Simon Leys: The Death of Napoleon

Edmond the Veteran stops short. In the sudden silence, the song of the lark fills the air again.

Now there are only two men walking in the sun, deep in an interminable and petty argument about the positions of the Grand Army. Neither will give in. Edmond the Veteran with a sly sideways glance has the last word: “I should know. I was there.”

Napoleon changes the subject. “Have you ever seen the Emperor?” he asks point-blank.

Mollified, but with a hint of mockery, Edmond the Veteran stares at him, narrowing his crafty eye. “Why, he was as close to me as you are!…”

Then he starts off again, suddenly quite aggressive, as if he wanted to express his complete contempt for this puny tourist who, a few minutes ago, had had the impudence to contradict him. “The Emperor was young and handsome like a god. You have no idea.” He raises his eyes, contemplating a heavenly vision. Against the sky, between the clouds, he can see him once again on his white horse, reviewing the front line of his troops, while the long row of busbies and rifles begins to waver and sway like a wheatfield under the wind, and a thousand voices, hoarse with fever and smoke, roar in unison, “Long live the Emperor!”

But he quickly looks down again; his mobile features become almost repulsive as he adds, scarcely moving his lips, “Between you and me, Napoleon was a vampire. It was our blood that kept him going. You should have seen him in the evenings after a battle. The toughest veterans of the Guard were crying from sheer exhaustion, but there he was, passing among us, fresh as a daisy; he would look at the dead and wounded, wading through the blood. That’s where his energy came from. Take me, for instance — he’s gouged out my eye and bitten off my leg. Look, I can see that you are a man of the world. You, you’re not one of those tourists full of warm tea and gherkin sandwiches. Perhaps you’ve been a soldier, too? Well then, I’ll show you my war wounds! I don’t show them to just anyone, you know! There are always English tourists who would gladly pay extra, just to have a look, but they haven’t got a hope! It’s none of their business! But between the two of us, it’s quite different. You and I, we speak the same language — no need to stand on ceremony.”

As he finishes his patter, he begins to unwrap his stump from the empty trouser leg, which was furled around itself and secured with a large rusty safety pin. He performs the unswaddling like a professional, with quick, precise gestures. The whole routine has something ritualistic and vaguely obscene about it. But at the end of it, when he raises his head, he realizes that his customer has already left some time ago and is heading downhill toward the village. “Hey, friend! Don’t go yet! Wait a minute!”

Hopping on his crutch, he immediately gives chase. Napoleon has nearly reached the village when he finally catches up with him, grabbing him by his coattails in a last desperate lunge.

Napoleon turns around and looks at him, stony-faced. The small pale man is now livid with a cold fury that would make anyone else beat a hasty retreat. Not so Edmond the Veteran, who withstands his stare without twitching a muscle, then moves into the attack. “Well?…” he drawls, drawing out the syllable with a sort of crapulous familiarity.

“Well what?” Napoleon replies tersely, a little taken aback by his aplomb.

“Well, are you going off like that, without leaving something for the guide?”

Napoleon throws him a five-sou coin. With arrogant nonchalance, the cripple slips it into his belt, turns around on his crutch, and, without so much as a backward glance, makes his exit from the scene.

NAPOLEON FEELS very thirsty. He goes and sits on the terrace of the Café de la Grande Armée.

The girl who had spoken to him that morning comes to serve him.

She has the indefinable feeling that this man is somewhat different from the customers she usually sees here. When ordering his beer, he scarcely looks at her. His whole demeanor possesses a sort of haughty courtesy that both intimidates and delights her.

He is eating a bread roll that he has taken out of his pocket, like a pauper. And yet — she is sure of it — this man has nothing in common with the penny-pinching tourists who bring their own food to save the price of a meal. Ordinarily she can’t stand such people, but this time it’s different, quite different — but she can’t really say why. He absentmindedly breaks his bread with his plump white hands. His gestures have the unctuous solemnity of a clergyman.

She brings him a plate and a knife, so that he can eat his bread properly. She hovers around his table, wanting to start up a conversation.

“Have you seen the bedroom…?” she begins, but suddenly remembers that she already made this suggestion when he first passed by, and she fears that he may misunderstand her and suspect that she wants to make him spend more or that she is indirectly trying to make him ashamed of ordering so little. She blushes violently at the very thought that he could misjudge her in that way and corrects herself at once. “Have you seen the battlefield?”

“I’ve just come from there.”

“Oh, if I’d only known, I could have been your guide!”

“Thank you. To tell the truth, I did come across a sort of guide, an army veteran who…”

“Oh no! You don’t mean Edmond?… But Edmond’s a charlatan! And did he make you pay? How much did the old crook get out of you? I hate to tell you this, but he’s always trying to impress the tourists with tales of his missing leg. His famous leg! He tells people that it was shot off by a cannonball, and he even shows them a rusty old piece of shot — purple with his blood, so he says — which he keeps in his hut. He probably showed it to you, eh? You mustn’t believe him. Everything he says is a pack of lies, but he can’t fool us. The truth is that one night, when he was dead drunk, he tumbled into a ditch and gashed his leg so badly that in the end the maggots got into it and he had to go to the bone setter in Maransart, who cut it off. And ever since, he tells the visitors that he lost it in the battle. Edmond the Veteran of Waterloo! Ha! ha!” (she bursts out laughing like a schoolgirl, with her hand over her mouth). “He’s an awful liar, you know!”

“I gathered as much,” Napoleon replies, quite composed. Changing the subject, he inquires about ways of getting to France. She informs him that the mail coach to Charleroi is due at about four o’clock. He can quite comfortably spend the night in Charleroi and from there take the old bone shaker to the border.

After finishing his second bread roll, he stretches out his legs and closes his eyes. He still has plenty of time to take a nap in the shade.

He muses. He has always had the unshakable conviction that all the setbacks that have happened in his life, even those that seemed the most painful and futile, must in some way or another actively contribute to the working out of his destiny. There is no doubt in his mind that the bizarre pilgrimage he made that morning was also part of that mysterious grand design, but for the moment he gives up any attempt at exploring its obscure significance. Perhaps it was necessary to stir up the shadows of a vanished past in order to realize more clearly that, from now on, the only true Napoleon is the one who belongs to the future — a future that awaits him in Paris!

THE OLD COACH has been traveling for many hours. It was already on its way by the early morning, when the birds began to call; it has rumbled through the calm of noon, allowing the passengers only twenty minutes’ rest in an empty inn, silent and full of flies. It has traveled throughout the afternoon, until the sudden chill at dusk reminds the travelers that the warmth of the day has merely been the caprice of an early spring.