Susan Johnson (37 page)

“You know how important poetry is to her,” Teo retorted, worried for her daughter’s future. “The man’s turned her head.”

“Let’s hope that’s all the blackguard’s done,” Duras growled, his tall form silhouetted against the gray sky. “Perhaps it’s time to make a call on him.”

“I’ll join you,” Pasha cheerfully said, undraping his legs and pulling himself up into a seated position. Running his fingers through his wild black hair, he lazily stretched. “I hear he’s good with a rapier,” he murmured with a gleam in
his eyes. “Why don’t I stand you second, Papa, or you could second me,” he pleasantly added. “That should put an end to his pursuit of Dilly.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Teo exclaimed. “Nothing so drastic is required. You men could just talk to him, couldn’t you? I’m sure Odile is the merest flirtation for him.”

Pasha knew better; he knew Philippe Langelier. They gambled at the same clubs and met occasionally at the same demirep entertainments, such as the one last night. And the man needed money. “I’m sure a talk will suffice,” he said, not wishing to alarm his mother. “If you want, Papa, I think I know where to find him now.”

“Don’t wait up,” Duras said to Teo, walking over to kiss her good-bye.

“I won’t,” she said, rising from her chair. “But I’ll sleep more peacefully in Paris,” she significantly added.

Duras knew better than to argue when he heard that tone of voice, but he was firm on one point. “You can’t see Langelier.”

“Very well,” Teo grumbled. “I suppose men have all that manly talk that might soil my ears.”

Duras glanced at his son, who smiled. “We’re going to scare him to death, Mama. It won’t be a pretty sight.”

“As long as you’re not violent. Although I daresay,” Teo went on, her mouth curved into a smile, “a small scare might just do the trick.”

It turned out slightly different.

When father and son walked through the opened door of Langelier’s apartment, they discovered he’d been murdered by someone more disgruntled than they. Langelier’s beautiful mistress was standing naked on his bed while his still warm body lay in a spreading pool of blood.

“A man with an axe did that—just five minutes ago,” she calmly said, brushing aside a honey-colored curl from her forehead. “And I can’t move with all that blood,” she added, apparently less concerned with her nudity or her
lover’s demise than wetting her feet. “Would you lift me down?”

Pasha was more than willing; she was utterly gorgeous.

“Thank you,” she softly said, her lush violet eyes lifted to his as he set her down in the adjacent room. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she murmured with a small sigh.

No thought was required, no hesitation or reflection. Pasha pleasantly said, “Perhaps I could help.…”

1.
Ranges of field guns and howitzers varied according to elevation, loads, wind conditions, and projectiles fired, but the practical outer limit for the eight- and twelve-pounders was 800–900 yards. It was 800 yards for six-pounders and 700 yards for four-pounders. As one would imagine, effectiveness diminished with distance or when the target was protected, although the twelve-pound round shot could penetrate six-foot-thick earth ramparts.

For the individual soldier, long-range bombardment by round shot, against which he had no chance to reply, was terrifying. Coignet describes such a situation at Essling in 1809 when a regiment of the Imperial Guard of France, supported only by some small battalion pieces, came under the fire of a large Austrian artillery concentration. “To the left of Essling,” he recounts, “the enemy planted fifty pieces of cannon. The fifty pieces thundered upon us without our being able to advance a step, or fire a
gun … the balls fell among our ranks and cut down our men three at a time.…”

2.
Established in 1566, the Hofkriegsrat, a mixed military-civilian body, was primarily an agency of routine administration and not a command and control organization, although it did serve as a planning staff and handled replacement and logistics. It elaborated schemes and, with imperial approval, passed them on to field and regional commanders. Nominally it was responsible for officer entry and promotions at the junior levels, though the regimental proprietors had a good deal to say on this point, and the emperor reserved the right to appoint all field, staff, and general officers. It directed the ordnance, engineering, and supply departments, issued all routine orders, and enforced discipline. From 1762–74 various reforms organized the council into three functional departments, publica—military and political affairs; oeconomica—finances and supply; and judicalia—military justice. The first two, geographically subdivided into sections, were headed by military senior generals, while the justice department had a civilian head. To simplify administrative procedures, corresponding divisions were introduced in each of the twelve regional commands, the generalcies or Generalkommanden. This organization, introduced in 1766, remained in force until 1801.

Subject to the Hofkriegsrat, but outside its direct chain of command, were a number of agencies including the Director General of Artillery, the Director General of Engineers, the Feldund Hauszeugamt, dealing with ordnance and arsenals, the Reichswerbungsamt, for recruiting in the Holy Roman Empire, the General Vicar, Chaplain General, the Oberste Feldarzt, the General-Kriegs-Commissariat, the Commissary General, as well as civilian agencies such as the Hauptverpflegungsamt, responsible for provisions, the Oberst-Schiffamt, which looked after river transport, as well as additional agencies concerned with matters of pay, the care of invalids, and contracts.

The result of all this was much confusion and an endless stream of directives, minutes, and returns clogging up the military administration at all levels. For example, in 1772, the Hofkriegsrat sternly directed every company on the military border in Croatia to maintain seventy-two separate files, render two
weekly, ten monthly and two quarterly reports, as well as a consolidated return every six months, all in proper form and forwarded with endorsement through proper channels to Vienna. And then there was the story about the enormous file generated by the Lower Austrian Generalkommando’s request to keep a cat because mice were nibbling at the papers in the headquarters’ attic. Nothing could be done without a proper request and authorization. Needless to say, it was difficult for the Austrian command, mired in organizational structure, to fight a war against the new French army that lived off the land and operated swiftly and decisively as an offensive strike force.

