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“By her creditors.”
“Her creditors! I thought I had got rid of her creditors.”
“A year ago, yes.”
“Well?”
“Well, in the past year, things have totally changed. One year ago she was the wife of General Bonaparte. Today she is the wife of the First Consul.”
“Bourrienne, that’s enough. My ears have heard enough of prattle.”
“That’s my opinion, General.”
“It is up to you to take care of paying everything.”
“I would be happy to. Give me the necessary sum, and I shall quickly take care of it, I guarantee.”
“How much do you need?”
“How much do I need? Well, yes.…”
“Well?”
“Well, Madame Bonaparte doesn’t dare tell you.”
“What? She doesn’t dare tell me? And how about you?”
“Nor do I, General.”
“Nor do you! Then it must be a colossal amount!”
Bourrienne sighed.
“Let’s see now,” Bonaparte continued. “If I pay for this year like last year, and give you three hundred thousand francs.…”
Bourrienne didn’t say a word. Bonaparte looked at him worriedly. “Say something, you imbecile!”
“Well, if you give me three hundred thousand francs, General, you would be giving me only half of the debt.”
“Half!” shouted Bonaparte, getting to his feet. “Six hundred thousand francs! … She owes … six hundred thousand francs?”
Bourrienne nodded.
“She admitted she owed that amount?”
“Yes, General.”
“And where does she expect me to get the money to pay these six hundred thousand francs? From my five-hundred-thousand-franc salary as consul?”
“Oh, she assumes you have several thousand franc bills hid somewhere in reserve.”
“Six hundred thousand francs!” Bonaparte repeated. “And at the same time my wife is spending six hundred thousand francs on clothing, I’m giving one hundred francs as pension to the widow and children of brave soldiers killed at the Pyramids or Marengo! And I can’t even give money to all of them! And they have to live the whole year on those one hundred francs, while Madame Bonaparte wears dresses worth one hundred louis and hats worth twenty-five. You must have heard incorrectly, Bourrienne, it surely cannot be six hundred thousand francs.”
“I heard perfectly well, General, and Madame Bonaparte realized what her situation was only yesterday when she saw a bill for gloves that came to forty thousand francs.”
“What are you saying?” shouted Bonaparte.
“I’m saying forty thousand francs for gloves, General. What do you expect? That is how things are. Yesterday she went over her accounts with Madame Hulot. She spent the night in tears, and she was still weeping this morning when I saw her.”
“Well, let her cry! Let her cry with shame, or even out of remorse! Forty thousand francs for gloves! Over how many months?”
“Over one year,” Bourrienne answered.
“One year! That’s enough food for forty families! Bourrienne, I want to see all those bills.”
“When?”
“Immediately. It’s eight o’clock, and I don’t see Cadoudal until nine, so I have the time. Immediately, Bourrienne. Immediately!”
“You’re quite right, General. Now that we have started, let’s get to the end of this business.”
“Go get all the bills, all of them, you understand. We shall go through them together.”
“I’m on my way, General.” And Bourrienne ran down the stairway leading to Madame Bonaparte’s apartment.
Left alone, the First Consul began to pace up and down, his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulder and mouth twitching. He started mumbling to himself: “I ought to have remembered what Junot told me at the fountains in Messoudia. I ought to have listened to my brothers Joseph and Lucien who told me not to see her when I got back. But how could I have resisted seeing my dear children Hortense and Eugene? The children brought me back to her! Divorce! I shall keep divorce legal in France, if only so I can leave that woman. That woman who gives me no children, and she’s ruining me!”
“Well,” said Bourrienne as he reentered the study, “six hundred thousand francs won’t ruin you, and Madame Bonaparte is still young enough to give you a son who in another forty years will succeed you as consul for life!”
“You have always taken her side, Bourrienne!” said Bonaparte, pinching his ear so hard the secretary cried out.
“What do you expect, General? I’m for everything that is beautiful, good, and feeble.”
In a rage, Bonaparte grabbed up the handful of papers from Bourrienne and twisted them back and forth in his hands. Then, randomly, he picked up a bill and read: “‘Thirty-eight hats’ … in one month! What’s she doing, wearing two hats a day? And eighteen hundred francs worth of feathers! And eight hundred more for ribbons!” Angrily, he threw down the bill and picked up another. “Mademoiselle Martin’s perfume shop. Three thousand three hundred and six francs for rouge. One thousand seven hundred forty-nine francs during the month of June alone. Rouge at one hundred francs a jar! Remember that name, Bourrienne. She’s a hussy who should be sent to prison in Saint-Lazare. Mademoiselle Martin, do you hear?”
