The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon. Alexandre Dumas
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.
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