Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess Page A

justice and mercy.
    “W hy you , why do you tell me this?” This was the first moment, the refusal to believe what he knew he was all too ready to believe, because that would be an end of doubt, and the turning on the teller of the incredible believable. But it couldn’t be, they were cut off, there were no letters from France.
    “This,” Junot said, showing it. “Some got through.” Bonaparte froze him to a picture, the sort of thing that her young man Gros would paint, the sand-swirls frozen behind him, the merciless blue that the sun rent. The thing to remember, the terrible thing that was not so terrible.
    “My brother Joseph,” he said. “Said something. I took little notice. To humor him. I had the man posted.” The sun and desert drank his rage like a mere tear, unimpressed. The Sphinx, Nelson, was couched at ease. “The whole damned race of ladies’ men, fops and damned coxcombs, effeminate dandies, playing at soldiers. Oh God.” And then at Junot: “Why you , why do you have to tell me? Jealousy, is that what it is? You’ve ridden in coaches with her, you’ve stayed in inns.”
    “I don’t under—”
    “There was a certain champagne breakfast you gave and the punch you made from what you called a Creole recipe—”
    “That was not—”
    “Given to you by a Creole lady, wink wink. She put you off, is that it? One of the few she didn’t fancy?”
    “It was General Murat, not I.”
    “Murat too. Let us have them all in. Bourrienne! Bourrienne!” And Bourrienne his friend and secretary came stumbling over the sand. “Do you know, does everybody know?”
    “Know?”
    “That your commander-in-chief is a damned cuckold. The cuckold is always the last to know, isn’t he? Can you imagine anything more more more bizarre ? The Sphinx and the pyramids and the leagues and leagues of emptiness are witnesses to the denouement of a Paris farce. Buonaparte the cuckold. Oh Christ, oh Jesus.” He had gone back to the old form of his name.
    “You had to know,” Junot said, “sooner or later.”
    “Sooner or later, yes, when there’s no action to be taken. There’s no running to get a divorce here. But I’ll be back, by Jesus. The faithless bitch. But I’ll kill the lot of them, the impotent Paris swine of bastard pansies. I’ll lead the army in, I’ll make a man’s town out of it. Oh God, oh God God God.”
    “Women,” Bourrienne said gently, “are more open to calumnies than men. With a man it is never a calumny. A married lady with her husband at the wars—she has to have an escort. We don’t have purdah in a country where we boast of equality. Who has seen Madame Bonaparte with more than a mere escort?”
    “Don’t you give me a sermon, Bourrienne. The world cries cuckold and the world’s right. You know this, Bourrienne, you told me nothing. Is that loyalty, is that friendship?”
    “It’s not my duty to retail calumny. Even if it were a duty, I’d not choose a moment when you’re six hundred leagues from France.”
    “If that,” Junot said, his voice thickening, “is meant to be a stab at myself—”
    “It is you, if I may say so, who do the stabbing.”
    “I insist that you retract that. My motive was one of love, of duty, my heart bled—”
    “This is the end, what more is there?” Bonaparte shouted to the Nelson-Sphinx. “This is a great lesson, about the true meaning of honor and glory. Well, if she can fuck, I can fuck too.” Bourrienne wrinkled at the coarseness. That was his race, but it was also in his race to take the knife to her, swim the Mediterranean with the knife in his teeth. But he had read Othello , he had sometimes written laughing letters to her about the jealousy of Othello, he would not now be Othello. Enlightenment, reason, that sort of thing. “I loved her. Too much.” He was reasoning, sorting; he did not say not wisely but too well. “You don’t know what it’s like, you damned womanizers, to love a woman like that. I gave her my