The Retreat (11 page)

‘Your Majesty,' Jakovlev replied, sensing that the monologue was finished, ‘perhaps it would be for you, the victor, to speak of peace.'

The Emperor reflected, walked round the room, and then returned to the Russian's side with a bound. ‘Do you have direct access to the Tsar?'

‘Yes.'

‘If I write to him, will you take my letter?'

‘Yes.'

‘Will he receive it in person?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you certain?'

‘I give you my word.'

All that remained was to compose the letter. In what terms? Anger, no; supplication, no, even less so. How to get through to Alexander? How to make him yield? How to move him? Napoleon went out alone onto the terrace from where he towered over the decimated city. Through his theatre glasses he saw, sparkling in the night, church chandeliers hanging in the few palaces still standing, which
were serving as barracks; bivouacs in the palace courtyards, bivouacs in the plain, points of light, echoes of drinking songs. He went back inside to sleep, got up in the middle of the night and sent for his secretaries. Pacing up and down the large salon, he mumbled his way through his missive to the Tsar. The secretaries took notes of the snatches they could hear and stifled their yawns.

‘Mon frère,' said the Emperor very quietly. ‘No, too familiar … Monsieur mon frère, that's it, Monsieur mon frère … I want him to prove that deep down he still feels some attachment towards me. At Tilsit, he said, “I will be your second against England.” … Lies! Don't put that word. At Erfurt I offered him Moldavia and Wallachia, which would extend his borders to the Danube … Monsieur mon frère … Then say that the brother of one of his ministers … a minister of Your Majesty's … Write Your Majesty … I sent for him, I spoke to him, he promised me … no … I
recommended
he make my feelings known to the Tsar … Stress
feelings
… Then the burning of Moscow has to be deplored, condemned, the blame put on that swine Rostopchin! The incendiaries? Shot! Add that I am not waging war on him for my own pleasure … that I waited for a word from him … One word! A word or a battle. One word and I would have remained at Smolensk, I would have rallied the armies, assembled the supplies from Danzig, the droves. One word and I would have organized Lithuania. I already held Poland …'

When Sebastian went over Baron Fain's half-drafted notes to combine them with his and write up a version in ink, he added some figures (
Four hundred incendiaries have been arrested in the act
, and
Three-quarters of the houses have been burnt
) and took the liberty of inserting a remark
of the Emperor's he'd heard earlier that day, about Rostopchin, that seemed to him to reinforce the message (
This conduct is atrocious and utterly purposeless
). The Baron reread the final copy of the letter, appeared satisfied and submitted it for Napoleon's mechanical signature. Sebastian was especially proud of his conclusion: I
have waged war on Your Majesty without animosity; a note from him, before or after the last battle, would have halted my march
. He expected congratulations but received none.

*

In the Mother Superior's cell, which he had commandeered for himself, d'Herbigny stood up with an aching back. Bare-chested, in buckskin undershorts, he rubbed the small of his back; that wooden bed was confoundedly hard, even with the mass of cushions he'd brought from a canteen-woman who owed her business to pillage from the bazaar. ‘I'm getting rusty,' he said, opening the window. He shivered. The air was damp and cool. Below, in the courtyard, horses were noisily drinking Moskova water that had been brought up to the wash-house in hogsheads. Two dragoons were cooking soup, their cauldron hanging from the beams over a brazier.

‘What is it?'

‘Cabbage, sir.'

‘Again!'

Grousing, he went to the oratory, where Paulin had laid out his straw mattress. Assisted by a young nun with downcast eyes, he was treating the captain's uniform for lice, the Muscovite welcome, as their infestation of every scrap of clothing was known. Dressed in a coarse canvas shirt, with chestnut-brown hair cut very short, long-lashed
eyes that she kept half-closed and slow movements, the sister had turned the breeches inside out and was pressing them with a stone. Paulin was singeing the seams with flint and steel to kill any survivors.

‘Nearly there, sir.'

‘She's charming, this little girl. I wonder if I shan't take your place!'

‘She's lucky, is what she is, sir. Lieutenant Berton's have been getting different treatment.'

