Dennis Wheatley - The Rape Of Venice

Despairing of him, the Clichyans, as the Royalists were termed from having a Club where they brewed these plots up in Clichy, had turned to Carnot. But he and his respectable colleague, the diplomat Barthelemy, would have no truck with any movement for a restoration, although they were for peace and a new era of justice and toleration, which the moderates wanted.

Opposed to them stood the remnant of the Terrorists who still controlled the executive power: Rewbell, the German born apostle of equality through the murder of the whole of the upper class; Larevelliere-​Lepeaux, who would have liked to see every priest crucified; and Barras, brave, dissolute and utterly corrupt, who cared only for women and gold; together with all the minor Jacobins who had succeeded in keeping their heads after the fall of Robespierre and feared that they still might lose them should the reaction triumph.

Each week, motions were now being passed by large majorities in the Chamber of the Five Hundred that favoured such measures as the resumption of ringing of church bells, that the relatives of émigrés should no longer be debarred from holding Government appointments, and that certain categories of émigrés should be allowed to return. Above all, they agitated for the re-​establishment of the Paris National Guard; and on this hinged everything. By far the greater part of the National Guard was drawn from the bourgeois, who were heart and soul with the moderates. It was their attempt to assert themselves that Barras, with the aid of Boneparte, had crushed on13th Vendemiaire and after it the National Guard had been disbanded. Under the Constitution no troops, other than the 1,500 guards of the two Chambers, were allowed within twelve leagues of Paris; therefore, if the National Guard was recreated and armed, it would have Paris at its mercy, and could be used to overthrow the Directory. It was for that Pichegru was waiting.

The Directory had behaved far from well to Boneparte. Jealous of the name he was making for himself they had, until almost the end of his campaign, starved him of reinforcements, and it was largely their withholding funds from General Moreau which had rendered him unable to set his army in motion across the Rhine to make a junction with that of Italy.

Boneparte, on the other hand, had ignored their instructions in so flagrant a manner that it would have cost any less successful General his command. To start with, he had been told to turn Piedmont into a Republic; instead he had, on his own authority, signed a peace with the old King Victor Amadeus. Then he had been ordered to march his army south through Central Italy so that it might, in turn, crush the Kingdom of Naples; instead, he had risked it in the north against an Austrian Army of far greater numbers.

His policy had been right. The Austrians were the only major land-​power in arms against France. If they could be defeated, all the lesser enemies must collapse like a house of cards. By making a quick peace with Piedmont, he had freed his army so that it might be turned swiftly against the Austrians before they could become still stronger. Their defeats had led in turn to the fall of Parma, Modena, Milan, Mantua, the disintegration of the Supreme Republic, and Naples abandoning the Coalition to become neutral.

Again, the Directory had urged him to have no mercy on Rome and to abolish the Papacy. He had thrown that order away, too, and dealt with the matter in a way about which they could not complain but also enormously to his own personal advantage. He had deprived the Pope of the greater part of his territories, exacted from him a huge indemnity and robbed him of many great works of art; but he had left Rome free and not interfered in any way with His Holiness's spiritual authority. Such restraint by the representative of a Government of anarchists and atheists had been so unexpected that the Pope had written to him as 'my dear son', the Cardinals had blessed him while handing over their gold plate, and he had enormously enhanced his own popularity in France, where there were millions of Catholics still practising their religion in secret, who now began to look on him as a possible champion of their faith.

The Directory had, too, given him a Political Commissar one General Clarke without whose sanction he was not supposed to enter into any negotiations with the enemies of the Republic, let alone agree terms of peace. But this Franco-​Irish diplomat-​soldier proved no match for the wily Corsican. On plausible pretexts Clarke was always got out of the way to handle small matters in distant cities, to find on his return that Boneparte had already settled some big one according to his own fancy. When the Directors protested, he pretended surprise, wrote that he was tired and ill, and offered to resign his Command. They fumed with rage but dared not recall him because of his obvious ability and ever-​increasing popularity.

Nevertheless, his own interests demanded that he should support them against the Clichyans, and early in the summer he had sent his personal Adjutant, the ci-​devant Count de Lavalette, off to Paris to keep him secretly informed of the situation. Lavalette had reported that unless some drastic step was taken, the Directory was almost certain to be overthrown; but he had advised against Boneparte himself coming to Paris if it could possibly be avoided, because the moderates formed such a high proportion of the population that if he took any direct action against them his own popularity was bound to suffer.

With his usual cunning, he had got round that by making Augereau his cat's-​paw. The Army of Italy was rabidly republican and on July 14th it had celebrated the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille with tremendous enthusiasm. Boneparte had issued a stirring proclamation calling on it to demonstrate its adherence to the principles of the Revolution by loyal addresses to the Government. Each Division had done so in no uncertain manner. Augereau's men, the reddest of the reds, had, in referring to the new measures for moderation being advocated in the two Chambers, even gone to the length of including a passage which read:

Tremble, O conspirators! From the Adige and the Rhine to the Seine is but a step. Tremble! Your iniquities are numbered and the price of them is at the point of our bayonets!', These were open threats against the legally elected Legislature that should it go too far the troops would march on

Paris and bring about a renewal of the Terror. On the pretext of sending a number of captured enemy flags to Paris, Boneparte had then sent Augereau there with instructions to see to it that the loyal addresses from the Army of Italy were published. He was now sitting back, quietly confident that the fierce swashbuckling General would take any steps necessary to pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him.

Roger gained all this inside information while assisting Bourrienne, mainly in translating documents and writing précis of confidential reports. He would have given a great deal to be able to send a report himself to Mr. Pitt, but for the time being he had no means of doing so. He could only wait until an opportunity arose for him to return to Venice and hope to get one through by one of the secret couriers who must, he knew, be keeping Mr. Watson in touch with London.

Meanwhile, as one of the personal entourage, he saw Napoleon and Josephine every day and sometimes was invited to spend the evening with them. The former never tired of hearing more about Egypt and India, and the latter found him an asset to the family's amusements. She loved amateur theatricals, charades and childish games, and in private the great man was by no means averse to looking on or joining in the games, provided always that he was allowed to be the winner.

It was some ten days after Roger's arrival at the Chateau Montebello that chance revealed to him that childish games were by no means the only ones played there by the General-​in-​Chief. Having woken early one morning, he went down from his attic in a chamber robe and soft slippers to Bourrienne’s office to collect some papers with the intention of reading them in bed. As he walked noiselessly along a corridor on the first floor, he passed a door that was not quite closed, and heard someone on the other side of it say: