'Your Highness has not forgotten we are not driving post horses now? If we drive the way we did on the outward journey, these will be done in well before Lyon. And that, if I may say so, would be a downright shame.'
'I don't mean to kill my horses but I want you to make the stages as long as you can. We will go on further tonight. Drive on.'
With a resigned sigh, Gracchus-Hannibal Pioche mounted his box and began taming the berline round, watched with a jaundiced eye by the landlord who had stepped out to welcome such an elegant equipage. Then, whipping up the horses, he set the coach bowling along the road to Orange.
It was nightfall when, after a striking demonstration of the stamina of Marianne's horses, the travelling berline, so splashed with mud and coated with dust that even the colour, let alone the crest, was scarcely to be seen, drew up at the Fontainebleau guard post.[3] Marianne could not repress a sigh of relief when she saw the lights in the doorways of the elegant buildings designed by Ledoux which marked the outer limits of the city of Paris. She had arrived at last.
The initial surge of joy which had swept over her at Avignon and sent her speeding along the road to Paris had, it was true, abated somewhat, as it had seemed to do also in the minds of the people she met as she approached the capital. As the towns and staging posts swept by, Marianne had very soon made the discovery that Fouché's dismissal was regarded for the most part in the light of a catastrophe. This was not so much out of any affection for Fouché himself as from a universal dislike of his successor. People feared Savary for his blind devotion to his master; he was the imperial policeman, a man capable of carrying out any order, however monstrous, without blenching. As a result, Marianne had learned to her amazement that, in their alarm and bewilderment, the people of France had begun to think of the slippery Fouché as almost a saint, and regret his departure.
Well, I at least will never regret him!' she told herself, remembering bitterly all that she had suffered at his hands. 'Besides, this Savary has never done me any harm. I have never met him, and I can't see that I need have anything to fear from his appointment.'
However, she could not repress a certain irritation when she saw the men on duty at the guard post paying unwontedly close attention to her coach.
'May I ask what you expect to find?' she snapped sharply. 'I suppose you imagine I am carrying a keg of brandy concealed under my cushions?'
'Orders are orders, madame.' The reply came from a gendarme who emerged at that moment from the guardhouse. 'All carriages entering Paris to be searched, especially those coming from a distance. Where are you from, madame?'
'From Italy,' Marianne said tartly. 'And I promise you I have no contraband goods, or conspirators in my coach. I am merely returning home.'
'Then I daresay you'll have a passport,' the gendarme said, smiling unpleasantly and revealing in the process a set of startlingly white teeth framed in the bristly thatch of his moustache. 'A passport in the name of the Duke of Otranto, perhaps?'
It did not appear that such passports would be well received and Marianne blessed the fate that had made her, henceforth, a loyal subject of the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Proudly, she produced the passport which Count Gherardesca had presented to her three days after her marriage.
'This bears the signature of her Imperial Highness, Princess Elisa, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Princess of Lucca and Piombino – and sister to his Majesty, the Emperor and King, as you may perhaps be aware,' she added ironically, taking a sardonic pleasure in retailing the impressive list of titles. However, the gendarme seemed impervious to irony. He was heavily engaged in spelling out the name inscribed on the official document by the light of the lantern.
'Marianne Elizabeth d'Assel… nat de Villeneuve… Princess… Sarta – no, Santa Anna…'
'Sant'Anna,' Marianne corrected sharply. 'Now may I return to my coach and continue my journey? I am extremely tired – and it is starting to rain.'
Big, round drops, heavy as coins, were beginning to fall, making small craters in the dust around the coach, but the gendarme in his cocked hat appeared not to notice it. He was eyeing Marianne suspiciously.
'You can get back in, but don't move on. I've got to check something.'
'Just what, I'd like to know?' Marianne raged, as the man vanished into the guardhouse with her passport. 'Does the oaf imagine that my papers are false?'
The answer came from an old market gardener with a cart full of cabbages who had drawn up alongside the berline.
'No use getting impatient, m'dame. It's the same for everyone, every bloody day standing in the bloody rain! They've got so ruddy nosey you wouldn't believe! I can tell you, I've been made to unload a whole cart of cabbages, just in case I might be hiding some bleeding conspirator.'
'But, what is it all about? Has there been an attempt at assassination? Has a criminal escaped? Or are they looking for robbers?'
'Nothing like that, m'dame. It's all that bloody Savary, thinks he's the only one as knows how to serve the Emperor! So he goes on searching and nosing and asking questions. Who hatched it? Who laid it? Wants to know it all, he does.'
The farmer's confidences might have continued indefinitely but for the reappearance of the hairy gendarme, preceded this time by a sub-lieutenant, a dapper, beardless youth who approached the coach and bowed perfunctorily, taking in Marianne with an eye of insolent appreciation.
'You are Madame Sant'Anna, it appears.'
Outraged at the tone the young whipper-snapper had used to her, Marianne felt herself stiffen.
'I am the Princess Sant'Anna,' she said, very distinctly. 'It is usual to address me as Serene Highness, lieutenant. Apparently they do not teach you manners in the gendarmerie?'
'It is enough that we are taught to do our duty,' the young man said, in no way discomposed by her disdainful tone. 'My duty, Serene Highness, is to conduct you forthwith to the Minister of Police – if you will be good enough to ask your maid to make room for me.'
Before the outraged Marianne could say a word, the lieutenant had opened the door and climbed into the coach. Agathe rose automatically to relinquish to him her place beside Marianne, but her mistress laid a firm hand on her arm.
'Stay where you are, Agathe. I did not tell you to move and I am not in the habit of allowing any Tom, Dick or Harry to sit beside me. As for you, sir, I believe I must have misunderstood you. Will you repeat what it was you said?'
The lieutenant, obliged to maintain an uncomfortable stooping posture in the absence of anywhere to sit down, spoke in a voice of stifled anger.
'I said that I was to conduct you forthwith to the Minister of Police. Your name has been circulated to every guard post for more than a week. These are my orders.'
'Whose orders?'
'Whose orders would you expect? The Minister of Police, his grace the Duke of Rovigo, and therefore of the Emperor.'
'That remains to be seen,' Marianne retorted. 'Very well, if that is what you want, we will go to the Duke of Rovigo. I should not object to telling him what I think of him, and of his subordinates. Until then, however, I intend to remain mistress of my own coach. Have the goodness to take a seat next to my coachman, young man. And while you are about it, you may show him the way. Under no other circumstances will you get me to budge from this spot.'
'Very well. I will go.'
With a very bad grace, the young gendarme climbed out and went to join Gracchus, who welcomed him with a sardonic grin.
'Nice of you to come and bear me company, lieutenant. You'll find it's well enough up here. A little damp, maybe, but you get more fresh air than inside. Now, where is it we're going exactly?'