looting redistributes wealth to the ruffians of the infantry. Gambling does the same, both more efficiently than taxes.
Napoleon stood, two thousand drums beat a charge, and the columns marched and reformed with mechanical precision. I didn’t detect a single misstep. Then the noise and marching stopped, noise grumbling away, and Bonaparte began speaking. I couldn’t hear his words but was told the emperor was reciting the oath of the Legion. When he finished, there was a roar of “Vive l’empereur!” so volcanic that it hurt my ears.
Next, thousands of new medals with Napoleon’s image were carried out for presentation. They were heaped on the medieval shields and helmets of French heroes like shoals of Spanish doubloons. The recipients filed forward, hundreds and hundreds of them, to receive the honor individually from his hand. I was told he greeted each by name and achievement in a procession that took hours.
How easily are we seduced by pomp and glory! Women wept, civilians lifted their hats, and soldiers roared themselves hoarse. To complete the triumph, the rising wind forced the English ships to beat farther offshore, providing an opening for a sailing convoy of supply from Le Havre that was six months overdue. The weather that had betrayed Napoleon before was his ally this day.
I found myself unexpectedly invited to his Pavilion for the celebratory banquet when the columns finally marched away. I was seated at the smallest and farthest of the tables. Men looked curiously at me, and there were murmurs that I was a great and ruthless spy, an idea I did nothing to discourage. The room was set with linen, silver, flowers, and paper regimental flags. Toasts were raised so often that all of us got drunk. The coastal artillery continued to boom salutes, the setting sun ducked in and out of clouds, and fireworks came at dusk, the exploding stars promising eventual victory. The scent of gunpowder blew back over the beaches and filled the room with its smell.
How odd to celebrate a man whom I knew believed in gnomes, shot at his wife’s swans, pinched ears like his Corsican mother, and whom I’d seen in his bath and in bed with his wife. So ordinary, so extraordinary! The writer Goethe had put to poetry last year the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and now France followed its own piper like those German children. Maybe all future kings will be in Napoleon’s mold, rising from obscurity to make their ambition that of their nation. Stature will come not from birth but from pageantry, men staking their lives on political opera. Truth will be defined by illusion. People will rally around lies.
We filed to go out, congratulating the emperor, and I gave him my hand in a daze of wonderment, apprehension, and calculation. This Brazen Head: did it really exist and, if so, was it something we should find and control to keep it from misuse, like the Book of Thoth from my earlier adventures? Could Rose be trusted? Did I belong with France or England?
“My star is ascending, Ethan,” Napoleon told me quietly, grasping my hand in both of his own. “Do not betray me.” His bright gray eyes had seduced every man in the room.
“I’m dazzled, Your Majesty.” This was true, though that didn’t mean I wanted him to succeed. “I’ll return to Paris to consult with your savants.”
“Listen. You are ever the outsider, so become part of France. Surrender to history. The feeling is electric.”
He meant surrender to him. “I envy your rise.”
He nodded, and then suddenly flashed that soldierly smile. He could be as earthy as his soldiers. “Don’t envy me too much. The worst thing about these ceremonies is that you can’t break for a piss, and I have had to hold my bladder for four hours!”
CHAPTER 14
So I returned to Paris as a dubious double agent, armed with the Jaeger rifle and ancient crossbow. Both fascinated Harry. I continued to leave reports for Smith in the Saint-Sulpice confessional without police interference. It was unlikely that anything I reported would frighten the British to sue for peace, but my cooperation with Napoleon allowed me to stay in the capital until the emperor’s formal coronation. As usual I got no reply from my English spymasters, and no money, either. Réal’s police had destroyed royalist communication,
allowing my missives to go out but nothing to come in.
As compensation, we now had a French stipend. My wife plunged more deeply into her studies in the archives. And