The Barbed Crown

Chapter 5





The sound of the guillotine chopping through a rebel neck is exactly that of a cleaver through cabbage, the vegetable in this instance being the head of Georges Cadoudal hitting its basket with an audible thump.

The crowd rumbled as if a bull had been dispatched in the ring. The execution meant stability, finality, and tyranny, all at the same time. History would not reverse. It was June 25, 1804, nearly three months after my family and I had landed in France, and a royalist rebellion was as remote as the moon.

The conspiracy and assassination attempts encouraged by the British had reminded Frenchmen not of Bourbon would-be kings waiting to be welcomed but of the chaos of revolution. The opportunistic Napoleon seized on extracted confessions from Bourbon plotters to fortify his own position. He argued France needed a return to the stability of a monarchy, but a monarchy headed by him, not the ousted heirs of Louis XVI. And since the revolutionaries had pronounced inept Louis “the last king of France,” a new title was needed. Accordingly, just one month before Georges’s beheading, the French had voted 3,524,254 to 2,579 (by the eventual count of Napoleon’s minions, at least) in favor of making Bonaparte—a man who still spoke French with a Corsican accent—their emperor.

As first consul he’d beaten the Austrians at Marengo (with my help, though I never got proper credit), revitalized the economy, reformed the military, restored public works, reworked the law, and kept public order. Three overlapping police services spied not just on Frenchmen and foreigners but on each other. Sixty newspapers had been shuttered, plays were censored, and martial music banged in the streets. By making Napoleon’s rule hereditary, the French had made it immensely harder to overthrow him by assassination or coup, since his heirs would fill his empty throne. So while in 1789 the French had risen to eradicate royalty, in 1804 they voted to establish a brand-new one, trading freedom for stability.

I wasn’t surprised. We all balance liberty against risk, and are seduced by the safety promised by the strong. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither and will lose both, Benjamin Franklin had warned. Like any youth, I ignored his advice while never quite forgetting it. The older I grew, the wiser the words became.

Napoleon’s coronation would take place the coming winter. With it, he hoped to be accepted by the crowned heads of Europe as a royal himself, and to bring a French-dictated peace to the Continent.

No one saw the irony clearer than Georges Cadoudal. The Breton royalist and ardent Catholic had fought the French revolutionaries and Napoleon for eleven tumultuous years before being captured, only to see his crusade turned against him. “I meant to give France a king, but I have given her an emperor,” he summed up on the way to his beheading.

The counterrevolution I’d signed on for was in tatters. Fellow conspirator General Charles Pichegru had been strangled in his cell by Napoleon’s fierce Mameluke bodyguards, or so the rumor went. The four executioners were then killed themselves so complicity could be denied.

General Jean Victor Marie Moreau, the military hero of the Battle of Hohenlinden that had finished the Austrians after Napoleon’s Marengo, and who considered himself superior in generalship, had been exiled to the Americas. He was too popular to be either killed or trusted.

In the frenzy against conspirators like me, an apparently hapless Bourbon royalist named the Duc d’Enghien had been seized across the border in Germany, dragged back to France, found guilty without proper trial, put up against the wall of a dry moat, and shot.

Eighteen others had been condemned with Cadoudal in a sensational spring show trial designed to demonstrate the peril to the government. Subtracting six pardons, the guillotine schicked this day thirteen more times, filling five wicker baskets that were shared, for economy. Some victims wept, some proclaimed final loyalty to the Bourbons, and most went with stoic silence.

I’m not a believer in last words, either, since you never get a proper reply.

Rumor held that a composer named Ludwig van Beethoven was so disturbed by Napoleon’s suppressions that he’d renamed his new “Bonaparte Symphony” the vaguer Eroica, a puzzling title I doubt will ever catch on. The cranky German songmeister believed Napoleon, once the Prometheus of Liberty, was betraying his own reforms.

No matter. Most Frenchmen had concluded Bonaparte was the best thing since the baguette. The audience sighed and applauded every time the blade dropped. It’s mesmerizing to watch a massacre.

Astiza kept Harry home at our Paris apartment while I morbidly witnessed the slaughter with Catherine Marceau. She pressed to my shoulder, one of a number of surprising intimacies that made me increasingly uncomfortable, but which I couldn’t bring myself to entirely discourage. She jerked slightly each time a head rolled, eyes wide, no doubt remembering the execution of her parents. Since we’d begun sharing an apartment, the comtesse had become inexplicably more flirtatious, as if inspired by the competition of a wife. Women forever confuse me.

“I’m sorry you have to see this, Comtesse,” I said.

“On the contrary, it reminds me of my purpose,” she murmured.

Astiza considered execution barbaric. “What if the judges make a mistake?” she asked. “The truly secure show mercy.”

“Napoleon preaches that killing a few keeps the many in line. He says executions are a mercy for the nation as a whole.”

“The creed of the hangman, not the hanged. Wait until it’s his turn.”

