one temple where someone must have struck him after his attack on the Emperor. He barely turned his head at Marianne's entry.
They looked at one another for a moment, on his side with a kind of bored indifference and on hers with a choking misery that she could not control. Then the cardinal sighed and asked: 'Why have you come? If it is a reprieve you bring – for I don't doubt you have been begging for one – understand that I don't want it. It will have been bought at too high a price.'
'I bring no reprieve. The Emperor would not listen to my pleas. Moreover, we have long ceased to be on such terms as you imply.'
The prisoner's only reply was a faint shrug and a mirthless laugh.
'Yet I did ask him to spare your life,' Marianne continued. 'God knows I pleaded with him! But it seems that people would not understand if he were to show mercy in a case of such gravity, and in the present circumstances.'
'He is quite right. The last thing he can afford is to be accused of weakness. Besides, I have told you, I prefer death to clemency from him.'
Marianne walked slowly towards him, conscious of a sharp pang, now that she saw him from close to, at the realization of how tired he looked, and how much older than he had done a few nights before, in the passage of St Louis-des-Francais. Abruptly, she sank to her knees and, clasping his cold hands, pressed her lips to them.
'Godfather!' she begged. 'Dear Godfather, why did you do it? Why did you say such things to his face? What sort of impulse—'
'An idiotic impulse, isn't that what you mean?'
'It has done you no good! What did you hope to gain by speaking to Napoleon like that? To make him leave Moscow, depart from Russia?'
'Yes, I did. I wanted it with all my heart. You cannot conceive how much I wanted him to be gone from this place, to go back to his own country while there was still time to avert disaster.'
'He cannot! Even if he would, he is not alone. There are others – all those who stand to gain from his conquests. The men for whom Moscow has become a kind of Golconda. The marshals—'
'Them? They ask nothing better than to be gone! Most of them are dreaming all the time of going home. They have never really believed in this war, their hearts have not been in it and, above all, they have not needed it. All of them have grand titles, vast possessions and fortunes they want freedom to enjoy. It's human enough. As to the King of Naples, that glittering centaur, as vain as a peacock and just about as intelligent, at this present moment he is cavorting about in front of Platov's cossacks who are guarding the Russian rear, and doing everything but fraternize with them! The cossacks are swearing that the Russian army is at its last gasp, that more men are deserting every day, and assuring him that he's the most wonderful thing they've ever seen and he, the fool, believes them!'
'It can't be true!'
'Don't tell me you've met him and you don't believe it. He's so delighted with them that he's stripping all his staff officers of their watches and jewels to make them presents of them – having parted with everything of his own already! Oh yes, if I had managed to convince Napoleon, the army would have been off in the morning.'
'That's all very well, but why do it yourself? I should think there must be plenty of persuasive men ready to face the risk – among all those millions at your command.'
He started and looked at her with a mixture of surprise and curiosity.
'What do you mean?'
'That I know who you are, and the power you possess in this world. You are the man they call the Black Pope.'
Instantly he gripped her hands hard to silence her and shot a furtive glance around him.
'Hush! There are some things which should not be said aloud. How did you guess?'
'It was Jolival. He realized it at Odessa, when you showed your ring to the Duc de Richelieu.'
A faint smile touched the cardinal's lips.
'I should have been more wary of your friend's sharp eyes. He is a good man, and no fool. I am happy to leave you in his care.'
Marianne was suddenly angry with him.
'Leave Jolival out of it. We are not talking about him. What I want to know is why you suddenly transformed yourself into a prophet of vengeance! You can't have had the faintest idea of Napoleon's character. To have done what you did was to condemn yourself to death without a doubt. He was bound to react as he did. He took you for an enemy spy.'
'And what makes you think that I am not? An enemy, I have always been, and if I do not care for the word spy I am very willing to admit that my life has been passed in serving secretly, in the shadows.'
'That is why I cannot understand what made you choose to step out into the limelight like that.'
He thought for a moment, then shrugged lightly.
'I admit that I was mistaken in the Corsican's character. I was counting on the latin, the Mediterranean side of his nature. He is superstitious, I know. I could not have found a more dramatic setting, or a more auspicious moment to try and make an impression on him—and to bring him to reason.'
'You must have had a hand in the fire. Certainly you knew all about it.'
'Yes, I did know, and I was afraid for you when I found you here. That was the reason I did my best to save you. And then, when I saw such vast numbers of men – this huge army – and recognized some of our own among them—'
'Men of the old nobility, you mean?'
'Yes. Segurs and Monatsquioux, even a Mortemart, I tell you, my heart bled. It was these, also that I was trying to save, these men who had followed the star of this madman – a madman of genius, but still doomed. I'll not conceal from you that my object in coming here was to destroy him at all costs, he and his. God forgive me, I even contemplated assassination—'
'Oh no! Not that! Not you—'
'Why not? The society of which I am the head has not, in the course of its history, always shrunk from committing that sin when it seemed that the good of the Church demanded it. There was – Henri IV, and others. But I give you my word that I had changed my mind. I was sincere, most desperately sincere, when I begged him to turn back, return to France, abandon his endless wars and reign in peace at last.'
Marianne's great eyes had opened very wide and she was staring at the priest as if he had taken leave of his senses.
'Reign in peace. Napoleon? Godfather, you can't be serious? How can you possibly wish him to reign in peace when you have always served Louis XVIII?'
Gauthier de Chazay gave a faint smile with no touch of humour in it. He closed his eyes for an instant and then opened them and in the gaze that met her own his goddaughter read, for the first time, a grim despair.
'I serve only God now, Marianne, and God hates war. I was wagering everything, you see. Either I would succeed, or else leave here what has become to me a worthless life.'
Marianne's anguished cry held an element of disbelief.
'You cannot mean what you are saying? You, a prince of the Church, heaped with honours and power – truly wish to die?'
'Perhaps. You see, Marianne, in the position to which I have been called I have learned many things. Above all, I have become the repository of the Order's secrets. The most terrible of these I learned only recently and it came as a bitter shock to me, worse than anything I had ever known. The true king of France is not the man I have served for so long, blindly as you said. It is another, closely concealed, a close kinsman of this man and yet indebted to him for a cruel, unjust – and wicked fate!'
At that moment, Marianne had a feeling that he was no longer with her, that his mind and heart were somewhere else, caught up in a dreadful nightmare that oppressed him. It was as much to bring him back to reality as because she really wanted to know the meaning of what he hinted at, that she asked quietly: 'Do you mean that – that even if he ever came to the throne, Louis XVIII would be only an usurper – worse even than Napoleon? But that would mean that the boy Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who was supposed to have perished in the Temple—'
The cardinal rose quickly and laid his finger on her lips.
