The Barbary Pirates

CHAPTER FIVE

“Arrest?” I had to think fast. “We were simply trying to escape some thugs who sought to trap us in a fire.” I glanced back to see if Osiris was staggering after us, but saw no sign of him. “And fetch water. These men are esteemed savants.”

Fulton was gray with smoke and rock dust and Cuvier and Smith were drugged and swaying. Our clothes were torn and our dignity shredded.

“Monsieur Gage, it is not your escape you’re being arrested for.”

How did this policeman know me? “For what, then?”

“For consorting with the English while on a French diplomatic mission for Talleyrand in North America,” he said coolly. “You violated your instructions from the French government—not surprising, perhaps, given your service to the British against French forces in the Holy Land in 1799. To which we could add corruption of the morals of esteemed savants. For conspiring in prostitution, which does, after all, remain illegal. For your colleagues’ illicit consumption of drugs imbibed in a brothel. For arson, for promotion of a riot, for destruction of property, for the running down of pedestrians, for theft of a fire wagon, and for the fouling of traffic.”

I licked my lips. “I can explain all that.”

“Unfortunately, it is not me you are to explain to.”

“And you are?”

“Ah.” He bowed. “Minister of Police Joseph Fouché at your service.” His eyes were sleepy but watchful, his mouth set in an expression of skepticism, and his posture light but alert, like a fencer poised for a match. He was the kind of man who seemed unlikely to believe anything I had to say, which wasn’t a bad place to start. He was also extremely able and dangerous. He’d found the conspirators who tried and failed to blow up Napoleon with a keg of gunpowder on Christmas Eve, 1800, executing key royalists and using the excuse to send a hundred French anarchists to the Seychelles Islands.

“Fouché? You bother with tourists like us?”

“Monsieur, I bother with everyone, everywhere, at all times. Including the murderer of a prostitute some four years ago…”

“I had nothing to do with that!” I’d once been unjustly accused, and had some notoriety because of it, but I thought Napoleon had put that issue to rest. “I warn you that I know the first consul myself.” I drew myself up. “I’m a hero of the French victory at Marengo, and of the Treaty of Mortefontaine. I also represent President Jefferson of the United States.”

“Yes. I would prefer simply to imprison and guillotine you, but Napoleon still thinks you might be useful. Just how, after nearly setting yourself on fire, I can’t imagine.” No hint of humor crossed his face. “I understand you’ve been attempting to see the first consul for some time. Your blundering has now won you that opportunity. The meeting will not have the agenda you intended, however.”

The trio behind me was trying to follow all this with dazed bewilderment. “At least let my friends go,” I said. “This was all my doing.”

“Your friends, Ethan, are the only reason I am saving you.” He snapped an order. “Lock them all up before they trample someone else.”

This was not the way I’d intended meeting Bonaparte, given that I fancied myself as a diplomat. He did have a habit of seeing people on his own time and at his own advantage. As we were herded into a waiting prison wagon it occurred to me that it was highly coincidental that the French minister of police, considered by many the most feared and powerful man in France after Napoleon himself, happened to be waiting at the gates of the Palais Royal just as I’d made a thorough fool of myself. Did the mysterious Osiris or treacherous Marguerite have some connection with the equally mysterious Fouché?

“Ethan, what the devil?” Fulton asked as the door clanged shut. We started with a lurch.

“It’s all part of our visit,” I said vaguely. “We’re off to see Bonaparte. You did want an audience with him, didn’t you?”

“Not as a criminal! I told you we shouldn’t have stolen the fire wagon.”

“You should feel complimented. We’ve been arrested by Fouché himself.”

“For what?”

“Me, mostly.”

The other two savants were still drugged and groggy about our arrest, and I knew I’d have to ask Bonaparte for the favor of releasing them, putting me in his debt. In short, the first consul had saved my appointment with him until I was dependent on his mercy. I suppose such tactical maneuvering was the reason he was ruler of France, and I was not.

Our wagon, with only tiny windows for air, wound through the streets of Paris in the darkest hour of the night. By peering out the openings I could occasionally discern a landmark in what was still a sprawling, medieval mélange of a city in recovery from the revolution. Its population had dropped a hundred thousand to just over half a million, thanks to the flight of royalists and an earlier economic depression. Only under Napoleon was the economy reviving. I guessed our destination from our westerly direction.

“We’re going to his château of Malmaison,” I predicted to the others. “That’s good news. No one you know will see us.”