I watched the slaughter to gauge our situation. Even the English captain who had brought Astiza to France ahead of me, John Wesley Wright, had been captured off the French coast and imprisoned. Betrayal had followed betrayal. Sir Sidney Smith’s brother Spencer had been forced by French pressure to leave Württemberg in Germany, where he’d served as a spymaster. Another British agent, Francis Drake, had fled Munich. My family was marooned as forgotten agents of a conspiracy in utter collapse. My investments in England were out of reach, and the gold I’d been given as salary had to be carefully nursed because we were supporting Catherine, and communication with Sir Sidney Smith was broken. I calculated we’d just enough to last until the coronation, planned for early December. I could still send messages out to England, using a collaborating priest in the confessional at Saint-Sulpice, but received no word in return.

In short, I’d given up control of my fortune and joined the wrong side at the worst possible time, at frozen wages, with a flirtatious roommate who lost her own money in the Channel, all to avenge a wife who turned out to be alive.

My foresight could be improved.

We also suspected we were being followed. Catherine said men watched her from café tables (a claim I didn’t doubt), and Astiza said clerks made notes of books she examined at the imposing Bibliothèque Nationale on rue de Richelieu. These gatekeepers claimed that the records she most ardently sought either didn’t exist or were restricted. Harry reported seeing a shadowy giant, though this specter melted away every time I turned, and I knew he might be a product of my son’s anxious imagination. He would wake with nightmares. It’s natural for a child to have a nervous imagination, but it was with love and guilt that I’d buy him pastries—or an early orange from the Mediterranean—or tell him monsters aren’t true.

Police were everywhere. Informers rife. Conspirators bleated under torture. And the most powerful army the world had ever seen was being honed like a knife on the Channel, ready to leap on Britain.

In short, it had been an anxious spring.

After emerging from the convent in April, a royalist tip had led us to a Paris landlord who didn’t ask too many questions. Our lodging was a second-floor apartment in the fashionable Saint-Germain neighborhood. The comtesse had insisted upon such an address to avoid complete humiliation, and it was certainly a notch above my earlier hovel amid the furniture workshops in Saint-Antoine. Perhaps I was making progress after all! Our quarter smelled of flower shops instead of tanneries, and we heard church bells instead of hammers and saws.

Status and price were contingent on how many stairs you had to climb, so we, on the second floor, were middle class in a literal way, paying four hundred francs a month. Above us on the third were a coppersmith with his wife and three noisy adolescent children. Tucked under the rafters were four washerwomen, war widows all, who worked on a laundry barge on the Seine. Once a week we gave them a basket of our clothes to clean. If they teased me for being a handsome and dashing rogue, I tipped them.

Bonaparte was restoring order to street addresses, but his committee hadn’t completed its reports yet, and so we were No. 1,043 rue du Bac. We were hardly secret. All the tenants used the same central stair, so we could hear the steady troop and quarrels of neighbors going up and down, just as they could see and hear us. But there was nothing remarkable about our household, much to the comtesse’s distress, and the presence of my son helped deflect suspicion. Spies don’t take rambunctious children along. We lived in obscurity while tracking the fast-changing political situation. My name, if asked, was John Greenwell of Philadelphia. I was in Paris to foster American trade if it could circumvent the British blockade. Since that was unlikely, it was justifiable to my neighbors that I did little during the day.

Catherine, easily bored, was impatient. “Nobody knows who we are. You should announce yourself as the famed electrician and diplomat, back from new adventures in the Americas with a royalist benefactor. Me.”

“Pride that will jeopardize my family.”

“But as Ethan Gage you would have access to high circles,” she persisted. “We could attend salons and balls together. Astiza could look after Harry.”

Before I was beneath her dignity, and now she wanted me on her arm? “I thought I was a colonial commoner you wanted nothing to do with.”

“I have new respect for you as husband and father.” Her smile was sly.

“You know very well that I’m a struggling husband and a hapless father, since I keep misplacing both wife and son.”

“I’m intrigued that a pretty woman loves you, Ethan. It makes you more attractive to other women’s eyes.”

“It’s not that unlikely, you know. I am amusing.”

“That’s exactly my point.” She touched my hand with dancing fingers. “With my manners and your charm, people might believe we are a real couple, if your wife is careful to hide at home. Just as a strategy.”

Had her opinion turned so much that she was flirting to separate me from my wife? Or was I a temporary toy to provide distraction? Was she an ardent agent, eager for action? Or was she proposing risks she knew I’d never agree to? I admired Catherine for not scuttling straight back to England, but was puzzled by her, too. It was like analyzing a player’s bet in the card game brelan, where one could never be certain if a move was a novice mistake or a clever long game.

“I don’t think my pretty wife would agree to that,” I said. “And celebrities in France have a way of landing in prison or worse. Let’s test the political winds without notoriety. My role as seaborne trader helps explain my exotic-looking wife. You’re swank for a governess, but we can say you lost your fortune in the revolution and that we took pity when we found you stranded in Calais.”

