Napoleon's Exile

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Book: Napoleon's Exile Read Free
Author: Patrick Rambaud
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two days to create a popular movement.’
    â€˜With whom? With what?’
    â€˜We have to simulate a vast royalist movement.’
    â€˜Simulate?’ said Octave in astonishment.
    â€˜We must persuade the allies to support the legitimate monarchy, and the people as a whole to accept it. La Grange, have our Committee assemble tomorrow. We should be able to see things more clearly by then.’
    In December, at the request of Louis XVIII, who had sought refuge in Hartwell, Sémallé had begun to put together a royalist Committee of about forty people. Having been rejected by the aristocrats, who were suspicious of police informers, he had recruited his partisans from officers, civil servants, the hardline bourgeoisie and businessmen craving peace. The committee met in the rue de l'Échiquier, in the town house of a certain Lemercier - a former banker who liked to think of himself as a man of letters - where they talked a lot, did little, and contented themselves with hoarding quantities of white cockades in all kinds of hidey-holes.
    As he led Octave back, Sémallé questioned him. ‘I knew a Blacé in the Tuileries, when I was one of Louis XVI’s pages.’
    â€˜My father.’
    â€˜You don’t look like him.’
    â€˜I’ve been told that before, my lord.’
    â€˜What became of your father?’
    â€˜The last image I have of him is his head on the end of a pike.’
    *
    Claiming to be worn out after his journey from England to Paris, Octave declined the invitation of dinner at the Palais-Royal, where some establishments were keeping their back rooms open for regulars. La Grange did not press the point, but walked him to his room and immediately took his leave.
    Octave hurried to bolt the door as soon as he heard the Marquis heading down the stairs. Then he stood at the window and watched him disappear from view. There was no one else in the street, but he had some lingering doubts. The Marquis was too amiable, too confiding: a letter of recommendation had sufficed, along with some twaddle about emigrant life in London. Was he being left to his own devices so that he might more easily be kept under surveillance? If he went out again, would one or other of the members of this great: Committee take advantage of the fact to tail him?
    Octave threw his wig on to the table and changed his clothes; from his case he took a black tie and a long blue frock-coat which he buttoned across his chest; he put on a high, broad hat. Then, carrying a cane as thick as a cudgel under his arm, he unlocked the big wardrobe: he opened a hidden door in its base and dashed down a spiral staircase that led to the antique shop at 14 rue Saint-Sauveur. (Before the Revolution, the building had been a house of assignation run by a tobacconist’s wife, and this secret exit, through the chamber that was in those days called ‘the changing-room', enabled frolicking noblewomen and worthies to avoid the front door and leave the house disguised as grisettes or respectable clergymen.)
    Octave walked with the quick, resolute pace of a man familiar with the district’s network of alleyways. Half an hour later, at the rue de la Culture-Sainte-Cathérine, he passed through the porch of the Renaissance town-house of M. de Pommereul, the director of the library, and thus of the Imperial censors. In the sentry-box, a corporal with a wooden leg was smoking his pipe; he didn’t ask any questions, as though the new arrival had an entrée into the building. Octave climbed to the first floor and found himself in a room in which files stacked on shelves rose to the ceiling, perched in chairs and tilted in unstable piles on the tile floor. Three men were busy throwing bundles of these documents into a fireplace wide and deep enough to roast an ox. One of the three men, Sebastian Roque - until recently the Baron d’Herbigny - glaced up. He was drenched in sweat, his sleeves were rolled up, and

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