Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 659
Perils went off his mind as clouds leave the sun. His chestnut hair was brighter than that of Frèjus.... Hélène sighed. But why should she sigh because God had allotted to her for the time a mate less glorious than Ney? She had a lover as glorious and as brave.... And it was not fitting to sigh because her mate was the paunchier, softer in the flesh... not at that moment when Frèjus had performed a deed of courage. She said:
“You left your snuff-box on the table of the inn. Madame has it safely. The soldiers you saw marching away had arrested the Baron, my husband. In error for you!”
Ney threw himself back on the seat, roaring in unrestrained mirth. He had an immense laugh.
“For me!” he exclaimed. “Men could mistake that mound of jelly for me! Have they eyes? I have always been called a fine figure of a man!”
CHAPTER TWO
SUDDENLY he threw himself forward; his face as puzzled as that of a bull who finds himself surrounded by picadors and the rest in the blazing sun immediately after the gloom of the pen.
“But...”he said: “but...”
Sudden illumination and rage lit up his stubborn features:
“But if they arrested that oaf in mistake for me... then...”
He raised a great, threatening fist:
“Who dared... who dared to... to... And Louis not yet...”
He regarded her with incredulous, bloodshot eyes. “But you are jesting,” he said; “it is in bad taste, let me tell you. Where is my wife?... Nevertheless I saw soldiers... only a few! They would not arrest me with a corporal’s guard!”
She said: “No doubt they thought that if they sent more the cortège would cause attention.... Attempts at rescue, perhaps.... It was the Comte Decazes who signed the... the lettre de cachet! The young fellow who was Fouché’s underling. But the King liked him much.”
He sat pondering, shaking his head a little.
“Where is my wife?” he asked. “I must consult... But no...”
He regarded Hélène again, his heavy-lidded eyes a little devious.
“No!” he exclaimed huskily; “do not tell Madame la Princesse what I... what I let drop....” He added: “She is long in coming.... You would imagine at such a time she would hasten....”
She said: “She has to take precautions. She has to see that no one is following her.”
He exclaimed: “Who would dare to follow...” Then he relapsed into silence, puzzling!
It was difficult indeed for him to realize how the world had changed. She herself could see that. It seemed but yesterday that tumultuous crowds had been acclaiming the victory of Quatre Bras and the Empire had appeared solid on its base.... It was true that three days later they had equally acclaimed the defeat of Mont St. Jean. The long silence lasted. It was astonishingly silent. Well, it was a July noon. Pan’s hour!... Frèjus was a sort of Pan. Not Ney. Oh no, not Ney!... It astonished her that she had her thoughts clear again. It seemed scarcely ten minutes since she had been near delirium....
That was no boon.... It seemed to her that she alone of the little clan she cared for, had to bear the whole burden of fear and knowledge. She knew not only the gloomy and implacable nature of the Bourbon hatred but she had especial fears. She had to fear not only for her husband, not only for her lover, but for these friends who even then did not know to what lengths the mournful and chilly hatred of the Bourbons could go. And not only of the Bourbons! There were the whole clan of the émigrés — her clan! If the obese and somnolent royal personages should be inclined to stay their hands they must — to secure their very throne and its supporters! — cast a great prey to the wolves. And if her cousin and his mates were odious and cruel when they were besotted with wine — as Clermont-St. Cyr had been when she had met him in the street — they were worse than that when they were coldly and soberly vindictive. Drunk, they were relatively good-natured satyrs: at least cheerful, but when sober they were snakes — cold, damned, infinitely skilful at plotting disaster.... Gamblers, pimps, small tradesmen, drunkards, whoremongers — they would sell their honours to the devil and then scheme to betray the purchaser himself. And these mm held in their hands the lives of all she most loved. And these men had a mania of gold....
Her husband had diverted from their crawling fingers a stream of gold that might have come to them!
Why did that thought have to come to her at that moment? Why? Why? Had she not tortures enough! Just Heavens!... Not enough!
