The Truth is Dead

  The doctor sighed even louder. “Dreadful what?” he asked.

  “Rheum! My nose. Sniffles and what all. And I have come down without a kerchief. Bertrand, lend me yours, will you?”

  “Hmm, yes, of course,” said Bertrand, who, rummaging in his pocket, pulled out not only a crumpled handkerchief, but a small smelly fish that fell neatly onto the middle of the card table.

  Napoleon began to make strange strangled snuffling sounds, which is what he did to show he was laughing. The doctor sighed, the grand marshal rolled his eyes, and only Bertrand had the sense to start laughing too.

  “Oh, very good, sir,” he said. “Very funny. Indeed.”

  It wasn’t quite enough, and Napoleon stomped away again in a worse mood than ever.

  “Bloody, bloody hell,” said Bertrand. ‘What are we going to do? That man once ruled half the known world…”

  “Perhaps,” said the doctor, as if he knew more than he did, “this mysterious visitor will lift his spirits?”

  Bertrand turned to the rain-lashed window. “Perhaps. If he ever gets here.”

  “Who is he anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Napoleon refers to him only as ‘L’.”

  “What kind of bloody name is that?”

  Bertrand almost smiled. “It’s the name of someone who doesn’t exist.”

  But that evening, the rain suddenly vanished as if by an act of God, and the stars were reflected on the bay, which was as calm as a bird bath. Napoleon stood at his window, gazing out into the darkness, when the elder valet appeared.

  “He will be here tonight, sir. But rather late.”

  “Very well, very well. Get them to put out a cold supper. Light a fire. And then everyone can go to bed.”

  He said it as if he were saying “Go to hell”, but the valet merely bowed, grateful for the rest of the evening off.

  Two hours later, the Emperor of Elba sat in near darkness in the long dining room, at one head of the table. Before him a place was set, matched at the far end of the table. Between the two plates lay fifteen feet of cold cuts, jellies, egg dishes, cheeses, breads, wine and water.

  He was thinking about his women. His wives, Joséphine and Marie Louise, now both gone; and Marie Walewska, his Polish mistress, perhaps the only one who’d ever really loved him.

  There was a tap at the door. A footman opened it without waiting to be called, and then ducked out of sight, leaving a tall caped figure standing in the shadows of the doorway.

  Napoleon rose slowly to his feet. “So,” he said. “It is true.” Then a doubt crossed his mind. “I cannot see you there. Come in. Come and sit down.”

  The figure moved into the room, automatically closing the door behind him. Napoleon noticed the action. Good! This is a man with a cautious mind, he thought.

  The figure moved slowly down the room, passing the five-sticked candelabra in the middle of the table, giving the Emperor a chance to see if he’d been fooled. He made a quick calculation in his head. My God! Had it been twenty years? That would make him…

  “Seventy? No! Seventy-one.”

  The figure stopped in its slow progress along the length of the room. “Correct.”

  His voice was as Napoleon remembered, precise and economic, though you could hear the extra years in it now.

  “Please,” Napoleon said, not a word he had much use for, “please, sit down.”

  “Thank you, I shall, for I am an old man.”

  “You were old when they killed you.”

  “Only six years older than you are now. Does that feel old to you?” There was bitterness in the man’s voice; anger at the waste. “I was at my prime. Not physically. But my work, my great work, was just beginning.”

  Napoleon felt a shiver travel down his spine. “Lavoisier,” he breathed, “it is truly you.”

  “At your service.”

  “What did the judge say at your trial? The old fool! Something about ‘We have no need—’”

  “‘—of genius.’ Yes, I have heard those words in my mind every day. Every day, for twenty years, Napoleon. But here I am. And in all those twenty years, I never had the chance to thank you. I suppose I should.”

  Napoleon felt the remark cut him. “You suppose?” he said. “Most men would be grateful for their lives. Are you not?”

