During the reaction that took place under the Directory, he had been lucky to escape with his life and, while in exile forty leagues from Paris, managed to sustain himself by breeding pigs. Somehow he had become an army contractor, made a small fortune, then suddenly emerged again as Chief of Police.
From Roger's first year in France right up to the autumn of '99, a bitter enmity had existed between him and Fouche. Each owed the other a long-harboured grudge and, on numerous occasions, they had pitted their wits against each other, with death as the forfeit. But at the time of Brumaire, when Napoleon had made his bid for power, their interests having become common they had buried the hatchet.
Roger had brought the aristocratic Talleyrand and the rabble-rouser Fouchc secretly together, because he knew that both believed Bonaparte to be the 'man with the sword' who could cleanse the Augean Stable that France had become. Talleyrand had stage-managed the coup d'etat out at St. Cloud while Fouche had closed the gates of Paris, thus preventing interference by troops still loyal to the Convention and the Revolution.
Confirmed in his office as Chief of Police by Bonaparte, Fouche had then worked wonders. His spy system was all-embracing, his files contained particulars of every important Frenchman in the country, and out of it. He worked eighteen hours a day and maintained a large staff of highly efficient subordinates. He was aware of every incipient conspiracy and every love affair that mattered. Although himself a Jacobin, he ruthlessly suppressed all his old colleagues who were anti-Bonaparte. He controlled a vast army of agents and his powers had increased to a point where his word became law from one end of France to the other. Meanwhile, he had amassed a vast fortune.
By the autumn of 1802 he had become so powerful that even Napoleon became afraid of him, so dismissed him and split his Ministry into two. But by the summer of 1804, the Emperor had reluctantly come to realise that, when he was away on his campaigns, Fouche was the only man capable of preventing trouble in France, so he had been reinstated as Minister of Police, and given special powers to deal with any emergency.
He was a tall, pale cadaverous man whose features resembled those of a living corpse. Habitually he never looked anyone straight in the face. His eyes were like those of a dead fish and, as he suffered from a perpetual cold, his nose was always running. Unlike Talleyrand, he was careless in his dress and his waistcoat was often stained with snuff. Unlike Talleyrand, too, no pretty woman ever graced his bed. He was completely faithful to a dreary wife who was as ill-favoured as himself. In 1804, when creating a new aristocracy to support his throne, Napoleon had made Fouche the Due d'Otranto.
Although Talleyrand and Fouche had combined to bring General Bonaparte to power as First Consul, their outlooks on life were as different as oil from water, and they loathed each other. But Roger, while having a deep affection for the former, also admired the latter for his extraordinary efficiency, and for a long time past had been on the best of terms with them both.
As the steadily-falling snow formed a thick layer over Roger's furs, his limbs gradually became numb. He felt a great desire to fall asleep, but knew that if he did that would be the end. He would never wake up. Vaguely he realised that he could not have been granted a less painful death. Even so, his instinct was to keep life in his body for as long as possible. From time to time he rubbed his face and ears hard, flailed his arms out and in, beating his chest, and kicked about with his free leg. But gradually his movements became more infrequent, and his mind wandered from one disconnected episode to another:
His divine Georgina in bed with him, bidding him nibble her ears, which she adored; himself angrily telling Pitt who, in 1799, had refused the peace terms offered by Bonaparte, to keep the money due to him and instead give it to the charity for soldiers and sailors wounded in the war; the evening when, on an island in the lagoon of Venice, he had singlehanded defended Napoleon from a gang of conspirators come there to assassinate him; the Emperor's sister, the beautiful Princess Pauline, standing naked in his Paris lodging while she implored him to risk her brother's wrath by demanding her hand in marriage; his horror and fury on that dark night in India when he had come upon Clarissa dying of exposure as a result of a Satanic ceremony performed by the fiendish Malderini; the sunshine and flowers of the Caribbean, which he had so loved while married to his second wife, Amanda, and had, for a while, been Governor of Martinique, Georgina again, happily playing with her son, Charles, and his own daughter, Susan, who shared the nursery of the little Earl. Then for a moment he was again a little boy himself, feeding a saucer of milk to a hedgehog in the garden of his home at Lymington. The pictures faded from his mind, and he slept.
He was awakened by being roughly shaken and gave a cry. A voice said something in a strange tongue. Roger had a flair for languages. He had learned to speak Russian from his first wife, that beautiful. tiger-cat Natalia Andreovna, whom Catherine the Great had forced him into marrying; and, during the past two months, he had picked up a little Polish. This was neither, but seemed like a bastard form of German. He sensed that the man had said:
'Here's one who is still alive.'
Three other men crowded round him. Between them they dragged the dead mare off his leg, then hauled him to his feet and ran their hands over his limbs, evidently to find out if he was wounded. As they released him, his weight came on his injured foot. It gave under him and, with a gasp of pain, he fell across the horse.
All his rescuers were muffled up to the eyes in furs. One towered above the others and must have been at least six foot five. Stooping, he thrust a flask into Roger's mouth and poured vodka down his throat. The fiery spirit made him choke, but his heart began to hammer wildly, restoring his circulation.
Straightening up, the giant spoke to the others in clear but heavily accented German, 'His ankle is broken. But he'll be all right. Get him to the wagon.'
Looking round, Roger realised that it had stopped snowing; but instead of the battlefield being dotted with the dark forms of fallen men and horses, it was now, as far as he could see in the dim light, an endless sheet of white. It was only as he was half carried, half dragged forward that mounds here and there showed the places where Frenchmen and Russians had breathed their last.
On the edge of the wood there stood a covered wagon. With callous indifference for his broken ankle, the men lifted and bundled him into it. Inside, it was pitch dark, but the sound of movement told him that he was not its only occupant. After a moment, a gruff voice said in French: 'Welcome to our hive, camarade. You're the third of us they've picked up. What's your rank and regiment?'
Cautious from long experience of dangerous situations, Roger did not immediately reply. Then he decided that nothing was to be gained by concealing his identity and that revealing it might even secure him better treatment; so he answered:
'Colonel de Breuc, aide-de-camp to the Emperor.'
'Ventre du diable!' exclaimed the other in an awed voice. 'Not le brave Breuc?'
Roger managed a half-hearted laugh. 'That's what they call me. Who are you?'