Chapter 4: Before the First Consul Wakes

Scene 1

The clock in the interior passage struck three. The sound reached the antechamber late and muffled, as though the stone had swallowed most of it.

Barbé-Marbois closed the door behind him with his own hand—not trusting the latch to the footman, who stood against the far wall with the practised vacancy of a man paid to neither see nor remember. A guttered candle on the writing table threw its light across perhaps half the room and left the rest to suggestion. Two gilded chairs. A stone floor that sent cold upward through the thin soles of his evening shoes until it settled in the bones of his feet.

He did not sit.

Standing was better. To be found in a chair when Talleyrand arrived would concede something he could not afford—the posture of a man kept waiting, which was not distinct from the truth, but the gap between truth and its appearance was the only ground worth holding at this hour.

Six pages inside his coat. He could feel the memorandum's edge against his ribs with each breath—the document that argued, in figures admitting no ambiguity, that Louisiana must be sold to the Americans before the British seized it by force, and that the Treasury must direct the transaction. He had dispatched it to the secretariat four days ago by a channel that circumvented the Foreign Ministry entirely. If Napoleon had read it and disagreed, then Barbé-Marbois had declared open war on the most dangerous man in the Consulate for nothing. If Talleyrand had intercepted it, the pages were already ash, and this summons was the prelude to his destruction.

Four days of performing ordinariness. Quarterly accounts. Warrants for naval stores. Dinner at the customary hour, his secretary permitted to observe him eating it.

A draught from somewhere found the candle flame. It bent, recovered.

Footsteps in the corridor—not the footman's shuffle but something more deliberate, a gait that composed itself for observation even in an empty passage. Barbé-Marbois turned to face the door and dropped his hand from the table's edge. The footman's eyes did not move, but his breathing shortened—a detail so slight that only a man already listening for betrayal would have caught it.

Talleyrand entered without haste.

He absorbed the room in a single glance—the guttered candle, the table, the Treasury Minister standing behind it as though it were a fortification—and permitted a small expression of pleasure to settle across his features.

'Minister.' He inclined his head the precise degree that courtesy required between equals.

'Citizen Minister.'

Talleyrand moved to the nearer gilded chair, considered it, declined it—the leg was chipped, a conclusion he reached by instinct rather than inspection. He positioned himself beside the window instead, where the darkness outside the glass offered him a background that revealed nothing.

'A singular hour for the First Consul to require our company.'

'He keeps his own hours.'

'Just so.' The pause that followed carried its own weight. 'I confess I had not anticipated the coincidence of our summons. The matters touching Louisiana are, after all, rather dispersed across several portfolios.' He said dispersed with the ease of a man describing a pleasant variety of terrain—as though the dispersal were a natural feature of the landscape rather than something his ministry had engineered over eighteen months.

Barbé-Marbois let the silence hold for three beats—then broke it himself, before it could be filled.

'You will have prepared something for this morning.'

The directness was a calculated offence. One did not ask Talleyrand what he had prepared; one waited for him to reveal it, at the moment of his choosing. To ask was to deny him the advantage of timing—and to signal that the question was not a question at all.

Talleyrand's chin lifted a fraction. 'A preliminary framework. How any Louisiana matter might be situated within the existing web of our relations with Spain and Britain. The diplomatic preparation such a question requires.' He said preliminary with the ease of a man placing a piece on a board he considers already won. 'It seemed useful to have that in his hands before this morning.'

The footman's breathing had returned to its former rhythm. He was very good.

Barbé-Marbois reached into his coat.

He drew out the memorandum—six pages, sealed with the Treasury's mark, his own name on the cover—and set it on the table. He smoothed it flat with two fingers. The seal had been broken and reapplied; the wax bore a faint ridge where a second pressing had overlaid the first. The date on the cover—five days prior—would tell Talleyrand precisely how long the Treasury had been conducting its business by routes that did not pass through the Rue du Bac.

Candlelight caught the seal.

Four seconds of silence.

