Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 666
“You would bolster up a throne by treachery and murder,” Mr. Assheton Smith said highly. “There are African potentates whose golden chairs are supported on skulls.... But what skulls are these that your Grace — a soldier — would employ for his throne of cobwebs?... You are a soldier and you will give the eyeless, socketless heads of whom?... Of the bravest of the brave, or the most commanding of commanders, of the most soldierly of soldiers... and of a few poor mice like Frèjus the banker and I know not whom!”
“Frèjus the banker is a most dangerous man,” the Duke said. “I was as relieved by his condemnation yesterday as if I had won a battle in Spain.”
“He does not hold any of your paper?” Mr. Assheton Smith said. “It is not Carleton House that shall mourn for the death of that financier. I on the other hand am handicapped in my pleading, holding a cool million pounds or so of his. So that if I pleaded for his life I should have the appearance of advancing the cause of my own pocket.... I should nevertheless suggest that you should respite him — in Louis’s interests.”
The Duke, relieved to be talking of Frèjus and so to be free of the subject of Ney, affected a limp interest.
“Why,” Mr. Smith said, “it is reported that his fortune and all trace of it have disappeared. His wife I know has been deprived of her dowry and charged not only with the expense of his trial to the state but also with the fees of the admirable Sanson, the executioner.”
“It is true that his papers and the traces to much of his fortune have disappeared in the hands of a fellow that passed for his footman,” the Duke said, “but I do not see what we should gain by his respite.”
“Why, you could worry him till he disclosed,” Mr. Smith said; “or there are red-hot pincers.... They say you have tortured Labedoyère.”
The Duke said: “Come, come, Mr. Smith.... Obviously we have put pressure on the Baron de Frèjus. He turned considerable sums belonging to the Crown into the coffers of Napoleon.”
“Why,” Mr. Smith said, “you could promise him his life and when he had revealed his secrets you could guillotine him.”
“I think you are not in earnest,” the Duke said.
“A cool million is no flea-bite,” Mr. Smith said. “You understand that I am talking of pounds sterling, not French livres.”
The Duke asked what he would have.
“Why,” Mr. Smith said coolly, “only that, if I am able to persuade the Comte Decazes to respite this financier for a month longer, you will not insist on his head for tomorrow’s breakfast.”
“I have nothing against it,” the Duke said. “Carleton House, as you know, demands that he should be made an example of, but I take it they are in no hurry.... That is rather a matter for the French. It is they who clamour for his removal...
“You could hardly call them French,” Mr. Smith said softly.
“Why, call them what your whimsical taste demands,” the Duke answered. “But it is certain that the Comte Decazes will lie on no bed of roses if he delays throwing Frèjus’s head to the ci-devant émigrés and Ultras. They are anxious that their paper should be put into a state where it cannot be presented as is the case when an accepter is executed for High Treason. And de Frèjus must hold enough of their pre-Restoration paper to line all the drawers in the Tuileries. But I am not sufficiently their friend — think what you will — to prefer their interests to those of Mr. Assheton Smith.”
The Duke at that point presented visible traces of fatigue. Sweat, when he leant forward between the candles, was visible on his temples, but mostly he had abandoned his ramrod attitude and leaned back in his chair.
“With that settled I would not keep you from the warm delights of your Grace’s bed,” Mr. Smith said. “But I do earnestly desire to set before your Grace certain considerations. I beg you to consider that Marshal Ney — with the exception of One,” and he glanced pointedly at the plaque that showed the vengeful visage of Bonaparte, “with the exception of one, the Marshal is the only soldier who in the opinion of the world stands before your Grace. If, without raising a finger in his protection you permit this man to go down before a squad of infantry to Orchus, what shall be the dreadful opinion of Posterity upon your Grace’s motives or of all the nations on the credit of our country? I beseech — I truly beseech — your Grace to let my representation weigh with you. And I am a man who never before deigned to ask a favour from the mightiest that ever sat on a throne. But I am interested for my country, and for good or for bad at this moment your Grace holds the credit of our country in the hollow of his palm as a child might hold a penny.”