“Yes, General.”
“Oh, now we come to the dresses. Monsieur Leroy. Back in the old days there were seamstresses, now we have tailors for women—it’s more moral. One hundred fifty dresses in one year. Four hundred thousand francs worth of dresses! If things keep going like this, it won’t be six hundred thousand francs, it’ll be a million. Twelve hundred thousand francs at the least that we’ll have to deal with.”
“Oh, General,” Bourrienne hastily said, “there have been some down payments made.”
“Three dresses at five thousand francs apiece!”
“Yes,” said Bourrienne. “But there are six at only five hundred each.”
“Are you making fun of me?” said Bonaparte with a frown.
“No, General, I’m not making fun of you. All I’m saying is that it’s beneath you to get so upset for nothing.”
“How about Louis XVI? He was a king, and he got upset. And he had a guaranteed income of twenty-five million francs.”
“You are—or at least when you want to be, you will be—more of a king than Louis XVI ever was, General. Furthermore, Louis XVI was an unfortunate man, you’ll have to admit.”
“A good man, monsieur.”
“I wonder what the First Consul would say if people said he was a good man.”
“For five thousand francs at least they could give us one of those beautiful gowns from Louis XVI’s days, with hoops and swirls and panniers, gowns that needed fifty meters of cloth. That I could understand. But with these new, simple frocks—women look like umbrellas in a case.”
“They have to follow the styles, General.”
“Exactly, and that is what makes me so angry. We’re not paying for cloth. At least if we were paying for the cloth, it would mean business for our factories. But no, it’s the way Leroy cuts the dress. Five hundred francs for cloth and four thousand five hundred francs for Leroy. Style! … So now we have to find six hundred thousand francs to pay for style.”
“Do we not have four million?”
“Four million? Where?”
“The money the Hamburg senate has just paid us for allowing the extradition of those two Irishmen whose lives you saved.”
“Oh, yes. Napper – Tandy and Blackwell.”
“I believe there may in fact be four and half million francs, not just four million, that the senate sent to you directly through Monsieur Chapeau-Rouge.”
“Well,” said Bonaparte with a laugh, delighted by the trick he had played on the free city of Hamburg, “I don’t know if I really had the right to do what I did, but I had just come back from Egypt, and that was one of the little tricks I’d taught the pashas.”
Just then the clock struck nine. The door opened, and Rapp, who was on duty, announced that Cadoudal and his two aides-de-camp were waiting in the official meeting room.
“Well, then, that’s what we’ll do,” said Bonaparte to Bourrienne. “That’s where you can get your six hundred thousand francs, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.” And Bonaparte went out to receive the Breton general.
Scarcely had the door closed than Bourrienne rang the bell. Landoire rushed in. “Go tell Madame Bonaparte that I have some good news for her, but since I don’t dare leave my office, where I am alone—you understand, Landoire; where I am alone—I would like to ask her to come see me here.”
When he realized it was good news, Landoire hurried to the staircase.
Everyone, from Bonaparte on down, adored Josephine.
III The Companions of Jehu (#ulink_ed629a3f-b279-58d1-b096-7dc320829525)
IT WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME that Bonaparte tried to bring Cadoudal back to the side of the Republic in order to gain that formidable partisan’s support.
An incident that had occurred on Bonaparte’s return from Egypt was imprinted deeply in his memory.
On the 17th Vendémiaire of the year VIII (October 9, 1799), Bonaparte had, as everyone knows, disembarked in Fréjus without going through quarantine, although he was coming from Alexandria.
He had immediately gotten into a coach with his trusted aide-de-camp, Roland de Montrevel, and left for Paris.
The same day, around four in the afternoon, he reached Avignon. He stopped about fifty yards from the Oulle gate, in front of the Hôtel du Palais-Egalité, which was just beginning again to use the name Hôtel du Palais-Royal, a name it had held since the beginning of the eighteenth century and that it still holds today. Urged by the need all mortals experience between four and six in the afternoon to find a meal, any meal, whatever the quality, he got down from the coach.
Bonaparte was in no particular way distinguishable from his companion, save for his firm step and his few words, yet it was he who was asked by the hotel keeper if he wished to be served privately or if he would be willing to eat at the common table.
Bonaparte thought for a moment. News of his arrival had not yet spread through France, as everyone thought he was still in Egypt. His great desire to see his countrymen with his own eyes and hear them with his own ears won out over his fear of being recognized; besides, he and his companion were both wearing clothing typical for the time. Since the common table was already being served and he would be able to dine without delay, he answered that he would eat at the common table.
He turned to the postilion who had brought him. “Have the horses harnessed in one hour,” he said.
