Читать книгу A Joyous Adventure - Baroness Orczy - Страница 8

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On the 27th March, 1802, London went mad with joy. It went mad because the peace treaty with France had been signed. There was to be no more fighting, no more agonising moments of doubt and fear for son, husband or lover, no more feverish scanning of news-sheets for scraps of information of what was going on “out there,” or for names that were dear among the list of dead. There was to be no more searching of the horizon for the coast of France, from whence Bonaparte and his immense army had sworn to come and invade England and lay waste her homesteads and her farms.

The Peace had been definitely signed at Amiens. Like all the other treaties to which Bonaparte had affixed his name, it turned out in the end to be a mere armistice. Suspicion and enmity lurked in its every line. True that on the one hand Napoleon, who had suffered severe defeat in Egypt at the hands of the English, showed a distinct inclination in the direction of good-fellowship, and that on the other, the retirement of Pitt from the leadership of the House of Commons removed from office the most bitter enemy of Revolutionary France, nevertheless every thinking person on either side of the Channel knew that old rivalries and old jealousies were as alive as ever. Dormant for the time being, they would blaze up again into open enmity at the slightest provocation.

And there was always the small party of stiff-necked Tories, royalists by tradition, who felt that England had no right to make peace with a low-born soldier of fortune who had usurped the throne of the Bourbon kings. But these were in the minority. On the whole the news was received both by the wise and the ignorant with complete satisfaction. England had been shut away from continental Europe for ten years. Except surreptitiously—such as the great league of the Scarlet Pimpernel in the days of the Terror—no English subject had set foot on French soil since the day when England, outraged at the murder of King Louis XVI, first declared war on the Revolutionary government. But now moved by curiosity, as well as the joy of adventure, English and French travellers of all ranks and both sexes flocked into one another’s country, eager to witness the changes which had been wrought on either shore of the Channel by a bloody Revolution on the one side, and ten years of warfare and attrition on the other.

Above all did English men and women of note wish to see the ogre Napoleon. Statesmen, artists, scientists to whom the very name of the little man from Corsica had been synonymous with Satan, now thronged the magnificent courts at the Tuileries, and paid their respects to “the usurper” and his Creole wife just as they had done little more than a decade ago to King Louis and beautiful Marie Antoinette.

Members of the great French noblesse who had lived in exile in England all these years hastened to take advantage of Bonaparte’s amnesty to the émigrés. Relying on his promise that their estates would be restored to them, they hurried back to Paris, ready to pay their court to the newly risen star, just as if the crown of their murdered King had descended upon him by divine right.

“Other times, other customs,” was Lord Saint-Denys’s favourite dictum when his Tory friends talked with some bitterness of this strange attitude of mind.

“Imagine,” His Grace of Flint declared with a shrug, “those French aristocrats, who gave themselves such airs over here, bowing and scraping before that Italian upstart.”

“Not Italian, my dear fellow,” Saint-Denys corrected sternly. “Corsican.”

“What’s the difference?”

And Saint-Denys then assured them all solemnly that he didn’t know.

“What are you going to do about it, Saint-Denys?” another friend queried with equal seriousness.

“About what?”

“This begad peace?”

“Help to break it as soon as I can,” was Saint-Denys’s curt reply.

“It’s an outrage,” His Grace of Flint asserted hotly.

“No,” Saint-Denys retorted. “It’s worse than that. It’s a bore.”

“I’m afraid I shall have to pay some of my creditors now,” he continued with a weary sigh.

They all sighed in response, for they fully agreed with Martin Saint-Denys. What were they all going to do now that this begad peace was signed? They had had ten years of a strenuous, adventurous life: some of them, under the leadership of the Scarlet Pimpernel, had faced death almost daily for over five years. They had all of them fought against Bonaparte the rest of the time. And heavens above! What fighting it had been.

There were plenty of pessimists who vowed that the peace would never last, and frankly these smart young men about town sincerely hoped that it would not. To them royalty was a sacrosanct state, and kings were kings by divine right, and though Bonaparte had not actually belonged to the Robespierre gang of murderers, he did begin life by serving the Revolutionary cause, and now, in his arrogance, had set himself up above the divine right of kings; and for royalist England to make peace with such a man was, to the last degree, humiliating to their pride.

Or else a bore.