Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements, Page 5

  The paperwork was beginning and it was all in Arabic. The Mameluke palace was loud with boots, the music of order. He would have thought: like a ship, clean and trim on a dirty sea of pox and camel-dung. But a ship was not a good symbol these days, not after the horror of the news from Aboukir Bay. Water. The Sphinx kept having a look of Nelson, the pyramids took on in dreams the shape of monstrous advancing hulks. He dictated to young Legrand, who had worked for the Egyptian branch of the Propagation of the Faith: “Why, O people of Cairo, is your city poor and ragged when it should be blazing with health and prosperity? The answer is simple: absentee rule from Constantinople, the presence of a haughty and alien military caste that consults not the welfare of the population but only its own aggrandizement.”

  Legrand scratched his cheek with one of Conté’s lead pencils and started to Koranize: I say unto you that you have been brought low by kings who lie with houris on the fat sofas of Stamboul and by those that were once among you and came from lands of the sunset, men pale but warlike, to steal your camels and women and snatch the bread from your teeth, in no wise to raise you high among the peoples of the earth. Meanwhile the C-in-C got on with other things—gunpowder factory, street-lighting, Paris-style café, accommodation for laundresses, a balloon demonstration.

  “Done that?”

  “Yes, general. General, that case of Arabic type isn’t complete. No toks, not enough nuns.”

  “Improvise. Surely you can make a tok out of a combined saad and alif. I leave the details to you.”

  “If we could send to Paris—”

  “There will be no sending to Paris.” Legrand wondered why. “We must learn to make everything ourselves. Even lead pencils. Monsieur Conté himself is with us. That is something to go in a later proclamation perhaps. Bullets melted down to make lead pencils.”

  “There are not many here who use lead pencils.”

  “They will learn, we shall teach. Have we kept those dignitaries waiting long enough?”

  “The eyes of the eternal are blind to time.”

  “Is that in the Koran?”

  “It’s the sort of thing they say.” They left the office with its sweating clerks and clomped down a long corridor to a sort of council chamber. Imams and muftis and kathis sat here on cushions, turbaned elders who had risen above the squalor of the flesh. The heat was tamed by wide-eyed boys with feathery fans. One of the muftis much admired one of these boys, and he stroked his buttocks with a gentle hand. The smell of the holy was wafted toward entering Bonaparte, who said with care:

  “Salaam aleikum.”

  They nodded at that and waited. Bonaparte sat on a kind of throne. Young Legrand did his best, but it was a long slow business.

  “We believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a sacred book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum, in his own land we struck down her Sultan whom men call the Pope, in Malta we slew the Knights, sworn enemies of Islam. Inform your people that we are sent by Allah to geld the evil Turk and raise high the people of the Nile.”

  “How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondsman.”

  “That can be put right, with time and God’s holy help. My men shall grow mustaches. The point I would now make is that we French are children of Islam like yourselves. Where lies the difference, save in things of the surface? We believe in brotherhood under one God, the reward of heaven and the punishment of hell, the power of prayer—”

  “You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.”

  “It was not seemly to raise your flags on the minarets.”

  “That was a mistake. We were too eager to show that our cause and the cause of Islam are one. They have all been taken down.”

  “As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth whence the grape came. Haram.”

  “Yes yes yes, later. For now I would ask you to proclaim next Friday from the mimbar in the masjid that the French are protectors of the faith and friends of the Prophet.”

  “What the people have so far seen is godless slaves who tear at the veils of our women and have stolen gold dangling from their belts.”

  “What you will see is justice. Justice. You will see printed books, from which the people will learn—”

  “There are afrits and shaitans in books.”

  “Houses where the sick shall be healed. With us are learned physicians.”

  “Allah disposes sickness and health. All is in the hands of Allah.”

  “Look,” he said. “I’ve heard about these afrits and shaitans before. Some of your holier citizens said that my soldiers were shaitans and afrits. You know what they did. Holy slaughter. I was strongly advised to wreak vengeance. One of my staff went on his knees to me, imploring that I burn your mosques and hang some of you. As an example. Some of you here, that is. I did not. I was merciful.”

  “Only Allah is merciful.”

  “But I am quite capable of not being merciful.”

  Legrand translated that, making them mumble among themselves. But he perceived, a little too late perhaps, that the C-in-C was thinking of other, more privy, areas of justice and mercy.

  “Why you, why do you tell me this?” This was the first moment, the refusal to believe what he knew he was all too ready to believe, because that would be an end of doubt, and the turning on the teller of the incredible believable. But it couldn’t be, they were cut off, there were no letters from France.

  “This,” Junot said, showing it. “Some got through.” Bonaparte froze him to a picture, the sort of thing that her young man Gros would paint, the sand-swirls frozen behind him, the merciless blue that the sun rent. The thing to remember, the terrible thing that was not so terrible.

