Tuesday 6 June 2023

Its snowing


[The Grande Armée Crossing the Berezhina, 1866, January Sulchodolsky (1797–1875), oil on canvas. National Museum, Poznań]

I have been reading Patrick Rambaud's trilogy based on the second, downward half of Napoleon's trajectory off and on for more than ten years now. Three handsome yellow paperbacks from Grasset, getting on for a thousand pages altogether. The first covers the battle of Aspern (across the Danube from Vienna), the second the retreat from Moscow and the third the short sojourn on Elba.

All of interest to me for the portrayal, the imagining, of the mechanics of the power of a charismatic individual, in this case (the first) Napoleon. Power centred on a person rather than on an institution or office. And of the gradual unravelling of same under stress. Related, I suppose, to the interest in observing the mechanics of power in a place like the Treasury.

The blog archive turns up around nine posts in which Rambaud is mentioned, spanning the period 2011 to 2018, but arriving at some sort of conclusion at reference 1 in 2016. With at least some of the mentions being the Chambertin which Napoleon liked to drink and supplies of which were included in the Imperial baggage. Chambertin which is now far too expensive for me to drink, although we do occasionally get to savour the rich colour of the substitute Gevrey-Chambertin. From where I associate to the bottle of Sauternes, along with a bottle of red, which my father used to buy to go with our Christmas dinner, which can also be very expensive. As far as I can recall, children did not partake.

Over the past few weeks, I have been rereading, as opposed to recreational dipping, the second of the three, the one about Moscow: starting with the arrival of the knocked-about and knocked-up Grande Armée at Moscow, the burning of Moscow, the subsequent retreat back to Poland and ending with Napoleon's return to Paris with just a few attendants and without his customary cavalry escort. 

The comments at reference 1 stand and I only add that I have been struck by the way that this novel has been organised in much the same way as a series of books by Trollope or a drama series on television, tracking the doings of a small number of quite small groups of people, small groups which sometimes interact with each other. With the series progressing by jumping from group to group, thus providing a bit of variety, variety which is needed to carry one through the 333 pages.

On this read, I was a bit lazy about looking up the words that I did not know, but I close with 'pense-bête' from the very last paragraph, being a loose translation of 'Post-It note' - not invented until near 200 years after the events in question.

PS 1: the painting above, turned up by Bing, makes the crossing of the Beresina (a little to the east of Minsk in what is now Belarus. A tributary of the Dnieper) look rather more benign that Rambaud would have it: a catastrophe during which the discipline of the Grande Armée really did break down and around which tens of thousands died.

PS 2: a rather sophisticated mid-nineteenth century graphic from Wikipedia turned up by Bing. 'Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. The graphic is notable for its representation in two dimensions of six types of data: the number of Napoleon's troops; distance; temperature; the latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates'. Counterintuitively, a lot more men were lost on the way out in the autumn than on the way back in the winter.

PS 3: despite the large number of excess deaths that Napoleon clocked up, being the best general of his day resulted in a lot of Napoleon flavoured names in the Paris of today. Not least the boulevards running around the inside of the Périphérique, named for his marshals. One day I shall try to make a similar tally of Wellington and Nelson names in London - the most obvious being Waterloo Station and Trafalgar Square. My bet is that there will be less than in Paris, despite our being the eventual winner.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/08/rambaud-concluded.html.

Reference 2: La Bataille, Patrick Rambaud, Grasset, 1997. Aspern.

Reference 3: Il neigeait, Patrick Rambaud, Grasset, 2000. Moscow.

Reference 4: L'Absent, Patrick Rambaud, Grasset, 2004. Elba.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Arm%C3%A9e. The army.

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