Napoleon's Exile by Patrick Rambaud Read Free Book Online Page A

Désaugiers and Gentil,
The Ogress
, in which the comic actor Tiercelin had triumphed the previous year.
    *
    Octave rested his elbows against the guard-rail of an open window beneath the roofs. By leaning forward he could make out the pinnacles of the Hôtel de Ville that they were about to commandeer. Behind him, La Grange and Morin had finished a quick meal, drinking a mixture of water and vinegar in order to stay sober. The Marquis rose to his feet, stretching himself.
    â€˜Let’s go and get some sleep,’ he said, ‘even if it’s only for a couple of hours. We’ll need our strength at dawn.’ La Grange withdrew into the adjacent room, and Morin into his bedroom, at the end of a corridor; Octave would make do with a sofa.
    Left alone in the drawing-room, he fetched his binoculars from the pocket of his frock-coat, unfolded them and trained his gaze on the army encampments. Very early in the morning those men would be re-forming into columns and leaving Paris for the west, but it was also possible that their officers would lead them to Fontainebleau to place them under the Emperor’s orders. Octave wondered what his own fate would be. If the royalists, with their manoeuvring and collusion, succeeded in installing Louis XVIII on the throne, then emigrants would be returning from London, people who had known the real Blacé, and when that happened Octave would have to flee the capital. Why didn’t he leave that very night? He had just enough time to run along the rue Saint-Sauveur, change his clothes and his hairstyle, and pocket the gold packed away in the luggage of the cavalryman whose name and wig he had borrowed.
    Octave was determined to get to Fontainebleau and meet the Duke of Bassano, his employer, but first he could scupper part of the royalist plan by eliminating two of the most active conspirators: La Grange and Morin were sleeping sweetly a few metres away from him; if he killed them, they wouldn’t be able to stir up any more trouble among the functionaries of the Hôtel de Ville and the town halls. Octave took his cane in one hand, a candlestick in the other, and crept carefully into the office where the Marquis lay like a recumbent figure on a tomb, his mouth open and his hands on his belly. Setting the candlestick on a chest of drawers, and gripping his cane in both hands, he was about to bring the latter crashing down when the Marquis opened an eye and said in a cool and sonorous voice, ‘Were you looking for a blanket?’
    â€˜Yes...’
    â€˜Can’t you get to sleep?’
    â€˜Neither can you.’
    â€˜I’m resting, and I suggest you do the same: we have a hard day ahead of us.’
    â€˜I know ...’
    â€˜And I know what your problem is, Blacé, you think too much.’
    â€˜You think so?’
    â€˜Don’t worry, my friend, everything will come to pass as we have decided it should. God will protect us.’
    Discountenanced by La Grange’s natural manner and naïve trust, Octave abandoned his murderous project. Why had he failed? With one well-aimed blow he could have split the Marquis’s head open, without giving him a chance to utter a cry and alert his accomplice; after that Octave could have executed Morin. But he felt tired, and perhaps he really was thinking too much; he no longer had the killer instinct his profession required.
    Yawning, Octave decided to delay his departure - anticipating the muddle of the next few days, he would wait for, and seize, the next opportunity - and looked back down at the Seine. Firelight, far away on the left bank, past the Faubourg Saint-Denis: had some irregular Cossacks taken advantage of the truce to enter the city unimpeded?
    Octave was mistaken about the nature of the flames that licked the court of the Imperial residence in the Invalides. In actual fact, Marshal Sérurier, the commander of the Parisian National Guard, had ordered the trophies stored in the