Talleyrand crossed the room. He did not ask permission. He lifted the memorandum, turned it, and examined the seal with the unhurried attention of a man reading a letter addressed to someone else. His thumb found the ridge where the wax had been reapplied. He set the document down.

'The Treasury's perspective is always valuable in these matters.' His voice was unchanged. His thumb, pressed flat against his thigh, was not.

'The figures require no perspective. They require only reading.'

'Figures.' He let the word sit, as though tasting it. Outside, beyond the palace wall, a horse shifted in its traces—the sound small and flat against the stone. 'The question of Louisiana is in its essential nature a diplomatic question. The cession from Spain, the European implications—these require the Foreign Ministry's direction if they are to be handled without giving offence where offence cannot be afforded.' His tone shifted—collegial, almost confiding. 'I say this not to diminish the Treasury's contribution, which is indispensable, but to suggest that the manner of the thing's presentation to the courts of Europe is not a question of revenue.' He let his gaze rest on the memorandum. 'I trust you will not find it irregular if I mention to him that I reviewed the Treasury's analysis before this conference. So that he is not presented with two documents in apparent contradiction.'

Barbé-Marbois stepped forward and placed his hand flat on the memorandum.

'He has already read it. The seal tells you as much.' He held the Foreign Minister's gaze. 'If you wish to inform him that you have also read it, that is your affair. But if you attempt to amend this document's conclusions before it enters that room—or to represent its contents as something they are not—I will make that attempt known. Not to him. To the Moniteur.'

The threat was absurd. No minister leaked to the Moniteur and survived. But the absurdity was the point—it told Talleyrand that Barbé-Marbois was operating beyond the range of ordinary caution, which meant he was either desperate or certain, and the Foreign Minister could not yet determine which.

The quality of Talleyrand's stillness altered—not dramatically, not visibly to a casual observer, but in the way a body of water changes when the wind drops: the surface the same, the depth suddenly apparent.

'I see.' A pause, measured and deliberate. 'Then we shall let the First Consul determine whose counsel prevails.'

The footman turned his head a fraction toward the inner door. 'He will receive you now, citizens.'

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Scene 2

Tallow. Wet wool. Beneath both, the close sour heat of a body that had not slept—the animal warmth of a man burning through the night on his own reserves, the particular sharpness of exertion dried and dried again.

Napoleon stood at the central table with his back to the door, one hand pressed flat against the Gulf Coast. He did not turn.

Maps covered everything. The Caribbean pinned open with inkwells. The Mississippi Valley in a broad brown line someone had reinforced with a second stroke of the pen. Candles in clusters rather than rows—placed for utility, not ceremony—each illuminating one coast or one river mouth while leaving the spaces between in darkness.

Barbé-Marbois positioned himself two paces behind Talleyrand's left shoulder. If Napoleon had read the memorandum and rejected its premise, then the Treasury Minister had placed himself in opposition to the Foreign Ministry and the First Consul simultaneously. There would be no ministry to return to. A provincial appointment. Or nothing.

Napoleon spoke without turning. 'Saint-Domingue is finished.'

'Fewer than eight thousand effective men.' Barbé-Marbois stepped forward, past Talleyrand, to the table's near edge. 'The dispatch from Cap-Français arrived Tuesday. The fever has done what the insurgents could not accomplish alone.'

'The fever and the insurgents together have done what I permitted.' Napoleon turned. His face was greyish in the candlelight, the skin beneath his eyes carrying the discolouration of a man who has been awake since midnight. 'Leclerc had his instructions. He executed them imperfectly.'

A candle guttered. Recovered.

'Without Saint-Domingue, Louisiana is a corridor without walls.' His hand moved across the table—tracing, as though touch gave him information the eye could not supply. 'A thousand leagues of river and no garrison to hold it. The British fleet at sea by June.' His hand stopped. 'I will not give England the Mississippi. I would sooner sell it.'

The word dropped into the room.