“Mr. Smith,” the Duke said, “you have spoken with a frankness such as is in turn seldom my privilege to hear. I will speak with an equally open revelation of my mind. I have my duty to consider and if Posterity is ass enough to adopt your views, which seem to me to be tinged with the hypochondria of the age — a thing that I regret to see in one who — be my claims to immortality, or those of Marshal Ney or of Bonaparte, who at least was a soldier, what they may — is the greatest master of the Quorn that ever ordered the Hark Forrard — in short if Posterity will malign me Posterity be damned!”
Both of them had sprung to their feet and regarded each other, breathing hotly through their nostrils.
“Sir,” the Duke said, “this pother that the Universe makes about that fellow is inexplicable, and you will regret in the end your besottedness. The fellow is a boisterous oaf, the fellow is no general, the fellow is no soldier. Do you suppose that soldiering is a matter of standing on guns or the plinths of statues waving your sword as a drummer before a booth gesticulates with his drumstick!”
Mr. Assheton Smith’s face had become set and vicious. “Wellesley, Wellesley!” he exclaimed, “the man you malign was called the Bravest of the Brave by a greater than you and his very sword has received the accolade of the Universe.”
“It was his sword, as you know, betrayed that swaggering and drunken peasant to the prefect’s men at Auxerre,” Wellington said. “And bravery! What has bravery to do with soldiering? I do not pride myself on my bravery!”
“You do well!” Mr. Smith said. “Ney was a fool not to have served under John Company in India. Against Tippoo Tib was it? At Patiala was it? Or Bandracore?”
The Duke’s high, lean face in turn became rigid and, the star on his breast gleaming as he moved, he shifted his right hand to his left thigh. He had actually, in his youth, passed before a Court of Inquiry concerning a retreat he had ordered in an Indian campaign, and, though he had been acquitted, he had never — as was the case with most of his great contemporaries — had occasion to display conspicuous valour on the battlefield.
“Why,” Mr. Smith said, “I am well-known enough to refuse to receive the seconds of Arthur Wellesley, now Duke of Wellington, Marquis of Douro and the rest. I think your Grace would do well to avoid the disgrace of my refusal!”
The Duke stood looking down at his long, lean fingers that now tapped the table before him.
“Of that too I must take my chance with Posterity,” he said dryly, “though I am aware that it is a more serious matter to have one’s personal courage impugned by Mr. Assheton Smith than to be saddled with the responsibility for the death of Mr. Smith’s protégé.... In short Mr.
Smith will not fight and the Duke of Wellington will not send his seconds to Mr. Smith.... We are Englishmen of position in a foreign country in time of peril and change....”
“Why, if you can find a formula...” Mr. Smith said. His eyes glittered with excitement.
“I am looking for one,” the Duke rejoined.... “You wish for a formula to save the face of the Duke of Wellington, for the credit of your country.”
“I look for nothing else!” Mr. Smith said.
“Why,” the Duke answered, after he had pondered, “you may say that first the King of France was sick so that I could not go to him and that now I am so gripped that I cannot stir out and go to the King of France. So we cannot discuss the matter.”
Mr. Smith started with astonishment. The answer was so exactly the heartless pronouncement that he had desired to get from the Duke that he was unable to believe his ears. He exclaimed:
“You say that seriously. It is a pronouncement that alone might save Ney by causing a revulsion in the minds even of his persecutors!”
The Duke answered: “Why, if that is what you came for you have it. For myself I am indifferent!”
“It is an answer that will convince the world,” Mr. Smith said. “I too should prefer lying abed by day with Kitty Clandon to the society of Louis le Désiré in the evening!”
The Duke laughed dryly:
“Lady Clandon is in Belfast,” he said, “but if she were here I too should prefer it.”
