He had told men something and the men had wanted to listen to a fairy story, and believe it could come true. Men are ready for anything, just as long as someone exalts them and the speaker is skillful.
The diminutive Corsican had used every publicity technique. He had staged his coronation, embraced a heritage without doing its inventory, and pictured a new aesthetic. He had distributed new titles, rewritten pedigrees, invented rewards. In his puppeteer hands a new court had been established. The system was based on merit: everybody could bring home the bacon and aspire to high office. You used to be a pork butcher’s boy? You could end up a marshal! It was no longer necessary to be of noble birth, as long as you were driven! He had produced slogans. His responses were imprinted in the collective unconscious. His letters and bulletins had acted as press releases for immediate business and archives for posterity. In battle, he had shaken up old rules. He had raised opportunism into an art of war. His military feats were theatrical. He had baffled war scholars, trusting in his lucky star, manhandling theories. Basking in victories, he had formed a geography of glory. Austerlitz, Wagram, Jena warmed the cockles of the heart, and inflamed minds. In the architecture of legend, he had neglected nothing: with the help of his Napoleonic Code, he had even endowed the Empire with its little red book!
The golden dome was glowing. Goisque had been busy. He had called the military governor of Paris and obtained permission for us drive our bikes into the main courtyard. We cut through a line of tourists. The Japanese were staring, eyes wide. The gendarmes moved back against the railings. Vitaly was proud. He wasn’t used to the constabulary holding the door open for him.
Our small column of Uralist-radical-Napoleonists, as Vassily called it, ventured onto the cobbles. We drove in a row, made half a turn to the left, parked our bikes, and cut our engines at the bottom of the courtyard, at the foot of Napoleon’s statue. We were a few yards away from his tomb. We had stretched an earthly thread from Moscow to this courtyard.
There were a few friends there. They’d come to hug us. They were surprised by the fact that we said nothing. We were just happy standing there, beneath the bronze statue.
I felt as though I was waking up after a two-and-a-half-thousand-mile-long dream.
Who was Napoleon? A wide-awake dreamer who believed life wasn’t enough? What was History? A faded dream of no use to our small-minded present?
The sky darkened, and a few drops fell.
I suddenly felt like going home, taking a shower, and washing off all those horrors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sylvain Tesson has traveled the world by bicycle, train, horse, motorcycle, and on foot. His best-selling accounts of his travels have won numerous prizes, including the Dolman Best Travel Book Award for The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga (2013). He is also the president of an NGO, La Guilde Européenne du Raid.
COPYRIGHT
Europa Editions
214 West 29th St.
New York NY 10001
Copyright © 2015 by Editions Guérin
Published by arrangement with Agence litteraire Astier-Pécher
All Rights Reserved
First publication 2019 by Europa Editions
Translation by Katherine Gregor
Original Title: Berezina
Translation copyright © 2019 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
Cover photo © www.thomasgoisque-photo.com
ISBN 9781609455552