There was this bull-man — this Minotaur! — to be feared for. And his beloved, his beloved wife. The dear! The Majestic!... Oh, poor dears: they could not know what was coming.... The wife feared at most exile. He, the bull-man, feared nothing. He bellowed and whilst bellowing felt still all-powerful.... A demi-god!
Why were men so brave? Frèjus, whom this man had called an oaf, was maybe the braver of the two. He at least knew that he was running into grave peril when he allowed the noose prepared for Ney to settle over his neck. Grave peril! His cynical, Satanic mind appreciated that. He must at least be aware that he was putting himself into the power of men at whom he had gibed, whom he had thwarted.
The long, stone, closed façade of the Fusstossers’ bank at Lyons came into her mind — with Frèjus, suddenly descended from their carriage, hammering on the great, yellow-grained door with the handle of the whip he had snatched from one of the postillions.... There was gold behind those doors.... There had been none when Frèjus had gone away!... She remembered the eyes of the Jew peeping at them from the grilles that obscured the windows... the grin on Frèjus’s face!
He had — it was true — left paper in exchange for their gold. You could trust him not to let the pockets of the Fusstossers suffer.... But those people had a certain fidelity to their employers; and what good was paper — signed with the best names in the world — to their employers at that juncture? It was to make enemies of them merely to make them fail their employers.... And that rout of drunkards, gamblers and whoremongers had had to flee from Paris without the English-derived gold.... English-derived!
Alas! English gold was at the bottom of all these disasters.... And this had proved not even to be English gold. Or yes, English ingots... but that bullion had turned out to be English gold coined by the Fusstossers and the English in Flanders. In the shape of napoleons!
... For the payment of Wellington’s troops when he had been doing his cold butcher’s work round Bordeaux.
Butcher Wellington could not pay his way with guineas.... Oh, singular ramifications of gold... English guineas were worth less in exchange than napoleons, so people would not take them! Yet Napoleon was tottering then to his first fall.... All the same it had had to be napoleons that the Fusstossers smuggled through France to Wellington....
And it was the last instalments of this gold, returning from Bordeaux, that Frèjus had demanded of the Jew in the great house at Lyons.
Well, he had known it had been dangerous! He had known that if Napoleon fell a second time he would have, piling themselves on his back to drag him down, not only the Fusstossers, but the drunkards and gamblers and the Bourbons and the English — and the implacable Wellington! He had known it! His grin — his mischievous magpie’s, his Pan’s grin — betokened that. Now he had put himself into their power. To save Ney!... Why?... Well, they were both Alsatians.... In their power! Wellington ruled that city, its palaces, its streets, its jails!... And you could say that Frèjus had betrayed the Bourbon king! He had financed the Bourbon king in England... If he had not done that financing, Louis XVIII would have been less obese. He might have been able to enter his capital a-horseback as a king should. For surely no one else would have lent money to Louis and his minions if Frèjus had not backed the loans. Then Louis would have starved!
Since then Frèjus had financed Napoleon.... That was to betray Louis. If you feed Louis and then Napoleon that is to betray Louis!... And Louis had again entered Paris in his carriage! And Frèjus was already no doubt in a cell.
Why, merely to let himself be arrested in place of another was a crime! And when they came to investigate and found that he was that Alsatian!
Why then had he done it? Why had he mutely submitted to arrest? Partly to save Ney? Partly out of despair at the fall of Napoleon.... But he was not ruined. He had sufficiently speculated in the opposite camps — she knew that! — to cover himself. He had told her that — out of consideration, to spare her anxiety about money!
... If he had not done that would she ever have yielded to the supplications of the young man? She did not know....
She remembered Frèjus suddenly as he had told her, standing beside her whilst she sat at her dressing table in her tall boudoir of their great hotel in the rue St. Honoré. He had been in negotiation with the London Fusstossers for English funds that were then much depreciated owing to the news and the endless drain of gold from England.... England had not been able to find troops enough to come up to the standard of the Allies. So she paid twenty pounds a year for each foot-soldier missing and thirty for each cavalry-man.... Always, always the English gold!
