Rambaud concluded

Having been noticing Rambaud, sometimes in the spelling Rimbaud, since at least 2009, it is now time to draw the matter to a close. To be reopened in the event of my branching out into some other part of his oeuvre, although it is hard, just now, to see how or why I might do that, this despite the fact that I would probably get on quite well, once started.

First a puff for Grasset and their printers. In this country, the custom is, in the first instance, to publish serious fiction in rather poor quality hardbacks. In France, the custom seems to be to publish in rather good quality paperbacks, often with the pages properly grouped in 32 page signatures. And while the pages might not fall open in the way that they do in good quality hardbacks, they do open rather better than they do in one of our often poor quality paperbacks. In sum, I think I prefer the French way of doing things. Possibly a relic of the days when French people who bought a lot of books tended to get them bound in their own colours.

The first book of the trilogy is about the two-day battle of Aspern. Napoleon does not figure in it that much, but he is at his zenith. He has had his flashy victories, in particular Austerlitz, but now his opponents are getting better, better generalled, better trained and better equipped. He might still be the best, but in the long run he was going to be ground down by the more or less united powers of Europe. He was going to run out of men who were willing to die for him. His marshals, perhaps by then in their early forties, were already thinking that it would be nice to be able to retire & relax among their spoils and their women.

The second book is about Napoleon's arrival at Moscow and his subsequent retreat through the snow. Mainly told from the points of view of an imperial clerk, an imperial horse guard and a troupe of French actors & actresses who happen to be caught in Moscow, along with a number of other French civilians. All dead, except the imperial clerk, by the end of the book. With the story including a short bit of what I regard as typically French sex & violence - the naked death of an attractive actress at the hands of exasperated peasants. Not the sort of vignette that I would expect to find in a comparable English work. I don't know whether this particular vignette was based on the truth, extracted from some memoir or other, but Rambaud certainly did read a lot of memoirs by way of preparation and something of the sort may well have actually happened: the peasants certainly were exasperated and they certainly were brutal, if not brute.

Of particular interest to me is the portrayal of the imperial entourage and the imperial guard under stress, both of which get special treatment - not least rations of a sort - and many of which survive the retreat. A far higher survival rate than the rest of the army and its accompaniments. So the army as a whole might be disintegrating, but somehow the centre holds. Napoleon is still the king of his mobile castle. He still gets his evening glass of Chambertin. In some large part because of the force of his personality, a force which enables him, as it were, to defy the forces of gravity. A reminder of why personalities matter in history; it is not all down to the tides of economics, to the forces of history - all these being matters on which I have dilated before. See for example, reference 5.

A reminder also that the original purpose of guards of this sort was to guard the monarch. Being the crack troops of the realm came later. A precaution which Charles I did not think to take, unlike Cromwell - from whose guard, ironically, our own Household Division was eventually to spring. See reference 4.

The third book is about Napoleon's abdication and his subsequent sojourn on the island of Elba. Mainly told from the point of view of a (personal protection) policeman called Octave Sénécal. A time in which the mobile castle really does fall apart and Napoleon is reduced to a mobile shed. A time of plots and threats. He still has a household of sorts, but he can no longer pretend to rule the continental world. He even fears for his personal safety passing through some of the towns on the way to embarkation from the south coast. But the magic is not quite finished and after less than a year he is back in France, at it again.

A three volumed study into how power is projected out from a person to his world, into the nuts and bolts of that projection; a study which I have always found fascinating, be the subject a senior civil servant or a Roman general like Julius Caesar.

All in all, all good reads. And I am finally converted to the cause of historical fiction. In this case, not necessarily the whole truth, but an impression of how it might have been. A bit of life has been breathed into the bare facts - while I still feel that I have a grip on which is which; I am not going to rehearse the life bits in conversation or in the bar as facts. A legitimate endeavour.

Reference 1: La Bataille, Patrick Rambaud, Grasset, 1997.

Reference 2: Il neigeait, Patrick Rambaud, Grasset, 2000.

Reference 3: L'Absent, Patrick Rambaud, Grasset, 2004.

Reference 4: Horse Guards, Barney White-Spunner, MacMillan, 2006. Found remaindered at the Taunton branch of 'The Works', but a good book for all that. An outfit which used to remainder quite a lot of good books, but a custom which does not seem to be maintained here in Epsom. See http://www.theworks.co.uk/.

Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=caute.