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

JULY, BAFFIN ISLAND. SIX MONTHS PRIOR TO DEPARTURE

It’s during a previous journey that the idea of a future one comes to mind. Imagination carries the traveler far from the trap where he’s gotten stuck. While in the Negev desert, he’ll dream of a Scottish glen; in a monsoon, of the Hoggar Mountains; on the west side of the Aiguille du Dru, of a weekend in Tuscany. Man is never happy with his lot, but aspires to something else, cultivates the spirit of contradiction, propels himself out of the present moment. Dissatisfaction motivates his actions. “What am I doing here?” is the title of a book and the only question worth asking.

That summer, every day, we would brush against moaning icebergs. They drifted by, sad and lonely, suddenly appearing out of the fog, ice-cubes in our evening whisky. Our sailboat, La Poule, sailed from fjord to fjord. The summer light, clouded by steam, nourished the Baffin coastline night and day. Sometimes, we would draw alongside the bottom of a two-thousand-foot wall sticking out of the water. Then we would unwind our ropes and go climbing. The granite was compact, so you had to drive the pitons hard. For this we had Daniel Du Lac, the bravest among us. He was comfortable suspended over the water—more so than on the deck of the ship. In opening up the way, he’d dislodge blocks. Rocks would come pouring down onto our backs and slam into the water with the sound of an uppercut into a guilty jaw.

Cédric Gras would follow, lifted by the virtue of indifference. As far as I was concerned, I dreaded coming back down. The atmosphere on board the ship was not cheerful. In the wardroom, everybody would lap up their soup without a word. The captain talked to us as if we were dogs and, in the evening, treated us as his audience. You had to endure his exploits, and listen to him go on with his opinions about the science in which he’d become an expert: shipwrecks. There are such mini-Napoleons about; they generally end up on board ships, the only place where they can reign over empires. His was sixty feet long.

One evening, Gras and I happened to be on the foredeck. Whales were sighing at the prow, swimming lazily, rolling on their sides: the lifestyle of the large. “We should start all over with a real trip, my friend,” I said. “I’m fed up with this Mormon cruise.”

“And what’s a real trip?” he asked.

“It’s a madness we get obsessed with, that transports us into myth; a drift, a frenzy, with History and Geography running through it, irrigated with vodka, a Kerouac-style ride, something that, in the evening, will leave us panting, weeping by the side of a pit. Feverish…”

“Oh?” he said.

“That’s right. Next December, we have to go the Moscow Book Fair, you and I. Why don’t we go back to Paris on a bike with a sidecar? On a beautiful, Russian-made Ural. You’ll be nice and warm in the sidecar, so you can read all day long. I’ll drive. We can leave from Red Square, go straight west toward Smolensk, Minsk, and Warsaw. And you know something else?”

“No,” he said.

“This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the Retreat from Moscow,” I replied.

“You’re kidding.”

“Why not give these twenty-five hundred miles as a tribute to Napoleon’s soldiers? To their ghosts. To their sacrifice. In France, nobody gives a damn about the Old Guard. They’re all absorbed by the Mayan calendar. They’re talking about the ‘end of the world’ and don’t realize the world is already dead.”

“You’re not wrong there.”

“I say it’s up to us to salute the Grande Armée. Two hundred years ago, there were guys who dreamed of something other than high-speed internet. They were ready to die just so they could see the Moscow domes sparkle.”

“Except that it turned out to be a slaughter!” he said.

“So? It’ll be a journey to remember. I promise you, we’ll also come very close to a few disasters.”

“Alright then.”

A moment later, Priscilla joined us in the prow. She came on all our trips. With her cases of photos, essential oils, and yoga moves. We told her about our plan. A cyanotic sun was drifting on the horizon. The sea was made of steel. The tail of a large fin whale was whipping this expanse of mercury. Priscilla suddenly said, “Why reconstruct the Retreat exactly?”

On the port side, a whale breathed out a puff of steam. The cloud lingered in the light.

“For the sheer glory of it, darling. For the sheer glory of it.”