Napoleon's Exile Read Online Free PDF Page B

outside - although jostled, harried and dragged along by the opposing currents of the crowd - Octave managed to force his way back along the boulevards until he found himself behind the derisory barricade of the Porte Saint-Denis, far from the barriers.
    The local people were at their windows or on their roofs. For want of coaches, those who had fled had left their many possessions behind, piled up on the pavement, and the National Guard were carting furniture away to reinforce their defences. Planks from a building site supported wardrobes, bed-frames and chairs, all weighted down with cobble-stones. The monumental arch, whose pillars were, ironically, sculpted with royal victories, the crossing of the Rhine and the taking of Maastricht, was obstructed by carts. Skirmishers lay in wait, their eyes fixed on the long road leading from the buildings of the suburb to the gardens of the enclosure of Saint Lazare and the square buildings of the royal mail-coach service, before passing through the fallow fields scattered with farms, hamlets and hedges. The noise of the cannon was constant, louder now, and closer.
    Octave perched on a tree-trunk that had been thrown across the road, and rested his elbows on the sandbags crowning the barricade. At his side, a toff was firing harmless duelling-pistols; his neighbour, a top-hatted apothecary, shouldered his hunting rifle, grunting, ‘They’ll taste my potion, the bastards!’ In the distance, pillars of black smoke rose from bombed-out villages at the foot of the hills. A troop of men came up the road, wearing scorched uniforms filthy with mud, ash and gunpowder, their foreheads wrapped with bloody cloths. They were carrying dying men on stretchers, a blanket, a coat tied to some branches.
    Octave and some volunteers leapt down from their barricade and helped the soldiers climb over it, holding the moaning casualties in their arms. The most seriously injured were immediately laid on an ammunition wagon pulled by some strong men, to be taken to a hospital if one able to admit them could be found; the remainder lay in improvised ambulances below the gates. Octave carried down a corporal with a big moustache, a gold ring in his ear and a vacant expression on his face, and entrusted him to some women who tore their aprons and headscarves into strips to serve as compresses or bandages.
    â€˜There are too many,’ said the corporal, over and over again.
    â€˜The Prussians? The Russians?’
    â€˜There are too many. The more you kill, the more there are ...’
    At that moment a cavalryman emerged from the boulevard Poissonnière. He had lost his helmet, but Octave recognized him as a cheveau-léger by his green jacket and the red-and-white pennon on his lance. The man rode his mount into the crowd, knocking men and women over as he passed. He was drunk and shouting, ‘Run for your lives!’ This unleashed a movement of panic, a retreat into the streets running down to the Seine. Shortly afterwards, a shell crashed into the middle of the road and all the women and unarmed onlookers charged off in search of shelter. They ran hither and thither, bellowing at the tops of their voices; fresh casualties, civilians this time, crowded the paths of the houses. Octave unfolded the opera-glasses. On the Butte Montmartre, among the windmills, he saw cavalrymen with stovepipe hats and impossibly long lances: the Cossacks were turning their cannon on the capital. He saw others, a cloud of them, charging down the hills towards the blazing houses of Belleville.
    *
    At about four o’clock in the afternoon, a terrible silence followed the roar of battle. The injured men revealed that the Army of Silesia had occupied the banks of the Ourcq, that Marmont had forced his way through with cold steel, to retreat to the Belleville tollgate with decimated battalions. In considerable numbers, the enemy had taken Ménilmontant, La Villette, Clichy. In Paris, the shutters were