As they had been leaving the room, Mr. Smith supporting the Corsican solicitously with a hand under his left armpit, the Duke had said:
“A moment, Mr. Smith. I care nothing as to who hears my opinions of Marshal Ney, a gentleman so vain that he cannot travel without a presentation sword so conspicuous that it procures his arrest — to our great inconvenience... It was indeed said that Ney at the house of a kinsman where he had been in hiding after Waterloo had left a presentation scimitar lying in that kinswoman’s drawing-room and, visitors observing it and reporting on it to the sub-prefect, that official had argued that Ney must be in the house and so had effected his arrest....” But,” the Duke continued, “there are things that as patriots we can only discuss under four eyes.”
Mr. Smith, depositing Gatti on a leather-covered bench that was in the stone corridor, had returned into the Duke’s room where he had stayed a long time. When he came out he was excited, animated and insistent. He insisted that Gatti should hurry his laborious steps down the long stone stairs. They were going at once to the Tuileries.
CHAPTER THREE
“SO that the life of the Marshal turns in the end on the sole will of the Tsar!” Gatti said. He surveyed Hélène for a long silence with his one eye, mournful and scrutinizing.
“Dearest Hélène,” he said, “I spoke not unadvisedly but yet perhaps wrongly as to the fate that hangs over Frederick, your husband.”
She said: “No, no, dear Felice. You did right. You could see that I listened with breathless attention. I have heard Mr. Assheton Smith himself recount that interview, and to hear your confirmation at least gives my mind repose.... Mr. Smith is a very admirable person, I do not doubt, but he has been for so long buried in such a maze of intrigue and business that it is impossible at times not to let a suspicion of doubt of his motives cross one’s mind.”
Gatti elevated his one hand in the air and dropped it slowly.
“I used,” he said, “to think as you say you do. But since I have known that milor better I have come to see that his is a very natural and unsubtle character.” Mr. Smith, in short, acted on the lines of insatiable vanity with a subtle, unemotional, but never-ceasing industry. If you desired to know which way Mr. Smith was going from any given position you had only to consider at which point his vanity could be most — and most astonishingly — gratified — and gratified in face of the world. So that his ambition to save Marshal Ney was simply and plainly a part of his life. He desired to save Ney in the first place because he had truly generous emotions, because the spectacle of Madame Aglaë’s grief had indeed touched him, and because he thought that the credit of his country would be smirched if the scoundrelly enterprise were persevered in. But perhaps none of those motives would have spurred him to the amazing activities that he had displayed — for he was a naturally lazy man — had it not been that his vanity had been aroused at the idea that he alone might thwart not only the Duke of Wellington, whom he heartily disliked and despised, but also King Louis XVIII and half the potentates of the earth. So, that his heart was wholly engaged and his imperious will altogether set in motion in the enterprise of saving the Marshal, no human being could doubt. He had declared that never again would he cross saddle as Master of the Quorn if he did not have the Marshal either freely pardoned by the King, or at the very least safely exiled and leading a pastoral life in one or other of the Americas.
“So that, in the end,” said Hélène, “we are all of us puppets in the game of this nabob whose money is his sole means of illustriousness and whose heart is as dry and thin as a last year’s leaf!”
“Why,” Gatti answered, “are we not all in the end the puppets of the gods?”
“Ay, but the men at whose hands we suffer are a little less than gods!” she answered bitterly.
He conceded that, in their separate roles, Michael Ney, the Baron de Frèjus, Mr. Assheton Smith — and the greatest of all! — were a little less than gods. But he doubted if Jupiter had as many men in the hollow of his hands as any one of them, their influence over the fortunes and so the lives of their fellows being so enormous, Mr. Assheton Smith obtaining his power by prestige, the Baron de Frèjus his by gold, Michael Ney his by the desperation of his bravery — and the Emperor his by a combination of all three attributes.... Why, even the Tsar Alexander had a certain gloomy force of — you might call it conscience. Or it was perhaps more than conscience — pious hubris....
He broke off to say, tentatively and as if advancing with fear along the ground:
“I would have you to know that Mr. Assheton Smith is not without his tenderness or his affections. He is difficult to engage but once his heart is interested it is of a great loyalty. He manifests a genuine and continuing affection for yourself, for Madame Aglaë...”