  “For my life, yes. Thank you. But what kind of life is worth living? I have spent twenty years on the run; I have lived in sixteen different countries in that time. I have not put one foot in France since the day after my ‘execution’. Your man smuggled me to the coast, to England first. It was clear I could not stay there long. Then to Ireland. My God! What an awful wet place that was. Two years! Then back to the Continent, always moving when the rumours started again, heading into more and more remote regions. And my work! Once, I had three laboratories in Paris. For these twenty years I have dragged my laboratory behind me in horse and cart, through the mud and snows of Europe. What have I done in that time, apart from spend the fortune you sent me away with? Almost nothing! So, my Emperor, you will forgive me if sometimes I wish that I had died under the guillotine that day, instead of that poor stooge you disguised as me.”

  He fell silent, the rapid fire of his speech having spent itself, and coughed gently into an old silk handkerchief.

  Napoleon sat open-mouthed; he was not used to being spoken to in this way. Even during the retreat from Moscow, not one of his generals would have dared be so bold.

  “Did I force you to live?” he asked quietly, fingering the chain of the small black bag at his neck. “I suppose in a way I did, for who can really take their own life? But what could I have done? I was not Emperor then. I was a general with money and some power. It was as much as I could do to save a man whose skills I knew France could not afford to lose. I got you out. I gave you money. And then I never heard from you again. For five years I had my spies hunt for you. I needed you! But you were nowhere. I became Emperor and my dominions covered almost every country in Europe. But even in those … other countries, Britain and Russia, I had my spies. And no one could find you. After ten years I believed you were dead. How could I have helped you then?”

  “And excuse me,” he continued, waving a hand at the darkened room, “but as you see, life has been difficult lately. I was betrayed! By fortune and the stupidity of my generals. I chased from one end of Europe to the other, doing what no one could do but me: Egypt, Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland. And then came Russia and the bloody Czar. He needed to be taught a lesson, and by God, I intended to. The largest army ever to walk the earth! Half a million men, Lavoisier, can you imagine? Half a million men walked into Russia and I won. I won. We took Moscow, Alexander scurried around like the idiot he is, and yet it all came to nothing. I was defeated in the end, but not by Russia. By the weather. The winter!

  “My God, Lavoisier, you have never seen anything like that. You, the great scientist! In all your wanderings around Europe, you never saw what I saw in Russia in 1812. We captured Moscow, and then? What? I didn’t have the men to hold it, and I … may have hesitated. We pulled out of the city, putting it to the torch, only to find the Czar’s men coming at us from the south. We engaged, it was bloody, and then we began the long walk out of Russia, but the winter beat us to it. And the cold… Holy Christ, the cold. The snows came early, they said, and caught us while we were still halfway to Vilna. The temperature dropped and kept dropping. Forty below zero! For three weeks.

  “You have never seen anything like that, Lavoisier, with all your science. You should have been there, to learn what the cold will do to a man who tries to keep walking until he freezes on his feet. There were those who made the mistake of taking their boots off; they would never get them back on again, and frostbite took their toes in days. There were those who lay down in the cold and went to sleep; but the ones who kept walking were worse. Their faces! Their faces were red, flushed with blood, as if their veins had frozen and blocked, but still they walked until their noses and ears bled. I saw tears
of blood, Lavoisier – is such a thing possible? Yes, I saw it. And still they would walk until they froze where they stood. And if they made it to the bivouac each evening, still they were not safe. I saw men walk straight into a campfire and lie down, oblivious to the fact they were burning to death. And no one tried to stop them. There was precious little firewood to be had…”

  He stopped, the force of his vitriol seeping away among the awful memories.

  “And then, just before they sent me to this prison island, one of my spies heard an interesting story about a scientist in England who had a trace of a French accent…”

  Lavoisier inclined his head slightly. He didn’t mind the Emperor’s rantings. He knew him of old, and he had of course heard of his developments.

  “Et voilà! Your servant, ready to do your bidding.”

  “At a price.”

  “Naturally.”

  Napoleon thumped the table. “Dammit! This is France we’re talking about.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Lavoisier said. “It’s you we’re talking about.”