She remembered! Frèjus, with his other grin that attended successful speculations had laid his hand consolatorily on her shoulder. All the colour had gone out of the pink silk roses that draped her mirror; out of the pink silk wrapper that was about her shoulders — and out of her shoulders and face in the mirror! He had suddenly appeared to her black-haired and moustached!... When he had been agreeable to her she saw him as chestnut-haired!
He had bidden her not to be anxious. She should keep her great hotel and her great equipages, the bay horses and the white, the palfreys and jennets! He had made the investments in her name!
She had sprung suddenly up and faced him.
“I had rather,” she had cried out, “you had taken for me the bottom-most chamber in the bottom-most pit of hell!”
He had laughed and argued with her, his voice going on and on, but she had not answered. Her knees had weakened and she had sunk down again before her mirror. She had determined to be cruel to him. How then?
He was behind her. She had a sense of him, black, greasy, loquacious, floridly troubled. If she were not advantaged by the speculation, others’ would have been.... She had a sense of the Emperor, slaving, slaving, slaving for France in the great halls of the Tuileries... the lonely figure!
Ah, and she had a sense of the other — the young man, splendid and spotless, impassioned and pained beyond bearing.... He awaited her now and she was overwhelmed by the sense of him, too, lonely in her great salon, standing at the window and gazing into the courtyard with its high blank wall.... All the while that oaf spoke on in his suety voice with the burred accent she felt the presence of the other. She was going to him: she was going to him. For ever... Oh, to the Americas!
For he too was a pained soul! Life, gaiety, assurance had faded out of him! No, you would never have known it to look at him. He remained erect, his glance straightforward, his voice thrilling....
Her face looked cruel in the glass. Cruel! Cruel!... She took her hare’s foot and minutely darkened the inner corners of her eyes. She must account to the other for the look of cruelty. But when she was in his arms!
She rose and pointed an imperious hand to the door. She said:
“Go! You have never been a husband to me.... Now I will no longer be so much as a decoy for you! I came to you with no more than a shift of my own to my back. I will leave you in the same trim!”
Nevertheless he was waiting outside her door when she came out in a little frock of black.
“If you go to that popinjay,” he had said, “I go too.”
“Then I shall not go!” she had said and had gone back again into her room. She had written a note to the young man bidding him await her at the house of Madame Ney and had sent it by her maid through the other door. She had too prayed the young man to shun her husband as he would the plague. He must not kill Frèjus in a duel.... Frèjus was thundering on her door raving that she had cuckolded him and addressing to her in any language of which he was at all master, except French, the foulest epithets at his command. She admitted him at last and he was revealed in all the disorder of a heavy man exhausted by passion — grasping at his neckerchief, his hair in his eyes, staggering in his gait, leaning against the gilded door-posts or the door itself. He began to ask her incessantly if she had been unfaithful to him and for a long time she returned him no answer. At last she said:
“No! I have always been faithful to you. But I shall be so no longer if you do not consent to divorce me or to a nullification of our marriage brought about how you will!”
He grasped her with both his hands on her shoulders and so steadied himself, gazing deep into her eyes.
“That is true?” he kept on asking. “True? True? True?” Then he had rushed from the room and apparently had coursed half through the house in search of George Feilding. Then he had once more returned and uttered a number of disjointed speeches that she had not been able to follow.
At the time she had been full of loathing for him. She had left the house and had placed herself under the protection of the Princesse de la Moskwa who sadly enough needed consolation and companionship and who was willing enough to conduct negotiations with the Baron. Frèjus Madame Ney by no means disliked. He had conducted many successful negotiations for Ney and had even gone so far as to remonstrate with the Emperor as to the neglect that Napoleon meted out to the bravest of brave men. But the Baron had replied that then was no time for negotiations and they imagined that, as in the course of his ravings he had threatened to do, he had written to Squire Feilding about the whole matter. The Squire might be imagined as having a double interest in any marriage of his son to Madame de Frèjus, for not only was the boy his heir but he had provided the dowry for Hélène herself.