  “My brother Joseph,” he said. “Said something. I took little notice. To humor him. I had the man posted.” The sun and desert drank his rage like a mere tear, unimpressed. The Sphinx, Nelson, was couched at ease. “The whole damned race of ladies’ men, fops and damned coxcombs, effeminate dandies, playing at soldiers. Oh God.” And then at Junot: “Why you, why do you have to tell me? Jealousy, is that what it is? You’ve ridden in coaches with her, you’ve stayed in inns.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “There was a certain champagne breakfast you gave and the punch you made from what you called a Creole recipe—”

  “That was not—”

  “Given to you by a Creole lady, wink wink. She put you off, is that it? One of the few she didn’t fancy?”

  “It was General Murat, not I.”

  “Murat too. Let us have them all in. Bourrienne! Bourrienne!” And Bourrienne his friend and secretary came stumbling over the sand. “Do you know, does everybody know?”

  “Know?”

  “That your commander-in-chief is a damned cuckold. The cuckold is always the last to know, isn’t he? Can you imagine anything more more more bizarre? The Sphinx and the pyramids and the leagues and leagues of emptiness are witnesses to the denouement of a Paris farce. Buonaparte the cuckold. Oh Christ, oh Jesus.” He had gone back to the old form of his name.

  “You had to know,” Junot said, “sooner or later.”

  “Sooner or later, yes, when there’s no action to be taken. There’s no running to get a divorce here. But I’ll be back, by Jesus. The faithless bitch. But I’ll kill the lot of them, the impotent Paris swine of bastard pansies. I’ll lead the army in, I’ll make a man’s town out of it. Oh God, oh God God God.”

  “Women,” Bourrienne said gently, “are more open to calumnies than men. With a man it is never a calumny. A married lady with her husband at the wars—she has to have an escort. We don’t have purdah in a country where we boast of equality. Who has seen Madame Bonaparte with more than a mere escort?”

  “Don’t you give me a sermon, Bourrienne. The world cries cuckold and the world’s right. You know this, Bourrienne, you told me nothing. Is that loyalty, is that friendship?”

  “It’s
not my duty to retail calumny. Even if it were a duty, I’d not choose a moment when you’re six hundred leagues from France.”

  “If that,” Junot said, his voice thickening, “is meant to be a stab at myself—”

  “It is you, if I may say so, who do the stabbing.”

  “I insist that you retract that. My motive was one of love, of duty, my heart bled—”

  “This is the end, what more is there?” Bonaparte shouted to the Nelson-Sphinx. “This is a great lesson, about the true meaning of honor and glory. Well, if she can fuck, I can fuck too.” Bourrienne wrinkled at the coarseness. That was his race, but it was also in his race to take the knife to her, swim the Mediterranean with the knife in his teeth. But he had read Othello, he had sometimes written laughing letters to her about the jealousy of Othello, he would not now be Othello. Enlightenment, reason, that sort of thing. “I loved her. Too much.” He was reasoning, sorting; he did not say not wisely but too well. “You don’t know what it’s like, you damned womanizers, to love a woman like that. I gave her my youth, everything. And now she gives her her—” Delicacy like a sudden breeze. “—to these mincing coxcombs with their sweet red tongues. I worshipped the bitch. But that’s the only way to take them—bitches. Take them as a dog takes a bitch. Fuck and fuck off.” He turned again on Junot. “True, is it? You’re sure it’s true? Let me see that letter.”

  “With respect, it’s a personal letter. What it says is that she went to Plombières—”

  “The waters are great for pregnancy, that’s the damned silly superstition. Go on, go on.”

  “And they stayed at the same inns on the way back. And she had him several times staying the night at—the address is here, you see—6 rue Chantereine.”

  “Divorce,” he nodded. “A stinking great divorce. But first I’ll show her. I’ll show the whole of Paris.”

  “We’re cut off from Paris,” Bourrienne said.

  “I want a woman. I want women. Not these pox-ridden bints. I’ll have that one who shouldn’t be here. That dragoon’s wife. No wives—that was the order. Well, he must take his punishment.” He saw that he must seem already to be more cheerful, so he cried out: “Betrayal, betrayal—the pattern of history. Read Plutarch, read Suetonius. But men must accept their destiny and, in a sense, glory in it. There is a great lesson here in Egypt, with Antony and the wiles of that snake of a woman. And there is that martyr of Alexandria, named, like myself, Napoleon. But it was not a woman who betrayed him, it was the stupid, the faithless, the mob. We cling to our faith, all of us.” It was as if Junot and Bourrienne also had recently been betrayed. “The faith of the disregarded maker, the builder of civilizations. That bitch, that unutterable wretched treacherous harlot. Oh, I’d give anything for it not to be true. But I won’t be the laughingstock of Paris. I’ll write to my brother Joseph. I’ll tell him to have the divorce pronounced.”

  “Blockade. Interception. Cut off.”

  “Some things go through. Like this dagger, this letter of Junot’s. But treachery has wings, that’s well known. Wings, wings.”

  He conquers first, then seeks to civilize.

  With speed he bids an Institut arise.

  Where once the perfum’d houris of the Turk

  Seduced to play, the savants set to work.

  Forgotten now the jeer that flaw’d the air:

  “Let ass and scholar to the midst repair

  And skulk and shiver in th’ embattled square.”

  Dogs of Pekin the soldiers term them now,

  Pets of a general with a scholar’s brow.

