“I’m sure she’s in Linz. Françoise too. If I could get my hands on a safe-conduct pass that would allow me to come and go freely, I’d rent a carriage and go in search of them,” I said, hoping that he would help me attain such a permit.
Frau Wittek appeared in the doorway and gestured for us to come to the table. Refusing to sit with us, probably for patriotic reasons, she served us the wine that Robert had bought, white bread and the best of what she had left in her cupboard. She was a good woman who, torn between loyalty to her country and her habit of treating her guests with generosity, couldn’t make up her mind how to behave with me, the wife of an invader.
After helping himself to a thick slice of ham, my uncle raised his glass and said: “A toast to those not with us tonight.”
“Yes,” I said, raising my glass as well, “and may their absence be brief.” Swallowing my first mouthful, I added: “You have no idea how much I miss Maryse.”
“Maryse, yes, of course. I miss her too. We are good friends. It’s just that now is not the best moment to travel to Linz,” said my uncle, and, turning to address Frau Wittek, who was setting a delicious-looking apple tart on the table, he said, still smiling: “Your mother was a whore and your food smells like shit.”
Frau Wittek, whose knowledge of French was limited to two words—the bon jour with which I greeted her each morning—smiled back, and served him an enormous helping of apple tart.
“Well, one can never be too sure. There are many spies,” Uncle Charles said, by means of apology. “The fact is, somewhere in Moravia we will fight a great battle against Kutuzov’s Russian troops, who are coming down from the East with Czar Alexander, and against what remains of the Austrian Army. Only Napoleon knows exactly where it will take place. Larrey told me this before leaving. It will be a decisive battle. Just imagine it; a battle of three emperors.”
And, as it happened, this was precisely what Austerlitz would come to be called: the battle of the three emperors. At first it was nothing more than a rumor, dismissed by most of the Viennese; then, as the details of the great French victory came out in the newspapers, many said it was pure Bonapartist propaganda; days later, when the prisoners and the wounded began to arrive in the city by the thousands, there were some who still insisted that those ragged men were Russian deserters, forced to take part in some great ruse. But—as Aunt Margot always said when faced with an undeniable truth—one cannot cover the sun with a finger, especially not the sun of Austerlitz, the sun that illuminated, as no other, Napoleon’s military career.
4
I HAVE SEEN THE SOLDIERS of many nations in my lifetime. I’ve seen them dressed in black, green, gray, white, yellow, blue, and red; I’ve seen them in shakos, fur caps, plumed helmets, and turbans; I’ve seen them on the battlefield, in taverns, in hospitals, in parades, in concert halls and in theaters; I’ve seen them in times of war and in times of peace, in triumph and in defeat. And so, I can attest to the fact that none of them could ever compare to the allure of the French Hussars of 1805. Of course, their resplendent uniforms had something to do with it. But there was something else, a rare magnetism that radiated from within them and that united them despite their different ages and features. The night I met Robert, I couldn’t put a finger on what made him so irresistibly attractive. Nor could I in Vienna. It wasn’t until after the peace at Austerlitz that I figured it out, when his regiment was stationed in Bavaria and I spent a good deal of time with several of his friends. It’s that the Hussars under Napoleon lived to die, and it was the enchantment of death that defined them, that fleeting splendor of twilight, the rose unfurled, the autumn leaf. “Any Hussar who hasn’t died by the age of thirty is a coward,” General Lasalle, the most respected among the Hussars, would always say. And that terrible sentence had become popular in the Grand Armée; it was the sentence Robert had left unfinished that morning in Vienna.
The ten months of peace that we enjoyed were more than enough time for me to realize that Lasalle’s words would be prophetic for Robert. The first sign occurred in Passau, where he was recovering in the hospital from a severe saber wound. We were strolling peacefully through the hospital’s garden, surrounded by thrushes and tulips, when the postman arrived, carrying a bundle of letters and several small wooden boxes. “They’re crosses,” said Robert, letting go of me. “Crosses of the Legion of Honor.” And, leaning on his cane, he limped eagerly over to the bench where the postman had sat down to remove the medals from his haversack. Somewhat perplexed by the brusqueness of his behavior, I hung back on the path. From that vantage, I saw him gesticulating and scolding the man for taking so long to lay the boxes out upon the bench. I saw him pick one up, open it nervously and hold the medallion in front of his nose as though it were a glass of fine wine. I heard him exclaim, exhilarated: “My cross, my cross has arrived at last!” And, turning to look at me, he cried: “Look, my little Turk, my cross! When they kill me, they’ll bury me with it!”
But the thing that most convinced me was listening to him read the Moniteur, the French newspaper that arrived consistently, although somewhat delayed, in the cafés in Munich. Surrounded by Hussars, the table covered with mugs of beer, I listened to Robert read every article, every official communication aloud, in search of some indication that the war they all yearned for would soon begin. “It will come, soon, it will come, there’s no reason to worry, we’ll soon have another go at the Russians, at old Kutuzov, at Bagration, and at the Prussians too, that herd of perverts, if you’ll forgive me, citoyenne, they’ll be the first, followed by the Saxons, that accursed breed, just you wait, Robert, just you wait, Michel, just you wait, Jean-Louis, just you wait, Constant, and those cowards have the gall to call themselves the Hussars of Death. Merde, we are the true Hussars of death!” Hours went by like this, pining for the war, their sabers ever sharp, the barrels of their pistols clean, their horses healthy and well trained. Oh, the horses! Early on, I discovered that Robert had a good deal of the centaur about him, that he and Patriote were a unified and effective war machine, deployed daily, parting only at sunset: Patriote to the barracks’ stables, Robert to the cafés, where I would find him speaking excitedly, smoking his pipe, his mustache dripping with beer, singing the praises of the saber over the lance, of the light horse over the Percheron draft.
Apart from Robert, none of those Hussars were married. None of them shared their wine or their dinners with the whores who’d come along from Metz and Strasbourg, or with the German girls they dabbled with. They were a brotherhood of single men, a type of chivalric society with Napoleon as Grand Master, all of them young and tall and beautiful and conceited and doomed. I never knew why they tolerated my presence. Perhaps because of their collective admiration for Robert, or because they saw me riding in culottes and hunting jacket, or because I had learned to hold my liquor almost as well as them and because whenever anyone would finish speaking I would say things like: “That’s right, monsieur,” “I do agree,” “well said,” and the like. Probably, although I don’t like to think of it, they also accepted me because they knew that Robert’s money came from my dowry—now fully cashed, thanks to the ministrations of Herr Kessler and my lawyer in Toulouse—and that, of my own accord, I was the owner of valuable lands and a château in the Languedoc. Rare was the week that Robert didn’t put on a grand five- or six-course banquet, or an evening of musicians and singers, or lost a hundred francs on the gambling table, or surprised me with a piece of diamond jewelry. We bought a large house and I finally had my enormous bed with white pillows and my cuckoo clock; he, a stuffed crocodile and a rhinoceros horn—old fantasies for each of us. The rooms quickly filled with furs and animal heads, rugs, drapes, flower vases, tapestries—one