“Or see us disappear,” muttered Cuvier, who was beginning to regain his wits.

“Malmaison? Bad house?” Smith translated.

“A neighborhood name in memory of an old Viking raid, Bill. Probably your ancestors.”

“Bah. They sacked England, too. And came from France, the Normans did.”

Paris as always was a hodgepodge of palaces, crowded houses, vegetable plots, and muddy pasture. The only people I saw at that predawn hour were some of the thousands of water carriers who laboriously carry buckets to homes from the city’s inadequate fountains. The average Parisian makes do with a liter of water a day, and one of the reasons Bonaparte is popular is because he’s beginning to remedy the shortage.

My companions finally dozed.

From Paris’s crowded center we passed into its greener periphery, then through the Farmers-General enclosing wall built by Louis XVI to combat smuggling. We crossed the bending Seine and entered the sprawling suburbs of villages, estates, and hunting preserves. Somewhere off to the south was Versailles, I guessed.

Finally, an hour after dawn, we came to the first consul’s new home west of the city. Since seizing power just three years before, Napoleon had lived at the Luxembourg Palace, the Tuileries Palace, and was spending upward of 1.5 million francs to ready the old château of Saint-Cloud. Meanwhile, he liked to get away from the city to this estate Josephine had bought while he was in Egypt. He’d been infuriated by her purchase at the time, but had since warmed to Malmaison’s country charm.

We followed a high stone wall to an iron gate guarded by soldiers, and after a word from Fouché passed into a gravel lane between two rows of linden trees. When we were finally let out, stiff, unkempt, and hungover, I saw evidence of Josephine’s sweet taste. If her husband’s eye was for grandeur—how he loved a military review—Josephine’s was for beauty.

Malmaison is a pretty château in the French style, with yellow stucco, pale blue shutters, and a slate roof. Its long rectangle is only a single room in width, meaning that light floods through from windows on both sides of its public spaces. Ornamental trees are planted in trim green boxes, and a riot of flowers grows up to the sills of the windows, cut to fill countless vases inside. We could hear birdcall from the park.

“We’re here to see the first consul,” Fouché announced to some potentate in braid, sash, and black patent slippers.

“He’s already out by the pond. He never seems to sleep. This way.”

We stepped through a room with Roman columns and peeked left and right. The dining room had frescoes of Pompeii dancers, which made sense because Josephine was an avid fan of the recent excavation of that ash heap. Roman antiquities filled the shelves. On the other side of the entry was a billiard room and beyond it a rather opulent drawing room with expensive embroidered chairs, the arms decorated with winged Egyptian goddesses. It was homage to Bonaparte’s adventure at the pyramids. Two large and melodramatic paintings flanked the fireplace.

“Odysseus?” I guessed.

“Ossian,” Fouché replied. “The first consul’s favorite poem.”

Then into a grand music room with harp, piano, and portraits of constipated-looking French ancestors, the morning sunlight pouring on warm wood like honey. The marble eyes of Roman generals followed us with opaque gazes.

“There’s a meeting room upstairs draped with fabric as if the occupants are in an oriental campaign tent,” the policeman said. “The furniture is carved with Egyptian deities and Nubian princesses. It’s all quite imaginative.”

“A little fevered with the furnishings, isn’t he?”

“Bonaparte believes even a chair can sing his praises.”

Smith turned slowly about. “This isn’t like a British prison at all,” he marveled blearily.

“The French like to tidy up.”

We left the home again by glass doors and followed a gravel path toward a pond fed by a small river. Butterflies flitted in Josephine’s little paradise, sheep cropped to keep the grass down, and peacocks strutted. We were nearing the decorative lake when a gun sounded.

“Napoleooon!” We heard a woman’s protest, coming from a window high in the apartments behind us.

She was answered by another shot.

We passed through trees and came to a cluster of a dozen aides, officers, and groundsmen, proof that the great are seldom alone. One servant was reloading a fowling piece while Napoleon hefted another, squinting at some swans swimming and flapping at the opposite end of the water. “I purposely miss,” he told the others, “but I can’t resist teasing Josephine.” He aimed and fired, the shot hitting the water well short of the birds. The swans erupted again.

“Napoleooon, please!” her wail came.

“There’s swan shit everywhere,” he explained. “She has too many of them.”

Fouché stepped forward. “It’s the American Gage,” he announced. “He’s made trouble, as you predicted.”