Dewey Lambdin - A Jester’s Fortune

"Cheap theatrics," General Augereau grunted softly. "Jesus fucking Christ! General Scherer was an ass with ears, but a modest ass. Now, who pops up to replace him but-"

"He's good, Charles," General Andre Massena whispered back from the side of his mouth. "Have to give him that. Brilliant."

"Brilliant doesn't pay the whore," Augereau grumbled. "He marries Paul Barras's former mistress, this new bride of his… a favour for Barras, now he's one of the Five. And he gets us as his reward for taking the blowsy cunt… pardon а moi, the 'incomparable Josephine,' to wife. And if he shows me that miniature portrait of the bitch one more time, I'll rip his tiny leg off and beat his tiny skull in with it! That'll shit on his puppet show!"

General Andre Massena feigned a cough, partly in warning for the incorrigible Augereau to stop murmuring and carping; and partly so he could hide his helpless snickering fit behind a gloved hand.

Hello, what was this, he heard, though…?

"Soldiers, to the east and south lies our duty!" Their elegant little general was roaring, pointing like a bronze statue for a far horizon, which prompted some of his troops to turn their heads to look.

"There lies Piedmont, ruled by that bloody-handed tyrant, their Victor Amadeus II… father-in-law to the beast who would come to rule us again, Comte de Provence… who would be King Louis XVIII! There lies aristocratic Austria, who would trample our beloved France beneath the boots of their enslaved peasants, yet deny them the rights you as free, Republican Frenchmen enjoy!

" Piedmont, soldiers!" The general shouted. "The Po Valleys, the great cities, teeming with untold wealth! Austrian provinces in thrall to despots! There! There is where I will lead you this year! There is where we will be victorious. I will lead you into the most fertile plains in the world! Rich cities and great provinces will be in your power! There, in Italy, soldiers… is where we are going to take the fight to our foes. There you will find honour, glory… and wealth! In Piedmont, in Lombardy… there we will gain victory!"

Loot and plunder, clean linen, purses bulging with gold, or things as simple as a belly or knapsack full of bread, meat, cheese and brandy, with a ration-waggon to follow along behind with more. Their little replacement general had lit a fire under them, Massena had to admit. He'd taken them by the throat and made them stand taller, of a sudden. The raucous cheers, the screams of avarice and pride, with the promise of glory-to-come now aflame in them, were deafening.

Even with the organised might of Royal France at their backs, armies larger and better trained than this one, Massena recalled, had come to grief twice in the last hundred years. Maillebois and Villars had both failed to invade Italy. So what did the summer hold for this tag-rag-and-bobtail army? he wondered. And wondered, too, had the Directory given him the command he'd lusted for so eagerly, would he have attempted anything this damn-fool daring?

"Mon gйnйrals" their new commanding officer said, once he'd quit his crag. "Junot, the list. See to it that these five generals of brigade are dismissed at once. I see no fire in their bellies or wits in their skulls. We begin tightening discipline and drill now. This instant. Berthier has the details for you. But I want this army of ours to be drilled, shod, clad and ready to march by the end of the month! There will be no half-measures. Discipline is the nerve of the army, and I will see it taut as a bowstring-or else!"

The general had removed his huge cocked hat with its wide gilt bands and Tricolour rosette to address the troops man-to-man, letting his rich chestnut hair fall free to either side of his face, like any good Republican, as common as any man in the ranks. Now he clapped it back on, called for his horse and sprang into the saddle with haste, as if not an idle minute could be wasted. He suddenly seemed two feet taller, even without the horse. Impatient with his spurs, he galloped away, with his aides scurrying to catch him up.

"Goddamn," Augereau breathed, now that it was safe to speak aloud. "Chilly fucking blue eyes he has. Did you notice?"

"Alert as an eagle, Charles. Rapt, I think the 'aristos' once called it." Massena agreed. "Impatient. Restless."

"You know, Andre, I can't understand it," Augereau grunted almost in awe. "Been a soldier all my life…"

That wasn't strictly the truth; he'd flogged stolen watches on the streets of Turkish Istanbul, taught dancing in the provinces for a time, soldiered in the French and Russian Armies-eloped with a Greek woman to Lisbon, too.

"… but damned if that little bugger doesn't half scare the piss out of me all of a sudden!"

Their general dictated, arms folded close about his chest, each hand clutching the opposite elbow, head down and pacing slowly. Rarely did he sit for long, Andoche Junot thought with a sigh as he scribbled. Their general was possessed of a rather bad hand. When excited, or wrought by cautious care, his penmanship was almost illegible, and his French still littered with Italian-Corsican misspellings. His speech was laced with mispronunciations of even common words or place-names he'd heard over a hundred times. Perhaps he was cautious now, so as not to appear the stupid, dirty Corsican yokel he'd first been when he began school in France. Andoche Junot shrugged.

"… have been received by the army with signs of pleasure and the confidence owed to one who was known to have merited your trust," the general concluded the letter to the Directory. "The usual close, Junot. And the blah-blah-blah."

"Oui, mon gйnйral. " Junot smirked.