The hotelier showed the newcomers the way to the common table. Bonaparte entered the dining room first, with Roland behind him. The two young men—Bonaparte was then about twenty-nine or thirty years old, and Roland twenty-six—sat down at the end of the table, where they were separated from the other diners by three or four place settings.
Whoever has traveled knows the effect created by newcomers at a common table. Everyone looks at them, and they immediately become the center of attention.
At the table were some regular customers, a few travelers en route by stagecoach from Marseille to Lyon, and a wine merchant from Bordeaux who was staying temporarily in Avignon.
The great show the newcomers had made of sitting off by themselves increased the curiosity of which they were the object. Although the man who’d entered second was dressed much the same as his companion—short leather pants and turned-down boots, a coat with long tails, a traveler’s overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat—and although they appeared to be equals, he seemed to show a noticeable deference to his companion. The deference was obviously not due to any age difference, so no doubt it was owed by a difference in social position. Furthermore, he addressed the first man as “citizen,” while his companion called him simply Roland.
What usually happens in such situations happened here. After a moment of interaction with the newcomers, everyone soon looked away, and the conversation, interrupted for a moment, resumed as before.
The subject of the conversation greatly interested the newly arrived travelers, as their fellow guests were talking about the Thermidorian Reaction and the hopes that lay in now reawakened Royalist feelings. They spoke openly of a coming restoration of the House of Bourbon, which surely, with Bonaparte being tied up as he was in Egypt, would take place within six months.
Lyon, one of the cities that had suffered hardest during the Revolution, naturally stood at the center of the conspiracy. There a veritable provisional government—with its royal committee and royal administration, a military headquarters and a royal army—had been set up.
But, in order to pay these armies and support the permanent war effort in the Vendée and Morbihan, they needed money; and lots of it. England had provided a little but was not overly generous, so the Republic was the only source of money available to its Royalist enemies. Instead of trying to open difficult negotiations with the Republic, which would have refused assistance in any case, the royal committee had organized roving bands of brigands who were charged with stealing tax revenues and with attacking the vehicles used for transporting public funds. The morality of civil wars, very loose in regard to money, did not consider stealing from Treasury stagecoaches as real theft, but rather as a military operation.
One of these bands had chosen the route between Lyon and Marseille, and as the two travelers were taking their place at the common table, the subject of conversation was the hold-up of a stagecoach carrying sixty thousand francs of government funds. The hold-up had taken place the day before on the road from Marseille to Avignon, between Lambesc and Port-Royal.
The thieves, if we can use that word for such nobly employed stagecoach robbers, had even given the coachman a receipt for what they took. They had made no attempt, either, to hide the fact that the money would be crossing France by more secure means than his stagecoach and that it would buy supplies for Cadoudal’s army in Brittany.
Such actions were new, extraordinary, and almost impossible for Bonaparte and Roland to believe, for they had been absent from France for two years. They did not suspect what deep immorality had found its way into all classes of society under the Directory’s bland government.
This particular incident had taken place on the very same road Bonaparte and his companion had just traveled, and the person telling the story was one of the principal actors in that highway drama: the wine merchant from Bordeaux.
Those who seemed to be most interested in all the details, aside from Bonaparte and his companion, who were happy simply to listen, were the people traveling in the stagecoach that had just arrived and was soon to leave. As for the other guests, the people who lived nearby, they had become so accustomed to these episodes that they could have been giving the details instead of listening to them.
Everyone was looking at the wine merchant, and, we must say, he was up to the task as he courteously answered all the questions put to him.
“So, Citizen,” asked a heavyset man whose tall, skinny, shriveled-up wife was pressing up against him, pale and trembling in fear, so much so that you could almost hear her bones knocking together. “You say that the robbery took place on the road we’ve just taken?”
“Yes, Citizen. Between Lambesc and Pont-Royal, did you notice a place where the road climbs between two hills, a place where there are many rocks?”
“Oh, yes, my friend,” the woman said, holding tight to her husband’s arm. “I did see it, and I even said, as you must remember, ‘This is a bad place. I’m glad we’re coming through during the day and not at night.’”
“Oh, madame,” said a young man whose voice exaggerated the guttural pronunciation of the time and who seemed to exercise a royal influence on the conversation of the common table, “you surely know that for the gentlemen called the Companions of Jehu there is no difference between day and night.”
“Indeed,” said the wine merchant, “it was in full daylight, at ten in the morning, that we were stopped.”
“How many of them were there?” the heavyset man asked.
“Four of them, Citizen.”
“Standing in the road?”
“No, they appeared on horseback, armed to the teeth and wearing masks.”