That the Baron should have brought the money with the aid of which the Marshal was to transport himself abroad was inevitable enough. He was the Marshal’s banker — and indeed in those unsettled moments when no one knew whether the next coin of the realm should be a napoleon or a louis or even a guinea or a thaler it would have been difficult enough for Madame Ney to obtain money for her husband. And Hélène herself had been ready to meet her husband in the company of the Neys since she imagined that by now he might he resigned enough to submit himself to the combined remonstrances of Madame Ney and his wife. He had never been pig-headedly obstinate.
At Montereau Ney had shown little fear that the Bourbons would take steps against him. He cited the Brussels amnesty and imagined himself too popular with the inhabitants of Paris to dread molestation at the hands of the Royalists. But he saw that his wife was overwhelmed by fear at the news Hélène had given her of the list of proscriptions her cousin had exhibited, and he had lazily and good-humouredly consented to remain in that remote spot and to take the precautions that his wife had exacted of him.
So, the night before, the two women had proceeded across country to Lagny from which place Madame Ney had dispatched a note to the Baron begging him to be there in the Little Luxembourg close to the Closerie des Lilas — a spot which at the early hour of nine might be trusted to be entirely deserted. At the same time Hélène de Frèjus had written to George Feilding begging him to pack sufficient clothes for a possibly long journey and to proceed by a roundabout way to the inn of the Closerie des Lilas itself, where he should wait unobserved until, the interview with de Frèjus being closed and their plans decided, they should come for him in the berline.
Madame Ney and she had had the vague scheme of their driving to Belgium as an English couple with French friends and there embarking for England, where Ney imagined that he had admirers sufficient to secure him from molestation. Or they might even proceed to the Americas!
Beside her on the seat, with the whole world crumbled to pieces around them, the Marshal made a slight, as if ruminant sound. He had come to an end of his meditations.
“There remain then the Americas!” he said. “I do not believe that the Bourbons dare exile me. Or even the Allies! But I prefer to exile myself!”
She sighed a little. The prolonged absence of Madame Ney was beginning to cause her misgivings.... Supposing she had indeed been followed by men presenting the appearance of spies? She would undoubtedly walk down into Paris. But what would they do? How should they rejoin her?
Ney asked: “The English are still at war with their colonists? Or are they their colonists?”
She answered: “No, they are no longer their colonists. Surely you remember Lafayette. But I do not know whether they are still at war. I remember dimly to have heard that they signed a peace on Christmas day of last year.... But hostilities still continued on Christmas day of last year. There were some Americans in Lyons — a banker and his daughter — Coleman by name. They were pleasant people. They had a relative killed at sea on Christmas day — or he died on Christmas day. I remember the name of the ships that fought: they were the President and the Endymion — the Endymion was a ship the English had taken from us.”
“It is amazing, all that you know,” the Marshal said. “You are a gazette that walks... our gazette: the Princess’s and mine!”
“I remember these things more particularly,” she said, “because during the days the Emperor stayed at Lyons we were thrown much together with the English and Americans that were there. A young man — but George Feilding: you know him — saved the life of the American Mr. Coleman’s daughter. And indeed mine. Or at any rate he saved us from brutal handling by a mob. We should not have talked English in the streets.... But Mr. Coleman, the American, and his English brother were grateful. So we saw them often.”
She found it intolerable to talk of these things and not to know whether George Feilding had indeed been arrested. The English Mr. Coleman had been of opinion — at Lyons, and in Paris too — that George Feilding ran some risk. The American brother had been certain that George would be shot by his compatriots and begged him to take refuge in their estate in America, lauding its amenities and comforts. The Coleman young girl had been woefully in love with George Feilding. Tears had filled her eyes whenever she had looked at him and heard he was in danger.
