'You are going to give yourself up?'
'I don't see what else I can do. They may be in danger. How do you know the Emperor isn't planning to have them tried and condemned in order to force me to go back?'
'It has not come to that yet. If their fate had been decided, Constant would have known. He would have been told, if only so that he might try and communicate with you. In any case, it will do no good for you to give yourself up. You did not let me finish what I was saying. If you want to secure the release of your friends, you must not only go yourself but also take with you the man whom you helped to escape. Only then will Napoleon forgive you.'
Marianne sat down abruptly on a chair and stared up at him with drowned eyes.
'Then what can I do, my friend? I don't know where to find my godfather even if I wanted to, which I do not. I've no idea whether he went back to St Louis-des-Francais—'
'No,' Beyle told her. 'I went there after I left the Kremlin. The Abbe Surugue has not set eyes on him since the day of the fire. He doesn't even know where he might have gone to.'
'To Kuskovo, I expect, to Count Sheremetiev's house.'
'Kuskovo has been burned and our troops are encamped in what remains of it. No, Marianne, you must not look for anything in that direction. In any case, there is nothing you can do that will satisfy the Emperor and your own heart.'
'But I can't just abandon Jolival and Gracchus! The Emperor must be mad to vent his spleen on them. He is so angry with me that he is quite capable of putting them to death!'
She was crying hopelessly, the tears running down her cheeks. She had so much the look of a trapped doe that Beyle, overcome with pity, came and sat by her, putting a brotherly arm round her.
'There, there, my little one, don't cry! You are making a great to-do about nothing, you know. You've a good friend in the Kremlin, for Constant won't betray you, bless him, neither for love nor money. In his opinion, the Emperor has the whole affair out of proportion. I did not tell him where you were to be found, of course, but if there should be any danger he will send word to me at my office and then it will be time enough to consider what to do.'
'But, you don't understand! The Emperor will be obliged to do something. He can't clutter himself with prisoners on the road back to Paris.'
'And what makes you think he is going back to Paris?'
Marianne was so startled that she stopped crying and stared at her friend with disbelieving eyes.
'Isn't he?'
'Certainly not. His Majesty has decided to winter here. Count Dumas and your humble servant have precise instructions concerning the victualling of the army. General Durosnel has his for the movement of troops and Marshal Mortier is settling into his role as governor. Even the company of actors who were here when we came are to hold themselves in readiness to perform, as a means of maintaining French morale.'
'But he can't! Spend the winter here? I'd like to know what his Majesty's staff think of it.'
'Nothing good. I never saw so many long faces. None of them have ever wintered out of France except during the Polish campaign. According to what I've been told, the Emperor has two opposite ideas in mind. Either Alexander will agree to discuss terms and we'll think about going home as soon as the peace treaty is signed, or else we'll spend the winter here, bring the army up to strength with the reinforcements that have been sent for and then, in the spring, we march on Petersburg.'
'What? Another campaign – after the disasters of this one?'
'It may not happen. An envoy has been sent to the Tsar. He is carrying a letter from General Tutolmin, the director of the Foundling Hospital, witnessing that the French did their utmost to save Moscow, and another from the Emperor to the Tsar, assuring him of his goodwill and brotherly feelings.'
'Brotherly feelings! But this is absurd! It cannot work!'
'That is Caulaincourt's opinion and he knows Alexander. But the Emperor, thinks he's being unduly pessimistic and won't speak to him. The fact is that Murat is still flirting with Platov's cossacks and doing his best to persuade Napoleon that the Tsar will be only too happy to fall into his arms. Oh, it's a bad business altogether! I don't know what the outcome of it all will be, but I do know one thing – I've no hope of seeing Milan this year!'
That night, Marianne could not sleep. She lay searching feverishly for some way of reaching her friends but, short of finding the cardinal and giving herself up, there was none. There could be no thought of entering the Kremlin unofficially. The old fortress had been placed on a war footing. Regiments of the Old Guard, under the command of Generals Michel, Gros and Tindal, were on duty night and day, with a hundred men at each of the five gates still in use, while the remaining four were stoutly barricaded and watched by a sergeant and eight men. Entry into that stronghold, bristling with arms, was out of the question. She must wait, then, but for how long? Until when? If Napoleon was determined to spend the winter in Moscow, that might mean six months locked up in the house. It was enough to drive her mad.
True, there was also Constant's theory, as reported by Beyle, that they should allow time for the Emperor's anger to calm down and then he, Constant, would undertake gently to plead the rebels' cause. But Marianne put little faith in this. Napoleon's rage might be short-lived, but he was more than capable of bearing a grudge.
The days that followed were gloomy ones for Marianne, in spite of the lovely weather prevailing out of doors. She gazed out at it despairingly, killing time by sharing Barbe's sewing, but she lived entirely for the hour when her companion in misfortune would come home, bringing with him the day's news.
For the most part, it was dismally monotonous. Nothing had come from St Petersburg and preparations were still going ahead for going into winter quarters. The Emperor was delighted with his courier service, which was working wonderfully, thanks to the brilliant organization of the director of Posts, the Comte de la Valette. The mail arrived every day, with the regularity of clockwork, after a journey of fifteen days and fourteen hours. It had reached the point where the Emperor grew anxious and displayed a degree of tetchiness if one of the couriers was an hour after his time. This apart, he was in high good humour, amusing himself frequently at the expense of the wretched Caulaincourt and his dire pictures of the Russian winter, and for ever remarking that, in autumn at any rate, it was finer than at Fontainebleau.
This imperial jollity found no echo in Marianne, nor indeed in Beyle, who was spending exhausting days inventorying the victuals which were still coming to light in the cellars of the ruined houses.
Beyle, too, was depressed. He had met a man in Moscow, one Auguste Fecel, a harpist by profession, from whom he had at last been able to get news of his old flame, Melanie de Barcoff. What he heard had distressed him greatly. According to the harpist, the lady had left Moscow for St Petersburg some days before the fire, among the last fugitives to leave the city, and against the wishes of her husband, with whom she was on the point of separating, although about to bear his child. She was, moreover, wholly without money.
This unhappy tale sent the young man into something of a frenzy. He was trying desperately to find some way of reaching his former mistress and taking her back to France with him. He talked about her endlessly to Marianne, for comfort, praising her virtues so incessantly that Marianne found herself beginning to take the unknown Melanie in strong dislike. She grew almost as sick of his present mistress, Angelina Bereyter, although what Beyle had to say about her was more concerned with her charms than her virtues, which seemed to be non- existent. Poor Beyle seemed to have an incorrigible predilection for impossible women.
Only his sister, Pauline, won Marianne's approval. When he was not writing interminable letters to her – to be sent by the postal service the Emperor had been in such haste to re-establish – he was talking about her with an affection that touched Marianne because it was completely unselfconscious. Moreover, he would discuss her in French whereas, whenever he mentioned either of his two loves, he felt obliged to dot his conversation with snatches of English or Italian, a trick which Marianne soon found maddening.
It was only with Barbe that she felt able to relax at all. The Polish woman was comfortingly stolid and tranquil, while the plaintive songs she was in the way of singing as she worked seemed to Marianne to form an agreeable echo of her own melancholy mood. There was one she liked particularly:
The mere mention of a steed was enough to set her pulses trembling. Oh, to be able to mount a horse and
