The Truth is Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

table, giving the Emperor a chance to see if he’d been fooled. He made a quick calculation in his head. My God! Had it been twenty years? That would make him…
    “Seventy? No! Seventy-one.”
    The figure stopped in its slow progress along the length of the room. “Correct.”
    His voice was as Napoleon remembered, precise and economic, though you could hear the extra years in it now.
    “Please,” Napoleon said, not a word he had much use for, “please, sit down.”
    “Thank you, I shall, for I am an old man.”
    “You were old when they killed you.”
    “Only six years older than you are now. Does that feel old to you?” There was bitterness in the man’s voice; anger at the waste. “I was at my prime. Not physically. But my work, my great work, was just beginning.”
    Napoleon felt a shiver travel down his spine. “Lavoisier,” he breathed, “it is truly you.”
    “At your service.”
    “What did the judge say at your trial? The old fool! Something about ‘We have no need—’”
    “‘—of genius.’ Yes, I have heard those words in my mind every day. Every day, for twenty years, Napoleon. But here I am. And in all those twenty years, I never had the chance to thank you. I suppose I should.”
    Napoleon felt the remark cut him. “You suppose?” he said. “Most men would be grateful for their lives. Are you not?”
    “For my life, yes. Thank you. But what kind of life is worth living? I have spent twenty years on the run; I have lived in sixteen different countries in that time. I have not put one foot in France since the day after my ‘execution’. Your man smuggled me to the coast, to England first. It was clear I could not stay there long. Then to Ireland. My God! What an awful wet place that was. Two years! Then back to the Continent, always moving when the rumours started again, heading into more and more remote regions. And my work! Once, I had three laboratories in Paris. For these twenty years I have dragged my laboratory behind me in horse and cart, through the mud and snows of Europe. What have I done in that time, apart from spend the fortune you sent me away with? Almost nothing! So, my Emperor, you will forgive me if sometimes I wish that I had died under the guillotine that day, instead of that poor stooge you disguised as me.”
    He fell silent, the rapid fire of his speech having spent itself, and coughed gently into an old silk handkerchief.
    Napoleon sat open-mouthed; he was not used to being spoken to in this way. Even during the retreat from Moscow, not one of his generals would have dared be so bold.
    “Did I force you to live?” he asked quietly, fingering the chain of the small black bag at his neck. “I suppose in a way I did, for who can really take their own life? But what could I have done? I was not Emperor then. I was a general with money and some power. It was as much as I could do to save a man whose skills I knew France could not afford to lose. I got you out. I gave you money. And then I never heard from you again. For five years I had my spies hunt for you. I needed you! But you were nowhere. I became Emperor and my dominions covered almost every country in Europe. But even in those … other countries, Britain and Russia, I had my spies. And no one could find you. After ten years I believed you were dead. How could I have helped you then?”
    “And excuse me,” he continued, waving a hand at the darkened room, “but as you see, life has been difficult lately. I was betrayed! By fortune and the stupidity of my generals. I chased from one end of Europe to the other, doing what no one could do but me: Egypt, Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland. And then came Russia and the bloody Czar. He needed to be taught a lesson, and by God, I intended to. The largest army ever to walk the earth! Half a million men, Lavoisier, can you imagine? Half a million men walked into Russia and I won.
I won.
We took Moscow, Alexander scurried around like the idiot he is, and yet it all