After October began, rainfall in Champagne north of the Marne had noticeably eased, and a warm sun often hung in the sky. With the air clear and crisp—and with good news arriving from the front in quick succession—Commander-in-Chief André, feeling a touch idle, decided to take Comtesse Joséphine of Bordeaux and Little Victor out under gendarmerie escort, driving to the Montagne de Reims, some fifteen kilometres to the south, for a family outing.

The Comtesse from that Bordeaux sweet-wine estate had arrived at the Reims manor in mid-July. She came with Little Victor, then only one year and one month old—a lively, mischievous baby who had already learned to babble. Yet André did not meet Joséphine and her child in Reims until late August. It should be added that Joséphine was an extremely common name among French women.

As for “official duties,” that was merely an excuse the northern dictator used to hide the real reason: Colonel Marey, who oversaw MI5 (domestic)—the domestic security bureau—had been investigating the “Bordeaux leak” in secret (chapter one hundred and forty). Not until more than a month earlier, when Marey personally submitted his review to André, was it confirmed that Comtesse Joséphine and her family had nothing to do with the leak.

In addition, Perrier, president of the United Bank, and Ouvrard, who was far away with the Army of the North as a quartermaster, were likewise cleared. Although the case still needed time before it could be formally closed, certain surface evidence suggested that some members of the Bordeaux branch of the Jacobin Club had been drawn into the affair under instigation from Paris—and the names implicated included Brissot and Vergniaud.

Perhaps out of guilt, even after André moved the northern headquarters to Suippes, he still kept Joséphine and her child close at his side, so that they could remain together day after day. In truth, once the Battle of Valmy began in earnest, the fighting at the front no longer had much to do with the commander-in-chief personally; everything was proceeding, step by step, as planned.

At this moment, Joséphine was carrying Little Victor along a country path. White wild daisies bloomed beside the road. Unable to resist, the beautiful woman bent to pick one, held it to her nose, and took in its scent; the dewdrops still clinging to the petals carried the clean, earthy smell of fresh soil. But the little one in her arms was not pleased—he flailed and squealed, trying to snatch the “interesting” flower from his mother’s hand.

Not far away, André sat quietly on a leisure bench, sipping hot cocoa just brought by the cook, and reading The Life of Charlemagne—written more than nine hundred years earlier by Einhard, a Frankish noble and Charlemagne’s secretary. When he looked up and saw Joséphine and her child, warmth and calm settled in his heart.

Unlike Marguerite (Madame Vinault, the judge’s wife), who delighted in banquets, balls, and social display, Joséphine had features that recalled the ancients: black hair, black eyes, and a temperament as gentle as water. She almost never asked anything of her powerful lover on her own initiative. In fact, she had spoken up only twice: once to seek a secret recipe for sweet wine to preserve her family; and once for the future of her younger brother, Nansouty.

Two days earlier, at the joint conference of the administrative chiefs of the fifteen northern provinces held in Reims, André—unmarried in both lives—had hinted to his staff officers that he hoped to marry Comtesse Joséphine of Bordeaux. What he never expected was that this would provoke opposition from almost everyone. Even the Jews, who had long been close to Joséphine’s family—Perrier among them, as president of the United Bank—stepped forward to urge the man in power to abandon so unwise an idea. Ouvrard, in Lille, also sent a telegram after hearing the news, asking André to think far more carefully about marriage.

After all, André was no longer the inconspicuous the prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court of the Bordeaux days. Seizing the opportunity of this patriotic war, the Northern Command Headquarters under André’s leadership now held firm control over the Army of the Meuse, the Army of the Moselle, and the Army of the North. As for the commander of the Army of the Rhine, General Kellermann also made a timely show of submission to André; he even sent his eldest son and heir, Captain Kellermann (the son), to the commander-in-chief as liaison officer—effectively as a hostage. Naturally, André accepted the elder General Kellermann’s “kindness” with pleasure, and appointed the twenty-three-year-old Captain Kellermann as his nth aide-de-camp.

Administratively, not only André’s traditional power base—Marne and Ardennes—but the northern provinces as a whole were under his supervision. The Northern Command Headquarters had authority to dismiss key officials at both provincial and municipal levels, and, by leveraging André’s own immense influence—together with gendarmerie pressure and the behind-the-scenes operations of the Military Intelligence Office—could steer the selection of provincial chiefs and the election of provincial deputies to the National Convention.

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As for those stubborn diehards who still resisted André, the gendarmerie commander would work with Section Five of the Military Intelligence Office to pin on them the label of “Royalist collaboration with the enemy.” In lighter cases, they might receive a year or so of hard labour; in heavier cases, exile to overseas colonies. In ordinary circumstances, so long as a suspect did not openly use—or call for—the use of violence, André rarely employed the death penalty against such people.

