as naked behind as she was in front and looking back over her shoulder at them to make sure she had their complete attention, which was indeed the case. Nathan had not previously seen her from behind, even clothed. It was better than he could have imagined.

  “Tra la!” Their four heads jerked back to the door as the Hamelin entered, similarly attired. She was not as beautiful as Thérésa but her body was far more voluptuous: a walking, curvaceous scandal. Nathan saw Murat as if the mirror of himself, his eyes staring, his mouth open.

  “Tra la!” Madame de Coligny had a hard act to follow but she managed it well enough, being almost as well endowed as the Hamelin. And finally …

  Rose. Or the Queen of Hearts, as she announced herself, for as well as the uniform red ankle boots she wore two little hearts, attached by some mysterious means to her nipples and a larger one covering the mound of Venus. It showed a certain comparative prudery that Nathan would not have anticipated. Murat began tentatively to clap but stopped when he realised he was the only one to do so and that the performance was possibly not yet over. Indeed, it had hardly begun.

  The four women orbited the table with little dance steps, finally forming a tableau in the dying light of the sun as it poured in through the wide, half-open windows, the Queen of Hearts seeming somewhat overdressed among her nude companions. But not for long. Resting upon Thérésa’s shoulder she pulled off first one boot and then the other. Not a breath, not a sigh. Utter silence in the room. The Hamelin plucked a heart from one nipple, the Coligny the other. And Rose herself performed the final unveiling, removing the heart-shaped design from her loins to reveal the darker fabric beyond.

  “Behold,” said Our Lady of Thermidor, gravely, “the Queen of Spades.”

  Nathan felt the beginnings of hysterical laughter. He suppressed it with difficulty. Then Talma, with his fine sense of drama, began to applaud. An overloud noise in the silence. Ouvrard joined in and then Murat and finally Nathan—what else could he do?

  But now what? Four fully dressed men, who hardly knew each other, and four naked women. An orgy, for all its appeal in Nathan’s fantasies, was actually quite alarming when it presented itself as a genuine prospect. For all the delightfulness of Thérésa, in particular—fully revealed to him in all her nude magnificence—the idea of stripping off his own clothes and cavorting naked with her in the presence of others was really something he had rather not do. And what if it was not Thérésa? What if it was the Hamelin or de Coligny ? He would probably cope, a demon voice informed him. But what if it was Rose—the chosen one of Captain Cannon? If Buonaparte heard as much as a whisper of these proceedings, he would have Nathan’s guts for garters.

  Fortunately, there was a reprieve. At least, for the time being.

  To Nathan’s frank astonishment, all four women sat down again, at their original places at the table. Rose rang a little bell, and the servants entered with the next course. Not by a single look or a fumble did they betray that they had noticed anything unusual. Dishes were laid upon the table. Napkins shaken out upon naked laps. Then they retired. Nathan observed that the main dish was some form of fowl, possibly duck.

  “Will you carve, sir, being a military man?” Rose requested Captain Murat.

  Murat carved. His hands shook a little. The conversation flagged.

  “I once played Agamemnon in a loincloth,” Talma declared, his voice a little more high pitched than it had been. “It was a little inhibiting at first, but I soon found it quite … liberating.”

  This did not entirely break the tension. The women, having achieved the climax of
the evening, as it were, did not appear to know where to take it from here. It would have been better, Nathan thought, to have waited until after pudding.

  Thérésa rallied first.

  “A glass of wine with you, Captain?”

  Nathan, who had looked to Murat, quite forgetting his own rank, realised she was talking to him. He found himself blushing as he fumbled with his glass. Their eyes met. Her expression was unmistakable. My God, he thought, she’s going to have me.

  Their glasses clinked and then in the silence they heard the sound of a bell.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Talma. It was the tocsin. The dread alarum of the commune, not heard since the time of the Terror, calling the people to arms.

  In the silence that followed they heard the clatter of hooves in the cobbled courtyard outside. Voices were raised. Boots rang across the outer chamber and the door was flung open to reveal …

  Paul François Jean Nicolas de Barras. Booted and spurred in his blue uniform and his plumed hat, with a great curved sword at his waist, looking every inch the former vicomte, victor of Toulon, hero of Thermidor. His immense frame seemed to fill the smallish room.

  He stared at them in total astonishment.

  “Good God!” he said.

  Rose was on her feet, her expression one of shock and dismay. Her napkin slipped from her lap. She made a grab for it. Went for the tablecloth instead. Dishes slid to the floor. Murat stood to attention, saluting.

  “Do come and join us, Citizen Barras,” said Madame Hamelin calmly. “We are having a little duck but there is plenty to go round.”

  The tocsin rang again. Barras snatched off his hat.

  “Do you hear that?” he said. “Do you know what it is? It is the tocsin. Do you know what it means? It is the mob, madam, out upon the streets with their muskets and their pikes and their blood rage, and here you are sitting bare-arsed naked in this, this … this bawdy house.” He waved his hat about the room. Nathan looked to Rose in sympathy. She was trying to wrap the tablecloth around her but most of it was still on the table, weighed down by dishes. Her eyes were filled with tears. He felt a sudden gush of affection for her, not un-mixed with lust.

  “They are marching on the Convention,” said Barras, quietly now but with deadly earnestness. “Thirty thousand of them, at the very least, from every damned section in the city—and the Garde Parisienne with them. And if we do not stop them they will be marching back with our heads on pikes. So get your clothes on, you whores, and hide yourselves in the stables until it’s all over, and pray to God or whatever deity you worship in those tiny brains of yours that you won’t be wearing a different red stripe round your throats by the time the night is over.”

  He glared at Murat who was still standing rigidly at the salute.

  “Who are you, you ponce?”