  See how these dogs are swift upon the scent

  Of Egypt’s lore, on tempting tracks intent.

  Berthollet broods upon the natron lakes

  And tomes upon their chimick wonder makes;

  Saint-Hilaire snatches at the crocodile,

  The ostrich, and the fishes of the Nile,

  Whence the polypterus he brings to view:

  A finny monster but mammalian too.

  See Caffarelli wooden-legg’d advance

  (The homesick sigh: “He has one foot in France”)

  Seeking upon the Rouge Mer’s littoral

  The ghost of an impossible canal.

  By hot Rosetta Lancret finds a stone

  Variously inscribed, which may, he thinks, make known,

  Spite of the pedant’s scoffs, th’ unlearned’s sniffs,

  The secrets of the Pharaohs’ hieroglyphs.

  Meantime the workshops buzz with useful toil.

  A lighted city drinks a cleaner Nile.

  Conté’s balloons the turban’d mob astound,

  And the sharp surgeon probes the fetid wound.

  Extortion wilts to hear clear Justice call,

  Her canno n breach the tyrant’s crumbling wall,

  And keen-eyed Alexander watches all.

  “Sultan El Kebir,” he announced himself, coming into her room in robe and turban. “If they call me Sultan, I must dress like one. Tallien says not in the streets or at the Divan. I must be a sober Frenchman, he says. But here, with my little houri—”

  Bellitote, little houri, was at once briskly assaulted by her Sultan, whose dagger, loose in its sheath, clanked gently up and down in time to his action. Well, if he had been slower, more expertly and considerately amorous, the situation would have called out another dagger, and not in play, when Foures strode in. When Foures strode in, she was decently covered with a sheet and he, Sultan El Kebir, gaped under his turban. “No,” he said. Foures did not at first recognize him and was ready to say something about filthy natives, then he saw who it was. He said sarcastically:

  “So sorry to intrude on the Citizen General’s fancy-dress party.”

  “How dare you, sir! Out! Knock!”

  “I didn’t realize a man had to get his commander-in-chief’s permission to enter a room where his wife is. In bed. Sir.”

  “You,” Bonaparte said, “should be in Paris. I entrusted you with urgent dispatches to the Directory. Report at once to your company commander and, with my compliments, request him to make out the charge.” He was in control, despite the absurd costume and the naked woman in the bed.

  “Urgent dispatches my bottom. Your David and Bathsheba plan misfired, Citizen General. The British Navy captured our ship and kindly brought us back to Egypt.”

  Only Bellitote saw the humor of that. Her laughter shook gold hair over her shoulders. Her husband cried out: “False little whore.” That did not stop her laughter. Nor did Bonaparte rebuke the intemperate language; instead he spoke metaphysics. He said:

  “Your wife is not officially here. No wife is officially here. You smuggled your wife aboard at Toulon dressed as a drummer boy. This is a gross breach of discipline. You merit cashiering. There is a shameful ceremony attached to cashiering. It is performed in open square, before the entire regiment. Then, with your badges of rank cut off and your sword surrendered, you are automatically re-enlisted. But this time as a private soldier.”

  “You’re threatening me, Citizen General.”

  “The official becomes the real.” He shivered as he uttered the word, but he knew this would not be seen under the loose silk: “Divorce. Retroactive divorce. The papers can be made out tomorrow morning. Suitably backdated. That makes everybody free. Madame Foures free to come on board at Toulon as an army laundress. You free to continue in what, I’m sure, will be a highly successful military career.”

  Lieutenant Foures swore without pause for two minutes. Bellitote tut-tutted but Bonaparte listened with respect. At the end he said:

  “I’ll give you a brief free lesson, Lieutenant. In generalship. Good generalship is a matter of choosing, not of having to submit to the choice of others. You choose when to attack and where. Sometimes you also choose whether a thing actually happened or not. Time is a terrain whereon certain things can be eliminated. By choice. There. Don’t you think that’s a good lesson?”

  Foures just stood there, seeming to sulk. Then he smile
d. “Poor bugger,” he said, adding: “With respect, that is. Sir. Suppose it gets into the newspapers? You can’t wipe out what it says in the newspapers, can you? Well, it’s in the English newspapers. I learned that on board the ship.”

  “What is in the English newspapers? What are you driveling about?”

  “The British Navy captures everything. Everything that tries to get across the Mediterranean they just take. Like a letter you wrote. It was about—you will know, Citizen General, who it was about. To your brother, they said it was. Try choosing not to have let that happen. Sir.”

  “Out out out get out—”

  “Just going. Sir. Not forgetting madame”

  Talleyrand had dinner alone with Paul Barras. “This saltcellar,” Talleyrand said, admiring it under the bright candles, “looks vaguely ecclesiastical.”

  It was Friday and they had begun with a thick soup of pork kidneys. They had now been served with ham slices poached in Madeira. There was a dish of smoking spinach with croutons stuck in it like little golden gravestones. “Credite experto” Barras said. “From Bologna. Saliceti told me the name of the church, but I’ve forgotten. I have one or two nice little things. I’m disappointed,” he joked, “that I have nothing opulent from Constantinople. You failed me there.”