“Yet inextricable allies. Without Catherine, our scheme falls apart. And she can’t accomplish anything unless we deliver the Crown of Thorns.”
“I don’t trust her.”
“Women never trust women.”
She glanced at our grimy windows and the gray winter light, listening to thudding guns like heralding thunder. Napoleon, the new Prometheus. “A storm is coming.” She didn’t mean the weather, but something vast and far off.
It was the worst time to panic. “No, it’s getting light. We’re going to help France regain its sanity, Astiza, and be the heralds of a new dawn.”
CHAPTER 18
The Cathedral of Notre Dame was a brisk mile from our apartment. As we hurried and daylight grew, the snow stopped and clouds began to lift. Eight months had passed since Catherine and I had first landed on the Channel coast, and the entire world seemed to have changed. All of Paris was congregating either on the Île de la Cité, where the church was located, or along the avenues on the Right Bank where the coronation coaches would roll in procession from the Tuileries. The massive, drifting crowds reminded me of migrating buffalo I’d seen in America.
The wind bit, but the mood was festive and preparations precise. Vendors were already selling sausages and mulled wine. Cartloads of river sand had been spread for traction. Regiments of soldiers rose before dawn and marched to line the procession route three ranks deep. Ten thousand cavalry would sandwich the carriages of the elite. Power was to be confirmed by both might and God, and Bonaparte and his ministers had done all they could to avoid humiliation. It remained to us to turn coronation into fiasco.
I carried the Crown of Thorns in a bag on my shoulder, clasped with the imperial seal that would allow the baggage inside Notre Dame. Harry walked between us, scuffing happily at the light snow. He had his bag of marbles in his pocket. I knew he was likely leaving his toys behind, and those would be slight consolation.
I brooded. Would Catherine succeed? French police had followed us from the beginning. Napoleon manipulated us. I’m always nervous when things are going well.
“Whatever happens, we must stay together,” I said.
Astiza squeezed my hand.
The new plazas created by demolition of the old medieval houses were already crowded—the ordinary hoping for glimpses of the famous, and the elite of Napoleonic France grumbling good-naturedly as they were forced into snaking lines to show tickets. The weather-stained cathedral was in sad disrepair. Many of its statues had been “beheaded” during the revolution because rioting peasants had mistaken saintly figures for royalty and took hammers to them in a fit of patriotic vandalism. Political fanatics had subsequently turned Notre Dame into an atheistic “Temple of Reason,” a classical temple temporarily displacing the altar. Later the church served as a food warehouse. Now it was a cathedral again, but one temporarily paneled and painted on the outside with symbols of temporal glory.
The coronation committees had erected a false Gothic facade at the front of the church, covering real stones with fake ones that framed painted scenes of French heroes and battles. The temporary gallery and tent along its north side were used to muster dignitaries and keep the mob at bay. Long pennant flags flew from poles like a medieval tournament, and atop the Gothic towers of the cathedral itself, imperial banners the size of mainsails hung like gargantuan proclamations. A wooden “Roman temple” had been erected to sell snacks and souvenirs; a carousel turned in circles to amuse children; and velvet-clothed pages threaded through the crowds to give away tens of thousands of bronze coronation medallions engraved with images of Napoleon and Josephine.
Skepticism was forbidden. The playwright Marie-Joseph Chenier had opened a play called Cyrus in the Opéra-Comique, but when the actors urged tyrants to be democratic, the performances were promptly shut down.
Even such attempted criticism was rare. Everyone who was anyone wanted to watch the crowning. Women in fashionably low-cut dresses shivered as they shuffled forward, pulling furs onto their shoulders but not quite ready to cover their décolletage. A lucky few dismounted from coaches near the Palais de Justice just as magistrates were marching from the Court of Cassation. The judges gave ladies shelter from the chill with their flame-colored togas, scurrying for Notre Dame like scarlet birds with chicks under one wing.
Commoners buzzed like an agitated hive. People sensed that history had turned a page and something glorious and