Talleyrand moved first. He placed himself at the near corner of the map table, between Napoleon and the door, so that any man addressing the First Consul must address him also. 'The alienation of Louisiana is not a bilateral question. Spain transferred the territory under conditions that implicate the courts of Madrid and London both. Any instrument of sale will require diplomatic preparation of some delicacy.' He drew a folded paper from his coat and set it squarely atop the Mississippi Valley, covering the river's mouth. 'I have prepared a memorandum of the sequence required. Communications with Madrid first—a matter of some weeks—so that what is concluded between France and the United States does not become the occasion for a Spanish remonstrance that clouds the title. Without that preparation, any instrument we sign may prove unenforceable.'

Barbé-Marbois watched the paper settle atop the map. If Napoleon nodded—if he said yes, prepare the ground with Madrid—then the Treasury would be reduced to providing sums in support of Talleyrand's direction. The sale, when concluded, would bear Talleyrand's name. And the British would not wait for Madrid's reply. By the time the Foreign Ministry's diplomatic sequence had produced its first communication, the Channel squadron would be at sea.

'What will the Americans pay?'

Napoleon was looking at Barbé-Marbois. Not at Talleyrand. At Barbé-Marbois.

The question demanded a number—delivered in the tone of a man who has already done his own reckoning and wants to know whether his minister has done the same.

Barbé-Marbois set his memorandum beside Talleyrand's paper and placed one finger on the map, on the river's mouth, just below the Foreign Minister's document.

'Sixty million francs for the territory. A further twenty millions to liquidate American claims arising from the maritime depredations. Eighty millions in total, the claims handled separately so that the Americans may present the territorial purchase to their legislature without encumbrance.' He did not lift his finger. 'Monroe is at sea. He reaches Le Havre within a fortnight. The principal articles can be concluded within three weeks of his arrival. The instrument signed before the end of April.'

He paused. Then he said what the calendar required him to say.

'Delay for Madrid, and we do not delay for weeks. We delay until the Channel squadron is in the Caribbean and the question is no longer ours to decide. There will not be a second opportunity.'

Napoleon looked down at the two documents lying side by side on the map.

'Their minister's instructions,' Talleyrand said—his voice recovered, the register of a man making a reasonable observation—'extend to the purchase of New Orleans and the Floridas. Not to a continental transaction. Before a figure of that order can be presented, there must be—'

'Monroe is at sea.' Napoleon picked up an inkwell and set it down three inches to the left, on the river's western bank, directly atop Talleyrand's paper. The ink inside shifted audibly. 'He will have broader instructions than Livingston.'

'We cannot assume—'

'I do not assume. I calculate.'

He held Talleyrand's gaze. Then he turned.

'You lived in America. You know these people.'

'I do.'

'Talleyrand knows them also—but Talleyrand knows too many people, and some of them have competing interests in this matter.' He did not look at the Foreign Minister when he said it—the words were clipped, final, the kind that close a door without slamming it. 'Four weeks. Can you conclude it?'

The wicks were beginning to char. A thin thread of black smoke rose from the nearest cluster and drifted across the map, across the Gulf Coast, across the territory that was, in this room and at this hour, ceasing to be French.

'Four weeks is sufficient, if the Americans accept the principle at the first conference.' He allowed himself that much. 'Jefferson wrote to Livingston eighteen months ago. The minister knows what his government wants.'

'He wants the Mississippi.' Napoleon said it the way a man states a fact about terrain. 'Give him the Mississippi. Give him everything west of it.' A gesture—almost impatient—dismissing the question of boundaries as a matter for clerks. 'I want this concluded before the British understand what they have lost. You will see Livingston directly. Not through channels. Directly.'

'Yes.'

'The Foreign Ministry'—and here, at last, he turned to Talleyrand—'will be informed when there is something to communicate to the courts of Europe.'

Talleyrand received this with no alteration of expression. The candlelight found the planes of his face and found nothing there that had not been placed there deliberately.

'Of course.'

Napoleon had already turned back to his maps.

'Go.'

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Scene 3

The grey came up while no one was watching.

Not light exactly—a diminishment of dark. The garden below the window acquiring edges, the bare lindens resolving from black to charcoal against a sky the colour of old pewter. The cold coffee on the side table sat untouched in its cups, and the room smelled of wax and exhaustion, and the interview was over, and Barbé-Marbois had won, and the winning tasted of nothing at all.

