Egypt. Trees enclosed her soul while sheltering mine, and I was drawn to mountains while Astiza preferred the shore. She loved me, but I was a sacrifice. I loved her, but she pulled me in directions to which I was reluctant to return. When unmarried, the future was vague and full of endless possibility. With marriage, we began to make choices.
Wedded bliss is certainly more complicated than the rapture of falling in love, but once you share out the victories and defeats and come to compromise, there’s more contentment than I’d ever enjoyed. The growth of little Harry is a marvel, and the warmth of a nightly lover is a relief. We became comfortable with our intimacy, leading me to wonder why I hadn’t seriously considered marriage before.
“You’re actually a quite suitable father, Ethan,” Astiza remarked with mild surprise one day, watching me build a dam on a little rivulet near Nimes with Harry, who would turn three in June.
“It helps to retain the mind of a twelve-year-old,” I said. “Most men do.”
“Do you ever miss your independence?” Women forget nothing, and worry forever.
“You mean the bullets? The hardship? The scheming temptresses? Not in the least.” I pointed out some more dam-building rocks to Harry, who was working like a beaver. “I’ve had more than enough adventure for any fellow. This is the life for me, my love. Dull, but comfortable.”
“So I’m dull, now?” Women pick at words like a barrister.
“You’re radiant. I just meant my new life is pleasantly placid, without the bullets and hardship.”
“And the temptresses?” See what I mean about women forgetting nothing?
“How can a man be tempted, when he has Isis and Venus, Helen and Roxanne?” Yes, I was becoming quite the husband. “Here’s some more stackable stones, Harry-let’s build a castle on the shoreline!”
“And blow it up!” he cried. I was teaching him to be a boy, even though my wife sometimes frowned at our games.
So my family came to Paris. My plan was this: A precious gem is more portable, and easily hidden, than a sack of money. Accordingly, we’d wait to sell the emerald where I judged I’d get the best price. Only then would we set off for some safe and sleepy place in America, my homeland.
I’m afraid there was vanity in this schedule. I had, after all, recently found and destroyed the mirror of Archimedes, rescuing Harry and Astiza from pirates in the process. I couldn’t resist the possibility of hobnobbing with the first consul again in hopes of being told how brilliantly I’d performed. There was also the lingering question of the vast Louisiana Territory that France had acquired and which I now considered myself expert on, having been dragged there by a Norwegian lunatic. I’d already advised Jefferson to buy and Napoleon to sell, but the negotiations had stalled while the president sent a new diplomat named James Monroe to Paris. I was just the man, I thought, to hurry things along before I retired as a gentleman.
That’s the trouble with success. It makes you feel indispensable, which is a delusion. Pride exacts more trouble than love.
Accordingly, when my family arrived in Paris in mid-January of 1803, I was asked by American envoy Robert Livingston to lobby Napoleon about the fate of the wasteland west of the Mississippi River. Since Livingston offered to put us up in a hotel and was working with my friend Fulton on a new contraption called a steamboat, I persuaded Astiza we should enjoy Paris while I sought another audience with Bonaparte. The city was buzzing with talk of renewed conflict with England, which is always entertaining: war is perennially exciting to society people with little chance of having to actually fight it. Astiza was curious to explore the city’s famed libraries for texts on mystery religions.
So we lingered like gentry. I was proud that while we’d once been imprisoned in Paris, now we were invited to its salons.
What we both wouldn’t dare admit is that we were still treasure hunters at heart.
Which set the stage for disaster.
Chapter 3
I couldn’t resist auditioning for history when I finally obtained an audience with Napoleon. France’s first consul, who had replaced the incompetent Directory with his own dictatorship, had spent a million francs rehabilitating the dilapidated palace of Saint-Cloud outside Paris to serve as his latest home. It was a headquarters six miles from the stinking heart of the city, prudently distant from democratic mobs, and far bigger than Josephine’s Malmaison. This new pile had the room to house the first consul’s growing retinue of aides, servants, supplicants, and schemers. It could also properly impress visiting ministers of state with wasteful opulence, the standard by which the powerful rank one another.
Having first met Bonaparte on the uncomfortably crowded warship L’Orient in 1798, I reflected how much grander and more beautiful his homes were each time I saw him. In the brief period since he’d ascended to power, he’d collected more palaces than I had shoes. I still had no house at all, and the contrast in our careers couldn’t have been plainer when I crossed the Pont de Saint-Cloud across the Seine and turned up the walled gravel avenue that led to the Court of Honor. The U-shaped palace is an imposing five floors tall and enclosed a graveled yard where messengers dismounted, diplomatic coaches reined up, ministers loitered, footmen smoked, dogs barked, tradesmen delivered, and servants scurried, the entire arena dotted with horse droppings and overlooked by Josephine’s grand apartments. The gossip was that Napoleon’s long hours had prompted the couple to keep separate bedrooms, and that the new quarters were so confusing that when the first consul wanted to sleep with his wife, he’d change into his nightshirt and cap, ring for his secretary, and be led down the dark corridors by a single candle to her bed.
I, of course, arrived in daylight, and was ushered by his new valet Constant Wairy, an unctuous functionary with well-fed face and muttonchop whiskers who sniffed at my clothes as if I were a private standing for inspection. I congratulated him with a goad, “What a grand place to be a lackey.”
“If anyone has experience with that,” he gave right back, “I understand it to be you, Monsieur Gage.”
Our mutual snobbery established, we ascended a grand staircase and strode down a paneled hallway, entering a library the size of a barn.
Napoleon was wolfing down the dejeuner being served in this study, since there was no designated room in his palace (or any other palace, for that matter) for regular meals. He occupied a settee covered with green taffeta, eating his lunch from a portable campaign table. He’d already bathed-despite the skepticism of his doctors, Napoleon had embraced the modern French fashion of scrubbing every day, now that he had servants to heat the water-and was dressed in a simple blue military coat with red collar, white breeches, and silk stockings. I thought he might offer coffee and a roll, not to mention some soup or chicken, but he ignored my hunger and gestured me to an upholstered chair.
I looked about. There was a large writing table Napoleon had designed in the shape of a kidney or viol so he could squeeze into its middle and have incoming and outgoing correspondence flank him. It was heaped with papers and had legs carved like griffins.
A smaller table was assigned to his new secretary, Claude-Francois de Meneval, who had abruptly replaced Bourienne when the latter became embroiled in speculation over military supplies. Young and handsome, Meneval glanced at me now, reminding me that we’d met at Mortefontaine when celebrating the American treaty. I nodded, though I had no memory of him.
Behind this scribe, clifflike bookcases covered the walls from floor to ceiling, helping insulate the cavernous office from winter’s chill. Bronze busts of the ancient antagonists Hannibal and Scipio eyed each other on the mantel as if wishing for more war elephants. The last time I’d discussed Hannibal with Napoleon I found myself guiding his army over the Alps, so this time I vowed to stay entirely away from military history.
“Gage,” Bonaparte greeted me matter-of-factly, as if we’d just conferred yesterday instead of nearly a year ago, “I thought the pirates might have finally extinguished you, but here you are again, like a misfire you can’t pry loose from a muzzle. The naturalist Cuvier tells me you actually succeeded in accomplishing something.”
“Not just destroying a dangerous ancient weapon, First Consul, but finding a wife and son.”
“Remarkable that someone would have you.” He took a drink of his favorite Chambertin, a pinot wine with a rich, fruity flavor. It reminded me I was thirsty, too. There was, alas, only one goblet.
“But then I spied merit in you as well,” he said with his usual bluntness. “The secret to rule is to find the
