William Dietrich - The Emerald Storm

“I guess we could spare you a small stipend,” Livingston said.

Bonaparte also gave me a letter of introduction to his minister Francois Barbe-Marbois, the French negotiator. I got on famously with him as well, because we were both victims of the unpredictability of fortune. Francois had actually served as intendant of Saint-Domingue in 1785 before the slave revolt began, and was well aware the colony was swallowing Napoleon’s army. After the revolution, his moderation made him suspect by royalist and revolutionary alike, since reasonable men like us are always threatening to the ambitious and fanatic. For a while he was imprisoned in hellish French Guiana. Now that Bonaparte was firmly in power, his common sense was deemed useful again.

I confided that I’d had my own ups and downs. “I’ve had a pharaoh’s hoard and a book of magic slip through my fingers, and until I got married I had the devil’s own time with women. But I remain ambitious. I’ll try to get the Americans to raise their sights. If you could advance me a French salary for my expenses, I can afford to wait to bend the ear of James Monroe.”

“You really think your countrymen will pay to take this wasteland off our hands?” Barbe-Marbois could scarcely believe we Americans were so gullible.

“I had companions who thought Louisiana was the Garden of Eden. One killed, the other wounded, but they were optimists.”

So my chance to draw pay from both America and France, and to encourage the greatest real estate deal in history, caused us to linger in Paris into the spring of 1803.

It was a pleasant interlude. We strolled the Tivoli Gardens, where fireworks and acrobats delighted my son. There was a tethered elephant, two rather bored and ratty-looking lions in iron cages, and an ostrich that Napoleon’s troops had brought back from Egypt. It displayed considerably more ferocity than the cats.

At the competing Frascati amusement park (only a franc a day per person) there was a miniature village of mills and bridges that absorbed my boy like a Gulliver. “Look, a real castle!” he’d cry at fortifications three feet high.

The balloon ascents we watched at the Tuileries brought powerful emotions to Astiza and me, given our history in Egypt. The exotic costumes of street performers brought to mind perilous times in the Holy Land.

I found married life altogether different from our frequently interrupted courtship. We were no longer allied by danger and didn’t have the flush that comes from novelty and infatuation. Instead, there was deepening affection and security. Like many great men, my mentor Benjamin Franklin had been a poor husband who hadn’t hesitated to expound on what makes a good one. Marriage was an investment in time, commitment, and compromise, he told me, a work for which the profit was contentment and even, “at times,” bright happiness. “The most natural state of man,” he’d counseled.

“If natural, then why are our heads always swiveling toward the next woman like a dog spying a rabbit?”

“Because we don’t catch the rabbit, Ethan, or, if we do, we scarcely know what to do with it.”

“On the contrary.”

“Marriage saves us from confusion and heartbreak.”

“Yet your wife is five thousand miles away, in Philadelphia.”

“And I take comfort knowing she is there, waiting.”

I counted myself astoundingly lucky, then. I’d snatched an emerald, yes, but what was the real jewel from Tripoli? My wife beside me. We walked arm in arm under rose arbors, ate sugared ices, swayed to accordion bands playing on brilliantly lit stages, and watched up to three hundred people at a time wheeling to the new German waltz. The crowd thinned when the more complicated quadrille and mazurka were danced, but gaiety had returned to Paris.

There was also quiet anxiety, because the newspapers were full of tension with England. Rumor contended that Napoleon had ordered work on an invasion fleet of barges to cross the Channel. Once the boats were ready, war would return, predictions went.

“Ethan, if we tarry much longer, we may be trapped in Paris,” Astiza warned as we crossed the new pedestrian Bridge of the Arts at the Louvre, an iron novelty that was one of several bridges Napoleon had ordered to unite both banks of the city. “Britain will blockade, and France may arrest any aliens.”

She was not just beautiful (the antiquity-inspired fashion of high waist, puffed sleeves, and a vale of decolletage enhanced her Greek Egyptian sultriness to a bewitching degree) but practical as well. She thought ahead, a novel quality, and despite Napoleon’s prejudices, was probably closer to his habits than I was.

She also gave me a wifely elbow when my eye lingered too long on other consular beauties, some of them with breasts in mere gauze. Unfortunately, that happy fashion was being discouraged by a more conservative, militarist ethic that began with Bonaparte himself. The Corsican was proving stern, announcing that the primary purpose of women was not to display their charms but make future soldiers. Given male instincts, I thought the two went hand in hand, but I think he wanted sex, like everything else, bent to efficient purpose.

For myself, I saw fashion as one of life’s pleasures and necessities, its display as articulate as bright conversation. Astiza and I made quite the dashing couple, given that I’d copied the incroyable dandies with the long boot, tight coat, carefully wrinkled shirt, and stylish top hat, a precisely calculated mix of elegance and disorder to mirror the turmoil of our times. We were a couple at the height of fashion, and I enjoyed being glanced at. It was mostly bought on credit, but once I sold the emerald my debts would be erased.

“The British are already leaving the city,” Astiza went on as we strolled. Harry would run ahead and then come back to announce he was exhausted, and then run ahead again. “There are rumors Napoleon wants to invade England.”

“Since he’s ordered the building of boats, it’s more than a rumor.” I paused to watch the traffic on the Seine. Paris was a pleasing spectacle on a sunny March day. The polluted river glittered, its banks skirted with bright arcades and singsonging merchants. Palaces and church towers punctuated bright blue sky like exclamation points. Napoleon’s rule had brought stability and reinvestment. “But I’m supposed to wait for Monroe and finish the purchase of Louisiana. Even if war breaks out, we’re neutral as Americans.” I knew she didn’t think of herself as American yet, but I intended she become one.

“Two dueling navies, and Ethan Gage, the hero of Acre and Mortefontaine?” she responded. “You’ve managed to make enemies on all sides. We’ve a son to think about. Let’s take ship for New York or Philadelphia, settle before Nelson or Napoleon strikes, and you can seek an appointment from Jefferson. You’ve got a family now, Ethan.”

Indeed I did, a revelation no matter how many times I remembered it. “But we still have to sell the emerald. We’ll get a far better price here than in the United States, but I don’t want to have to worry about coin until negotiations are concluded. Let’s wait until the proper moment.”

“The proper moment is now. The first consul is not content without a war.”

This was true. People repeat what they’re successful at, and Napoleon had made himself with generalship. For all his trumpeting of peace, he was forever listening for the roll of the drums. I suspected this next war would dwarf all that had come before.

So I looked at her fondly and decided to indulge. Worry made her look vulnerable, uncommon for Astiza, with a beauty that stirred my heart. “Very well. I’ve lent the negotiators what wisdom I can. Let’s sell the stone and retire to the everlasting peace we both deserve.”