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

      “NOW THAT WE ARE in the Tuileries,” Bonaparte, the First Consul, said to Bourrienne, his secretary, as they entered the palace where Louis XVI had made his next-to-last stop between Versailles and the scaffold, “we must try to stay.”

      Those fateful words were spoken at about four in the afternoon on the 30th Pluviose in the Revolutionary year VIII (February 19, 1800).

      This narration begins exactly one year to the day after the First Consul’s installation. It follows our book The Whites and the Blues, which ended, as we recall, with Pichegru fleeing from Sinnamary, and our novel The Companions of Jehu, which ended with the execution of Ribier, Jahiat, Valensolles, and Sainte-Hermine.

      As for General Bonaparte, who was not yet general at that time, we left him just after he had returned from Egypt and landed back on French soil. Since the 24th Vendémiaire in the year VII he had accomplished a great deal.

      First of all, he had managed and won the 18th Brumaire, though the case is still being appealed before posterity.

      Then, like Hannibal and Charlemagne, he crossed the Alps.

      Later, with the help of Desaix and Kellermann, he won the battle of Marengo, after first losing it.

      Then, in Lunéville, he arranged peace.

      Finally, on the same day that he had David’s bust of Brutus placed in the Tuileries, he re-established the use of “madame” as a form of address. Stubborn people were still free to use the word “citizen” if they wanted, but only yokels and louts still said “citizeness.”

      And of course only the proper sort of people came to the Tuileries.

      Now it’s the 30th Pluviose in the year IX (February 19, 1801), and we are in the First Consul Bonaparte’s palace in the Tuileries.

      We shall now give the present generation, two thirds of a century later, some idea of his study where so many events were planned. With our pen we shall draw as best we can the portrait of that legendary figure who was considering not only how to change France but also how to turn the entire world upside down.

      His study, a large room painted white with golden moldings, contains two tables. One, quite beautiful, is reserved for the First Consul; when seated at the table, he has his back to the fireplace and the window to his right. Also on the right is a small office where Duroc, his trusty aide-de-camp of four years, works. From that room they can communicate with Landoire, the dependable valet who enjoys the First Consul’s total confidence, and with the large apartments that open up onto the courtyard.

      The First Consul’s chair is decorated with a lion’s head, and the right armrest is damaged because he has often dug into it with his penknife. When he is sitting at his table, he can see in front of him a huge library packed with boxes from ceiling to floor.

      Slightly to the right, beside the library, is the room’s second large door. It opens up directly to the ceremonial bedroom, from which one can move into the grand reception room. There, on the ceiling, Le Brun painted Louis XIV in full regalia, and there a second painter, certainly not as gifted as Le Brun, had the audacity to add a Revolutionary cockade to the great king’s wig. Bonaparte is in no rush to remove it because it allows him to say, when he points out the anomaly to visitors: “Those men from the Convention years were certainly idiots!”

      Opposite the study’s only window, which allows light into this quite sizable room and looks out over the garden, stands a large wardrobe that’s attached to the consular office. It is none other than Marie de Médicis’s oratory, and it leads to a small stairway that descends to Madame Bonaparte’s bedroom below.

      Just like Marie-Antoinette, whom she resembles in more ways than one, Josephine hates the state apartments. Consequently, she has arranged her own little safe haven in the Tuileries, as had Marie-Antoinette at Versailles.

      Almost always, at least at the time we are speaking of, the First Consul would enter his office in the morning through that wardrobe. We say “almost always,” because after they moved to the Tuileries the First Consul also had a bedroom separate from Josephine’s. He slept there if he came home too late at night, so as not to disturb his wife, or if some subject of discord—and such moments, though not yet frequent, were beginning to occur from time to time—had precipitated an argument that left them for a time not on speaking terms.

      The second table is nondescript. Placed near the window, it affords the secretary a view of thick chestnut tree foliage, but in order to see whoever may be walking in the garden he has to stand up. When he is seated, his back is turned just slightly to the First Consul, so the secretary has to turn his head only a bit to see him. As Duroc is rarely in his office, that is where the secretary often receives visitors.

      Bourrienne is that secretary.

      The most skillful artists competed with each other to paint or sculpt Bonaparte’s,