Marianne

be that of a famous Italian singer, belonging wholly to the present regime. There can be no question of turning it into a temple for your ancestors. Do you forget that you are no longer Marianne d'Asselnat?'

Oh, the tone was merciless and cutting! Why did there have to be two such contradictory natures to this man? Why, oh why did Marianne have to love him so desperately? She rose, white to the lips, and shaking with distress.

'Whatever name it may please your majesty to call me by, it cannot make me other than I am. I have killed a man for the honour of my name, sire, and you will not prevent my feeling for my parents the love and respect which is their due. For myself, if I belong to you body and soul, which you cannot for an instant doubt, I alone belong to you. My family is my own.'

'And mine too, remember! All Frenchmen, past present and to come, belong to me, by which I mean they are my subjects. You are somewhat too apt to forget that I am the Emperor!'

'How could I forget it?' Marianne said bitterly. 'Your majesty gives me little chance! As for my parents —'

'I have no wish to prevent you mourning them, discreetly, but you must understand that I have little love for the fanatics of the old regime. I have a good mind to take that house back and give you another.'

'I want no other, sire. Your majesty may withdraw your architects if it offends them to work in an outmoded style, only leave me the house. I prefer the Hotel d'Asselnat as it is, ruined, mutilated and pitiful, to the most sumptuous house in Paris! As for the noble subjects of the king – I thought your majesty had been one of them!'

'Do not be insolent. It will do you no good with me. The reverse, in fact. It seems to me, that you have too much pride of caste, to be a loyal subject. I hoped to find more submission and obedience in you. Know that what I value most in a woman is gentleness, a quality in which you seem to be singularly lacking!'

'The life I have led hitherto has scarcely taught me gentleness! I am deeply sorry I must offend your majesty, but I am as I am. I cannot change my nature!'

'Not even to please me?'

The tension was increasing. What game was Napoleon playing? Why this sarcasm, this attitude almost of hostility? Was he truly such a despot as to demand from her a submission that would make her blind, deaf and dumb? Was it the servile obedience of a slave in a harem that he wanted? If so, it was too bad. Marianne had fought too hard simply to preserve her dignity as a woman to bend now. Even if it meant tearing the heart out of her breast, she would not yield. Her eyes did not fall before that terrible blue gaze as, with infinite gentleness, she said:

'Not even to please you, sire! And yet, as God is my witness, I have no more earnest desire than to please your majesty.'

'You are going the wrong way about it,' he said with a sneer.

'But not at the price of my self-respect! If you had deigned, sire, to tell me that all you looked for in me was a servile creature, a mere consenting slave, going in perpetual terror of your majesty, then I should have begged you to let me leave France as I had meant to do. Because, for me, to love so is not to love at all.'

He took two steps towards her and with a quick movement untied the velvet ribbons holding her cloak. The heavy folds slid to the ground. He gazed at her for an instant, standing very straight before him. The candlelight fell softly on her beautiful shoulders and on the swell of her bare breasts, gilding them like summer fruits in their basket of white lace. Her face was very pale under the heavy helmet of midnight-coloured hair but her long green eyes were bright with bravely unshed tears. She looked, in that moment, breathtakingly lovely. He had only to make a single movement, to take her in his arms and wipe away the pain from her face. But he was in one of those tyrannical moods when no human power could have made him yield to that desire. She dared to stand up to him and that was enough to rouse in him a cruel determination to break her.

'And what if that is how I wish to be loved?' he said slowly without taking his merciless eyes off her.

'Then I do not believe you! You cannot wish for a love that is crawling, terrified, debased – not you!'

He ignored the cry of protest, in spite of all the love it held. His hand was on her breast, hot, ungentle fingers working upwards to the slender column of her neck.

'What I love in you,' he said with brutal sarcasm, 'is your matchless voice and your beauty. You are a wonderful singing bird with the body of a goddess. It is my intention to enjoy both to the full. I am not concerned with feelings. Go and wait for me in my room. Take your clothes off and get into bed. I will come to you in a moment.'

Marianne's high cheek-bones flamed suddenly as though he had hit her. She recoiled instantly, and her two hands flew to her uncovered breast. Her throat dried suddenly and her eyes burned with shame. All at once, she remembered the gossip overheard in the rue de Varennes. The story of Mademoiselle Dudresnoy whom he had dismissed without so much as a word of explanation after getting her into his bed. The episode of the little girl he was betrothed to in Marseilles, got rid of by a curt letter on the patently false excuse that she had not asked her parents for her own hand. And, finally, the well known story of the Polish countess whom he had so maltreated that she became unconscious, of which he then took advantage to rape her and then afterwards send her back to her native Poland to bear his child. Was it possible that all this could be true? Marianne was beginning to think so. At all events, not at any price, even that of her love, would she consent to be treated so. Love did not give him the right to everything.

'Don't be too sure,' she murmured, clenching her teeth to force back her anger. 'I gave myself to you before I knew you, because, like a fool, I fell in love with you. Oh, how I loved you! I was so happy to belong to you! You could have asked anything of me because I thought you loved me a little! But I am not an eastern concubine to be caressed when the fancy takes you and then kicked out when your desire is slaked.'

Napoleon drew himself up to his full height, hands clasped behind his back. His jaw was set, his nostrils white with anger.

'You refuse to belong to me? Think carefully! That is a grave insult!'

'And yet – I do refuse,' Marianne said sadly. She felt suddenly very tired. Now there was only one thing she wanted, to escape as soon as possible from this close, quiet room into which she had come so happily a few minutes before and where, since then, she had suffered so much. She knew very well that she had just placed her whole life in jeopardy once again, that his power over her was limitless but not for anything in the world would she have accepted the degrading part that he was trying to force on her. She still loved him too much for that. In a low voice, she said: 'I refuse – more for your sake even than my own – because I want to be able to go on loving you. Besides – what pleasure would it give you to possess a senseless body, made insensible by grief?'

'Don't look for excuses. I had believed myself to possess a greater power over your senses than you grant me.'

'Because there was a love between us then which you are killing now!'

She almost screamed the words, goaded by the grief that nearly stopped her heart. Now she was trying to find the chink in his armour. He could not be this monster of ruthless pride, this utterly insensitive despot! She could still hear his words of love ringing in her ears.

Abruptly, he turned his back on her, walked over to a bookcase and stood before it, hands clasped behind his back.

'Very well,' he said curtly. 'You may withdraw.'

For a moment she hesitated. They could not part like that, quarrelling over a trifle. It was too hard! Suddenly, she wanted to run to him, tell him that she renounced everything he had given her, only so long as he would keep her with him, that he could take back the Hotel d'Asselnat and do what he liked with it! Anything, only not to lose him, not to be cut off from the sight and sound of him – she stepped forward.

'Sire,' she began brokenly.

But then, as though the plain front of the bookcase had opened suddenly, she seemed to see before her, with terrifying clarity, the great portrait hanging on the crumbling walls. She saw the proud eyes, the arrogant smile. The daughter of such a man could not demean herself to beg for a love that was denied her. And just then she heard:

'Have you not gone?'

His back was still stubbornly towards her. Slowly, she went and picked up her green cloak and laid it over her arm, then sank into a curtsey so deep that she was almost on her knees.

'Farewell – sire,' she whispered.