Marianne and the Crown of Fire

again, Madame Tambouille!'

The vivandiere's laughter followed her as she set off along the river and she heard her new friend crying after her through her cupped hands: 'Hey! If you can't find your uncle, come back here! I can do with a pretty girl like you – and so can the lads here, too!'

The next moment, Marianne had plunged into the seething confusion of Red Square. The troops who had been bivouacked there the previous night were doing their utmost to save their guns and their ammunition and some of them were occupying the mansions and other buildings surrounding the square in an attempt to protect them from the fire. There was also a wild assortment of vehicles of every description, from gentlemen's carriages to tradesmen's carts, all of them filled to overflowing with plunder, for, acting on the excuse of saving what property they could, the troops had been pillaging to their hearts' content.

Jostled on all sides and in constant danger of being run down by carriage wheels, Marianne succeeded somehow in reaching the Rostopchin Palace, only to run straight into the arms of Sergeant Bourgogne when literally on the doorstep.

She started violently on recognizing him. Early that morning, when Gauthier de Chazay had launched his attack on the Emperor, Bourgogne had been in the gallery with the party of boutechniks he had taken prisoner. He must have witnessed all that passed. But she pulled herself together at once. He had seen what happened, certainly, but if he had come back to the Rostopchin Palace after that he could not be aware of what had followed.

However he was barring her way.

'And where are you off to, little lady?' he inquired with his usual good humour.

'Inside. Have you forgotten that I was living here when you arrived the other evening, with a gentleman with a broken leg – my uncle.'

He beamed on her candidly. 'Indeed I've not! In fact I'm fairly sure I saw you at the palace this morning. But you can't go in here. It may not be burning yet, but it's in danger and has been requistioned, on his Majesty's orders. Besides, all civilians are to leave the city.'

'But I have to meet my uncle! He should be here already! Have you not seen him?'

'The gentleman with the broken leg? No. I've not seen anyone.'

'But he must have come here. Are you sure he did not go inside when you were not looking?'

'Couldn't have done that, little lady. I've been on guard here with my men now for four hours. If anyone had come I'd have seen them, as sure as my name's Adrien Jean-Baptiste-Francois Bourgogne of Conde-sur-Escaut! If your uncle was in the Kremlin, he must be there still. So long as the Emperor is there—'

But Marianne, giving him a pale smile of thanks, was already turning away. She made her way towards the church of the Blessed St Basil, meaning to think over her situation. Where could Gracchus and Jolival be? If the sergeant had not seen them, it could only be because they had not been there. 'That much is obvious,' Marianne muttered to herself, 'but what could have kept them? And where shall I find them now?'

She stepped aside just in time to escape being run down by a spring van, piled high with furniture and bales of cloth and far too heavily loaded for its brakes to be of any use, which came plunging without warning down the hill from the church. Instinctively, she flattened herself against the circular, stone-built platform on which the punishments meted out by the Muscovite law were habitually carried out, then, the danger past, climbed on towards the church, thinking to find a few moments' peace and quiet inside, even if the place were overflowing with refugees at their prayers. Never had she felt in such need of divine support as at that moment, knowing that she was lost and alone in the midst of an unfamiliar and hostile city.

But as she climbed the steps leading up to the doors the sound that met her ears was not the murmur of prayers but the neighing of horses and the cursing of their grooms. St Basil the Blessed had become a stable.

This discovery came as such a violent shock to her that she turned on her heels and fled as if the place had been infected with the plague. Her heart was bursting with an anger and indignation that drove out all her private fears and alarms. They had no right to do such things! However little a Catholic like herself might think of the Orthodox faith, still its adherents worshipped the same God, and in a manner not so very different from her own. Moreover, lax though she might be in the practice of it, her faith was none the less deep and what she had just seen had touched her to the quick. So, not content with driving out the cardinals, making the Pope a prisoner and flouting the Church's laws by his divorce and remarriage, Napoleon was actually permitting his troops to profane God's house! For the first time it occurred to Marianne that his cause might after all be doomed to failure. Cardinal de Chazay's passionate words suddenly took on a strange, almost prophetic resonance.

She paused for a moment, wondering what to do. Where, in all this confusion and sea of flames, could she go? The thought of her godfather, and the remembrance of the story she had told to Mere Tambouille a little while before came together in her mind. Why not do as she had said? The cardinal must have gone either to St Louis- des-Francais or to Count Sheremetiev's house at Kuskovo, where he had arranged to meet her before. That was the answer, of course. In fact it was the only possible answer since Jolival and Gracchus were not to be found. Perhaps they had not even managed to leave the Kremlin. With only one good leg, the Vicomte was not exactly mobile and if he had failed to reach the Rostopchin Palace, how much less likely the posting house on the road to France, with that great conflagration barring the way on every side.

Having made her decision, Marianne tucked up her skirt and pulled it over her head, like a peasant woman in the rain, to protect her hair from the sparks that were still flying through the air, and then set out to cross the square in the direction of the Lubianka district in which the French church stood.

But in spite of all her efforts, she found it impossible to push her way through the solid mass of vehicles and men, all struggling to get to those few gates which the fire had not yet reached. She heard someone shouting in French that the Tver road was the only one still open but it meant nothing to her. She did not want to go with these people. She only wanted to find her godfather.

Suddenly, she gave a joyful cry. The crowd had parted for a moment, thrust aside by a platoon of soldiers emerging from a side street, and she had caught a lightning glimpse of a figure that made her heart beat faster: a grey-haired man wrapped in a long, dark cloak, just such a cloak as she had thrown round the cardinal's shoulders a short while before. He was there, ahead of her.

After that, instead of fighting against the tide, she let herself be carried along with it. In any case, to have tried to cut across it would have been to court certain death under the wheels of the carriages and the hooves of the maddened horses, many of which were barely under control. Instead, she directed all her efforts to catching up with the man in the black cloak.

All at once, what had been a narrow street seemed to open out. They were crossing a wide boulevard lined with fine, large houses.

Just then, the man in front stepped out of the main stream and hurried down the boulevard, although that, too, was blocked by fire at the far end. Marianne darted after him, calling at the top of her voice but without making herself heard above the roaring of the fire and the howling wind. She began to run, oblivious of everything about her and not even aware that all those gracious houses were at that moment given over to plunder by the drunken soldiery.

The man ahead – she was sure that it was the cardinal when the wind blew aside a fold of his cloak and revealed the black soutane – was running now, like a man pursued, so fast that Marianne had the greatest difficulty in following.

She was gaining on him, even so, when all of a sudden he vanished. At the place where she had last seen him there was nothing but a high, gilded iron gate and beyond it a bit of stunted shrubbery. Desperately, she hurled herself against it. It gave out a metallic clang but held as firm as if it had never been made to open. Catching sight of a bell, Marianne hung onto it with all her strength but there was no answer. No one came. The man had vanished as completely as if a trapdoor had opened suddenly and swallowed him up.

Marianne sank down despondently on a stone block that stood beside the gate and looked about her. Everywhere were yelling voices, the crash of broken bottles and the strains of drunken singing. The city was burning, the flames coming closer every minute, and still there were men capable of breaking into cellars and revelling in their contents rather than flying for their lives.

From two or three of the adjacent streets, small groups of scantily clad women and children were running out into the still empty boulevard, weeping and shrieking aloud with terror. It was at this point that Marianne first noticed a big woman, dressed in much the same fashion as the vivandiere she had met earlier but with the difference that instead of a bearskin this one sported on her head a policeman's cap with a long