The Rape of Venice (57 page)

Twenty feet from the gateway, the lane through the crowd made a curve, then ran straight on between the two lofty columns, one topped by a figure of St. Mark and the other by the Winged Lion of Venice, to the quay-side. As Roger rounded the bend, he saw that a little crowd of richly dressed officials was standing at the top of the steps, and that a great gilded barge had just drawn up to them. Everyone was now craning their necks in that direction but at that moment an officer caught sight of Roger's party. Waving his drawn sword, he shouted angrily to the Sergeant to get off the route. Hastily, and greatly to the annoyance of some members of the crowd. Roger was bundled sideways into its front rank; for, instead of thusting through it, the Sergeant said to his men, with a grin:

‘Timed it nicely, didn't I, boys? Couldn't ‘ave a better view, not if we was the Directors themselves awearin' their plumes an' cocked ‘ats.'

In spite of the tumultuous agitation that seethed in Roger's mind, instinct impelled him to ask, ‘What's happening? What is all the excitement about?'

‘It's the Little Corporal's Missus,' the Sergeant told him. ‘'E's sent ‘er ‘ere on a visit.'

That meant nothing to Roger, and he remained silent for a minute; then, a vague interest aroused again, he enquired, ‘Who is the Little Corporal?'

‘Well; of all the ignorance!' exclaimed the Sergeant. ‘You must ‘ave been dead six months already not ter know that. It's our name for 'op-o'-me-thumb—the little General. We give ‘im ‘is stripes fer the way he led us to all our victories.'

Instantly Roger became as stiff as a ramrod. Next moment he saw her. The group of officials forty yards away had parted. Carrying a great bouquet of flowers,
La belle Creole,
as she was called—Josephine, widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais and now Madame Buonaparte—was still nodding to right and left, acknowledging their homage. Then she began to walk forward, and the crowd burst into cheers.

Like a cannonball with a double charge of powder behind it, Roger launched himself towards her. Taken completely by
surprise, the two soldiers were dragged after him. At the top of his lungs, he yelled:

‘Madame Buonaparte! It is I. Citizen Breuc. Help! Help! They are going to shoot me! Help!'

The cheers ceased abruptly. Every face was turned towards him. He had already covered half the distance that separated him from Josephine before the soldiers, tugging on the cords that bound his arms, brought him to a halt. She, too, had halted. She gave him a look of compassion, but shook her head. She was the kindest of women and spent half her life interceding with her normally ruthless husband to secure mercy for enemies upon whom he was about to vent his wrath; and more often than not saving them from imprisonment or death. But this was Venice, and the matter evidently one in which she felt she had no right to interfere.

Roger's guards were handicapped by their muskets, but several of the soldiers who had been lining the route came to their assistance. One of them hit him a savage blow on the side of the head. It temporarily silenced and half stunned him, and he was hauled back through the crowd into its fringes. Bowing to right and left, Josephine walked on. The people began to cheer again. Somewhere in the distance a salute of guns was still booming out. A band in the Piazza struck up the Marseillaise.

The Sergeant, furious at the thought that he would be called to account for this untimely scene, smacked Roger's face hard several times with the flat of his hand. The blows had the effect of bringing him out of his temporary stupor. Josephine was then passing within fifteen feet of him. As he glimpsed the standards that were being carried aloft behind her, he let out a last despairing shout:

‘Fouché! Your diary! William de Kay! Help!'

Josephine's footsteps faltered. She had gone suddenly pale under her rouge. She halted and gave a loud cry: ‘That man! Who is he? Please... bring him here.'

Anxious to earn merit in her eyes, half a dozen officers sprang forward. The crowd melted before them. Roger was torn from his captors, turned about and shoved by them to within a yard of her.

Half fainting, he fell on his knees, but turned his face up and managed to gasp out, ‘Madame, I am the Citizen Breuc. You remember me! You must! I implore you to save me!'

She stared down at his grimy face, with its tangled hair and
beard. ‘No, no! You cannot be. You bear no resemblance.'

