Next day the journey was resumed with the ladies in coaches, the gentlemen riding beside them, and with a full regiment of Chasseurs clattering along before and behind as escort. They travelled by Vicenza, Verona and Brescia, at each being lodged in the sumptuous apartments of some great palace and being lavishly entertained by the authorities of the city. The fifth day was their longest stage, but relays of horses were always ready for them every few miles, and as twilight fell they arrived at the imposing Chateau Montebello, three miles outside Milan, which Boneparte had made his permanent residence since the cessation of the fighting.
Soon after the arrival of Josephine's cortege, Junot spoke to Duroc, the Master of the Household, about accommodation for Roger, but the Chateau was so crowded that only an attic could be found for him. Having freshened himself up as well as he could there, he went down to the great chambers of the building, and mingled with the many people who were lounging and gossiping in them, until the General made his appearance with Josephine on his arm on their way to supper.
From what Junot had said, and various remarks made on the journey, Roger had been prepared to find a big change between Buonaparte, as he had known him in Paris, and Boneparte the conqueror; but, even so, it far exceeded his expectations.
The change was not so much in the man himself as in the state of things he had created round him. In Paris he had only recently become acknowledged as a young General who might well have a future, and been somewhat feared for his sharp tongue. Here, he moved in an aura of adulation and glory, even grizzled veterans hanging on his words with bated breath whenever he spoke of war. Then, he had not long acquired his first coach, or been able to afford to replace his shabby clothes with such luxuries as an enormous hat laced with a three inch deep band of gold galloon. Now, although quietly dressed himself, he was the pivot around which revolved an amazing scene of pomp and splendour.
Roger had seen many Great Headquarters; not only those of Revolutionary Generals such as Dumouriez and Pichegru, but also those of the Prince de Conde on the Rhine, and of King Gustavus in Sweden. Compared with this, they were all as cottages to a mansion; for this was the Court of a mighty potentate. It was thronged not only with scores of officers in brilliant uniforms and lovely women, but also with ambassadors from many of the German States, the Swiss Cantons and the lands to the east of the Adriatic, and notabilities from every city in Italy, The presence of these last brought home to Roger more than anything else the fact that from Nice to Venice, and from Rome to the Brenner Pass, the young Corsican, who had celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday only a fortnight before, ruled with supreme power and that, throughout all these many lands, his least word was law,
Nominally he was still the servant of the Directory, but even if he wished to consult them it took the best part of three weeks to get from Paris the answer to a question, and he rarely asked one. Meanwhile he acted like an absolute monarch, and played the part of a King as though he had been born to it.
During the campaign he had fed in private with his staff, and any of his senior officers who had been in the neighbourhood of his headquarters had always been welcome at his table. Now, like royalty, he had his meals served in public, in the great banqueting hall of the Chateau, with two or three hundred people looking on, and his Generals and other persons of importance were invited to eat with him only as a favour. Whenever he emerged from his private apartments, lanes of bowing courtiers formed for him to pass through, no one sat in his presence unless he indicated that they could, men removed their hats when he appeared, and only a very limited number of people enjoyed the privilege of addressing him unless he had spoken to them first.
To augment the semblance of a royal family, he had sent for his mother and his two eldest sisters, Eliza and Pauline. His features had a closer resemblance to those of Laetitia Boneparte than those of any of her other seven living children, and it was from her that he got all his strongest traits of character. His father, Carlo, had given him only a dash of gentle blood, a love of display and an open-handedness with money. The mother was of near-peasant stock. She had lost her husband twelve years before and had had a desperate struggle to bring up her large family. Honest, virtuous, strict and frugal, she had done so in a way that did her great credit; but her natural limitations deprived her of much of the pleasure she might now have derived from her son's rise to fortune. Tall, gaunt and plainly dressed, her very presence was a censure on the frivolity of Josephine and her circle. Tight-lipped and frowning she showed her disapproval of the adulation paid to Napoleon, whom she continued to regard as an uncertain-tempered young scatterbrain. Years of scraping had made her chronically mean, and his extravagance appalled her. But she had her principles, and remained the rock upon which the whole family was founded. For that he loved and honoured her.
Eliza was twenty; cold, hard and snobbish, from having been educated, although by Royal charity, at an academy for young ladies near Paris. She had recently married a Corsican noble, named Pasquale Baciocchi. Her mother had been pleased with the match and permitted it without consulting Napoleon. When he had heard of it, he had been furious as he had intended to provide her with a husband having better brains and fortune.
His elder brother, the pedestrian-minded, yet industrious, Joseph, he had had appointed Ambassador to Rome, but he had already usurped the headship of the family from him, and on that account been even more enraged with his second brother, Lucien, than with Eliza. This young man was such a rabid revolutionary that he had changed his name to Brutus, and some time before, in true democratic style, married a girl named Christine Boyer who acted as barmaid in her father's inn at St. Maxime. In the spring of '96, Roger had bought a property in the South of France not far from that little town. to enable him to give out in Paris that he was going to stay there for a while, as cover for secret returns to England; so it chanced that he knew the girl slightly. He thought her pretty, honest and reasonably intelligent, but that did not make up for her lack of birth and fortune in the eyes of Robespierre's old protégé the poverty stricken little Captain of Artillery now that he had become the uncrowned King of Italy.
Pauline, however, was admirably sustaining her new role as a Princess. She was the beauty of the family, a lovely young creature of seventeen, gay, flirtatious and always surrounded by a group of admirers, although she too was married, and had been so only for a few months. But she had married, under Napoleon's auspices, the handsome and gallant General Charles Leclerc.
Louis, Laetitia's third son, was also there. As the only possible means of giving him an education Napoleon had, after a leave in Corsica as a young Lieutenant, taken him back to France. He had shared with Louis his modest lodging, kept him on his meagre pay and tutored him at nights; so he looked on Louis as a son rather than as a brother. Louis was now nineteen; he had served through the Italian campaign on Napoleon's staff and worshipped him.
Jerome, the youngest boy, as yet only thirteen, was at school under Joseph's care in Rome, and Caroline, the youngest girl, aged sixteen, was with Hortense de Beauharnais, Josephine's only daughter, at Madam Campan's, a smart finishing school for young ladies outside Paris.
Josephine's son Eugene was also doing his step-father credit. He was short, sturdy and had a waddling walk, but was full of fun, generous and, although still in his teens, had proved his courage in several battles as Napoleon's youngest A.D.C.