The Sergeant, furious at the thought that he would be called to account for this untimely scene, smacked Roger's face hard several times with the flat of his hand. The blows had the effect of bringing him out of his temporary stupor. Josephine was then passing within fifteen feet of him. As he glimpsed the standards that were being carried aloft behind her, he let out a last despairing shout:
'Fouche! Your diary! William deKay! Help!'
Josephine's footsteps faltered. She had gone suddenly pale under her rouge. She halted and gave a loud cry: 'That man! Who is he? Please… bring him here.'
Anxious to earn merit in her eyes, half a dozen officers sprang forward. The crowd melted before them. Roger was torn from his captors, turned about and shoved by them to within a yard of her.
Half fainting, he fell on his knees, but turned his face up and managed to gasp out, 'Madame, I am the Citizen Breuc. You remember me! You must! I implore you to save me!'
She stared down at his grimy face, with its tangled hair and beard. 'No, no! You cannot be. You bear no resemblance.'
'I swear I am.' He staggered to his feet, so that he was facing her. 'I was here on a secret mission; that's why I am disguised. But look in my eyes, Madame. Look in my eyes, and you will know me.'
For a moment her soft brown eyes looked into his deep blue ones, then she whispered, 'It is! It is!'
'You are right, Madame,' said a deep voice behind her. 'It is indeed the Citizen Breuc. I, too, now recognise him.'
Shifting his glance for a second, Roger saw that the speaker was Andoche Junot, an old friend of his, and General Buonaparte's first aide-de-camp.
Josephine had turned to the Mayor of the new Municipality of Venice, who was doing the honours of the city for her. In Italian, which she could speak a little, she said, 'Citizen Mayor, this man is well known to me and in the past rendered me a service which I shall never forget. I do not know of what crime he is accused, but whatever it may be I beg his pardon of you, and that you will give him to me.'
The Mayor bowed so low that the big old-fashioned wig he was wearing came down almost to the level of Josephine's waist. As he lifted his fat face he replied with a servile smile, 'Madame, your illustrious husband has bestowed liberty on Venice, and liberty is worth more than life; so the lives of everyone in this city are yours to dispose of.'
Without even waiting for the Mayor's reply, General Baraguay d'Hilliers, the Commander of the French troops in Venice, who was standing beside him, cried, 'Free this man! And be quick about it.'
Roger's escort hastened to obey. As his arms were being untied, the Sergeant grinned at him. 'Your lucky day, chum. But I were right, weren't I? Didn't I say they'd turned out the guard speshul f er you?'
The irrepressible humour of the old soldier released the tension of Roger's overstrained emotions. He found himself laughing, and saying, 'If you hadn't delayed to see the procession, I'd be dead by now. Find me later through Colonel Junot and I'll make you a handsome present to drink my health.'
As the procession moved on Roger fell in behind Junot, an incongruous figure among this splendid array of gorgeously clad officials and the bevy of beautiful women who were in attendance on Josephine. A moment later, at a touch of his shoulder, he turned to find that the clever-looking Citizen
Villetard had sidled up to him. In an anxious voice the Charge d'Affaires said:
'Citizen Breuc, I am desolated at the thought of the part I played in Court this morning. At any other time I should have gone into such a matter more fully. I should have sent for you and questioned you myself. But for the past few days I have been overwhelmed with the work of preparing for Madame Buonaparte's reception. And the Signor Malderini had already denounced you as a British spy before your letter was received. He seemed so positive of his facts. I can hardly hope for your immediate forgiveness; but if there is any way in which I can be of service to you, you have only to command me.'
Roger was much too shrewd to show malice to a man who might prove useful to him, so he replied at once, 'Even the most conscientious of us makes mistakes at times, Citizen; and my narrow escape this morning was one of the risks inseparable from my work. In that I may later accept your offer of assistance. For the present, I require only a certificate of civicism, as a protection against any further mistakes of the same kind, and decent quarters where I can exchange this now useless Arab disguise for more suitable garments.'
Villetard gave a sigh of relief. 'Nothing could be simpler, Citizen. When our Ambassador was withdrawn in April, I took over the Embassy, and in it there is ample accommodation. I beg that you will allow me to become your host, and everything you may require shall be furnished you.'
The invitation suited Roger admirably; so he graciously accepted and they walked on side by side, across the great courtyard of the Palace, up the broad stairway, now flanked by Venetian halberdiers, and through to the enormous hall in which the Grand Council had elected the Doges. It had a frieze of their portraits going right back to the year 810 and, at one end, forming a twenty-foot high background for the seventy-foot-long dais, Tintoretto's vast painting the largest in the world.
It was from the dais, three months earlier, that Junot had read to the cringing Senate Buonaparte's threatening message, which had led to the fall of the thousand-year-old Republic, Now he stood behind Josephine, a resplendent figure, square chinned, curly haired, smiling amiably, while the Mayor made a long speech of servile adulation about the benefits the conqueror had bestowed upon the city, and Josephine replied in her halting Italian that only urgent affairs had caused him to send her, instead of coming himself, to say how greatly he valued their friendship.
Afterwards she was conducted to the Doge's private apartments, which had been made ready for her, so that she might rest through the heat of the afternoon. Roger then accompanied Villetard to the French Embassy, where his host installed him in a comfortable room, provided him with a valet and sent for a barber and clothiers. As a further gesture of amends the long nosed diplomat then begged his acceptance of a silver-hilted sword and a purse of five hundred sequins for present expenses. Roger saw no reason to refuse them and, to the delight of Citizen Villetard, promised to speak well of him to Madame Buonaparte.
Four hours later, bathed, rested, his beard shaved off, and dressed in ready-made, but not too ill-fitting, clothes, he returned with Villetard to the Palace for the banquet which was being given in Josephine's honour. When he kissed her hand at the reception and thanked her for his life, she said:
'People may reproach me for laziness and love of pleasure, Monsieur, but not for forgetting my friends; and I shall ever count you one of them. But I am all agog to learn what brought you to so sorry a pass. Please come here tomorrow morning and tell me all about yourself.'
Junot, too, was eager to hear his story and, later in the evening, after the first formal quadrille had been danced, the two men sat down together over glasses of wine. Roger had always found it good policy to tell as much of the truth as possible about his doings and, since he had to account for his long absence from France, he had decided to make no secret of his voyage to India.
When last in Paris, he had succeeded in blending various roles he had played in the past into one coherent story which was now generally accepted in the salons of the French capital. By then there were plenty of people who had once graced the halls of Versailles, but having liberal principles had stretched them far enough to the Left to survive the Terror and, after the fall of Robespierre, they had emerged, either from prison or a caution-dictated obscurity, to form with the new masters of France a revived upper-class of wealth and fashion; so to them there was nothing at all strange in the ci-devant Chevalier de Breuc having kept his life and liberty by fooling the sans culottes into believing him to be a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary. He had, too, so skilfully dovetailed his French and English identities that the Buonaparte’s, Barras, Junot and everyone else with whom he was well acquainted as Citizen Breuc thought him only half French by birth and brought up in England, but entirely French in sympathies, and a patriot who had rendered France many useful services.