  Napoleon stood. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. I am going to bed. A room has been prepared for you. Eat something if you will.”

  Lavoisier stood. “Thank you, no. I am not hungry.”

  Over breakfast two days later, the two men met again. Lavoisier had spent his time supervising the transportation of what passed for his laboratory from the docks up to the house. Napoleon had turned over an unused kitchen to the stranger, with the strictest instructions that no one was to enter the room or disturb him in any way.

  “What is it that you want?” Lavoisier asked, though he had more than a rough idea.

  Napoleon regarded the face opposite him. Now impossibly wrinkled, its characteristic almond shape, long nose and wide eyes were still the same as ever, though there was a touch of death in those eyes that had not been there before. Lavoisier, for his part, was studying the eyes of the Emperor, thinking that even when he smiled, there was always the look of death about him.

  “When I knew you first,” Napoleon said, “I was a student at the École. You were ending your time at the Royal Gunpowder Administration. Was it 1787? The accident?”

  “It was 1788,” Lavoisier said testily.

  “What happened? I heard you were experimenting with some new explosives.”

  Lavoisier said nothing.

  “They must have been … efficacious. Mademoiselle Chevraud was killed in the explosion, was she not?”

  Lavoisier had been goaded enough. “Yes,” he spluttered. “And that fool Le Tors. He would never listen to my instructions. And yes, it was a new gunpowder I had developed. Lethal. It was absolutely lethal, very unstable at the time. I had struck on using a different potassium salt than is usually used. The nitrate of potassium is the usual component of gunpowder, but I was using potassium muriate. Twice as powerful. I believe it liberates more oxygen in the combustion process, and as my early work on oxygen proved, this gas is—”

  “Yes, yes, very well,” snapped Napoleon. “I know you can kill people. My question to you is this. Can you manufacture it again? Could you make, for example, enough for two hundred thousand men?”

  Lavoisier smiled. “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth. Of course I can, given enough time, and money, but you have a garrison here of what? Five hundred men? What do you want with such large amounts of gunpowder?”

  “Six hundred,” said Napoleon pedantically, “but the weaponry is not for Elba. Come with me.”

  He stood and walked over to a small door that led off the side of the dining room. Lavoisier followed the Emperor along ornate corridors and up narrow stairs to a small study on the first floor. Napoleon fiddled with the blinds, trying to shed a little more light into the room, in the centre of which stood a large square table, the entire surface of which was covered with a detailed map of Europe.

  “The best my map-makers ever made,” he said proudly. “Come and look, come and look.”

  They wandered around the map, admiring its beautiful draughtsmanship, its colour and detail.

  Lavoisier gazed at the map, almost speechless. A tear formed in one eye. “How much of it I saw! But how much still to see!” His hand stroked the outline of the French coast.

  “You will see France again,” Napoleon said, as if soothing a child. His eyes scoured the map greedily. “In the spring we will leave this rock, you and I, and as many men as I can muster from Elba, from Sicily, from Corsica. We will land on the French coast, somewhere near Antibes, and then we will strike inland. We will march this way, through the Bas Alps, to Grenoble, thence to Rives and Lyons. Then Paris. We will arrive there without firing a shot. Undoubtedly on the way we will meet some force sent to intercept us, and I will throw my coat open and say, ‘Here is your Emperor’s breast. Kill me if you will! If not, follow me to glory!’ and the men will all fall on their knees and shout, ‘Vive L’Empereur!’ They will love me as they did before and we will depose the puppet king. Then the British and the Russians will start to fear me, and will send forces to engage me.

  “Most likely I will march north-east to Brussels, and battle will be met.” He pointed at the map idly, his finger drifting, his mind playing out the military encounters like a game of chess. “Maybe here, at Wavre, or Mont-Saint-Jean, or at some godforsaken village near by, like this one, Waterloo.”

  “You dream!” Lavoisier said.

  “No, I know these things. This is my world and I will win these battles, with the help of your world. You will make enough of this gunpowder of yours to blow the British into the sea!”

  “No,” said Lavoisier simply, “I won’t.”

