Berezina: From Moscow to Paris Following Napoleon's Epic Fail

DAY ELEVEN. FROM NAUMBURG TO BAD KREUZNACH

Yesterday, I had clenched my teeth so hard during the night ride that I spat half a stub in the bathroom’s earthenware sink.

“Vitaly, I’ve lost a tooth,” I said over our morning coffee.

“A Ural can keep going with just eighty percent of its bolts,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

That morning, we were driving toward Eisenach and Fulda through Westphalian woods. When the banks of fog were torn apart, pine forests would appear that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a scene from Parsifal. The road was a silver whip. On the Fulda Autobahn, we were overtaken by a customs officers’ car, which squeezed up against us, its revolving lights on, and an arm through the window signaled that we should pull over on the emergency lane. A second Mercedes jammed our behinds just as we’d braked dangerously fast. Our column had lured the salt-tax collectors. They must have smelled Chechens. It hadn’t occurred to them that a Caucasus dealer wouldn’t take the risk of carting around his merchandise in such obvious collector’s pieces as Ural motorbikes.

We’d been driving four hours in the cold, soaked through like drowned rats, and we could have done without having to empty our trunks. The Germans seemed to find the scene entertaining. They must have been bored this morning. They wanted to see everything. We had to open every bag. They felt our belongings like tourists at a souk. They showed little respect for our machines. Their sense of humor was devastating: “Have you vodka, haschich, Makarov, Kalachnikov?” They asked in English. They laughed boisterously. Frozen, muddy, we unpacked, repacked, squinted at their thick jackets, their dry boots, and the inside of their cars. Still, we soon lost any temptation to warm up on their back seats because we would have then had to endure their jokes.

We had nothing to declare. Not even goodbye when we set off again. These were the last few miles of calm before the Frankfurt conurbation.

I couldn’t stop thinking that, along this road, there had been a moment when our rubber tires had touched the spot where the skates of the sleigh had passed, two hundred years before us to the day—and the second! This point of quantum contact, this spatiotemporal conjunction must have occurred somewhere before Poznań, where the Emperor passed at dawn on December 12th, and where we had driven through during the night of December 11th and 12th, 2012. This idea was of no interest, but these small calculations helped me stay awake until we’d reached Fulda.

I was convinced that movement encourages meditation. The proof of this is that travelers always have more ideas on their return than when they leave. They’ve captured them on their way. Moreover, this is at the expense of their friends, through what we call travel stories. Therefore, the law of thermodynamics must apply to moving. Whenever we “stagger” (Montaigne’s expression to indicate travel), the body warming up seems to produce spiritual energy which then contributes to triggering ideas. When the body moves, the mind wanders, and our thoughts explore hidden recesses. It’s a law known to all escape professionals: truck drivers, tramps, and hikers. Often, thoughts engendered by trials are the best. “Only those thoughts that come to us while we’re walking have any value,” Nietzsche rapped out at sunset. Along the roads of car-led civilization, the metronome-like passing of white stripes in your field of vision invites you to ponder.

So did the parading of foliage past the frosted windows of the sleigh inspire the Emperor’s meditation? At any rate, it encouraged introspection. For two weeks, Napoleon talked to Caulaincourt the same way he had lived: in a whirlwind. He changed subjects quicker than piqueurs replaced horses. He would skip from politics to women, from his childhood to military deployment. He would redo the French Directory, visit the campaigns of Spain, Italy, and Illyria, fly to Egypt, return to Europe to talk about Prussian maneuvers, and comment about Austrian politics.

He opened up, and invented a genre: the confession of a child of the century, beneath a bearskin. He took pleasure in his self-portrait. He confessed the whole truth to Caulaincourt: he was carrying a burden. Destiny had charged him with a mission: to bring Europe to peace. He was fulfilling it in spite of himself: “I’m no more an enemy of life’s pleasures than anyone else. I am not a Don Quixote who needs to seek adventures.”

He was not overly modest. He knew he was superior to other men, sovereigns especially: “I am only too aware of my power. […] I can see things from higher up. […] I walk with a franker step.” He also knew he was a champion on the physical front, and “would joke that rest was intended only for lazy kings.” He would talk about his Corsican family, his uncle Lucien, his success at military school while running after skirts. He would punctuate his descriptions of himself with very humble conclusions: “What seemed difficult to other people appeared easy to me.” At times, he would try to describe himself as an ordinary being: “I am a man. Whatever some people might say, I also have guts, a heart, but it’s the heart of a sovereign. I am not softened by the tears of a duchess but I am touched by the afflictions of nations.”

Depending on the leg of the journey, when he received a dispatch letter from Marie-Louise, he would wax lyrical: “I have a good woman here, don’t I?” On other days, he would dream about the empress and the King of Rome, their son, and would “talk extensively about the pleasure he would feel at seeing them again.” Still, as someone who knew men, he was wary of women. They were hotbeds of intrigue, drained your energy, and drove the strongest minds to distraction. Several had set him “ambushes of tears,” and would “confuse empires” if you let them.

He was not taken in by men either. He had spent too much time with them to like them. Lucidity doesn’t turn anyone into a philanthropist. His fellow men didn’t even deserve his anger. “I don’t respect them enough to be, as they say, cruel and take revenge.” He would review his government, remember Talleyrand, praise Cambacérès, but would criticize the Duke of Otranto and his cohorts of hasslers. At one stage, when faced with the number of victims, Caulaincourt was forced to exercise self-censorship: “In this respect, the Emperor mentioned such prominent traits and names that I do not dare write them down. I do not wish to tarnish the glory of some names that belong to History.”

Like other people with too large an entourage, he had turned his affections on “the peoples,” these abstract monsters. “I want them to be happy and the French will be.” But then he would immediately water down his affection: “I make myself out to be nastier than I am because I’ve noticed that the French are always ready to eat right out of your hand.”

He would congratulate himself on having built an egalitarian system, thus breaking with the privileges of the Old Regime: “Have talent and I will promote you, have merit, and I will protect you.” He believed only in the “open paths of merit.” He would conclude with this aphorism: “It’s in the appreciation of the principle of equality that lies the power of the government.” He knew that his political task was not complete, but was relying on the help of posterity: “They will bless me as much, ten years from now, as they perhaps hate me today.”

At times, his confidences would lapse into pure self-apology. He would grant himself mountains of laurels. “France,” Caulaincourt writes, “owed him codes that would be the making of her glory.” It’s hard to imagine that Napoleon didn’t know that his Grand Squire was secretly writing down his monologues, and that these pages would one day help build generations: “Under my government […] there are no bribes, the cash boxes are watched, […] taxes go where they are intended. […] Who shouts in France? […] The bulk of the nation is righteous.” And he would complete the extolling of his own virtues in a booming voice: “Nobody is less preoccupied with what is personal to him than I.”

And this long monologue, which Caulaincourt would interrupt with timid assents, was interspersed with self-persuasion sessions aimed at concealing the disaster of the campaign from himself: “A well stocked Wilna will put everything back in order.”

Meanwhile, Paris drew nearer with strong lashes of the horsewhip.

Our crossing of the Rhine was more laborious and less romantic than that of the Emperor. He had crossed on board a boat kept by Count Anatole de Montesquiou-Fezensac. We just had a bridge, but still had trouble finding it in the Frankfurt web of highways, next to which the Ruhr interchange looked like neighboring byway crossroads. In the middle of the night, we drove another fifty miles and, our eyes sore from tiredness, when we approached the small town of Bad Kreuznach, we decided it was time to put a stop to our outing before a roadside tree did it for us.