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

youth, everything. And now she gives her her—” Delicacy like a sudden breeze. “—to these mincing coxcombs with their sweet red tongues. I worshipped the bitch. But that’s the only way to take them—bitches. Take them as a dog takes a bitch. Fuck and fuck off.” He turned again on Junot. “True, is it? You’re sure it’s true? Let me see that letter.”
    “With respect, it’s a personal letter. What it says is that she went to Plombières—”
    “The waters are great for pregnancy, that’s the damned silly superstition. Go on, go on.”
    “And they stayed at the same inns on the way back. And she had him several times staying the night at—the address is here, you see—6 rue Chantereine.”
    “Divorce,” he nodded. “A stinking great divorce. But first I’ll show her. I’ll show the whole of Paris.”
    “We’re cut off from Paris,” Bourrienne said.
    “I want a woman. I want women. Not these pox-ridden bints. I’ll have that one who shouldn’t be here. That dragoon’s wife. No wives—that was the order. Well, he must take his punishment.” He saw that he must seem already to be more cheerful, so he cried out: “Betrayal, betrayal—the pattern of history. Read Plutarch, read Suetonius. But men must accept their destiny and, in a sense, glory in it. There is a great lesson here in Egypt, with Antony and the wiles of that snake of a woman. And there is that martyr of Alexandria, named, like myself, Napoleon. But it was not a woman who betrayed him, it was the stupid, the faithless, the mob. We cling to our faith, all of us.” It was as if Junot and Bourrienne also had recently been betrayed. “The faith of the disregarded maker, the builder of civilizations. That bitch, that unutterable wretched treacherous harlot. Oh, I’d give anything for it not to be true. But I won’t be the laughingstock of Paris. I’ll write to my brother Joseph. I’ll tell him to have the divorce pronounced.”
    “Blockade. Interception. Cut off.”
    “Some things go through. Like this dagger, this letter of Junot’s. But treachery has wings, that’s well known. Wings, wings.”
    He conquers first, then seeks to civilize.
    With speed he bids an Institut arise.
    Where once the perfum’d houris of the Turk
    Seduced to play, the savants set to work.
Forgotten now the jeer that flaw’d the air:
“Let ass and scholar to the midst repair
And skulk and shiver in th’ embattled square.”
    Dogs of Pekin the soldiers term them now,
    Pets of a general with a scholar’s brow.
    See how these dogs are swift upon the scent
    Of Egypt’s lore, on tempting tracks intent.
    Berthollet broods upon the natron lakes
    And tomes upon their chimick wonder makes;
    Saint-Hilaire snatches at the crocodile,
    The ostrich, and the fishes of the Nile,
    Whence the polypterus he brings to view:
    A finny monster but mammalian too.
    See Caffarelli wooden-legg’d advance
    (The homesick sigh: “He has one foot in France”)
    Seeking upon the Rouge Mer ’s littoral
    The ghost of an impossible canal.
    By hot Rosetta Lancret finds a stone
    Variously inscribed, which may, he thinks, make known,
    Spite of the pedant’s scoffs, th’ unlearned’s sniffs,
    The secrets of the Pharaohs’ hieroglyphs.
    Meantime the workshops buzz with useful toil.
    A lighted city drinks a cleaner Nile.
    Conté’s balloons the turban’d mob astound,
    And the sharp surgeon probes the fetid wound.
Extortion wilts to hear clear Justice call,
Her canno n breach the tyrant’s crumbling wall,
And keen-eyed Alexander watches all.
    “S ultan El Kebir ,” he announced himself, coming into her room in robe and turban. “If they call me Sultan, I must dress like one. Tallien says not in the streets or at the Divan. I must be a sober Frenchman, he says. But here, with my little houri—”
    Bellitote, little houri, was at once briskly assaulted by her Sultan, whose dagger, loose in its sheath, clanked gently up and down in time to his action. Well, if he had been