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horse. She was plain Madame Beauharnais then, recendy out of the slimy prison of Carmes and recendy widowed. Her husband had been executed in the Terror; she had only escaped because Robespierre was murdered on the morning she was to follow him. Domino called her a lady of good sense and claimed that in her penniless days she had challenged officers to play her at billiards. If she lost, they could stay to breakfast. If she won, they were to pay one of her more pressing bills.
    She never lost.
    Years later, she had recommended Domino to her husband eager for a groom he could keep and they had found him eating fire in some sideshow. His loyalties to Bonaparte were mixed, but he loved both Josephine and the horses.
    He told me about the fortune tellers he'd known and how crowds came every week to have their future opened or their past revealed. 'But I tell you, Henri, that every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There's only now.'
    I ignored him and kept working on my little book and in August when the sun turned the grass yellow, Bonaparte announced his Coronation that coming December.
    I was given immediate leave. He told me he'd want me with him after that Told me we were going to do great things. Told me he liked a smiling face with his dinner. It's always been the way with me; either everyone ignores me, or they take me into their confidence. At first I thought it was just priests because priests are more intense than ordinary people. It's not just priests, it must be something about the way I look.
    When I started working for Napoleon direcdy I thought he spoke in aphorisms, he never said a sentence like you or I would, it was put like a great thought. I wrote them all down and only later realised how bizarre most of them were. They were lines from his memorable deliveries and I should admit that I wept when I heard him speak. Even when I hated him, he could still make me cry. And not through fear. He was great. Greatness like his is hard to be sensible about.
    It took me a week to get home, riding where I could, walking the rest. News of the Coronation was spreading and I saw in the smiles of the people I travelled with how welcome it was. None of us thought that only fifteen years ago we had fought to do away with Kings for ever. That we had sworn never to fight again except in self-defence. Now we wanted a ruler and we wanted him to rule the world. We are not an unusual people.
    In my soldier's uniform I was treated with kindness, fed and cared for, given the pick of the harvest. In return I told stories about the camp at Boulogne and how we could see the English quaking in their boots on the opposite shore. I embroidered and invented and even lied. Why not? It made them happy. I didn't talk about the men who have married mermaids. All the farm lads wanted to join up straight away, but I advised them to wait until after the Coronation.
    'When your Emperor needs you, he'll call. Until then, work for France at home.'
    Naturally, this pleased the women.
    I had been away six months. When the cart I was riding in dropped me a mile or so from home I felt like turning back. I was afraid. Afraid that things would be different, that I wouldn't be welcome. The traveller always wants home to be just as it was. The traveller expects to change, to return with a bushy beard or a new baby or tales of a miraculous life where the streams are full of gold and the weather is gende. I was full of such stories, but I wanted to know in advance that my audience was seated. Skirting the obvious track, I crept up on my village like a bandit. I had already decided what they should be doing. That my mother would be just visible in the potato field, that my father would be in the cowshed. I was going to run down the hill and then we'd have a party. They didn't know to expect me. No message could have reached them in a week.
    I looked. They were both in the fields. My mother with her hands on her hips, head