Dennis Wheatley - The wanton princess

'Is there a reception there then?'

'Yes, for the First Consul to receive congratulations on the result of the plebiscite. I would advise you therefore, not to attempt to beard him in his den this morning, but to refrain from showing yourself until he is surrounded by smiling faces.'

Roger bowed, 'Your Excellency's advice has always proved invaluable to mc, and I'll certainly take it now.'

The Minister smiled and laid a beautifully-kept hand on his arm. ‘It will always be at your disposal. I'll never forget that you saved mc from being sent to the guillotine during tho Revolution.'

At seven o'clock that evening Roger joined the throng of men, most of whom were in brilliant uniforms, and silk-clad bejewelled women, that was making its way slowly up the grand staircase in the Palais des Tuileries. The last time ho had done so was at Bonaparte's reception on Christmas Day, a date deliberately chosen by him to indicate that the Chris­tian festival was to be revived and the persecution of the Church to cease. Since Brumaire he had occupied the Luxembourg, but now that the plebiscite had confirmed him in power it was being said that he intended to take up his residence in the Tuileries permanently as from the following day.

At length Roger came opposite him and made his bow. Bonaparte was then aged thirty, a little under medium height and still slim. His large head was finely shaped, his forehead superb, his eyes big and luminous, his nose and mouth well modelled, his jaw exceptionally powerful and his face pale. His reactions to what people said to him were as swift as lightning and conveyed instantly pleasure, doubt, sorrow or anger. He had beautiful hands of which he was very proud and while conversing would often glance at them with com­placency. When Roger had first met him at the siege of Toulon he had been an out-at-elbow Artillery officer with lank, ill-kept dark hair falling to his shoulders. He had since become fastidious in his dress, never wearing a shirt twice, and scrupulously clean in his person, frequently spending up to two hours a day in his bath while dictating to his secretary.

'Ha, Breuc!' he exclaimed in his rasping voice with its heavy Italian accent. 'So those pig-headed fools have kicked you out of England. Talleyrand told me this evening of your return. You must be glad to be back in Paris after surviving two months of London fog. What a country! But one day that fog shall prove the undoing of those stubborn people. Under cover of it I'll land there with a hundred thousand men.'

'My dearest hope is to be with you then. Consul,' Roger smiled.

'You shall,' came the instant reply. 'You've proved yourself little good as a diplomat, but you are still le brave Breuc and speak their uncouth language.’

‘I thank you. General. Meantime I trust you will find me some suitable employment.'

'Since you wield a pen as ably as a sword, I can. Bourrienne is up to his eyes in work. Report to him tomorrow.’

Greatly relieved, Roger passed on and made his bow to Josephine. She was a few years older than her husband, an alluring brunette with a strikingly voluptuous figure. Her looks were marred only by her bad teeth and, from habit, she kept her lips closed as she smiled at Roger. In more than one crisis in their lives they had rendered one another invaluable services; so she spoke to him most kindly.

Ranged in a semi-circle behind the First Consul and his wife stood the Bonaparte family. The mother, a tall, lean, handsome, commanding presence, whose expression showed a suggestion of disapproval at the adulation being showered on her amazing son. On her right her other sons: Joseph, a year older than Napoleon—an amiable man now becoming a little portly—with his wife Julie, already regarded as an angel of charity; Lucien, a short-sighted man with thin, gangling limbs—the firebrand of the family whose fervour for the Revolution had caused him in his teens to rename himself Brutus, but who had now, as the recently-appointed Minister of the Interior, become respectable—with his simple, sweet-natured, ex-barmaid wife Catherine; Louis, a handsome young man whom Bonaparte, while still a poor cadet at the Military Academy in Paris, had personally brought up; and Jerome, as yet only a youngster of sixteen.

On Madame Letizia Bonaparte's left were her daughters. Eliza most closely resembled Napoleon but, having heavy masculine features redeemed only by flashing black eyes, was the plainest of the girls. Beside her was her Corsican hus­band, a dolt named Pascal Bacciocchi. Caroline came next; a shrewd, ambitious, clever girl, good-looking and with a beautiful complexion but a bust and hips too large for her dumpy body. With her was Joachim Murat, Bonaparte's crack cavalry General, to marry whom she had only lately left Madame Campan's Academy for Young Ladies. Pauline stood alone, as her husband General Leclerc had been given command of a Division on the Rhine. She was such a ravishing young creature that she had been nicknamed 'La Belle des Belles'.

Roger knew them all, and that they were a grasping, scheming crew who thought of little but feathering their nests out of the pocket of their now rich and powerful brother. They were also bitterly jealous of one another and united only in one thing—their hatred of his wife. It was on Pauline that Roger's glance lingered, for he had long admired her; and, to his delight, she gave him a charming smile.

To the left of Bonaparte's sisters stood Josephine's two children by her earlier marriage to the Vicomte de Bcauharnais: Eugene, a pleasant, round-faced young man whom, while still in his teens. Bonaparte had taken with him as an A.D.C. in both his Italian and Egyptian campaigns; and Hortense, a pretty girl with a mop of fair curls. Their step­father was extremely fond of them and treated them as his own children.

The assembly was an extraordinarily mixed one. Men who had been responsible for massacres during the Terror, but who had been clever enough to save themselves from the reaction after the fall of Robespierre, rubbed shoulders with ci-devant nobles who had succeeded in getting permission to return from exile There were financiers like Ouverard who had made vast fortunes out of supplying the Armies, eminent lawyers with Liberal principles who had lived in hiding throughout the worst years of the Revolution, learned men who were members of the Institute, the diplomatic represen­tatives of a score of nations and many soldiers whose exploits had caused their names to become household words.

The looks of the women were much above the average for such a gathering because in recent years blue blood had become a liability rather than an asset and rich families had been deprived of their possessions; so, instead of seeking a wife who could bring them a coat-of-arms or a big dowry, most of the men who were carving careers for themselves had chosen brides solely for their beauty.

This was particularly the case with the soldiers. Several of the most distinguished were absent: Moreau and St. Cyr were on the Rhine, Massena, Soult, Suchet and Oudinot were in Italy, Kleber, Dcsaix and Junot had been left by Bonaparte marooned in Egypt; but among those present were:

Berthier, Bonaparte's ugly, ill-formed little Chief of Staff in whose overbig head everything to do with the Army was filed like a vast card index; Marmont, the brilliant young Artilleryman who, at the siege of Toulon, had been Bonaparte's first A.D.C; Brune, who despite his very limited abilities, being opposed only to the hopelessly incompetent Duke of York, had, the previous autumn, destroyed the Allied armies in Holland; Davoust, clever, taciturn, the harshest disciplinarian of them all, whom Bonaparte had discovered in Egypt; Bessieres. another discovery in the same campaign and, although still only a dashing young Colonel, now charged with making the Consular Guard into what was to become the finest dike Corps in the world; Ney, the red-headed son of a cooper, whose sole ambition was to win glory, with beside him the loveliest wife of them all; Augereau, the tall, terrible swashbuckler, who had saved the day for Bonaparte at Castiglione; Moncey, the hero of the Battle of the Pyramids; Lannes, the foul-mouthed little Gascon who, as a Brigadier in Italy in '96 and later at the siege of Acre, had won fame by his indomitable courage, and who also had an exquisitely beautiful wife; Bernadotte, another Gascon, still wearing his black hair long, who hated Bonaparte. He had, when Minister of War, proposed to arrest him for having deserted his Army in Egypt and, alone among the Generals, had refused to support him in the coup d'etat of Brumaire.