‘I swear I am.' He staggered to his feet, so that he was facing her. ‘I was here on a secret mission; that's why I am disguised. But look in my eyes, Madame. Look in my eyes, and you will know me.'

For a moment her soft brown eyes looked into his deep blue ones, then she whispered, ‘It is! It is!'

‘You are right, Madame,' said a deep voice behind her. ‘It is indeed the Citizen Breuc. I, too, now recognise him.'

Shifting his glance for a second, Roger saw that the speaker was Andoche Junot, an old friend of his, and General Buonaparte's first aide-de-camp.

Josephine had turned to the Mayor of the new Municipality of Venice, who was doing the honours of the city for her. In Italian, which she could speak a little, she said, ‘Citizen Mayor, this man is well known to me and in the past rendered me a service which I shall never forget. I do not know of what crime he is accused, but whatever it may be I beg his pardon of you, and that you will give him to me.'

The Mayor bowed so low that the big old-fashioned wig he was wearing came down almost to the level of Josephine's waist. As he lifted his fat face he replied with a servile smile, ‘Madame, your illustrious husband has bestowed liberty on Venice, and liberty is worth more than life; so the lives of everyone in this city are yours to dispose of.'

Without even waiting for the Mayor's reply, General Baraguay d'Hilliers, the Commander of the French troops in Venice, who was standing beside him, cried, ‘Free this man! And be quick about it.'

Roger's escort hastened to obey. As his arms were being untied, the Sergeant grinned at him. ‘Your lucky day, chum. But I were right, weren't I? Didn't I say they'd turned out the guard speshul fer you?'

The irrepressible humour of the old soldier released the tension of Roger's overstrained emotions. He found himself laughing, and saying, ‘If you hadn't delayed to see the procession, I'd be dead by now. Find me later through Colonel Junot and I'll make you a handsome present to drink my health.'

As the procession moved on Roger fell in behind Junot, an incongruous figure among this splendid array of gorgeously clad officials and the bevy of beautiful women who were in attendance on Josephine. A moment later, at a touch of his shoulder, he turned to find that the clever-looking Citizen
Villetard had sidled up to him. In an anxious voice the
Chargé d'Affaires
said:

Citizen Breuc, I am desolated at the thought of the part I played in Court this morning. At any other time I should have gone into such a matter more fully. I should have sent for you and questioned you myself. But for the past few days I have been overwhelmed with the work of preparing for Madame Buonaparte's reception. And the Signor Malderini had already denounced you as a British spy before your letter was received. He seemed so positive of his facts. I can hardly hope for your immediate forgiveness; but if there is any way in which I can be of service to you, you have only to command me.'

Roger was much too shrewd to show malice to a man who might prove useful to him, so he replied at once, ‘Even the most conscientious of us makes mistakes at times, Citizen; and my narrow escape this morning was one of the risks inseparable from my work. In that I may later accept your offer of assistance. For the present, I require only a certificate of civicism, as a protection against any further mistakes of the same kind, and decent quarters where I can exchange this now useless Arab disguise for more suitable garments.'

Villetard gave a sigh of relief. ‘Nothing could be simpler, Citizen. When our Ambassador was withdrawn in April, I took over the Embassy, and in it there is ample accommodation. I beg that you will allow me to become your host, and everything you may require shall be furnished you.'

The invitation suited Roger admirably; so he graciously accepted and they walked on side by side, across the great courtyard of the Palace, up the broad stairway, now flanked by Venetian halberdiers, and through to the enormous hall in which the Grand Council had elected the Doges. It had a frieze of their portraits going right back to the year 810 and, at one end, forming a twenty-foot high background for the seventy-foot-long dais, Tintoretto's vast painting—the largest in the world.

It was from the dais, three months earlier, that Junot had read to the cringing Senate Buonaparte's threatening message, which had led to the fall of the thousand-year-old Republic. Now he stood behind Josephine, a resplendent figure, square chinned, curly haired, smiling amiably, while the Mayor made a long speech of servile adulation about the benefits the conqueror had bestowed upon the city, and Josephine replied in her halting Italian that only urgent affairs had caused him to
send her, instead of coming himself, to say how greatly he valued their friendship.