  “You will.”

  “No,” Lavoisier repeated, “I won’t. As it happens, I have already sold the recipe to the British.”

  “What!” roared Napoleon. He thundered round the table and roared at Lavoisier again. “Treachery?”

  The old man held up a hand. He was not in the business of winning arguments by shouting. Napoleon fell silent.

  “I had to make some money somehow. I ran out of what you gave me ten years ago. Anyway, the gunpowder is lethal. Impressive in a demonstration, maybe, but impractical in the field. Now, keep your peace and come with me. It is my turn to show you something.”

  The old scientist led the way down through the bowels of the house to his improvised laboratory, where he swung the door aside to allow the Emperor in. Napoleon was still on the edge of anger, but he was impressed nonetheless.

  “You have been busy,” he remarked, gazing at the apparatus that cluttered every surface and most of the floor.

  Lavoisier shrugged. “This was why you kept me alive, was it not? So that this would not be lost. Let me show you something.” He fumbled through a sheaf of papers clumsily, until he found what he was looking through, and handed it to Napoleon. “Did you ever see this?”

  “Never. What is it?”

  “It is a machine I designed, built and tested, forty years ago. It is called the Burning Glass.”

  The drawing showed a flat wooden wagon, thirty feet long, upon one end of which was mounted a huge circular glass object, a lens. It rested between two hefty metal screws which seemed intended to facilitate vertical movement. Ten feet away, and again on an adjustable track, was a smaller lens, but still perhaps four feet across. Various other handles and levers were fixed here and there.

  “What does it do?”

  “It annihilates things. It incinerates them, using the rays of the sun. It makes them catch fire, sometimes even explode.”

  Napoleon was impressed, but Lavoisier waved his hand.

  “In practical terms it is useless as a weapon, unless you can contrive to get your enemy to place his head on the focus block here. Then you could fry his brains, but only an enemy with no brains at all would be stupid enough to get so close. Not only that, but it is cumbersome: very, very heavy and hard to manoeuvre. Can you imagine that in the mud of the battlefield? We abandoned it for anything other than
scientific use.”

  “So why show it to me?”

  “I am trying to educate you, to teach you something of the methods of the natural philosopher, to show you the agonizingly slow steps he takes towards his goal.”

  “Show me the goal,” said Napoleon.

  Lavoisier sighed. “Very well.”

  He turned to the table behind him, and with a flourish more befitting a magician than a scientist, whipped a covering cloth away to reveal a board six feet long, upon which stood an array of mirrors and lenses, all securely bolted to the base, but all free to pivot vertically.

  “This…” Lavoisier said, then stopped. He glanced out of the kitchen window. “For a man such as yourself, it will be easier to show you. Here, you will have to help me with this. I cannot lift it. Call someone, but someone you can trust.”

  Napoleon nodded and turned to the kitchen steps. “Bertrand!”

  The Burning Glass stood on a small table in the courtyard. Bertrand kept asking questions but Napoleon ignored him, occasionally waving him back a few feet. The Emperor himself hovered at Lavoisier’s shoulder, while the old man fiddled and adjusted and calibrated and estimated.

  “Very well,” Lavoisier said finally. “It is not perhaps as perfect as I would like it, but not bad after six months at sea. Very well. So, you will observe that today is a sunny day. A winter’s day, but the sun is shining, yes? Now…” He gazed around the courtyard. “Behold the lemon tree over there. If you please.”

  Napoleon and Bertrand did as they were told and turned to watch the innocent little tree growing at the far side of the three-sided courtyard. Beyond, the land fell away from the house, down to the town, down to the sea. Lavoisier made one last adjustment, then flicked a mirror so that it faced the sun directly. Instantly a focused ray of brilliant white light shot across the courtyard, where it struck the tree, which after four or five seconds of smouldering burst into flames.

  A heavenly citrus scent wafted across on the gentle breeze. Napoleon’s nostrils twitched, and he knew it was the smell of victory.

  “How far can that thing reach?” he said quietly.