3.
Sieyès had been with the Directory since May, having returned from his Berlin embassy. The feeling in the air was Jacobin. Since the Fructidor coup of 1797, royalism had been under close surveillance; in spring and summer 1799 the military situation reawoke memories of the threatened homeland. If police reports are to be believed, however, Jacobinism was peculiar to the political and military classes in a somewhat lethargic Paris. In June the councils voted a
levée en masse
, mobilizing five classes of conscripts and in August a compulsory loan was collected from the rich; in July, there was a fearsome law passed on hostages, intended to terrorize internal enemies once more.

The country was in a state of chronic disobedience.

And Sieyès was in a position of power once again, the Revolution back in the grasp of its inventor. The former vicar general of Chartres had made himself master of the Executive, with the complicity of the councils’ political left, led by the Corsican deputy Lucien Bonaparte. The deputies had nullified Treilhard’s election to the Directory, then forced La Revellière and Merlin de Couai to resign. The chosen replacements were obscure and republican, two qualities necessary for supporters of a constitutional revision: Louis-Jérôme Gohier, former minister of justice under the Convention; Roger-Ducos, ex-Conventionnel regicide; and a general without any glory—but Jacobin—Jean François Moulin.

In the Directory, Sieyès had only one rival, Barras, who had been there from the outset and for that very reason was worn out, a symbol of the discredit into which the regime had fallen. Sieyès’s following included post-Thermidor centrist republicans,
the ideologists of the Institut, which was the result of the reorganization of schools in 1795, Daunou, Boulay de la Meurthe, Marie-Joseph Chénier, Pierre-Louis Roederer, not to mention Talleyrand, who had just left Foreign Affairs and was sniffing the wind. Sieyès found himself the leader of the postrevolutionary Parisian political milieu, the focus of extraordinary esteem, credited with having a constitutional plan that would at last provide the Republic with institutions. A civil savior, since the military one—Napoleon—was in Cairo.

In the France of that era, a
coup d’état
backed by the army had become sufficiently customary for the plan to come almost naturally into Sieyès’s mind. He still had to find “the sword,” as he called it. He had spoken about it to Joubert, a young Republican general appointed to the Army of Italy, which was a promise of glory; but Joubert had been beaten and killed at Novi on August 15. Sieyès was thinking of Moreau, when Bonaparte disembarked at Fréjus.

4.
At the age of four, while in the care of a peasant woman, Talleyrand injured his foot in a fall from a chest of drawers. And because of that accident, which left him a cripple, the young Talleyrand was disinherited, forced to renounce his right of primogeniture in favor of his younger brother. Since he could neither fence nor dance, he could never hope to succeed either at court or in the army, the only two callings proper for the heir of the ancient line of Périgord. The only course possible for Talleyrand was a career in the church, where he might rise in wealth and eminence. Unfortunately he had the deepest aversion to the calling. But he was sent at age seven to the Collège d’Harcourt where he was commanded to obey and believe. He never did; his natural instincts urged him to disobey and question—something he did all his life.

In terms of family, Talleyrand considered himself a virtual orphan “who never enjoyed for a week of his life the joy of living beneath the paternal roof.”

5.
On taking over his new command in Zurich on December 10, 1798, Massena had to immediately deal with the usual problems of finance and administration for the troops
were short of rations and in arrears of pay. He took to task the chief civil commissary, a man named Rapinat, who had diverted away from the army the very heavy contributions he’d exacted from the Swiss authorities. Rapinat was the brother-in-law of one of the Directors and in a strong position to do as he liked. Massena, however, brought him to heel.

The particular manner of financing the French army created vast temptations for the commissioners. Essentially the army lived off the land and Paris sent out commissioners, independent of the military command, to levy contributions from local conquered governments in support of the army. Since the positions were appointed, unfortunately many of the commissioners were connected to the civil ministers in Paris and large amounts of money raised from conquered territories often enriched personal fortunes.

Rapinat’s reputation was notorious enough for a contemporary humorist to write the following lines:

6.
Chur had been taken by Massena on March 9 but it was impossible to follow through on his successes due to the shortcomings and corruption of the commissariat. His army was without supplies. On March 18, Massena, thoroughly exasperated, wrote this strongly worded letter to the Directory:

7.
Divorce was allowed in France by the decrees of December 28, 1793, and April 23, 1794. Either a husband or wife could seek a divorce and since marriage was simply a civil ceremony after the Revolution, divorce was easy. Incompatibility could be given as sufficient reason. When Napoleon as First Consul signed the Concordat with the Pope in 1801, Roman Catholicism was restored as the official religion of France and a nuptial mass was added to the civil ceremony. Under the 1804 Code Napoléon women lost freedoms and property rights that had been theirs even under the old regime. “A wife must promise obedience and fidelity in marriage” is inscribed in one of the articles of the Code. There was one exception in the Code’s attempt to restore family values: divorce laws remained flexible. France noted this and Josephine’s barrenness, and believed that the First Consul Napoleon had his own reasons for making this exception.

8.
The relationship between Duras and his wife was partially based on the circumstances surrounding Napoleon and Josephine’s marriage. Depending on whose memoirs are cited, the nuances vary, but the story remains essentially the same. Barras, tiring of his newest mistress, Josephine, offered her in marriage to Napoleon, who was madly infatuated with her. As added incentive, he offered Napoleon the command of the Army of Italy—Josephine’s dowry as it were. Josephine was reluctant to marry Napoleon, but was convinced by Barras and her friends that the marriage would be advantageous. At the time, Josephine was one of three reigning belles in Parisian society—although at thirty-three, she was past her youthful bloom, concerned for her
future, and had recently broken off her affair with the handsome, dashing General Hoche, who had gone back to his wife.