In the Prefecture the Duchess received them eagerly. Her beautiful face was drawn with fatigue, and she still wore a mud-splashed riding habit — she had ridden through the night with her squadron of musketeers, entering Nevers by another road on the heels of Bonaparte’s proclamation.
“They changed sides quickly enough again,” said the Duchess.
Nevers was not a garrison town and contained no troops; her hundred disciplined musketeers made her mistress of the little place without a blow struck.
“I was about to send for you, M. le Comte,” went on the Duchess. “I was not aware of our extraordinary good fortune in Lord ‘Ornblower’s being present here, I want to appoint you Lieutenant-General of the King in the Niveroais.”
“You think a rising can succeed, Your Royal Highness?” asked Hornblower.
“A rising?” said the Duchess, with the faintest of interrogative inflections.
To Hornblower that was the note of doom. The Duchess was the most intelligent and spirited of all the Bourbons, but not even she could think of the movement she was trying to head as a ‘rising’. Bonaparte was the rebel; she was engaged in suppressing rebellion, even if Bonaparte reigned in the Tuileries and the army obeyed him. But this was war; this was life or death, and he was in no mood to quibble with amateurs.
“Let us not waste time over definitions, madame,” he said.
“Do you think there is in France strength enough to drive out Bonaparte?”
“He is the most hated man in this country.”
“But that does not answer the question,” persisted Hornblower.
“The Vendée will fight,” said the Duchess. “Laroche-Jacquelin is there, and they will follow him. My husband is raising the Midi. The King and the Household are holding out in Lille. Gascony will resist the usurper — remember how Bordeaux cast off allegiance to him last year.”
The Vendée might rise; probably would. But Hornblower could not imagine the Duke d’Angoulême rousing much spirit of devotion in the south, nor the fat and gouty old King in the north. As for Bordeaux casting off her allegiance, Hornblower remembered Rouen and Le Havre, the apathetic citizens, the refractory conscripts whose sole wish was to fight no one at all. For a year they had now enjoyed the blessings of peace and liberal government, and they might perhaps fight for them. Perhaps.
“All France knows now that Bonaparte can be beaten and dethroned,” said the Duchess acutely. “That makes a great difference.”
“A powder magazine of discontent and disunion,” said the Count. “A spark may explode it.”
Hornblower had dreamed the same dream when he had entered Le Havre, and used the same metaphor to himself, which was unfortunate.
“Bonaparte has an army,” he said. “It takes an army to defeat an army. Where is one to be found? The old soldiers are devoted to Bonaparte. Will the civilians fight, and if so, can they be armed and trained in time?”
“You are in a pessimistic mood, milord,” said the Duchess.
“Bonaparte is the most able, the most active, the fiercest and the most cunning soldier the world has ever seen,” said Hornblower. “To parry his strokes I ask for a shield of steel, not a paper hoop from a circus.”
Hornblower looked round at the faces; the Duchess, the Count, Marie, the silent courtier-general who had stood behind the Duchess since the debate began. They were sombre, but they showed no signs of wavering.
“So you suggest that M. le Comte here, for example, should submit tamely to the usurper and wait until the armies of Europe reconquer France?” asked the Duchess with only faint irony. She could keep her temper better than most Bourbons.
“M. le Comte has to fly for his life on account of his late kindness to me,” said Hornblower, but that was begging the question, he knew.
Any movement against Bonaparte in the interior of France might be better than none, however easily suppressed and whatever blood it cost. It might succeed, although he had no hope of it. But at least it would embarrass Bonaparte in his claim to represent all France, at least it would hamper him in the inevitable clash on the north-eastern frontier by forcing him to keep troops here. Hornblower could not look for victory, but he supposed there was a chance, the faintest chance, of beginning a slight guerrilla war, maintained by a few partisans in forests and mountains, which might spread in the end. He was a servant of King George; if he could encompass the death of even one of Bonaparte’s soldiers, even at the cost of a hundred peasant lives, it was his duty to do so. A momentary doubt flashed through his mind; was it mere humanitarian motives that had been influencing him? Or were his powers of decision becoming enfeebled? He had sent men on forlorn hopes before this; he had taken part in some himself; but this was, in his opinion, an utterly hopeless venture — and the Count would be involved in it.