The Retreat (30 page)

‘The Chancellor awaits Your Grace,' announced the valet coming back into the salon.

‘Is it really true?' one of the men asked Sebastian, who remained behind when the grand equerry left to report to Cambacérès and make arrangements for the following day.

‘Where is the Emperor?' asked another.

‘Has he suffered some misfortune?'

‘We have been worried since yesterday morning …'

‘We read the last bulletin in the
Monitor
with horror!'

‘Will there be no army left?'

‘Why is the Duke in Paris without His Majesty?'

‘Speak, young man, speak!'

‘Set our minds at rest!'

‘The Emperor is in Paris,' said Sebastian, falling into a gilt armchair.

A
NEW ARMY WAS
making for Leipzig in 1813, where it was preparing to face the coalition of Russians and Prussians. Europe was in ferment against the Empire. Sweden had rejoined England, Austria was wavering, inflammatory pamphlets were circulating in Germany. Napoleon had raised troops, authorizing the early conscription of the very young, the recall of disbanded contingents and the formerly exempt, the enrolment of sailors into the infantry, and the recall of whole divisions from Spain even though the English were sending Wellington reinforcements. All men under thirty were mobilized, except Sebastian Roque, who was well out of it. As Vice-Director of the library at the Hôtel Carnavalet, he devoted his perspicacity and penmanship to the service of Imperial censorship. He approved plays, arranged productions, adapted or cut texts and granted permissions to theatre companies and playwrights. He had a box at the Opéra, a gig with a driver, a generous annuity from the Emperor, which he supplemented with the diamonds from Moscow. He was, in short, the happiest and most serene of men in a tumultuous time.

In the Tuileries gardens that spring, Sebastian climbed the steps of the Feuillants' terrace and entered the portico of the Véry restaurant. He straightened his clothes in front
of the long mirrors, checking the shine of his riding boots and the hang of his fashionable cinnamon-bronze kerseymere frock coat. He'd barely reached the foot of the staircase lined with orange trees in tubs when a maître d'hôtel greeted him. ‘The young ladies are here already, Monsieur le vice-directeur.'

‘In my usual room?'

‘Naturally.'

Sebastian gave him his gloves, knobbed stick and hat and hurried to join the actresses he had invited to supper.

The private room was decorated in the style of Herculaneum, with half-columns, imitation Roman balustrades, gilt candelabras and a granite table; the vases of flowers were reflected in the mirrors. ‘Dear friends,' he said, seating himself between the chic young girls, ‘forgive me. I was detained by Baron de Pommereul.'

Still wearing their ribboned straw hats, the actresses narrowed their eyes, batted their eyelashes, and pushed back their curls as waiters brought oysters and pickled fish, and a sommelier (the word had just been coined) poured the wine.

‘Did you know that they have seventeen kinds of white wine at Véry's?'

‘We've never been here before.'

‘Oh, well, now you can tell people you have.'

‘Where did you get that scar on your cheek, Monsieur le vice-directeur?' the more inquisitive of the two asked.

‘A wound in the Emperor's service.'

‘Did you fight?'

‘In Russia.'

‘Were you in Moscow?'

‘Oh, yes, and I can assure you that the menus there
were not like Véry's! No chicken galantines or champagne truffles.'

The actress studied Sebastian's failings as they encouraged him to talk. To get parts at the Théâtre-Français – for he could cast plays as well as scripting them now – they indulged his conceited tendencies. He was not fooled, but the game amused him and he had his part to play as well. Even if they fluffed their lines, he would still give them what they dreamed of, without demanding anything in return: they were pretty and it was enough that he be seen walking back through the gardens with them on his arm. Tongues would wag. He wanted to make a reputation, for it to be his name that people brought up in salons and at court.

‘Over there,' he said between oysters, ‘the cold killed fewer people than hunger. Close to His Majesty we managed to survive, but most of the men had nothing to eat except their horses.'

‘How dreadful!' said one of the girls, who couldn't care less.

‘I have reason to believe that there were even cases of cannibalism.'

‘No?'

‘I didn't see it first-hand, but it can't be ruled out.'

‘They ate the horses, you were saying …'

‘The horses started to become scarce. They were dying of thirst.'

‘Didn't they drink melted snow?'

‘We didn't always take them out of harness in the evenings; they needed water but where are you going to find that in the dark? How can you guess where a frozen stream is? Even if we found one, we had to break the ice
with an iron bar, collect the water in a pot, bring it back without getting lost.'

The supper passed in this fashion, Sebastian lightening or darkening his tale as his inspiration or the curiosity of his audience dictated. They took their time over the slices of sturgeon on skewers, the cucumbers stuffed with marrow and partridge fillets in rings; glass in hand, they talked of the fire of Moscow, the famine, the cold, the epidemics, the Cossacks and the sound of the cannon.

Sebastian was escorting the young ladies back to their homes in his gig when the driver knocked a pedestrian in crumpled clothes against a corner post. Out of curiosity, Sebastian looked at the individual, shuddered and ordered the carriage to stop for a moment; he jumped down, taking his leave of the actresses. ‘My postilion will drive you back. Come tomorrow morning to Carnavalet, rue Sainte-Catherine, ask for Vice-Director Roque. Your business will be seen to.'

Without troubling about his boots in that muddy street with its overflowing drains, he bent over the fallen man.

‘Monsieur Roque?'

‘Paulin, is that really you?'

‘Alas, yes, it is me.'

‘Why alas? Is Captain d'Herbigny dead? Have you no job? If that's it I'll take you on in my service, in memory of so many memories.'

‘No, no, the captain is alive, but it would have been better if he'd stayed in the Russian snow.'

‘Explain yourself.'

‘We live near here.'

‘You're frightening me with your riddles!'

Near the Marché des Innocents, they turned into an
alleyway and climbed the four floors of a building that was shored up by wooden struts as broad as tree trunks. The stairs were steep and smelled of urine and soap. Paulin puffed and panted as he hobbled up; finally he pushed open a door without a lock and ushered Sebastian into a low, dark, tiled room, which opened onto the well of a small courtyard. In an armchair Sebastian could make out a vague silhouette. When the servant lit some candles, he saw d'Herbigny lying prostrate, his cross pinned to the lapel of a dressing gown; the captain had a leather nose, fixed, milky eyes, wrinkles and white hair.

‘Sir!' Paulin said in a very loud voice. ‘I've got a surprise for you.'

‘Can't he hear anymore?' asked Sebastian, a lump in his throat.

‘Oh yes, but he can't see. And I think he left his brain out there.'

‘I'm not deaf, you poor sap!' the captain said suddenly, getting to his feet.

He held his riding whip in front of him like a white cane, took three steps, bumped into the table and swore.

‘It's Sebastian Roque, Captain.'

‘I know! You've been talking together. You should know that that cretin Paulin is as chronic a liar as a teeth-puller! No, I'm not still stuck out there, but what I am is in an absolute fury not to be of any use for anything anymore! A cannonball has just carried off Marshal Bessières, I've been told, Duroc too. I used to dream of that happening to me! But the rest of us, the menials, when we got to Prussia … Prussia! I know it through the eyes of that blockhead Paulin, those pretty light grey and pink houses, with white curtains at the windows, brown half-timbering, Prussia!
Before allying themselves to the Russians, those scoundrels watched us pass like those bewildered monkeys that are shown on our boulevards, and they refused to give us lodgings, not even a bowl of soup; instead they pelted us with snowballs and stones and robbed us!'

‘We reached that country thanks to M. Vialatoux.'

‘The actor from Mme Aurore's troop?' asked Sebastian, feeling his heart thump.

‘That's the one, he'd got us warm clothes at Vilna through a hoax—'

‘The story would take too long!' interrupted the captain.

‘What about the other actors?' insisted Sebastian.

‘We only saw him,' said the captain. ‘And can you imagine, that fool died at Königsberg. Do you know how? You'll never guess, you'll die with laughter. Stuffing himself with cakes in a patisserie!'

‘We couldn't take rich food any more,' said Paulin. ‘A lot of men died of indigestion.'

‘Cakes!' cried the captain.

As one might guess, Sebastian was thinking about Mlle Ornella, whom he was still convinced he would chance upon one day, turning a corner, or on stage even. The picture he had of her in his mind was crystal clear, but already her voice was growing indistinct. In one's memory, it's the voice that goes first. There was no point questioning the two men further, though; instead, he offered to help financially.

‘No need,' growled the captain.

‘Then why are you living in this rat hole?'

‘Because I have become a rat, my young friend!'

The captain broke into a forced laugh. Sebastian thought: In Russia we all crossed paths without ever meeting. The adventure overwhelmed us, we were swept
along by the current like the ice on the Berezina, we couldn't bank on anything except luck and egotism …

Sebastian gave his address to Paulin and promised to come back. The servant led him downstairs.

‘Don't hesitate, Paulin, if I can be of any use …'

‘He doesn't want anything.'

‘Has he no family?'

‘I am his family, Monsieur Roque.'

‘And the d'Herbigny chateau?'

‘Monsieur refuses to go back to Normandy.'

