William Dietrich - The Barbary Pirates

"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 Fouche?

"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 Fouche 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 melange 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 chateau 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 chateau 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 Fouche 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 chateau 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," Fouche 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," Fouche 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."

Fouche stepped forward. "It's the American Gage," he announced. "He's made trouble, as you predicted."

Bonaparte turned. Again he exhibited that electrical presence, that firmness of command, which inspired and intimidated. The shock of dark hair, the bright gray eyes, the oddly sallow skin for a soldier of Corsican descent (a slight yellow tint, which I wondered might hint at some malady), and the tense energy were all there as I remembered. He was thicker than when I'd last seen him almost two years before-not fat, but the leanness of youth was gone. Napoleon had the mature muscle of a thirty-two-year-old soldier dining at too many state banquets. His hair was combed forward in the Roman style to cover a hairline already beginning to slightly recede, as if he lived and aged faster than most men. His gaze was calculating, yet amused.