“Jacobins! Cowards with cunts instead of cocks! They would blow up a convent, burn down an orphanage, just to get me! The firing squad is too good for this human shit. That’s a death reserved for military officers. The guillotine is too swift. They should be tied up in sacks and drowned in the Seine like common curs! The fish can feed on their balls, small sustenance that it is!”
The Tuileries had rarely, if ever, borne witness to so raw a display of barracks language. Even the sallow Fouché—who it was said was the one man Bonaparte feared—blanched further in the presence of his superior’s volcanic rage.
Face red as claret, gold-laurel collar sprung, the First Consul pounded the desk in his private study with both fists; the tantrum of a spoiled toddler, grotesque in a grown man. One grew sick in its presence. Was it genuine? Was he acting? Could even he tell? That was the crux of his singular position on the world’s stage. The theatre had lost another Talma when the Corsican had chosen the military.
“Drowning would be an interesting change,” Fouché said, “but time-consuming, and we need the sacking material for uniforms. What makes you so certain this was the work of Jacobins?”
That sect, the first to have called for the death of Louis XVI, was hell-bent upon eternal revolution. They’d have made the Terror a permanent fixture of government had not Robespierre, its architect, himself followed his thousands of victims to the scaffold.
“Who, if not them?” But the unexpected question had halted Bonaparte’s wrath.
“There are others just as eager to see the government fall. Foreign powers, for example.”
“Unlikely. I gave them reason last time to think twice before they pinch the eagle.”
Fouché’s tone was silken. “Of course, kings and princes never act against their countries’ best interests.”
“You’re trespassing in Talleyrand’s yard. He won’t thank you for it.”
“The Foreign Minister confides in me when our yards overlap, as do I in him.” That smooth fellow was as easy to admire as he was to despise.
“No. Who else?”
He’d saved his favorite for last. “Royalists.”
“Those powder puffs? You’re mad.”
“Perhaps they’ve changed the color of their powder.”
The First Consul scowled at his reflection on the desk’s glossy top. It was seldom so bare, even at this early hour. Every evening, some trusted adjutant cleared it of its burden, and every morning it was heaped once again with books splayed open and maps the size of bedsheets, sticky from handling by fingers stained with peppermint. There was, of course, the inevitable sack of striped sweets, intended to settle the nervous stomach of the head of state. They had their work cut out for them this day.
The fact that the First Consul had chosen to stay in the Tuileries, when he preferred to spend Christmas at Malmaison, Josephine’s charming house in the country, underscored the meeting’s dire purpose. Every member of the government, and all of the military, had been recalled to duty pending a definite plan of action. Fouché longed for the local peppermint concession. A plague of dyspepsia was in store.
“Bah!” Bonaparte turned his back, locking his hands behind him in a characteristic pose. “Those perfumed rascals haven’t the stomach for murder.”
“I suggest they’ve developed one since the head of their king rolled into a basket.”
“It’s too direct for them. They started the rumor that I was dead on the Nile. They invent vacuums, which they hope to fill just by existing. They don’t actually bring them about. Instead they play croquet on lawns borrowed from the nobility and depend on others to do the dirty work, like the English who shelter them.”
The Minister of Police patted back a yawn. Bonaparte turned just in time to see it.
“Am I boring you? Is the near prospect of my own destruction—and three of the women in my family—not enough to keep you alert?”
“No, Citizen. It’s just that I’ve been up all night.”
“You think I have not?”
Not all of us have managed to turn insomnia into an asset; but the thought remained unspoken. Fouché was determined to reintroduce calm. Such meetings were fire and ice, with the police chief obliged to supply the latter.
“I merely ask that you consider my suggestion. This government has too many enemies to discount any of them at this point.”
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten the Jacobins tried to carve me up like a Christmas goose in the opera house earlier this year? They’re so keen on mayhem for mayhem’s sake they lack even the imagination to change their venue.”
“I have hardly forgotten. Perhaps it has slipped your mind that I heard them spilling their plans—by listening for just that, not by happenstance—and spared you that fate.”
“Water under the bridge!” The Strong Man of France was working himself into a fine new lather, and it was no metaphor; spittle actually bubbled in the corners of his classically shaped mouth. “For the love of Christ, Fouché, these jackals poisoned my snuff!”
“That showed imagination, you must admit.”
“As if a man who kept the positions and numbers of scores of regiments in his head—in his head!—in the course of a campaign would not notice the difference between the box he carries every day, a gift from the Emperor of Austria, and a cheap imitation. These ragged rebels seek to make war on a pauper’s budget. What is the current market rate of a charge of gunpowder?”
Much less, thought the other, than the price of the scarf Josephine had returned to the palace to retrieve.
“Still, Citizen, I’d like to make inquiries abroad. All these Royalist plots originate in England, as you pointed out. Allow me at least to brief the spies I’ve placed in their circles. They could do with some exercise. They’ve grown fat on black market caviar.”
Again Bonaparte’s fist came down. The desk, more splendid even than Fouché’s, was made of some African wood liberated from Egypt, and boomed like a regimental drum.
“You will confine your investigation to France! These rats burrow into holes throughout the countryside. You will make arrests! I will prepare a list to get you started.”
“That won’t be necessary. The Ministry has files.”
At this, the First Consul abruptly changed tactics. Fouché’s files were infamous, but what they contained was known only to him. Was this a logistical retreat? Impossible to say. The man changed moods the way his lady changed ensembles.
He popped a peppermint into his mouth and crunched. He had the jaws of a mastiff. “What is Dubois up to?”
The Minister scratched his long thin nose, dissembling his distaste for Dubois. The Prefect of the Paris Police was altogether too capable a man for the comfort of one placed just above his station, and without apparent ambition. That alone was sufficient to inspire distrust. Who in these turbulent times did not hope to capitalize upon them to his benefit? But here was an opportunity to gain a march upon the fellow.
“When I left him, an hour ago, he was inquiring around for an experienced veterinarian to reassemble the remains of the horse that was attached to the”—what was the city press calling it, in those remarkable broadsides that miraculously managed to appear moments after the police themselves arrived at the scene of an atrocity?—“infernal machine.”
Thus—le Machine Infernale—was the name the journals had colluded upon, to exalt a simple charge of gunpowder placed in a hay cart into screaming headlines.
The gambit backfired. Bonaparte was a native of an agricultural island, who would know about such things as livestock. He appeared interested.
“Reconstruct the carcass? To what end?”
“It is his conviction that by this means the animal can be identified, and the man or men who hired it identified also.”
Had he scored? Impossible to tell. One moment the man was as transparent as cheapest muslin, the next his thoughts were enclosed within a square of armed infantry. A dedicated bureaucrat could spend a lifetime attempting to collate and codify the structure of a Bonaparte and end up filing him under miscellaneous.
The First Consul straightened and buttoned his collar.
“I want reports, Minister. On the hour, unless you uncover something useful in the interim. I want the Jacobins responsible in irons or dead, and the rest nullified. By Easter!”
Fouché thought it impolitic to point out that Easter was just another day in the Republican calendar. He inclined his head and left.