The wheels crunched with a soft melancholy and the axles moaned with human-like voices.
X
He fell asleep in the carriage. The sun rose, just as it always had, mighty and golden. The morning was already as hot as midday. The carriage wheels crunched along as the axles groaned. The Emperor’s three companions were silent. They studied his sleeping face. He was pale yellow, and every so often his mouth fell open, revealing his even, gleaming white teeth, before he sighed gently and closed his mouth again. They gingerly lowered the windows, on account of the untenable heat in the carriage. The fresh breeze awoke the Emperor. He forced his great, pale eyes open, ran his hand over his brow, and for a moment looked at his companions as if they were strangers he did not recognize. Then he smiled at them, as if to appease them, and asked if he had slept long and where they were. “Near Poitiers,” said General Bekker. Poitiers! — It was still far from the coast! The Emperor was very impatient. He wished to get to the coast quickly.
“Let’s hurry, gentlemen,” he said. “I long for the sea. I want to see the water, I want to see the water!”
They remained silent. They were astonished and a little startled. The Emperor’s words seemed bizarre to them and they exchanged uneasy looks. The Emperor noticed his companions were uncomfortable. He smiled. “Don’t be surprised,” he began, “that I long for the sea. I’ve had enough of the land. Fate truly has middling notions, like a middling poet. I was born amid the sea and I must see it again. I’d like to see Corsica too, but that is not to be. But the sea, gentlemen, every sea reminds me of Corsica.”
None of his companions knew exactly what he meant, but they all maintained solemn and attentive expressions. Still, he could tell that they understood nothing of what he said. How wide a gap already separates me from the common people! he thought. Only a week ago they understood a wave of my finger, a passing glance, every nuance of my lips, but now they do not even understand my clearly spoken words. One must, he thought further, speak very plainly to them. And although at that moment he had no desire for it, he said, just to be friendly: “May I have some snuff?”
He was given an open snuff box, took a pinch, inhaled slowly with pretended pleasure, then closed the lid. He was about to give back the little box when his gaze fell upon the lid. It featured a miniature portrait of the Empress Josephine — that endearing, smiling face, the wide tan cheeks, and the great noble red curve of her mouth. Her strong, slender neck gleamed white, and her enticing breasts peeked, dainty and inquisitive, from her neckline. The Emperor examined the box, closed it, ran his hand over the lid, brought it near his eyes and then his lips, and said: “May I keep it, General?” The General bowed silently. The Emperor held the box in his folded hands. He closed his eyes. He fell asleep again.
It was early evening when they reached Niort. He climbed out of the carriage at the Golden Ball Inn. Nobody recognized him. The innkeeper came along, thick, pudgy, and noiseless — himself a ball, a soft red rubber ball that moved as if some unseen player had pushed him, sending him rolling toward his destination. He even rolled up the stairs. He opened up the room and attempted a bow, but was wholly unsuccessful. As a desperate attempt to demonstrate respect and out of confusion over the gleaming carriage and the distinguished gentlemen, he said to the Emperor: “Your Reverence, here is the room.”
“You might have addressed Monsieur Talleyrand by that title,” murmured the Emperor. As the innkeeper was preparing to roll back down the stairs again, the Emperor grabbed his coat and ordered: “Stay here!”
The Emperor tossed his round hat on to the bed, and the innkeeper noticed his forehead with the black lock of hair and light eyes — and gave a terrific start. Downstairs in the breakfast room hung a portrait of the Emperor bareheaded. This same face was painted on all the plates, engraved on all the knife handles, and permanently imprinted in people’s minds. The gentleman looked like the Emperor, and the innkeeper rolled a step backward to the door. He wavered for some time between the impulse to drop to his knees and the fear that told him to flee the room as quickly as possible. But the Emperor, who could see the man’s misery, smiled and said once again: “Stay here! Have no fear!”
Yes, now the innkeeper was certain of the identity of his guest. He wished to kneel but because of his rotund body he could only fall down and thus he lay at the Emperor’s feet, stammering incomprehensibly. “Stand up!” the Emperor ordered, and the man rose surprisingly quickly and stood with his fat rounded back touching the door and his large black bulging eyes rolling (also like balls) pitifully and helplessly in all directions.
Just then there was a commotion outside; through the window came the joyful and melancholy whinnying of horses and the loud voices and coarse laughter of men. The Emperor went immediately to the window. Below in the plaza before the inn he saw soldiers, his soldiers and his horses. In the blink of an eye he forgot everything — his abdication and the sea for which he longed — only the soldiers registered in his brain. He forgot even the innkeeper, who was still leaning against the door, now resembling a neglected ball. One of the soldiers suddenly lifted his head toward the window and saw and recognized the Emperor. Within seconds all the soldiers were crowded beneath the window, longing faces raised upward, giving voice to that old cry through their wide open mouths: “Long live the Emperor! Long live the Emperor!”
He turned around. There stood the innkeeper at the door; he too was shouting: “Long live the Emperor!” — with such a resoundingly loud voice he could have been shouting in the open air and not a few steps away from the Emperor. Someone knocked, bringing news to the Emperor that the enemy was just outside Paris and that the artillery fire had begun.
“Write immediately to Paris!” the Emperor ordered. The General sat down, and the Emperor dictated: “We hope that Paris will defend herself and that the enemy will allow you ample time to await the outcome of the negotiations that are being conducted by your ambassadors. . You may now look upon your Emperor as your General and call upon my services as someone inspired solely by a desire to be useful to his motherland. .” But hardly had the General left the room with this message when the Emperor was again overcome by that already familiar feeling of unhappiness — by sorrow, by uncertainty, and by regret over the letter he had just dispatched. He was no longer Emperor. He had abdicated. How could he have believed, even for a moment, that he could still be a general? The country did not need him! It was exiling him too. He had come from the coast to conquer it. Now it was returning him back to the coast! He knew this. “Onward, onward,” he ordered. And: “The sea! The sea!”
XI
There it was, the sea that he had so craved, the eternal sea. He sat in a cramped room on the ground floor of a little house on the Île d’Aix. The bed, table, and wardrobe were all black, like ebony coffins. The Emperor woke several times during the night. The sea did not let him sleep. Long gone were the days when he was able to sleep in happy unison with the song of the sea. He had been a young man and it was his native sea, the sea that surrounded Corsica. Even when it was rebellious, its frothy waves betrayed a kind of tender joy amid the anger, and its crests of spray were not storming the shore but caressing it with stormy passion. That was what he hoped to hear now when, unable to sleep, he opened the window and listened to the regular, excessively violent crashing of the waves against the beach. Oh, how amicable it had been, his native Corsican sea! But this was no French sea; its waves seemed to speak English, the language of the enemy, the eternal enemy. From his window, he could see lights a few miles out to sea. The English ship Bellerophon was waiting. Its captain’s name was Maitland. These names, thought the Emperor, will become immortal through me, an honor they don’t merit! Bellerophon and Maitland! Hundreds of years from now people will still talk of them. By then the ship will have sunk or its parts been salvaged to build another; the captain will be lying on the ocean floor or in an English graveyard. I myself will be dead, although probably lying in a more solid coffin! But even that too will one day be gnawed at by worms. It will be a coffin like this black ebony dresser, like this black bed on which I’m about to lie and which already looks like a catafalque. But their names will be remembered — Maitland and Bellerophon, Bellerophon and Maitland.