"I have a letter of my own to write now," his general hinted, shooing his aide to a desk in the other room. He took the chair where Junot had sat, drew out a sheet of paper and dipped a fresh quill in the inkwell. With a fond sigh, he drew from his waistcoat pocket a miniature portrait of his bride. They'd had only two days in Paris, in that splendid little house of hers at 6 Rue Chanterine, aswim in a pleasant grove of lime trees. Married on the ninth, into a coach on the eleventh, and in Nice by the twenty-seventh. How he ached for her, every waking moment! His incomparable Josephine! Though her real name was Rose Beauharnais, he'd always awarded his loves with made-up names. Earlier, there'd been Eugenie, in Marseilles -he'd called her his Desiree! He sighed. The curse of a man who'd once wished to be a great writer, one who'd create fantasies, epic tales of love so grand, of glory and martial conquest-grander than anything reality offered? He scoffed at that.

He tested the quill's nib by forming a string of vowels, then his name on a scrap. Too Corsican, Josephine had teased him during their courtship. "Your name smacks too much of Paoli and rebels, my dear, and that's not safe these days," that font of all marital joy had cautioned him. "Even though mon cher Paul is one of the Directors, and admires you, he cannot deflect all criticism of you, no matter how successful you've been 'til now. And Corsica… what happened there, n'est-ce pas? Before the British took it from us? Please them, mon cher! Be more 'Franchioullard,' " she'd coyly insisted.

He gritted his teeth, thinking of Paul Barras, a good friend… one he owed so much. Had he ever, the handsome swine…? Had she… had they, before …? And with him away… no! It was impossible to contemplate!

And Corsica! He'd failed, there, on his native soil. Unable to subdue the few misguided fools who still followed that old rebel Paoli into another rebellion, this time against France. Before the "Bloodies," the British, had landed. And all the Royalists who'd fled there…! Not for much longer would they swagger over his ancestors' very gardens, he swore. Not if he could do anything about it, this fine summer of 1796!

One more deep, calming breath, a fond, doting smile at her portrait again-"an artichoke-heart's" smile? He stiffened. No, Josephine was his grand, his one, his only epic love!

Another essay at a round, sure hand, in the proper mood of the absent, ardent-trusting!-lover. He wrote his name. This time it came out round, firm, simpler.

Napoleon Bonaparte.

Felices, mediis que sedare fluctibus ausi

nec tantas timuere vias talemque secuti

huc qui deinde verum; sed sic quoque talis abito.

Happy, they who braved the intervening seas,

nor feared so long a voyage, but straightaway

followed so valiant a hero to this land; for

all that, valiant though he be, let him begone.

Argonautica, Book VII, 18-20

Gaius Valerius Flaccus

Admiral Sir John Jervis was a stocky man, just turned a spry and still energetic sixty years of age. Still quite handsome, too, for he had been a lovely youth, and had sat to Frances Cotes for a remarkable portrait once in his teens. Duty, though, and awesome responsibilities, had hunched his shoulders like some Atlas doomed to carry the Earth on his rounded back. Keeping a British fleet in the Mediterranean, such was the task that wore him down now, countering the ever-growing strength of the French Navy. Suffering the foolish decisions-or total lack of decisions-of his predecessor, the hapless Admiral Hotham, who had dithered and dallied while the French grew stronger, frittering away priceless advantages in his nail-biting fogs, merely reacting to French move and countermove, or diluting his own strength in pointless patrols or flag-visits.

Now France was in the ascendant, and he was in the unenviable position of being outnumbered at sea, should the French ever concentrate and come out. There were no allies left in the First Coalition possessed of anything even approaching a navy; the Neapolitans' feet had gone quite stone-cold after Toulon had fallen in '93, and sat on the sidelines. British troops were still committed to the colonial wars, dying by the regiments of tropical diseases on East and West Indies islands where Jervis himself had held the upper hand.

To guard the Gibraltar approaches, he had to send a part of his fleet west, yet French line-of-battle ships still slipped into the Mediterranean from Rochefort, L'Orient and Brest, on the Bay of Biscay, fresh from the refit yards, some fresh from the launch-ramps. Over twenty-three sail of the line were at Toulon, that he knew of. French grain convoys from North Africa and the piratical Barbary States had to be hunted down and intercepted. He had to hold a part of his fleet in San Fiorenzo Bay, near the northern tip of Corsica, Cape Corse, just in case the French sallied forth from Toulon.

The Barbary States, encouraged by general war, had to be kept under observation, before his supply ships and transports proved to be too great a temptation for their corsairs in their swift xebecs. Then there were the Austrians-goddamn them. They were the only ally left that had a huge army. Even that very moment, they were skirmishing along the Rhine for an invasion of France, and still had enough troops to threaten a second invasion in Savoy, then into the approaches of Toulon. With Toulon his again, he might breathe easier; that French fleet would be burned, properly this time, or scattered to fishing villages in penny-packets.

But the Austrians were not happy with His Majesty's Government, nor with the Royal Navy, at present. Late the previous year, General de Vins had lost his army-they'd run like terrorised kittens-at the very sight of French soldiers, losing him the use of Genoa and the Genoese Riviera as a base. And, of course, they'd blamed being run inland and eastward on lack of naval support.