Already on the first night, the cold made them suffer. The temperatures didn’t get milder until Fulda, in Westphalia. However much the Grand Squire covered him with his bearskin, “the Emperor was shivering.” On the escarpment of Marijampolė, they had to get off and push the carriage to the top of the slope. Did Napoleon help? At the Gragow post house, Caulaincourt bought one of those covered sleighs, fixed on skates, that “flew along the surface.” In Pułtusk, moved by the modesty of a servant girl, the Emperor gave her a few gold coins together with this pre-Marxist thought: “In this class, you could make many people happy with a little money.” In Warsaw, suddenly seized by a sovereign whim, he insisted on entering the city on foot, “very curious to see if he would be recognized.” In Kutno, one of the sleigh shafts broke, and it took two hours of DIY to repair it, during which Napoleon took advantage to sample the conversational charms of the sub-prefect’s wife and sister-in-law—very attractive Polish women. Before entering Prussia, he checked that his pistols were in good working order. “In case of certain danger, kill me rather than let me hang,” he had told his officers before leaving. In Poznań, going back on the route of the army, Caulaincourt could receive the courier dispatches, which Napoleon would devour, reproaching his Grand Squire for never breaking the seals fast enough. In Dresden, the King of Saxony lent his beautiful Berline but its skates broke between Lützen and Auerstaedt, so they had to enter Vigenov in “the modest post coach” before leaving in “a carriage Monsieur de Saint-Aignan had arranged in such a way that the Emperor could lie down in it.” In Leipzig, Napoleon took a nap on a few chairs lined up near a stove, before he noticed he was being watched by a spy. Farther on, in Eisenach, Caulaincourt uncovered an ambush and obtained fresh horses by threatening with his sword the landlord of coach inn who was grumbling he couldn’t supply them. When they reached the banks of the Rhine, they noticed that the river was still carrying ice. The boat bridge hadn’t been set up yet, so they had to cross in a small boat. In Saint-Jean-les-Deux-Jumeaux, the two men got into a small, open cabriolet in which they continued “at the speed of hell.” In Meaux, they jumped into a post chaise “that could shut firmly” and it was in this contraption that, at a quarter to midnight on December 18th, they reached the Tuileries. Caulaincourt knocked on the door of the gallery that opened onto the garden, and the hall beadle had the good sense to choose not to recognize the Emperor and his Grand Squire in these two muddy, bearded ghosts in fur-lined boots!
Thus ended one of the most formidable games in the history of open-air sports. Caulaincourt went to the Empress’s duty staff, and the ladies nearly passed out before this specter who, in addition, announced the return of the Emperor. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, Napoleon rushed to the Empress and rewarded Caulaincourt for his four years as Ambassador to Saint Petersburg, four months of war, two months of rout, and two weeks of galloping, with a magnanimous, “Goodnight, Caulaincourt. You also need some rest.”
“You couldn’t ride back from Smorgon in thirteen days now,” I said to Goisque in the service station on the road to Marijampolė.
“Why? Do you want us to try?”
“Because the forests are interrupted by highways, the fields by barbed wire, and the plains by canals.”
“We’re no longer in the days of horse-riding Europe. The car has triumphed.”
“And yet Gouraud managed it.”
In 1990, the writer Jean-Louis Gouraud had traveled from Paris to Moscow on horseback. He had been welcomed in triumph on Red Square and had made a gift of his mount to Raisa Gorbachev. We had boundless admiration for the author of this trek undertaken with a bridle across the countries of the Warsaw bloc. Even though we suspected he had organized his adventure solely for the pleasure of being able to boast that he had “ridden through the Iron Curtain on horseback.”
“It took him seventy-seven days,” Goisque said.
“Yes, but he had no Grand Squire to prepare the legs of his journey.”
During these solitary hours across snowy fields, Napoleon talked to Caulaincourt. He talked as though words transcended the nightmare, and kept ghosts away. He talked as though to free himself. And Caulaincourt took on the role of court clerk in this conversation that was actually more of a monologue. The Grand Squire took “rushed” notes, he says, without respite. At the relay station, next to a stove in the inn, while Napoleon slept or had dinner, under his bearskin, his fingers numbed from the cold, he would take notes. And the hundred or so pages, to which he gave the title of On a Sleigh with the Emperor, became one of the most unclassifiable confessions of a head of state. Did Napoleon manipulate his Grand Squire? Did he know that his words would immediately be published? Was he rehearsing The Memorial of Saint Helena three years before its time? Whatever the case may be, he was aware of the strange atmosphere of this confession, since he stressed to Caulaincourt that “never has a man had such a long tête-à-tête with his sovereign…”
We were making good progress toward Marijampolė. Our machines seemed delighted with the icy evening air. These were the forests at the start of the European Union. Everything looked tidier than in the ex-Soyuz. The road cut through images of Brueghel countryside. A man with a chapka on his head went by on a bicycle. A cart hitched up to a bay horse was carrying peasants to farmhouses covered with shingled roofs that came down to the ground. We went through hamlets. We guessed that wood stoves were pulling in full. Poor Lithuania, that had suffered so much, was smoking happily now that History had gone to bed. The sun set and the countryside turned into a Viennese cake, pink and fat.
What the hell had Vassily eaten? He was darting into the night. We left Marijampolė behind us, and drove at a hundred and twelve miles an hour. A few hours later, we were on the Polish border. Complete with sodium projectors lighting the snow, and awnings with Cło! and Postój! stamped on them, their installations maintained a Cold War feel about them. We weren’t even entitled to a glance on the part of the customs officer.
“This is becoming annoying,” Vitaly said.
Vassily wanted to drive even faster. I struggled like mad to keep up with him in the fast-forming fog. The road snaked and all the former Eastern Bloc trucks seemed to have agreed to gather in this section of Masuria. I dreaded the right turns, which were likely to lift the sidecar and capsize the bike. It started snowing more heavily and got the better of Vassily’s rage. We stopped off in a timber inn by the roadside, in Augustów, the very same town through which Caulaincourt and the Emperor traveled two hundred years earlier to the day.
“To the day? Thomas asked at the inn.
“Yes,” I said, “they arrived in Warsaw on the 10th, and were in Marijampolė on the 7th, so they went through Masuria and Podlachia on December 8th and 9th, and today is the 8th, so they clearly stopped off in Augustów.”
Sensitive to symbols, Goisque couldn’t get over the coincidence and wanted to check this in the oil-stained copy of Caulaincourt’s Memoirs.
“Show me, Tesson, I don’t believe you.”
I quoted Napoleon speaking to Caulaincourt, “Goisque, when I tell you something, you must believe it.”
DAY SEVEN.
FROM AUGUSTÓW TO WARSAW
Where did they go through? This was now our concern.