“Not a day goes by in France when we don’t come across regulations sprung out of his brain,” Gras said.
“Was he a madman? Or a genius?” I said. “Or an insular prophet who was inspired by Corsican clan divisions to long for unity—”
“—and even a fusion between East and West?” Gras said.
“This isn’t really about our escapade, actually—”
“—Not at all,” Gras continued, “what we want—”
“—is to pay tribute to the memory of hundreds of thousands of poor soldiers, victims of having followed their leader, of having believed that a nation,” I said.
“—could write a collective novel with each and everyone’s blood—”
“—and touch glory with the tip of its finger—”
“—and blend in with Napoleon’s soul, as Léon Bloy put it.”
“We’ll travel by motorbike in memory of these men,” I said.
“We won’t celebrate anything,” Gras said.
“We’ll simply recreate the itinerary of the Retreat.”
“And measure, deep inside us—”
“—the burden of misery—”
“—the sum of suffering—”
“—what a dream of greatness costs in terms of sorrow—”
“—and the amount of tears needed to reform the world.”
“Why did these men agree to take part in a marriage of honor, folly, and death?” Gras concluded.
“They’re close to us, after all. Two hundred years is nothing,” I said.
The conference came to a close. Maylis ran away. We went back to our host, a network diplomat, in charge of literary events at the French Embassy.
We were all fired up by our contribution. We went up to her. “Do you think our speech made the Russians shudder?” I said.
“They like Napoleon, don’t they? Will they appreciate our journey?” Gras said.
The representative for the diffusion of the French language replied, “You have checked into your hotel, haven’t you?”
You soon get used to wearing a bicorn. It was late November. There were fifteen of us at the table that night, after the conference at the Moscow Book Fair. Fifteen friends in the apartment on Rue Petrovka, sitting under portraits of Lenin and Beria. The chandeliers held Slavonic candles: they melted at full speed, with translucent sobs. We spoke Russian the way polite Europeans do. There were French present, Slavs, a German, a Balte, two or three Ukrainians: all had been invited by our friend Jacques von Polier, an asthma sufferer, grand seigneur, Russophile, and businessman. I was wearing on my head a replica of the imperial hat, the one you find in lunatic asylums, and which I’d decided not to take off for the whole duration of our campaign. I’ve always been a great believer in the merits of headdress. In ancient times, the hat made the man. This is still the case in the East: you’re identified by what you wear on your head. One of the symptoms of modern times was to make us go out into the streets with our heads bare. Thanks to the bicorn, a mysterious alchemical percolation would perhaps instill into me some of the Emperor’s genius…
The bicorn I was wearing was a replica of the diminutive Corsican’s. The hat with the rosette had covered the head of an enigma more than a man. The Emperor was born on a granite island covered in chestnut trees, unaware that he carried within him a monstrous energy. How do we become what we are? It was what we were wondering about Napoleon’s fate. What mysterious string of events led the obscure officer all the way to the coronation in Notre Dame de Paris in 1804? What divinatory power propelled him to the command of half a million warriors feared by the whole of Europe? What star led him to triumph? What genius inspired his technique, worthy of a Greek god: lightning, daring, kairos.
He had persuaded his men that nothing would stand in the way of their glorious march. He had offered them the Pyramids in 1798, the Rhineland in 1805, the gates of Madrid in 1808, the plains of Holland in 1810. He had brought Britain to her knees in 1802, in Amiens, and forced the Tsar of all the Russias to purr softly in Tilsit in 1807. He had ruled the administration, reformed the State, overturned old models of civilization, and built a legend with Macedonian undertones.
Then, suddenly, the dream would come crashing down because of a march to the death across the Russian steppes. The year 1812 was a whirlwind of shadows, the first chapter of which would be played out by the River Neman and, three years later, end within the salt-corroded walls of Saint Helena.
And so we were drinking von Polier’s wines. Knocking back Crimean cabernet, eating herrings with dill, black pudding with cranberries, sweet gherkins. There were small carafes filled with that elixir of oblivion—that is, of forgiveness—and wicked joy: Belarus vodka, as limpid as Savoy spring water. Our host had moved to Moscow twenty years earlier, having gotten weary of France, of its regulations, its petit-bourgeois reactionaries, its bad-mannered socialists, its potted geraniums, and its rural traffic circles. France, a little paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell, administered by do-gooders busy keeping in check the residents of the human park, no longer suited his need for freedom.
He’d longed for adventure, for reality. He preferred dealing with businessmen who looked like thugs, rather than HEC[1]-qualified barracudas who never even thought of inviting him to get hammered in a sauna after negotiating a contract. Jacques felt closer to a fisherman on Lake Lagoda than to a guy rambling on about tax installments. As a matter of fact, he thought everybody in France seemed preoccupied with his own bank balance. So, ever since then, he’d been dragging his tall frame to the farthest corners of the former USSR, along with his generous gestures and a pair of dark, wild eyes hungry for an opportunity for not sleeping.
In 2008, he’d purchased the Raketa watch factory, founded in the 17th century by Tsar Peter the Great and taken over by the Soviets in order to establish the legend of the USSR. The Politburo ordered an edition of a watch for every event. There were models to glorify submariners, the 1980 Olympics, Gagarin’s first flight into space, and polar expeditions. The factory had escheated in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Jacques was excited by bad business, and his spirit would get carried away by lost causes. Of the six million watches produced in 1990, the factory was manufacturing a mere thousand by the year 2000. The staff, whose salaries were six months in arrears, was down to a forgotten fifty, whereas it had amounted to thousands under Gorbachev.
And so Jacques slaved away at resurrecting the brand. He devoted his entire energy and his whole heart to it. Mocking at first, the Russians had ended up admiring this Parisian who wouldn’t let the only precision industry factory in the country of approximation die, and who fought for the Raketa pulse to keep beating on the wrists of the Moujiks.
Gras and I were as proud as tractor drivers of Farm Squad No. 12 receiving the work medaclass="underline" Jacques had just given us two watches stamped with the Napoleonic eagle, which he’d issued for the bicentenary of the 1812 campaign. The profiles of Napoleon and Kutuzov were depicted on the back, facing each other on the battlefield of Borodino. With a watch like this you could head into winter and into the night with nothing to fear. Except delays, since the mechanism wasn’t automatic yet, and we children of the West had lost the habit of winding our watches.
Thomas Goisque was at the table, a friend of ten years, a photographer turned Russophile later than us, but with as much ardor. He’d come to join us. He’d felt demoralized by his landing at Sheremetyevo Airport, twenty-four miles from Moscow city center. Through the porthole, he’d discovered the true face of the Russian winter: a depressing landscape. The world had been forsaken by color. The forest looked dejected. The sky was a defeat, and the snow was the same tint as cement. Mud everywhere.
1
Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris: a prestigious European business school based in the suburbs of Paris.