Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess Page A

now, true, and too many of the wrong ghosts—” He felt them too then, they were both from islands where the dead familiarly walked. “But we’ll soon lay them with statues of the ever-living, men who became great, not puling inheritors of empty purple. A couple of dozen statues here, I think—Demosthenes, Alexander, Brutus and so on. Poor dead Washington, great general, great democrat. Cato, Julius Caesar—”
    “Next to Brutus?”
    “In the shades they are friends again, aware of each other’s destiny. Marlborough, an Englishman but a very considerable, nay a towering, a gigantic—”
    “Are you ” she said, “a great democrat?”
    He stopped their walk and looked at her. She looked at him, seeing his red velvet on fire. “Democrat?” It was strange to hear a political term from those languorous lips; perhaps she had, aware of her husband’s new civil greatness, taken to reading A Child’s Guide to Montesquieu or something. “Well, yes. Well, no. The whole process has been democratic, shall I say. A free vote and so on. The electorate knows nothing, God bless it, of constitutions, nor need it, nor should it. I believe in the obscurity of constitutions, but they should be short in order to appear simple.”
    “That sounds Machiavellian.” She had been reading, no doubt about it. She walked on and he had to follow. “Poor Sieyès. I’m sure he had no idea that this would come about.”
    “The triumvirate—do you know that word?—was his idea. The term consul also. He knows all about constitutions but he knows little of rule. It’s a matter of personality, of course. That piping little voice, those varicose veins—”
    “Let me put it another way,” she said. “Do you believe in the people?” He smiled indulgently; she knew that he was ready to say I believe that the people exist if that’s what you mean . “I mean, do you like the people, do you love the people?”
    “You can love only persons,” he said, and put his arm vigorously about her breast. “When I see the people as a mob, and that’s the only occasion when one really sees the people, then I know how I feel about them. They petrify me, like a nightmare. But give them the discipline they need and, at bottom, desire, place them under officers, put guns and not bricks in their paws, and then I don’t fear them, even when they’re marching toward me.
    “But what are you going to do ? You and the two others, I mean?”
    “ Hic, haec and hoc Talleyrand calls us. Witty and cruel. See that bloodstain on the wall there? That might be from poor Marie Antoinette. Must have it cleaned off. This isn’t a museum. Do, you say, do? Take you to that great gilt bed for a quarter of an hour before dinner, bump a few royal ghosts out of the way.”
    “Be serious.”
    “I was never more. Come. What I’m going to do in the other er bed, a big weedy flower-bed you could call it, needs a gardener, to do is to rule. Stop the people being a mob.” They strolled back, her silk slippers soundless, his boots firm and harsh. “Frederick the Great too. Cicero. Gustavus Adolphus. Hannibal. He crossed the Alps,” he said with regret. A civilian now, ready to grow pot-bellied in his country’s service. The new Constitution said that the First Consul could not command in the field. Well, constitutions could be changed. No immediate hurry. “Scipio Africanus. Those poor devils in Egypt. Kléber and that fool of a general Menou. Became a Muslim, circumcision and all.” He sighed. “There are some with no notion of moderation. Ah well, there’s a lot to do.”
    In the name of Allah the Merciful the Most High. In that year of the Hijrah nothing of note occurred in the lands of the Nile except for the discontinuation of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

G erminal in the Year Seven, and if it is the spring of power it is no longer the spring of love. I would meet you honestly on this. And my seed will not work in you nor, as I now suspect, in any woman.