“Pity!”

“Only as a ruse. We’ll write coded messages in sympathetic ink, and await further instructions.”

She sighed, looking bleakly at our modest home. “I long for society.”

“Well, until Napoleon’s overthrow, you just have us.”

And we had her. Catherine believed that high birth made her expert not just on fashion and flirtation, but also on finance, espionage, and child rearing. She chafed under my careful budgeting and treated my wife to unwanted advice.

“Harry is entirely too carefree,” she informed Astiza one day. “Children need discipline. He should be learning his catechism, music, and the names of the kings.”

“Which you can do with your own child, should a man ever give you one,” Astiza replied. Their catty bristling made me edgy. “Horus is my son, Comtesse, not yours.”

“I know you’re trying, but you were raised an Oriental slave. I provide perspective you lack.”

“As I have a husband, a child, and a home—and you do not—perhaps I have perspective that you lack. Here’s my advice: keep your opinions and hands to yourself.”

The comtesse looked stricken. “I am only trying to help.”

“Help with deeds, not words, and maybe we can make this triad work.”

I put in that the boy was doing fine, and was rewarded with looks of annoyance from both of them.

Accordingly, I didn’t mind getting out of the house. It was on one of my strolls that I confirmed Catherine Marceau’s ingenuity.

Against my intention, I was accosted by Edme François Jomard, a companion from Egypt, while shopping for a telescope on the rue Saint-Victor. I didn’t know what I needed to observe, but I thought a spy should have a spyglass, and the British had neglected to provide one.

I was weighing the quality of optics against the size of my purse, wishing for the millionth time that I had access to my swelling England investments, when Jomard touched my shoulder. “Ethan Gage, is that you?”

I jumped. “Greenwell, sir.” Then I turned and recognized my old friend. Jomard was a mathematical wizard who’d led me to the top of the Great Pyramid. “Except to you, Edme. Keep your voice low, please.”

“Mon Dieu, I’d no idea you were in Paris.”

“It’s something of a secret.”

He cocked his head. “But of course. Always attached to one conspiracy or another, aren’t you? What a romp your life is.” He said it lightly. “Are you on a mission for the United States?”

He’d given me an alibi. “Yes. You may know I was involved with negotiations over Louisiana. Now, with war . . .” I shrugged, as if unable to share more information.

“I quite understand. No doubt it involves ladies as well! My own occupation is scholarly; I’m working on presentation of our discoveries in Egypt. A lost world, Ethan, and we’re making new calculations about the pyramids every day. How I long to go back for more measurements! The English block us. Still,

human knowledge will leap when we publish. Savants are thinking of coining a new term, Egypt-ology. Clever, don’t you think?”

“I’m in awe of your intellect, Jomard.”

“But where are you staying? Can you visit?”

“I’m not really here, I told you. Is it possible to keep this encounter quiet?” I glanced about. “It would be a pity to upset affairs of state.”

“But of course! You must be working with Napoleon.”

“Jefferson, actually.” That tidbit seemed innocent enough.

“It’s genius how you insert yourself. Without academic degree, birth, station, appointment, or accomplishment, you remain indispensable. I don’t pretend to understand it, but certainly you’re an inspiration.”

“It’s you who are the vanguard of knowledge.” I put the spyglass down and eyed the door. As much as I’d enjoy chatting about old times, this encounter could spoil everything.

“I suppose you’re rich, Ethan.”

“An investment here or there.”

“Do you need help? I have many contacts.”

“No, I’m fine.” I decided not to mention Astiza or Harry, in order to protect them. “A young woman is sharing my quarters.”

He smiled. “I am not surprised.”

“An aristocrat, actually. A comtesse, if Bonaparte brings back titles from before the revolution. Catherine Marceau must remain as secret as I am.”

“Marceau! But that’s genius. How clever of her.”

“Clever?”

“To use a name wiped out in the Terror.”

“She’s quite real, I assure. More than I can handle at times. Her parents died, but Catherine fled to England and has returned to see to her affairs.”

“So you say?” Jomard was turning the matter over in his mind. “I thought her dead. Did she fool us all? What a happy miracle! And now she’s back? No wonder you want to keep things quiet.”

“Indeed.” I was confused and wary.

“I remember her story of youth and beauty, throttled in her cell.”

“Throttled?”

“There was even a headstone before the cemeteries were emptied into the catacombs. But obviously it was a ruse to smuggle her to freedom.”

Had Catherine survived by faking her own death? Or was the comtesse in my apartment pretending to be someone she was not? “She’s very adroit,” I said, pretending to knowledge I didn’t have.

“Attractive?”

“Bewitching. So please, Jomard, not a word until I complete my assignment for Jefferson. I can succeed only if no one in Paris knows I’m here.”

“Your secrets are safe with me. You were never here, and Catherine was never alive.”