‘He'd be better off there than in this stinking building.'

‘He says that noises without smells or colours would be too painful.'

‘What will become of his estate?'

‘Monsieur has bequeathed it to me.'

‘Would you be up to running it?'

‘On no, Monsieur Roque, I'd sell it if something terrible happened.'

‘When that day comes, think of me, Paulin. Herbigny is my part of the world too. Anyway, I only say that to comfort you, let's hope nothing distressing happens …'

‘What else do you want him to suffer? I've stopped him jumping out of the window so many times.'

Sebastian couldn't think of anything to say and so he left. The following week, as he was inserting some lines of Molière – more animated – into a Racine tragedy, he learnt by a note from Paulin that Captain d'Herbigny had thrown himself out of the window, a little gold cross clenched in his fist. Sebastian Roque, Vice-Director of the Library, scribbled a note to himself on the margin of his copy: Tell Paulin I'll buy the land and the chateau.

‘Il neigeait.' Several of my friends, without conferring, suggested this as a title for this novel. It is the leitmotif of a famous poem by Victor Hugo entitled ‘Expiation', part of his
Châtiments
[
The Punishments
], in which he evokes the retreat from Russia. Here is the start, followed by Robert Lowell's translation:

Il neigeait. On était vaincu par sa conquête.
Pour la première fois l'aigle baissait la tête.
Sombres jours! L'empereur revenait lentement,
Laissant derrière lui brûler Moscou fumant.
Il neigeait. L‘âpre hiver fondait en avalanche.
Après la plaine blanche, une autre plaine blanche.
On ne connaissait plus les chefs ni le drapeau.
Hier la grande armée, et maintenant troupeau.
On ne distinguait plus les ailes ni le centre:
Il neigeait. Les blessés s'abritaient dans le ventre
Des chevaux morts; au seuil des bivouacs désolés
On voyait des clarions à leur poste gelés
Restés debout, en selle et muets, blancs de givre,
Collant leur bouche en pierre aux trompettes de cuivre.
Boulets, mitraille, obus, mêlés aux flacons blancs,
Pleuvaient; les grenadiers surpris d'être tremblants,
Marchaient pensifs, la glace à leur moustache grise.
Il neigeait, il neigeait toujours! La froide bise
Sifflait; sur le verglas, dans des lieux inconnus,
On n'avait pas de pain et on l'allait pieds nus.
Ce n'étaient plus des cœurs vivants, des gens de guerre;
C'était un rêve errant dans la brume, un mystère
,
Une procession d'ombres sous le ciel noir
.
La solitude vaste, épouvantable à voir
,
Partout apparaissait, muette vengeresse
.
Le ciel faisait sans bruit avec la neige épaisse
Pour cette immense armée un immense linceul …

The snow fell, and its power was multiplied.
For the first time the Eagle bowed its head –
Dark days! Slowly the Emperor returned –
Behind him Moscow! Its own domes still burned.
The snow rained down in blizzards – rained and froze.
Past each white waste a further white waste rose.
None recognized the captains or the flags.
Yesterday the Grand Army, today its dregs!
No one could tell the vanguard from the flanks.
The snow! The hurt men struggled from the ranks,
Hid in the bellies of dead horses, in stacks
Of shattered caissons. By the bivouacs
One saw the picket dying at his post,
Still standing in his saddle, white with frost
The stone lips frozen to the bugle's mouth!
Bullets and grapeshot mingled with the snow
That hailed … The guard, surprised at shivering, march
In a dream now, ice rimes the gray moustache
The snow falls, always snow! The driving mire
Submerges; men, trapped in that white empire
Have no more bread and march on barefoot.
They were no longer living men and troops,
But a dream drifting in a fog, a mystery,
Mourners parading under the black sky.
The solitude, vast, terrible to the eye,
Was like a mute avenger everywhere,
As snowfall, floating through the quiet air,
Buried the huge army in a huge shroud …

* * *

What did Napoleon look like? It is hard to tell, since the visual record is unreliable. Only the Spanish have produced portraits of their rulers that are realistic to the point of cruelty – debased, monstrous princes and degenerate princesses with black bags under their eyes and huge noses painted by Velázquez or Goya. In the hands of French artists, the portrait becomes a smooth, flattering creation; Gérard and Détaille, for instance, give us a young, thin, alert Emperor when Veretchaguine shows him to be stout and puffy. The only example of truth in official portraiture is Rigaud's portrait of Louis XIV: he painted the aged king's face but then his studio took over and stuck his face onto a young man's body. The finished result looks a bit like an alien; you should go and have a look in the Louvre. As for Napoleon – the question has no real answer. His appearance depends on one's opinion of him.

