Simon Leys: The Death of Napoleon

THE PARTY MAKES a first stop at the village of Waterloo-l’Eglise, to visit the Brasserie de l’Empereur, a large farm that has been turned into an open-air café with a dance floor. On the rough, freshly whitewashed front wall hangs a notice:

THE EMPEROR SPENT THE NIGHT HERE BEFORE THE BATTLE. VISIT NAPOLEON’S BEDROOM

Underneath, in smaller letters, is a timetable and a list of admission prices, with reductions for “Groups, Children in the Company of Adults, Servicemen in Uniform & Others.”

The twelve English tourists rush into the building and up the stairs to see the historic bedroom.

Napoleon does not follow them. Suddenly he feels faint. The vague malaise that has been upon him all morning at the sight of that smiling countryside where the shadow of a soft gray cloud occasionally caresses the hills abruptly gives way to an overwhelming certainty: he realizes with horror that HE HAS NEVER BEEN IN THIS PLACE BEFORE!

The English tourists are on their way down.

Recovering his composure, he, too, enters the farm, crosses the paved hallway, and climbs the narrow staircase leading to the first floor.

Napoleon’s bedroom is sparsely furnished with the basic items: iron bed, plain wooden table, wooden chair with straw seat, jug and basin on a painted chest of drawers. The paper on the walls has garlands of mauvish flowers.

He takes the whole room in at a glance.

The horses are stamping impatiently down below. The coachman is counting his passengers, ready to set off again.

He cannot stay any longer. He stares desperately at the unfamiliar room, seeking vainly for some clue; his eyes slide over a blank surface, making no contact. He suddenly feels dizzy, he can hardly stand. He stumbles downstairs, his legs shaking, and finds himself back in the coach, which sets off immediately. On to Mont-Saint-Jean!

“Mont-Saint-Jean! Everyone out, please!” The coachman reminds his passengers to be back by six o’clock for the return journey.

The return? Napoleon has no intention of ever going back to Brussels. There is no looking back, his mind is made up. If he can steadfastly confront a second Waterloo — all the more daunting a task on such a beautiful spring day — if he can emerge victorious from this strange trial he has so recklessly set himself, he will immediately make his way to Paris by the old Charleroi road; he will allow nothing to delay him. In his sudden eagerness to rush forward and to engage in the last decisive struggle, he superbly forgets that he has not yet paid his bill at the hotel in Brussels.

Turning his back on the ludicrous charabanc that has brought him to this crucial encounter with himself, he walks down the other street in the village — the one which the twelve English tourists have not taken. This time, he does not bat an eyelid as he passes by the Café de la Grande Armée, which also boasts a tricolor signboard:

VISIT NAPOLEON’S BEDROOM! THE EMPEROR SLEPT HERE THE NIGHT BEFORE THE BATTLE!

Special prices for families and school parties! Taste our famous local specialty, cherry beer! Customers’ own food may be eaten on the premises!

A girl is standing on the doorstep. She is shy and sweet, and asks him in her rather slow Walloon drawl, “Don’t you want to see Napoleon’s bedroom?” There are obviously not many visitors at this time of the year. But the lies of all the museums in the world cannot affect him anymore. He keeps walking, irresistibly drawn on by the softly rising curve of meadows and fields at the other end of the village. From there, the unchanging circle of the plain comes into view, and it is there that he has an appointment with his own destiny!

However, he will not be there alone.

On the side of the road stands a makeshift little hut which also bears a notice announcing:

EDMOND, VETERAN OF NAPOLEON’S OLD GUARD, SURVIVOR OF THE LAST BATTLE SQUARE. GUIDED TOURS OF THE BATTLEFIELD.

BY APPOINTMENT.

The owner of the premises, with his unkempt beard, squats on the doorstep, waiting for appointments.

As Napoleon passes in front of him, he gets up — or more precisely, he gathers together the remains of his person, for it then becomes apparent that one leg is missing, one arm is withered and twisted like a dead twig, and he has lost half an ear and perhaps an eye, unless he is just cross-eyed. He hauls himself up on a crutch, clumsily mended with string, and tries to follow. Taking pity on his efforts, Napoleon slows down to allow this heroic but gruesome physical wreck to follow with less difficulty.

And thus they climb the hill — the pale little man and the broken-down scarecrow — an odd couple born of the same dream of glory. As they make their progress across the plowed fields, flocks of partridges take flight in front of them. A cuckoo is singing in the wood nearby.

When they reach the lookout point that dominates the whole plain, Edmond the Veteran automatically launches into his set piece without waiting to be asked. He has trotted it out so often that he knows his monologue by heart, and points out the historical landmarks in the surrounding countryside — La Papelotte, the Caillou farm, the Holy Hedge, the Sunken Lane — without even bothering to look at them, so well does he know where to find these permanent buoys in the ocean of fields and meadows. On the plain, the only movement — if you can call it that — comes from groups of sleepy cows. A plow drawn by three horses that move so slowly they seem to be standing still knits new black furrows, one after the other, into the gray and yellow surface of a fallow field.

Although the words of Edmond the Veteran betray the effects of constant repetition to tourists, behind the hackneyed expressions and affected rhetoric, the attentive listener can detect an authentic ring in the evocation of the epic battle that this simple man must have lived through, body and soul. As if hypnotized by the deathly pale little man, the guide finds himself departing imperceptibly from his prepared speech. Closing his eyes, he abandons himself to the flow of his memories, and begins to relive the whole ordeal, as it happened, from dawn to dusk. “It was raining on that day, it was pissing down…” And in spite of the peaceful sunshine and the pure song of an invisible lark piercing higher and higher into the blue sky, like a medium in a trance he summons up and brings to life the real spirit of the plain. Before Napoleon’s very eyes, the false decor of pastoral calm, with its fields and cows and plow on the horizon, parts like a naïvely painted country scene on a theater curtain, revealing the somber truth that is always there, hidden behind the veil of appearances.

… In a murky twilight, under a low sky, men, horses, and cannon are once more bogged down in the mud. Across the sodden fields comes the loud rumble of regiments on the move, while the muffled boom of cannon can be heard in the distance. The men have been marching all night to meet their fate, weary as beasts of burden; here and there in the grass, a few are already dead, their eyes wide open with astonishment.

Yet when did this vision, which at first seemed so overwhelmingly true in every detail, suddenly become confused and begin to fall apart? Napoleon again experiences the same dizziness that he had felt in the unfamiliar bedroom. Edmond the Veteran foams at the mouth and screams and whirls around on his crutch like one possessed, as he goes through all the torments of that incredible day. Under this hail of words, Napoleon is horrified to discover the image of ANOTHER Waterloo, which is more and more difficult to reconcile with his own memory and sense of logic. He can no longer find a single landmark on the plain; even as he stares at it, the scene becomes weirdly distorted. Edmond the Veteran’s incantation is drawing him into a whirlwind where his reason falters and is about to be swallowed up. He struggles to break free; with one final effort, he suddenly resists and interrupts his relentless guide: “No, no! It’s not the grenadiers who are holding Belle-Alliance, it’s the dragoons!…”