“Why, I know it,” Hélène said, “but we are women....”
“It is nevertheless for your husbands and lovers that his exertions are expended.” He looked her carefully and cautiously in the eye. “You may, as you know, count me as your devoted lover, and the kindness and humanely thoughtful consideration that this milor has bestowed upon me are beyond belief. When my wounds have ached he has sat up whole nights with me since he believes himself gifted with healing properties.”
She said: “That then is only another of his ceaseless vanities.... He desires to be not only ruler, leech, healer, despot of modes...”
“He has,” Gatti rejoined, “a very marvellous liniment of his own devising made for the relieving of the pains of his hunters and that has singularly relieved the ache of my wound. It is compounded of turpentine, the white of eggs and other things I forget.... And to see him with a horse — they will follow his stiff figure as a woman at the height of her passion will follow her lover to the world’s end!”
“Why,” she exclaimed harshly: “Tell me, then, about George Feilding. It is of him that you itch to speak. Mr. Assheton Smith went principally to the Duke of Wellington to speak about him. Yet you have told me of a whole long play of Hamlet without a Hamlet.... I am at my wits’ end as it is with this fellow below stairs. A little more or a little less is much the same.”
He mopped his brow with an old purple handkerchief. He asked: Phew! did she not suppose that the presence of the young man downstairs pleading with Madame did not give him as much of a pain in the back as her. He said he had not spoken of what Mr. Smith had said of the young man during his interview with the Duke because he did not know how she herself felt towards the young man.
“Well, you need not speak of it,” she said; “Mr. Smith has already reported most of it to me — his solitudes, his despairs, the odours of the horses that the troopers cleaned below his windows in the barracks where he was confined: the upshot of the trial too and his — his admirable bearing. You see, I know. You might as well have told me.”
He regarded her, pondering:
“It comes back to this,” he said; “the life of the Marshal turns in the end on the sole will of the Tsar!”
He felt that in some mysterious way all their lives were bound up in that event, but the clue to the riddle he could not see. Thus in some way the life — the survival — of Frederick de Frèjus undoubtedly was bound up with the fate of Ney. But how? Mr. Assheton Smith was as earnest that Frèjus should be respited from tiihe to time as that Ney should be saved. Yet no one — least of all Mr. Assheton Smith — was much interested in Frèjus. Frèjus was jovial, a bon-vivant, he gave enormous entertainments at which the silver-plate blazed like the sun and the champagne poured itself out like waterfalls. But in the end he was a financier — and financiers, if they may have mercy, excite seldom either the affection or the pity of their fellow men. There is too much debt in the world: a natural-born beggar will excite you to more exertion in his interests than the greatest of financiers come on ruin.
Yet from time to time Mr. Assheton Smith would say between his teeth:
“We must get that banker respited.... Do not forget to remind me that that banker must be respited!”
In the end he had been respited.... Sine die!
He lived in his cell in the Conciergerie, which was next to that of Ney himself, in the full splendour of the life of a financier. Going about everywhere with Assheton Smith, ostensibly in the role of interpreter, Gatti had been many times in the cell of Frèjus.... It was redolent of hothouse blooms, oysters, sherbet of Shiraz, cantatrices from the opera, attar of roses, foie gras, oriental divans.... And, since Frèjus jocularly declined to discover where one jot of his millions had disappeared to, it was Mr. Smith who not only paid for but took pains to procure these pleasures for the banker. Yet Mr. Smith spent nothing on the Marshal, who, most of his goods having been sequestered, was dependent on Madame Aglaë for such comforts as she was able to afford him.
Mr. Smith conversed mostly in private with the Baron, Felice Gatti being left outside the cell door; but when the milor came out, Felice could always hear the Baron exclaiming after a riotous laugh:
“C’est entendu.... It’s understood. It’s understood!” One day he had even asked the milor whether in the first place the Baron was certain to die and, in the second, whether he knew it.