Afterwards she was conducted to the Doge's private apartments, which had been made ready for her, so that she might rest through the heat of the afternoon. Roger then accompanied Villetard to the French Embassy, where his host installed him in a comfortable room, provided him with a valet and sent for a barber and clothiers. As a further gesture of amends the long-nosed diplomat then begged his acceptance of a silver-hilted sword and a purse of five hundred sequins for present expenses. Roger saw no reason to refuse them and, to the delight of Citizen Villetard, promised to speak well of him to Madame Buonaparte.

Four hours later, bathed, rested, his beard shaved off, and dressed in ready-made, but not too ill-fitting, clothes, he returned with Villetard to the Palace for the banquet which was being given in Josephine's honour. When he kissed her hand at the reception and thanked her for his life, she said:

‘People may reproach me for laziness and love of pleasure, Monsieur, but not for forgetting my friends; and I shall ever count you one of them. But I am all agog to learn what brought you to so sorry a pass. Please come here tomorrow morning and tell me all about yourself.'

Junot, too, was eager to hear his story and, later in the evening, after the first formal quadrille had been danced, the two men sat down together over glasses of wine. Roger had always found it good policy to tell as much of the truth as possible about his doings and, since he had to account for his long absence from France, he had decided to make no secret of his voyage to India.

When last in Paris, he had succeeded in blending various roles he had played in the past into one coherent story which was now generally accepted in the
salons
of the French capital. By then there were plenty of people who had once graced the halls of Versailles, but having liberal principles had stretched them far enough to the Left to survive the Terror and, after the fall of Robespierre, they had emerged, either from prison or a caution-dictated obscurity, to form with the new masters of France a revived upper-class of wealth and fashion; so to them there was nothing at all strange in the
ci-devant
Chevalier de Breuc having kept his life and liberty by fooling the
sansculottes
into believing him to be a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary. He had, too, so skilfully dovetailed his French and
English identities that the Buonapartes, Barras, Junot and everyone else with whom he was well acquainted as Citizen Breuc thought him only half French by birth and brought up in England, but entirely French in sympathies, and a patriot who had rendered France many useful services.

In consequence he led Junot to believe that, since he could pass with ease as an Englishman, he had been sent to India by the French Government to assess the possibilities of the French regaining a hold on the territories they had lost there, and of the wealth they might hope to gain if they could succeed in ousting the British from Bengal. He then showed equal eagerness to hear from the young Colonel an account of General Buonaparte's remarkable campaign.

Junot had the heart of a lion, but no great brain, and it had been his conspicuous bravery while a Sergeant at the siege of Toulon that had led the little Corsican to promote him to Lieutenant and make him his A.D.C. Afterwards, he had accompanied his new master to Paris where, during Buonaparte's dark days, when he was out of employment, they had shared a room in a back-street hotel, and, by various shifts, Junot had managed to support them both. When the
coup d'état
of 13th Vendémiaire had brought Buonaparte with one bound from obscurity to Military Governor of Paris, he had not been slow to show his gratitude, and Junot, who regarded him as little short of God, was delighted to plunge into a panegyric about his triumphs.

‘When we arrived in Nice towards the end of March '96,' he said, ‘I will confess that I was just a shade anxious about the sort of reception our General would have when he took over the command. He had brought with him from Paris Berthier, to be his Chief-of-Staff, Marmont, Murat and myself. Naturally, we all had absolute faith in him, but he had never before commanded even as much as a Brigade in the field; so we couldn't help wondering how the old hands would like his appointment.

‘Sérurier was one Divisional Commander. He is a
ci-devant
Count, you know. He spent years in the old army and only joined the revolution because he had been treated so shabbily; a conscientious man and good at looking after his men, but stuck fast in all the old traditions about set-piece wars. Augereau was another; a
sans-culotte
if ever there was one, and vain as a peacock, but a skilful tactician and a tremendous fighter. Masséna was the third; a dour silent fellow, but by far
the ablest of the lot. All of them had victories to their credit, and a much better claim to be appointed General-in-Chief than our little man; but in no time at all they were eating out of his hand.