They had locked the cantankerous Mother Superior and the oldest, most wizened nuns in their chapel; the troopers had shared out the others amongst themselves to wash and mend their linen. The evening before, Lieutenant Berton had organized a dance; d'Herbigny had heard laughter and crude songs most of the night. Berton had dressed up some of the nuns as fine ladies, got them drunk, and forced them to dance, laughing at their silent tears, the looks on their faces, their awkwardness. Bah! the captain thought to himself, those girls are better off than if they'd fallen into the clutches of a Württemberg regiment; they would have given them a good going over, those brutes.

‘It's ready, sir,' Paulin said, checking the deloused uniform one last time.

‘Then nip along to the robber's and bring back something for a decent stew.'

The robber was their nickname for Comptroller Poissonnard, who reserved his best cuts to exchange for icons from the convent, the silver from which he melted down into ingots.

‘I'll get you dressed and then run off there, sir.'

‘No need. The little one will help me; look at her fingers, those aren't peasant's hands, she's the daughter of
an aristocrat who's been shuffled off into a convent … What is she called?'

‘I don't make small talk in Russian, sir,' said Paulin with an offended air.

The servant heaved a long sigh, took another icon out of their cabinet, went down to the ground floor, heard a woman's moans as he passed Lieutenant Berton's cell, crossed the refectory, which had been converted into a stable and set off towards St Vladimir's, pulling his donkey behind him.

The church was filled with a stale, nauseating, cloying smell. Hung from scaffolds by butcher's hooks, animal chunks rotted in midair, their blood dripping into sticky pools, running off in gutters and congealing on the flagstones. Paulin left his donkey tethered under the porch; he walked down the middle of the filthy nave, blowflies buzzing around him, and blocked his nose as tightly as he could, but the fetid atmosphere still seeped in through his mouth. He cleared his throat and spat. How could Poissonnard live here? Very happily, as it turned out. He was buoyed up by the idea of profit; in this cesspool, he breathed easier than he would have at two thousand metres' altitude with no hope of a fortune. Cheeks blue but shaved with care, he had set up his office in a confessional; the door, torn off and laid across two barrels – there was his desk; files were stacked on the penitents' prayer-stools.

‘Ah, good day, my dear Paulin,' Poissonnard said unctuously.

‘Comptroller. What can you offer me today for this work of art?'

He held out the silver-grounded icon.

‘Let's see, let's see,' said the crook, adjusting his spectacles
on his florid nose. He appraised the icon expertly, and, scraping it with his fingernail, estimated it at three hundred grams of silver; he thought for a moment and then led Paulin, who was still ill at ease, to the sacristy he had converted into a storeroom and his lodgings. They passed a hundred or so skinned cats piled up in a chapel. Butchers were carting the heads away in tubs; they were going to join a mound of bones, oozing muzzles and hooves at the bottom of a crypt; thrown out, even buried, this waste would attract the wolves.

Paulin looked away from a group of workmen from the commissariat; their red fingers were prising ribs apart with a cracking sound and throwing soft things into buckets overflowing with offal. Others, on ladders, were hanging garlands of dead crows on lines strung between the pillars. ‘Will this church ever return to normal?' the servant wondered. Stones have a memory, the old priest who had taught him the alphabet used to say. In Rouen, you could still see holes in the pillars in the church of St Ouen: during the Revolution, the zealous new recruits of the armies of the Republic had set up forges in its aisles to cast bullets; the choir's copper grille had ended up as a cannon. But this wasn't the same. Blood was going to stain the stones and tiles of St Vladimir's.

‘I've kept the best for our dear captain,' said Comptroller Poissonnard, taking a mare's liver – which glinted olive green when it caught the light – out of a chest, and wrapping it in a Russian newspaper.

‘Is that all?'

‘Ah yes, Monsieur Paulin, that is all, but it is oh so tender.'

‘Just a little more effort, Monsieur Poissonnard.'

‘A bottle of Madeira, then, there you go! Do you think you're going to find beef after eight days' pillaging? Our regiments have swiped the lot!'