In many ways, instead of an art gallery one should go to Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum in Marylebone in London, which contains astonishing casts of historical figures. Every morning during the Revolution, Madame Tussaud used to go to cemeteries where the previous day's guillotined were buried. She would wash the blood and sawdust from the severed heads, apply a layer of lead protoxide and linseed oil and, using cloth to secure it, take the impressions that would serve as moulds for her waxworks. Marat, Philippe-Egalité, Hébert, Desmoulins, Danton: the death masks she produced, either secretly or in collusion with the executioners, can never be replaced by portraits. Her subjects weren't posing anymore; they slept, their faces frozen by a brutal death. I was transfixed by the cast of Robespierre's head, which hangs at the entrance to the Chamber of Horrors. The Terror was coming to an end and one senses that Madame Tussaud was finally able to take her time. The portrait is very precise; the most faithful, so it is said, of her collection. And the fact is that this severed head of Robespierre bears little relation to the familiar portraits of him. In it his face is less thickset, his forehead less bulging, his lips less thin and he has an almost sardonic air.

When Marcel Brion writes a life of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he doesn't trust the painters. Gozzoli depicts a blond, curlyhaired, vaguely androgynous angel, Ghirlandaio a boxer, Vasari a pickpocket. Instead Brion stops and stares at the death mask: this is the true Lorenzo. He is forty-three years old and there is a whole life etched in the lined, square face, with its crooked nose, toothbrush moustache, broad mouth and non-existent lips; coarse features, which nonetheless emanate an incredible serenity.

Can one form an idea of Napoleon from his death mask? No, not even that is possible. When Napoleon died on Saint Helena, Dr Burton was unable to find the plaster needed for a mould in Jamestown. Gypsum crystals were reported on an island to the south-east, which he sent a sloop to fetch. He calcined them, ground them up and thereby obtained a grey plaster, which he took to Longwood. The previous night an attempt had been made to take a cast using candle wax and tissue paper steeped in limewater. But the results had been inconclusive. When Burton returned, Napoleon had been dead for forty hours. The cheekbones were protruding. The face had altered but a cast was taken anyway, in extremis. As the skin was coming off in places, only one attempt was possible.

Antoine Rambaud, my great-great-grandfather, was thirty when Napoleon camped out in Moscow. What did he think of it? Anything? What did his family in Lyons say? Will the future ever know what we dream of; how we live; that we like Cistercian choirs, or irises, or Peking duck? Will they know our tiredness, our joys, our angers? Only a few avowals will survive us, froth. What does that Merovingian's femur tell us? What do these remnants of a barber's basin evoke? What happened in the caves at night, after the auroch hunt? The scholar deliberates, and then delivers his verdict, which is soon refuted by another scholar's. Honestly – we will never enter the minds of our ancestors; we barely know what they looked like. Paul Morand
knew this: ‘Those who come after us will be happy to imagine us as we have never been.' In one of its exhilarating publications, the College of Pataphysics gives its response, ‘Imagination alone draws crowds to the beetroot fields of Waterloo.' And the imagination is not the province of academia, but of legend and the novel. The musketeers? They will always be Dumas. The jungle, Conrad. The hollow needle of Etretat belongs to Maurice Leblanc and the road to Trouville to Flaubert. The London fog, hansom cabs, Conan Doyle. Besides, Sherlock Holmes still gets mail at 221b Baker Street, now a blockish, unsightly building. History is not an exact science; it rambles, digresses; it should be left to dreamers who can recreate it by instinct.

To return to Napoleon. No historian is objective about him. He began fashioning his legend during the war of pillage he waged in Italy to bail out the Directory. He created and controlled his image by surrounding himself with publicists, draughtsmen and painters. He never stepped onto the bridge at Areola; he fell in a ditch before he could reach it. In the famous painting one sees him brandishing his standard and leading Masséna's infantry. In fact Augereau played that role. When Parisians came to look at David's
Coronation
, they'd joke, ‘Goodness, the Empress is looking young,' and burst out laughing. As for the Emperor's mother, who features prominently, she wasn't even at the ceremony; she was sulking because her son hadn't given her a title. Napoleon invented modern propaganda by detaching official history from facts.

