A Night Out
The carriage had been meant to take them to the Tuileries, a dignified route through streets the prefect had promised were calm. That promise had lasted as far as the Pont Neuf.
Now the horses stood with steam rising off their flanks, pressed against the bridge rail by a tide of bodies. Somewhere ahead, a cluster of men had hoisted a makeshift stage of barrels and planks across the rue Saint-Honoré, and on it a woman in a tricolor sash was singing something about the sea being ours again. Her voice cracked on the high notes, and the crowd roared anyway.
Murat leaned out the window, boots already on the step. He clapped for her.
"Absolutely not," Davout said.
"Be reasonable, Louis." Murat's grin caught the torchlight. "We could sit here until dawn, or we could walk. I'm told the human leg works even when the horse is stuck."
Davout's jaw tightened. He had not removed his greatcoat or his hat, and the heat inside the carriage had painted a line of sweat along his collar. "We are the Empress of France, the Governor of Paris, and a Marshal of the Empire. We do not walk through a mob."
"Then we sit here and let them turn the carriage into a monument. Your choice."
Joséphine had not spoken. She was watching the crowd through the far window, her gloved fingers still, her face half-lit by the bonfires someone had built where the rue de Rivoli met the Place du Carrousel. The singing woman had finished, and the barrels were being rolled away, and the crowd was reforming into something looser and drunker and more dangerous.
She turned. "Joachim is right. We walk."
Davout's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Your Imperial Majesty, the security —"
"The security," she said, with the particular softness that made men leap to do her bidding, "is my two marshals. One of whom I have watched ride through cannon fire, and the other of whom I have watched order cannon fire. I believe I am in capable hands."
She held out her hand to Murat before either man could argue further. He took it with a gallantry that bordered on theatrical, kissing her knuckles before helping her down onto the cobblestones.
The crowd did not recognize her immediately. That was the first strange thing. In the daylight, in the palace, Joséphine Bonaparte was unmistakable, the walk, the posture, the particular way she held her head. But at night, in the press of bodies and torch-glow and wine-soaked celebration, she was just a beautiful woman in a dark cloak, and the crowd pressed past her without a second glance as if she were anyone.
She laughed. Actually laughed, a sound Davout had heard perhaps three times in the four years he had served her.
"They don't see me," she said. "They see, everything else. The fire. The wine. Each other."
Murat offered an arm to each of them. Davout stared at the offered elbow as if it were a insult written on fine paper.
"I am not holding your arm, Joachim."
"You will lose us in three seconds flat. You think like a battlefield, Louis, straight lines and flanking maneuvers. A crowd is a cavalry charge."
Murat took his wrist and pulled, and Davout stumbled forward, and Joséphine laughed again, and the three of them were moving.
The streets smelled of wine and river-water and the particular Parisian damp that never quite dried. Woodsmoke layered over everything, and beneath it the sweat of bodies packed tighter than troops in square. Men in workmen's blouses and women in dresses that had seen better days moved together in a current that had no fixed direction. Someone had dragged a piano into the middle of the Place des Victoires and was playing something that might have been a waltz if the pianist had been less drunk.
A man staggered into Davout's shoulder. Davout's hand went to his sword before his brain caught up.
"Pardon, citoyen," the man slurred, and clapped him on the arm, and was gone into the crowd.
"Citoyen," Davout repeated, his voice flat.
"Embrace the revolution, Louis," Murat said. "She's the only mistress who never gets jealous."
Joséphine's hand tightened on Murat's arm. "There. That café. The one with the blue shutters."
It was a narrow building wedged between a tobacconist's and a closed-up bakery. A wooden sign creaked above the door, Le Vieux Sabre, and light spilled from windows that had not been cleaned in living memory. The noise from inside was the particular roar of a room where everyone had already passed the point of civility.
"We would not fit," Davout said.
"We would not be expected to fit," she replied. "That is the point."
She released Murat's arm and walked toward the door. The two men followed because there was nothing else to do.
Inside, the heat hit them like a wall. The room was low-ceilinged and dense with tobacco smoke and the scent of roasting meat. A fire blazed in a hearth that took up half the back wall, and around it crowded soldiers and shopkeepers and women in low-cut bodices and at least one man who appeared to be wearing a Roman toga over his trousers. Bottles passed from hand to hand. A game of cards had been abandoned in favor of arm-wrestling.
"Murat!" The shout came from the back corner, where a table had been commandeered by half a dozen cavalry officers with their shakos off and their collars open. "Murat, you magnificent bastard, sit down before I drink your share!"
Murat's face split into a grin so wide it looked painful. "Gentlemen. You'll forgive me — I have the Empress with me, and I suspect her standards exceed yours."
The table went quiet for half a breath. Then the officer who had shouted stumbled to his feet, and recognition spread like ripples, and suddenly the whole room seemed to shift.
Joséphine did not flinch. She walked to the fire, held out her hands to warm them, and turned to face the room with the particular stillness of a woman who had survived the Terror, survived the Directory, survived Robespierre's prisons and Barras's parlors and every shifting tide of fortune France could produce. She had been the most beautiful woman in Paris for a decade and a half, and she knew exactly what it meant to have a room full of soldiers looking at her.
"Gentlemen," she said. "I hope you have left some wine for the rest of us."
The arm-wrestlers abandoned their contest. The card players swept their deck aside. The men produced a bottle from somewhere within his drapery and held it out with both hands as if making an offering.
Davout stood by the door, arms crossed, watching the exits with the habit of a man who had never quite convinced himself that peace was real.
Murat was already at the table, already accepting a glass, already telling a story that involved a horse, a British cannon, and a pair of señoritas in Madrid who had, apparently, wept at his bravery.
Joséphine accepted a seat near the fire. The man who gave it up was a sergeant with a scar across his throat that had ruined his voice but left his grin intact. He bowed as if she were the Virgin Mary herself, and she touched his hand once, lightly, and he sat down on the floor at her feet like a dog.
"You," she said, looking at a man with aged wine in hand, "must explain yourself immediately."
The man straightened. "I have returned to witness the humiliation of the British, my empress."
"I see. And where did you get this wine?"
"From the cellar of a British merchant who fled rather than watch us dance in the streets." He poured her a glass with great ceremony. "I liberated it in the name of the empire."
She drank. The wine was surprisingly good — rich and dark and southern, a taste of Provence in this smoky Parisian cave.
Davout had not moved from the door. But his shoulders had dropped, barely perceptibly, and when a woman in a blue dress approached him with a glass and said something he could not hear over the noise, he did not refuse it.
Murat was on his third story and his second bottle, and the officers around him were laughing so hard that one of them had fallen off his chair. He was gesturing with his hands, describing something, and the light from the fire caught the gold on his sleeves and the rings on his fingers and the particular brightness in his eyes that belonged to men who had survived a war and were still young enough to enjoy it.
Joséphine watched him. She watched Davout, too, the way he held his glass like a weapon he was not sure how to use, the way his eyes kept moving even when his body was still.
These were her men. Not her lovers, not her soldiers, not her subjects. Her men, the ones she had chosen. The ones who had chosen her back.
The room roared around her. The fire crackled. The wine was warm in her throat. And somewhere outside, past the blue shutters and the singing and the bonfires, Paris was celebrating a victory that might actually last until morning.
For now, that was enough.