Even dried vegetables were running out. Squads went out marauding every day, but they had to go further and further afield and brave the peasants' hostility. Fresh meat was growing scarce and Poissonnard was reaping the benefits.

‘Captain d'Herbigny should try and bring back a drove,' he joked.

‘I'll tell him,' answered Paulin, recoiling at the sight of the high altar, his heart racing. The non-believers in army stores had nailed a wolf to it.

Poissonnard smiled. ‘They're not squeamish, those wolves. My goodness, they're fond of my meat – too fond, even. Talking of which, ask the gendarmes out there to see you back safely. Those beasts could easily attack you, on account of that choice piece you're leaving with.'

*

Time passed and the Tsar didn't respond; Kutuzov's troops, it emerged, had disappeared down south, as Berthier had predicted. The Grande Armée settled in for winter in the ruins of Moscow. The Emperor made numerous arrangements to that end: he wrote to Maret, the Duke of Bassano, who had remained in Lithuania, for fourteen thousand horses; he considered raising new regiments, organized parades, pestered his Parisian bookseller for the novels of the moment; he had the Kremlin fortified, the convents likewise. Caulaincourt had stepped up the post; the mail arrived every day from Paris, bringing wine and parcels. The couriers took fifteen days to travel between the two
capitals; the service functioned punctually by way of post stages. A rumour spread that reinforcements were on their way with winter clothes; they would throw the Russians into the Volga.

And then, suddenly, the incidents began. Soldiers were found murdered. The Cossacks, whom Murat claimed to have won over, turned hostile. One day they fell on some artillery wagons from Smolensk and burnt them; three days later, on the same road, they killed and wounded a party of dragoons of the Guard. The next day it was a whole squadron, and they seized two trunks of mail that were returning to France.

Sebastian was watching the first snow; big, slow-moving flakes were melting as they landed on the roofs. In the courtyard, the soldiers had constructed huts using pictures from the palace walls. An aide-de-camp from headquarters entered the secretaries' office; in his Hungarian-style uniform, with gold silk belt and red trousers, he cut a very elegant figure.

‘For His Majesty, the text of the 22nd Bulletin.'

‘Monsieur Roque,' said Baron Fain, ‘instead of watching the snow fall, read that and take it to the Emperor.'

He returned to drafting a promotion, a new general who was being sent to Portugal.

‘My lord …'

‘Take it, I tell you.'

‘There is a problem.'

‘What?' said the Baron, looking up from his paper.

‘Do you think that allusions to the incidents on the Smolensk road are necessary?'

‘Certainly not!'

‘I can excise them?'

‘Of course.'

‘And also …

‘What else?'

‘This dispatch lacks any favourable news.'

‘If you can find anything favourable to add, then do so, in your most florid style.'

‘I need your approval.'

The Baron took the piece of paper and Sebastian, standing at his side, made certain suggestions. ‘After
The fires have entirely ceased
, why not add
Warehouses of sugar, furs, linen are being discovered every day
…'

‘But no meat.'

‘No, but this will be published in the
Monitor;
it's better to be reassuring. See, there as well, after
The greater part of the army is in cantonment in Moscow
…'

‘What am I supposed to see, Monsieur Roque?'

‘In the same positive spirit, I would add
where it is restoring itself after its exertions.'

‘Add away.'

‘This young man is right.'

It was the Emperor. He had entered silently and was listening to them. The secretary and his clerk got to their feet.

‘Watch out for this lad, Fain, he has ideas. Where is Méneval?'

‘In bed with fever, sire.'

‘What's this lad's name?'

‘Sebastian Roque, sire. I employ him as my chief clerk, because he has a good hand.'

‘Perhaps we could use him at Carnavalet. What do you think, Fain?'

‘He is well read, it's true …'

In the Hôtel Carnavalet, the censor's office altered the texts of plays that had been authorized to be performed. Just as Pisistratus used to have Homer rewritten in Athens, so bookish civil servants cut any allusions from
Athalie
, however oblique, that might be disagreeable to His Majesty; they toned down the classics for the continuing peace of the empire and transposed overly contemporary comedies to the age of the Assyrians.