In Paris, however, conspirators who deeply hated the supreme war commander accused André, openly and in secret, of carrying out a series of dictatorial measures in the fifteen northern provinces that violated human rights. Yet these criticisms were never brought into the parliamentary hall for public debate. The National Convention, committed to the principle that everything must serve the war, largely took the view that so long as André could command the French armies and drive back more than one hundred thousand foreign invaders, a few excesses could be tolerated.

And yet, unlike his unchallenged authority within the army, André rarely imposed a one-man rule on the civilian apparatus. Usually, he would listen carefully to all sides, and only after repeated study and discussion would he decide. Thus, the group entrusted Colonel Marey—the man closest to André—to persuade him.

Little did they know that the head of MI5 (domestic), who understood André’s temperament to the bone, walked into André’s study and laid out the entire matter from start to finish, including the names of the officials who had urged him to offer such counsel.

Marey laughed broadly. “The reason these people oppose your marrying Comtesse Joséphine is that, deep down, they still cling to the idea of an enlightened monarchy. They want a new king to be born, to replace this chaotic republic.”

André glanced at his childhood friend and asked coldly, “Is that your view as well?”

Marey shrugged. “Perhaps I have been influenced by one man. For a time, that fellow always stood before Charlemagne’s statue, muttering to himself, wanting to remake France into a new Frankish realm.” It should be explained that “Frankish” and “France” both point to France; the former is grammatically masculine and the latter feminine, hence expressions such as “France the motherland,” or “Mother France.”

At that moment, André understood his own answer to the three philosophical questions more clearly: perhaps his memories had awakened; from the very beginning of this life, he had been the soul of his former life. It was not that a soul had suddenly crossed back from the twenty-first century at the turning point of revolution—he had always been himself, the same soul from start to finish.

Suddenly André grinned. He slung an arm around his friend’s shoulders with real intimacy and said, half in jest, “Ever since twenty years ago, when we started living in one room, you have still been that little bastard who eavesdrops on me. Fine—if I ever do crown myself king, you will be my Keeper of the Seals.”

To André’s surprise, Marey shook his head and replied with a straight face, “You had better make me a prince—or grant me some Duc title, that will do. As for all the other jobs that are hard and thankless, do not come and bother me. I am not like you. My greatest ambition is to host dances and banquets every day at my villa estate in Reims.”

“And with a whole crowd of Comtesse and Marquise circling around you!” André added, and he and Marey burst into laughter. Thus, the storm over marriage came to a halt.

Yes—at present, André represented not only himself, but also the many aides and confidants around him; the northern provincial officials influenced by him; commanders at every level of the four great field armies; and the direct interests of over two hundred thousand soldiers. The wife of such a commander, with a future so vast, could not be an ordinary woman—still less a widow of insufficient status. In every age and every land, the spouse of a monarch has always been a bargaining chip in the exchange of interests; caprice is the heresy the world will move to punish.

Indeed, after the victory at Valmy, both Duc de Brunswick—who quickly went from prisoner of war to honored guest at André’s table—and the Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg each dispatched an aide-de-camp, and, on behalf of the Prussian and Austrian royal houses, probed French officials who came and went, inquiring into André’s marital status and his thoughts on a future wife.

The Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg in particular, in his letters to Vienna, strongly advised the House of Habsburg to seek at once a suitable unmarried young woman. Yet his “kindness” was plainly wasted: the Habsburg family’s hereditary consumption, passing through the male line, had long since made André keep his distance, offering polite refusal.

At that thought, André could not help smiling. Soon he set the book down. Victor’s crying had shattered the countryside’s quiet; the little one had a powerful voice, and it was obvious he was hungry.

The Comtesse, cheeks flushed, glanced at André, then quickly carried the child into the tent, loosened her clothing, and began nursing. With his own interest suddenly stirred, André also rose, meaning to follow her inside—ready, as if in play, to “compete” with the little one for food.

But after only a few steps, urgent hoofbeats sounded from the direction of Reims. The rider was his new aide-de-camp, Captain Kellermann. André sighed to himself, lifted a hand toward the tent where Joséphine was, and signaled that they should remain inside and not come out for the moment. He knew that today’s outing was about to end.

For a man commanding four field armies and more than two hundred thousand troops—and overseeing fifteen northern provinces (including nearly half of Belgian territory) with close to five million people—being able to spend such a warm, sweet afternoon with the woman he loved, and the child they shared, was already a rare luxury.

After all, this sacred war was still far from over.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep