“They thought you could find all you needed in Acre, General.”
“That is my only failure, George,” said Bonaparte, “and if I had succeeded, I swear, I would have surprised all of Europe! If I had succeeded! I’ll tell you what I would have done then. I would have found the pasha’s treasures in Acre and enough weapons to arm three hundred thousand men. I would have roused and armed all of Syria, where everyone decried Djazzar’s cruelty; I would have marched on Damascus and Aleppo. My army would have grown larger and larger as I advanced, and I would have announced to the people the abolition of all servitude and of the pasha’s tyrannical government. I would have marched to Constantinople and overthrown the Turkish Empire. I would have founded a great new empire in the Orient that would have guaranteed my place in history. And then I would have come back to Paris through Adrianople or Vienna—after wiping out the house of Austria!”
“That’s like Caesar’s plan when he declared war on the Parthians,” Cadoudal answered coldly.
“Ah, I was sure we would come back to Caesar,” said Bonaparte with a laugh, his teeth clenched. “Well, as you see, I’m willing to accept discussion on whatever grounds you choose. Suppose that when he was twenty-nine years old, as I am now, Caesar, instead of leading a patrician life of debauchery in Rome and accumulating the greatest debts known in his time, suppose that he had been instead the Citizen First Consul. Suppose that at twenty-nine his campaign in Gaul had already been finished, his Egyptian campaign completed, and his Spanish campaign successfully ended. Suppose, I repeat, that he was twenty-nine instead of fifty years old—the age at which Victory, who loves only the young, begins to abandon bald brows—do you think he would not then have been both Caesar and Augustus?”
“Yes,” Cadoudal replied brusquely, “unless he had happened first to find Brutus, Cassius, and Casca in his path with their daggers.”
“So,” said Bonaparte with sadness, “my enemies are counting on assassination! In that case, it’ll be easy for them, and especially for you, since you are my enemy. What is preventing you at this very moment, if you have the same convictions as Brutus, from striking me down as he struck Caesar? We are alone, the doors are closed. You have your saber. You could surely be upon me before my guards could stop you.”
“No,” said George. “No, we are not counting on assassination. I believe it would require grave circumstances for one of us to decide to become an assassin. But the chances of war remain. One simple rebellion could cost you all your prestige, a cannonball could take off your head the way it did Marshal Berwick’s, or a bullet could strike you like Joubert and Desaix. And then what will become of France? You have no children, and your brothers.…”
Bonaparte stared hard at Cadoudal, who completed his thoughts with a shrug. Bonaparte clenched his fists. George had found the chink in his armor.
“I admit,” said Bonaparte, “that from that point of view you are right. I risk my life daily, and daily my life could be taken. But even if you do not believe in Providence, I do. I believe that nothing happens by chance. I believe that when Providence, on August 13, 1769, exactly one day after Louis XV had rendered the edict uniting Corsica to France, allowed a child to be born in Ajaccio, a child who would carry out the 13th Vendémiaire and the 18th Brumaire, it had great designs and supreme plans in store for him. I was that child, and Providence has always kept me safe in the midst of great dangers. Since I have a mission, I fear nothing. Because my mission is my armor. If I am mistaken; if, instead of living the twenty-five or thirty years I think are necessary to accomplish my goals, I am struck twenty-two times with a dagger like Caesar, or my head is blown off by a cannonball like Berwick’s, or a bullet hits me in the chest like Joubert or Desaix—then that is because Providence has its own good reasons for allowing such things to happen, and Providence will then provide what France needs. Believe me, George, Providence never fails great nations.
“A moment ago we were talking about Caesar, and you evoked for me the image of him collapsing at the feet of Pompey’s statue after he’d been stabbed by Brutus, Cassius, and Casca. When Rome in mourning attended the dictator’s funeral ceremonies, when the people set fire to his assassins’ homes, when the Eternal City trembled at the thought of a drunken Anthony or the hypocrite Lepidus and wondered where from the four corners of the earth would rise the genius who’d put an end to the civil wars, no one even thought to consider he’d be an Apollonian schoolboy, Caesar’s nephew, young Octavius. A baker’s son from Velletri, coated with the flour of his ancestors. A feeble child afraid of heat, cold, thunder, everything? Who could have seen in him the future master of the world when limping, pale, his eyes blinking like a bird’s in a spotlight, he passed in review Caesar’s old bands of soldiers? Not even Cicero, perspicacious Cicero: ‘Ornandum et tollendum (Cover him with flowers and raise him to the skies),’ he said. Well, the child they should have celebrated and then gotten rid of at the first possible moment tricked all the graybeards in the Senate and reigned almost as long over Rome, the city that had assassinated Caesar because it did not want a king, as did Louis XIV over France.
“George, George, don’t fight the Providence that has created me, for Providence will break you.”
“Well,” George answered with a bow, “at least I shall be broken as I follow the path and religion of my fathers, and God will forgive me my error, the error of a fervent Christian and a pious son.”
Bonaparte placed his hand on the young leader’s shoulder. “So be it,” he said, “but at least remain neutral. Let events take their course, let thrones quake and crowns fall. Usually it’s the spectator who has to pay to follow the game, but I’ll pay you to watch me in action.”
“And how much will you give me to do that, Citizen First Consul?” asked Cadoudal.
“One hundred thousand francs a year, monsieur,” Bonaparte answered.
“If you can give one hundred thousand francs a year to a simple partisan leader, how much will you give the prince he has been fighting for?”
“Nothing, sir,” said Bonaparte disdainfully. “In your case, what I’m paying for is your courage, not the principles that drive you. I would like to prove that for me, a self-made man, men exist by their works alone. Please accept, George. I beg you.”
“And if I refuse?” asked George.
“You’ll be making a mistake.”
“Will I nonetheless be free to journey wherever I want?”
Bonaparte went to the door and opened it.
“Duroc!” he called.
Duroc appeared.
“Please make sure,” he said, “that Monsieur