Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements Read Online Free Page B

poets write of the world well lost for love. True love, as true lovers know, is built on caution. Besides, my own General Leclerc will do anything for Madame Victoire. We could both go. There are some pleasant things to be picked up in Italy these days, so I hear. The fruits of conquest. And Venice is very lovely.”
    “Oh, you’re mad.”
    “Not really. Too many ears and eyes and noses in Paris. Better to have one pair of eyes, his. All for you and none else.”
    “Why do you say Venice? Venice is a long way from Milan.”
    “Not for lui . You’re always saying how quick he is. One of his big faults, you always say.”
    D appled Tuileries summer sun, mad with motes, danced on the map and on Barras’s ringed finger. “If we gave in, events have proved that we were right to do so. See what he’s done with his unified command. Look. The tricolor all over Lombardy. Florence. Leghorn—one in the snout for the English. Ah, I forgot.” He stuck a toy flag on a Mediterranean island.
    “Where’s that?” peered Moulins.
    “Corsica. Another one in the snout. That was the Leghorn Corsicans. Back in the fold, anyway. Apart from the actual occupations, there are the various invasion threats. Tuscany, Naples, the Pope. Good hard cash there. He’s already paying his men in silver.”
    “Is that wise?’’
    “Half silver, the rest paper.”
    “And all these damned works of art, as they’re called,” Reubell said. “I’d rather see more money.”
    “Paris,” Barras said primly, “is the great new center of culture. Revolutionary culture. Revolutions aren’t just decapitations and screaming women with no drawers on. Beauty and light—aspects of our republican policy.”
    “Cramming the museums with saints and the rest of the superstitious garbage,” the hunchback Larevelliere snarled. “Beauty, indeed. We have a solemn mission, and that is to keep the state Godless. If I had the Pope here now, I’d—”
    “Yes yes, your well-known zeal continues to be well-known.”
    “I admit the cleverness,” Moulins said, “but what worries me is the high-handedness. Look what he said about Saliceti.”
    “He has a strong objection to what he terms looting,” Barras said. “He draws a perhaps over-nice distinction between the wholesale and retail varieties of er spoliation. Ethically, that is. Saliceti has, apparently, been engaging in simony.”
    “A man’s tastes are his own,” Reubell said.
    “Let’s have that plain,” Larevelliere said. “I’m a plain man.”
    “Saliceti has been looting churches, selling chalices and ciboria and other godless trappings of godliness. Sometimes ciboria with the consecrated wafers in them.”
    “And right too,” snarling. “Show those priest-ridden cretins what superstitious wickedness it all is.”
    “You,” Barras said, “are a responsible man and a Director. Do think carefully. Consecrated hosts cannot be desecrated overnight. The priest-ridden cretins are quite capable of turning on their er liberators. There is such a thing as discretion, diplomacy.”
    “I think I have a right to object to that. I always think carefully. I would ask you to withdraw—”
    “A little more discretion and diplomacy towards the Directory would be in order,” Moulins said.
    “He lives and dies,” Barras said, “by the Constitution. That is, in a sense, touching. But there is a word hovering on my tongue, and undoubtedly on yours. Ambition. A word made rather fiery by the days of the Terror.”
    “What you mean is,” Reubell said, “that we don’t want him back in Paris.”
    “Oh, he can be controlled, I think,” Barras said. “But he will not be in Paris for a long time yet. He talked of compassionate leave, but his wife—his bride, I should say—is already on her way to Milan. A wife can be a great solvent of ambition. In the honeymoon phase, that is. Let him carry on with his wholesale spoliation.”
    “And the politics?”
    “Let him preach fraternity and equality