  “Sous-Lieutenant Joachim Murat, sir, 21st Regiment of Chasseurs.”

  “Well, Sous-Lieutenant, get on your fucking horse and join your regiment at the Tuileries. You, too, Ouvrard, if you don’t want to end up back in your grocery shop flogging lemons.” His eye swept round the table. “As for the rest of you, we need every man we can get, even half a man like you, Talma. If you can’t shoot a pistol you can inspire us with your rhetoric.” His head jerked round to Murat again.

  “Murat, did you say ?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Weren’t you with that cunt Buonaparte at Toulon?”

  “No, sir. That would be Sergeant Junot, sir. But I know who you mean. We have met on … on several social occasions.”

  “Have you, indeed? Why does that not surprise me? And do you know where he is now?”

  “I … I suppose he is in his quarters, sir.”

  “His quarters? He has been struck off the army list, you whoreson. Where in God’s name are his quarters?”

  “I … I don’t know, sir.”

  “I’ve been trying to find him all day. I expected to see him here,” he snarled at Rose de Beauharnais as if it was her fault that he was not.

  Nathan opened his mouth, perhaps unwisely. “I believe he lodges at the Hôtel de la Liberté,” he offered.

  Barras looked at him. If he recognised him from the last time the tocsin had rung in Paris during the month of Thermidor he showed no sign of it.

  “Then perhaps you would care to go and fetch him,” he proposed icily, “and bring him to the Tuileries. Tell him if he gets there in the next hour, he can have a new uniform and the Army of Italy. If he leaves it any later he can see what he’ll get from the Royalists and hope it isn’t a firing squad.”

  And right on cue, from out of the falling darkness, they heard a ragged volley of musket fire and then, as the echoes died away, the steady beat of a drum. It sounded no more than a street away and it was getting closer.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  a Whiff of Grapeshot

  THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION COULD hardly have come at a more convenient time, Nathan reflected, as he walked briskly away from the sound of the drum. Unless, of course, one were a committed satyr. He admitted to some regret that he and Madame Tallien had not become better acquainted during the course of the evening and had they been alone he did not deceive himself that he would have remained inviolate. But he had discovered in himself a certain prim reserve when confronted with public lewdity and lubriciousness. Not that he had encountered a great deal of either in his short life, nothing like as much as he had hoped at one stage, but once as a young midshipman he had peered down into the lower depths of a 74 at its mooring in Spithead shortly after a horde of tarts had been let aboard from the bumboats and had been shocked to the core. It had become engraved upon his impressionable mind like one of Gillray’s grosser caricatures. Ever since, the prospect of uninhibited mass copulation had possessed little attraction for him. Perhaps it was the Puritan in him, for though you would never have thought it from her own behaviour, his mother came from a long line of Huguenots, imbued with the convictions of John Calvin.

  He began to wonder where he thought he was going. He had, of course, no intention of trying to find General Buonaparte, even if he had known where to begin looking, for he had no idea where the HÔtel de la Liberté was situated. When he had left the house, his only thought had been to head in the opposite direction from the advancing drum. His previous experience of Paris induced him to the belief that a drum was the herald of sudden, indiscriminate bloodletting. But now he began to recollect his true character as a British naval officer, in which capacity he had always understood it to be a summons to action stations.

  He stopped for a moment, undecided. He did not wish to become involved in a street fight. Especially as it would be difficult to tell at a glance and in the confusion of the moment whose side he would be fighting upon. However, it was his clear duty to offer his services to the Royalists. The trouble was he did not know where to find them. Before he had left London he had been given the name and address of a certain lawyer near the Palais de Justice to whom he could pass on valuable information in the surety that it would make its way to England and who would, if it became necessary, secure Nathan’s escape from Paris. He supposed he could try to find him, but it was a little late in the day to be scurrying around looking for lawyers. Besides, he was not entirely sure he wished to risk his life for the Bourbons. It was one thing when you were on a ship-of-war on the high seas, fighting in the company of your fellow countrymen, for the flag; for your family and friends; for your own advancement or survival. Quite another when you were in the streets of Paris fighting for the French—of whatever political allegiance.

  Whilst so preoccupied, he had continued striding towards the centre of the city and now he found himself among the arcades of the Palais Egalité—or the Palais Royal as it once was and might shortly be again. The shops were all closed and shuttered but there were a few cafés still open, serving refreshments to those who had nothing better to do than sit around waiting for the next Revolution or counter-Revolution to take place. Nathan was passing such an es
tablishment with his head down when he found himself hailed by a gentleman seated at one of the tables set out upon the walkway. Looking up, he saw to his astonishment that it was Captain Cannon.

  He was with his hanger-on Junot, drinking coffee and cognac—surprisingly perhaps, given the amount of liquor he had consumed in the Procope. But he seemed perfectly sober now.

  “Come and join us,” he said. “We have just come from the theatre.”

  It was good to know that some aspects of Paris life continued uninterrupted.

  He asked Nathan where he was going in such a hurry. Nathan considered. Several conflicting thoughts crossed his mind. Finally he said, “As a matter of fact, I was looking for you.”

  “Oh.” Buonaparte eyed him without much interest. “And why is that? Have you got my hat?”

  “No.” His hat? Then Nathan remembered he had left it behind at the Procope. The general’s hair hung greasily about his shoulders, his complexion more jaundiced than ever in the light of the cheap candles. Nathan dropped his voice. “No, but Citizen Barras asked me to look out for you. I have just been having supper with him.” He glossed over the true circumstance of the repast, though he had a sudden vision of Rose de Beauharnais attired as the Queen of Hearts, just before her dramatic transformation into the Queen of Spades. He felt himself blushing. If Buonaparte only knew. “He wants you to report to him at the Tuileries.”