Paintings, drawings and sketches do exist, however, and provide an illuminating record of people's lives. They have been very helpful to me in travelling back through time, as they were before I could read, when I'd immerse myself in the thick volumes of Larousse's
An Illustrated History of France
, published around 1910, with its recreations by academic painters, in photographic detail, of
The Pillaging of a Gallo-Roman Villa
, or
The Excommunication of Robert the Pious
. In the following books, the images are more truthful and in many cases the work of first-hand witnesses:

Campagne de Russie (1812)
, Albrecht Adam and Christian Wilhelm von Faber du Faur, Tradition Magazine, special edition No. 3, available from 25 rue Bargue, 75015 Paris. Sketches of an unmistakable vividness and immediacy. [1]

Napoléon, 1812, la campagne de Russie
, part of the collection compiled by Tranié and Carmignani, Pygmalion, October 1997. A remarkable iconography, containing almost five hundred illustrations.

Then come the participants' accounts. There is an abundance of these and one must know how to navigate one's way through them to identify particular images, scenes and details. I tend to discard the author's judgements and retain the colour. When Castellane makes a note of the weather every day or Bausset describes the Kremlin's apartments or Ali lists the Emperor's tics or Larrey expatiates on the effects of severe cold in his
Mémoires de chirurgie militaire
, why should they be lying?

The works I consulted at the Service historique des armées, Fort de Vincennes are listed with their reference numbers preceded by a V for Vincennes.

[
Publisher's Note
. We have for convenience numbered those works that have been translated into English, and listed them on page 322–3.]

Ségur, P. P. de,
Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande Armée pendant l'année 1812
, Turin, 1831, chez les frères Reycent et Cie, librairie du Roi. The best-known and most literary account, which one can round out with another Ségur,
Du Rhin à Fontainebleau
, subtitled,
‘Personal memories of 1812”
. Gourgaud disagrees with Ségur, devoting an entire volume to his qualifications,
Examen critique de l'ouvrage de Monsieur le Comte Ph. De Ségur
, Paris, Bossange Frères (1825). He also gave us
Napoléon et la Grande Armée en Russie
, V. 72794–98. [2]

Caulaincourt,
Mémoires
, 3 vols, Plon (1933). Meticulous and
precious in its wealth of detail, especially concerning the Emperor's flight by sleigh; Caulaincourt accompanied him and recorded his conversations. Incidentally, as often as I was able, I have Napoleon say what those closest to him report him as having said. [3]

Fain,
Manuscrit de 1812
, 2 vols, chez Delaulay, Paris (1827). Baron Fain, secretary to the Emperor, has involuntarily become a character in this novel, whom I have treated with a certain licence.

Méneval,
Mémoires
, V. 9851-53. The other secretary, a more colourful writer than his colleague but who unfortunately fell ill in Moscow. [4]

Constant,
Mémoires intimes de Napoléon I
^er
, Mercure de France (1967). The indispensable confidences of the Emperor's valet. He does, however, draw heavily on Ségur for the retreat. Illuminating notes by Maurice Pernelle of the Académie d'histoire. [5]

Marbot,
Mémoires
, tome II, Mercure de France (1983). It is a pity he did not enter Moscow. [6]

Lejeune,
Mémoires
, tome II, ‘En prison et en guerre‘, Firmin-Didot (1896). [7]

Roustan,
Souvenirs
. V. 5931. Reminiscences by Napoleon's most prominent Mameluke.

Louis Etienne Saint-Denis,
Souvenirs du mamelouk Ali
, Payot (1926) recently reissued. This Mameluke and former lawyer's clerk gives us a far livelier and slyer account than his compatriot Roustam.

Fezensac,
Journal de la campagne de Russie
, V. 42037. A lieutenant-general's account. [8]

Bonnet,
Mémoires anecdotiques
, Plon (1900).

Bausset,
Mémoires anecdotiques sur l'intérieur du palais et sur quelques événements de l'Empire
, Paris, Baudoin frères, tome II (1913). [9]

Heinrich Roos,
1812, Souvenirs d'un médecin de la Grande Armée
, Perrin (1913).

Miot-Putigny,
Putigny grognard de l'Empire
, Gallimard (1950).

Rapp,
Mémoires
, V. 73242-45. [10]

Macdonald,
Souvenirs
, V. 42739. [11]

Castellane,
Journal
, V. 9074.

Bourgogne,
Mémoires du sergent Bourgogne
, Hachette (1978). Many accuse him of invention, but acknowledge it is done with great talent. [12]

Peyrusse,
Lettres inédites
, Perrin (1894).

Wilhelm von Bade,
Mémoires du margrave de Bade
, Paris, Fontemoing (1912).

Bourgoing,
Souvenirs militaires
, Plon (1897).

Ernouf,
Souvenirs
, V. 43103.

Jean Jacoby,
Napoléon en Russie
, Mercure de France (1938). Eyewitness accounts.