He released the back of the chair and flexed his fingers against his thigh. The knuckles ached. He did not know how long he had been holding on.

Talleyrand had not moved from his position near the door. He stood with his weight on his good leg, his ruined foot angled slightly behind him, his face composed into an expression of such perfect equanimity that it could only be the product of sustained and furious effort.

'There remains a matter of some procedural delicacy.'

His voice was measured, almost regretful—the tone of a man raising an inconvenient truth he would have preferred to leave undisturbed.

'Mr. Livingston has conducted his representations, these many months, through my ministry. He knows no other channel. To redirect him now, without preparation—without, one might say, the diplomatic courtesy of an explanation—risks communicating to the Americans that the French government is not of a single mind. Which would embolden Livingston to press for terms below the figure just named.' A pause, brief and precise. 'It would be a simple matter to route the American minister's initial enquiries through the established office. Merely as a formality.'

Somewhere in the garden, a bird made a single exploratory sound and then thought better of it.

Barbé-Marbois did not answer him. He turned to Napoleon, who had not moved from the window.

'If I approach Livingston through the channel that has produced eighteen months of silence and deferral, he will conclude that nothing has changed. He will wait for Monroe. We will have lost a fortnight.' He took a step toward the window—toward Napoleon—and spoke the next words with the deliberate clarity of a man setting a term. 'I will call on Livingston this morning. At his residence. Before noon. Without intermediary. If there are objections, they may be filed after the treaty is signed.'

'The Minister of the Treasury presumes to instruct—'

'Citizen Talleyrand.' Napoleon did not turn from the window. The name alone was sufficient. The use of Citizen rather than Minister stripped the title from him as cleanly as a blade strips bark. 'You will not obstruct this. You will not delay it. You will not communicate with the Spanish ambassador on any matter touching Louisiana until I instruct you otherwise.'

The silence that followed had a texture—thick, cold, absolute.

Talleyrand's chin dipped. The smallest possible acknowledgement.

'As you direct.'

Three syllables. Barbé-Marbois heard in them the sound of a door closing—and behind that door, already, the sound of another opening. Talleyrand did not need the Spanish ambassador. He had a dozen channels that required no ambassadors at all, that operated through dinner invitations and private salons and the wives of men who owed him money. The prohibition was a wall built across a single road in a country of ten thousand paths.

Napoleon straightened. 'Before noon, Barbé-Marbois.'

He bowed and withdrew.

The corridor outside was stone and cold, the candles in their brackets burned down to stubs that guttered in the draught from some ill-fitted casement. His footsteps were very loud. The palace was beginning to stir—a door somewhere, a servant's tread on a stair—but here he was alone with the sound of his own heels on the flags and the knowledge that the race had already begun.

At the far end of the passage, where it turned toward the public stair, he came level with Talleyrand's coat where it hung from a hook beside the antechamber door. He stopped.

The coat's quality was unmistakable in the guttering light—the cut from a house Barbé-Marbois could not have named but recognised by its effect, a particular fall at the shoulder, the lapels of a weight that held their line without assistance. His own coat did not hang so.

His hand moved to the interior pocket before he had decided to move it.

Nothing. Whatever Talleyrand carried, he carried on his person.

He withdrew his hand.

Outside, the air hit his face—raw, damp, carrying the river-smell of the Seine and the first smoke of a city's worth of kitchen fires. He descended the steps and turned toward the Rue de Rivoli. Somewhere on the Channel, Monroe's ship was running before whatever wind God had provided—three days out, perhaps four. And behind him, in the cabinet at the corridor's end, Talleyrand was already speaking. Not about the Spanish ambassador, because that had been forbidden, but about something else, some other lever, some other name—there was always another name—and the only question that mattered now was whether Barbé-Marbois could reach Livingston's door before whatever had just been set in motion reached it first.

He quickened his pace. The morning was here—grey, cold, indifferent to the fact that a continent had just changed hands in a room that smelled of tallow and sweat—and he had until noon.