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 Hôtel 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.
Once out of the room, she walked straight ahead, like a sleepwalker, not even seeing Rustan who looked at her with big, horrified eyes, not even thinking to throw her cloak over her bare shoulders. She was dazed with grief, too numb to feel the full pain. Shock had formed a merciful cushion around her which, as it melted away, would give place to the real suffering, in all its sharpness and cruelty. She did not even think what she was going to do, what would happen now. No. Nothing mattered to her at all, nothing except this dull burning pain within her.
She went down the stairs without so much as seeing them and did not turn, even when a breathless voice called after her. Not until Duroc took the cloak from her to place it round her shoulders was she aware of his presence.
'Where are you off to so fast, mademoiselle? I hope you did not mean to go out by yourself at this hour of night?'
'I? Oh, I do not know. It doesn't matter—'
'How's that? Doesn't matter?'
'I mean – I can easily walk. Don't trouble yourself.'
'Don't talk foolishness! You do not even know the way. You'd get lost – and, here, take this.'
He thrust a handkerchief into her hands but she did not use it. It wasn't until the Grand Marshal of the Palace gently wiped her cheeks that she realized that she was crying. He handed her carefully into the carriage and wrapped a fur rug round her knees, then went to give some orders to the coachman before climbing in beside her.
The coach was on its way before Marianne moved a muscle. She seemed like one thunderstruck. She huddled into the cushions like a hurt animal, seeking only silence and darkness. Her eyes looked out unseeingly at the passing spectacle of Paris by night. For a time, Duroc watched his young companion in silence but then, as the tears began again, running slowly down her cheeks while she made no move to stop them, he began trying clumsily to comfort her.
'You must not upset yourself so,' he murmured gently. 'The Emperor is often harsh, but he is not unkind. You have to understand what it means to have an empire stretching from Ushant to the Niemen and from Denmark to Gibraltar resting on the shoulders of a single man—'
The words came to Marianne as though through a fog. For her, that gigantic empire had only one meaning. It had made its master into a monster of pride and a ruthless autocrat. However, encouraged perhaps by hearing her sigh, Duroc went on: