At that very moment, Bishop de Talleyrand was nearly stunned by the scene before him. He had not imagined that, in his own church, someone would dare point a gun at him. The Reims officials and the Marquis de Demo? were equally taken aback—they, too, had not expected Cazalès to act with such decisiveness—no, such audacity.

  Yet once the first step had been taken, everything that followed became easier. Colonel Brice obeyed Cazalès’s order, searched the reception room and adjacent chambers, and found a length of rope, a long stocking, and a black hooded robe. The rope bound the archbishop’s hands tight; the long stocking, balled up, was forced into his mouth; and the robe wrapped him from head to foot. The others stood by and tacitly accepted the two officers’ violence.

  “We must confine the bishop in the National Guard’s barracks!” When the task was done, Colonel Brice looked up and spoke. Leaving him in the church was clearly too risky—hundreds, even thousands of devout worshippers came and went here.

  “Very well. Marquis de Demo?, you will personally keep watch. The rest, with me, to Fismes,” said Cazalès, nodding to indicate that the National Guard’s lieutenant colonel and he would take the archbishop out under guard.

  “Wait,” the Marquis de Demo? raised an arm to bar the two officers. He turned to Cazalès and asked, “If—if—he breaks his word, then what?”

  Cazalès smiled, then suddenly threw open his inner garment. Strapped against his skin was a lady’s pocket pistol. “I will make him pay with his life.”

  Moments later, there came a knock at the reception-room door: three long, two short—the agreed signal. When the door opened, a young cleric in a black robe slipped inside. He showed no reaction to the kidnapped archbishop, and merely reported that the carriage waited in the back garden. From now on, this young cleric named Marey would remain in the room, impersonating Bishop de Talleyrand until the party had withdrawn in safety.

  …

  Compared with the warm-hearted exuberance of the south, the small towns of northern France seemed serene and lovely. Standing on a hillside beyond the fields, André looked upon the little city of Fismes—just so. He recalled that before “he” turned twenty, this small city, a little over twenty kilometers from the Reims orphanage, had felt like the farthest edge of the world.

  Now the mild early-winter sun fell over the countryside, warming body and mind alike, and for a while the commander of the Champagne Composite Regiment forgot his many anxieties.

  But when the clatter of hooves began to shuttle back and forth around the heights, reality returned. Before long, André had turned away a dispatch rider—Second Lieutenant Suchet—for the second time. He had been sent by the exercise commander, Lieutenant Colonel Berthier, to report to the regimental commander. The news left André both secretly pleased and faintly helpless.

  Plainly, Lieutenant Colonel Berthier’s self-confidence was lacking. He was perfectly at home drafting plans and operations as a chief of staff; yet once seated in the chair of command, he was at a loss. Each time the exercise group came to a decision, the officers’ first reaction was to glance up the slope—thirty-odd meters away—toward the knoll where the regimental commander stood.

  Even so, this was no bad thing: it at least confirmed Colonel André’s absolute authority within the Champagne Composite Regiment. Moreover, as a wavering member of the Royalist Party—tongue-tied and short on guile—the chief of staff, Berthier, had little appetite for usurping command. Most officers—Moncey, Hoche, Senarmont foremost among them—respected him chiefly for his lieutenant colonelcy, his learning, and his long service.

  Although André had laid plans and spared no cost to form the Champagne Composite Regiment, he meant it as a hub to draw in able military men, not as a banner under which to raise rebellion. In any case such a venture could not succeed—not until the French people had wearied of the blood that spilled ceaselessly from the guillotine.

  Thus, on the march to Reims, André’s conduct was always “a heart of a tiger, yet with a rose held to the nose”: military means secondary, political resolution primary. From this vantage, he waited keenly for good news out of Reims. Unfortunately, by this morning, Cazalès and the Reims delegation had still not left the city.

  A week earlier, the staff and officers had already set the concrete scheme for taking Reims by force. War-game results indicated that unless the distant Marquis de Bouillé at Metz openly rebelled and sent his German legion south to intervene, the fighting in Reims would end in three–five days.

  Victory would not be difficult, yet André still hoped to settle the political question by peaceful means. He had even bypassed the Marne Commune and Chief Provincial Prosecutor Thuriot to reach, privately and in the name of the National Constituent Assembly, a political understanding with Reims’s “three grandees”: if the city opened its gates in peace, he would guarantee in writing that no political prisoner would be pursued afterward, and that all would enjoy unrestricted freedom of movement.

  Meanwhile, reconnaissance from the Ardennes frontier reported that the several hundred armed bandits hidden in the forests had made no move, as if content to watch Reims fall. This was not what Colonel André and the chief of staff, Berthier, wanted. The original idea in shifting the whole force to Fismes—rather than attacking Reims directly—was precisely to draw the attention of the 300-plus horse bandits in the Ardennes woods, entice them to harry the Champagne Composite Regiment, which stood ready to annihilate them and thus remove the hidden danger once and for all.

  There was also a farcical matter—trouble stirred up by Army Lieutenant Larrey, a surgeon. According to Suchet, the second medical officer—whose tastes ran rather extreme—had somehow “charmed” a “ghastly-looking” novice; she had even formed a “nun nursing corps” for her lover. Unsurprisingly, such scandal provoked the convent’s wrath, and the Reverend Mother lodged a protest at the medical service.

  As the National Constituent Assembly’s special envoy and Acting Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor, André was untroubled by possible censure from the Church; still, this was hardly edifying—especially with his own medical officers in the wrong. He had meant to dissolve the “nun nursing corps,” but the newly appointed head nurse, the nun Charlotte Lavel—no, rather, the daughter of Baron de Sulson—showed a grasp of clinical notions—bacteria, virus, infection, sterilization, and nursing—that far outstripped the capacities of women of this age; plainly, Lieutenant Larrey had trained her well.

  In short: talent was scarce. No wonder (though the source is disputed) Leonardo once said to Galileo that science and religion are two faces of the same thing. The gravediggers of Catholicism are often those trained by Catholicism. In the end, André weighed gain against loss and tacitly permitted the corps to exist; he even came forward personally and, after a mixture of pressure and inducement, barely soothed the Reverend Mother and the convent.

  Back to the present: on the wide plain to André’s right, the two exercise units stood ready—700 infantry with six four-pounders under Major Moncey (including a supporting artillery company), and 300 cavalry under Captain Hoche.

  The drill objective was this: in the course of a march, when surprised by an enemy cavalry attack, how to convert the marching column into a defensive formation in the shortest time. While the infantry formed hollow squares, they were also to assist the artillery company in establishing gun positions; together they would throw back the cavalry charge.

  Around ten o’clock a.m., the exercise began.

  An infantry regiment advanced in three columns across open ground. Soon a scout galloped in to report that, five kilometers ahead, a large body of cavalry had just emerged from thick woods and was forming up—ready to strike at any moment.

  At standard cavalry paces—canter, accelerate, then full charge—five–six kilometers of battlefield distance would bring horsemen onto the infantry within roughly fifteen–twenty minutes.

  After a quick survey of the terrain, the defense commander, Major Moncey, conferred briefly with Major Senarmont of the artillery and issued a series of orders. Several orderlies sprinted off. Barely twelve minutes later, the regiment’s nine companies, working from accurate instructions, were divided into three groups; each group paired two companies to form rectangular, two-rank hollow squares.

  In this formation, the front rank knelt with bayonets fixed, while the rear rank stood and fired. As the chief of staff put it, the two-rank hollow square was superior both to the French army’s old three-rank hollow square (with all ranks standing) and to the solid squares still used by Austria and Prussia. It fully exploited the firepower of muskets and guns; it forced horse and rider alike onto two ranks of bayonets; it gave a clearer field of view; and by presenting two layers of obstacle, it proved far harder to break…

  Given the lay of the ground, the three irregular hollow squares formed a rough “pin” pattern. The artillery company’s eight guns, as ordered, were placed at the four corners of the two front squares.

  “twelve minutes, nine seconds!” cried a member of the adjudication team, standing to read out the time.

  The chief of staff, Berthier, was delighted; in his excitement he began to chew at his fingers again. The officers ignored it—long since had they grown used to the habit. In his twenty years in uniform, the shortest time Berthier had seen to form a hollow square was twenty-one minutes; General Custine had been proud of that record.

  André pursed his lips and muttered inwardly, unimpressed: “Damn it. Since the Bordeaux camp we’ve drilled the battalion for nearly three months, and still we’re over twelve minutes. Far too slow by later standards.”

  The drill he had set—infantry versus cavalry—was based on the encounter, sixteen months hence, between the French Dillon Infantry Brigade and Austrian cavalry.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  When his grumbling ended, André raised his monocular and returned to the exercise. Under their gun captains, the artillery simulated live fire: they primed and touched off the charges, but no shot or propellant was loaded in the tubes. The muskets likewise. Once the enemy cavalry came into effective range, the gunners went through three cycles of loading and firing—first two round shot, then one canister—each interval under twenty seconds, roughly three rounds a minute.

  Thanks to the influx of skilled gunners from the Metz artillery school, the battery’s tactical proficiency was plainly a cut above the infantry’s. André knew, however, that this did not represent a gun crew’s true performance in action. Given terrain, powder smoke, barrel life, and casualties, a four-pounder muzzle-loading cannon in practice was generally held to two rounds a minute at most—more often one round a minute.

  Under the safety rules, to avoid accidents, the cavalry halted twenty–thirty meters short of the infantry’s two-rank hollow squares. The adjudicators later rated the cavalry’s losses under repeated fire from the eight guns at twenty-eight men—roughly ten percent casualties.

  At this, Second Lieutenant Suchet turned to report the adjudication to the regimental commander and the chief of staff.

  “The infantry battalion has won the defensive action, but the cavalry squadron still retains strength to fight again!”

  The result pleased André as well. It was a rare infantry success in these mounted-versus-foot drills—and plainly the eight guns had proved decisive. In actual combat, however, heavy guns were hard to bring up in time—unless one could somehow fix bayonets to them.

  On the other hand, the cavalry had merely failed in a single charge and still had strength to continue; as commander, Captain Hoche would be loath to accept excessive losses and would, in real fighting, carry on in a raiding style.

  Suddenly a thought occurred to André. He asked the chief of staff beside him, Lieutenant Colonel Berthier, “If Captain Hoche were to order his men to blindfold their horses during the charge—or if the infantry lacked artillery support—how would the action unfold?”

  “In the first case, the cavalry would suffer almost half again as many losses; they might win, but at an intolerable price—no cavalry commander would give so absurd an order. If the infantry had no guns, the horse could break off after a failed strike, ride the perimeter, and launch a second attack at leisure,” Berthier replied.

  “If the horse-guns could come up in step—or if the troopers carried some very powerful hand-thrown grenade—they could also break dense infantry defenses,” André offered two more possibilities for the cavalry.

  The chief of staff stared, then shook his head. “Forgive me, Colonel—Captain Hoche’s horse-guns cannot be dragged out of those tangled woods. As for some powerful hand-thrown grenade—I know of no such thing. And costly cavalry cannot embrace explosives for a suicide rush on a battalion square.”

  André felt instantly awkward. Measured by military grounding, the veteran Berthier left him far behind; but in foreseeing the course of military technology, André could slap a hundred old-school officers across the face.

  The effective way to break dense infantry formations was likewise with artillery. When guns could not support in time, one needed light mortars or grenade-dischargers; those weapons, however, were a shade too far ahead of their time. Hand-thrown grenades, on the other hand, were a sound idea—but nitroglycerin was too costly to refine. Even though André had already suggested diatomaceous earth and pure soda as stabilizers to reduce the danger of such high explosives, the word from the Chalons-en-Champagne arsenal was that mass production remained out of reach.

  While the prosecutor’s thoughts wandered, Intelligence Officer Second Lieutenant Penduvas ran up to report that several members of the Reims delegation had arrived in Fismes.

  Under the plan, the four men of the Reims mission were lodged at the national relay station on the outskirts of Fismes to await the Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor. On their way to the meeting, they too witnessed the drill—infantry and artillery in concert against a cavalry strike.

  Mayor Basile and Prosecutor Hubert dismissed it as André’s show of force. Colonel Brice and Cazalès, by contrast, were aghast. The troops’ professionalism and polish were one thing; what startled them was that rumor had not lied—André had indeed poured a fortune into arming this Champagne Composite Regiment. They were heartily glad they had not spurned the olive branch he had thrown—else the consequences would have been dire.

  As a fellow lawyer and prosecutor, Hubert seemed unwilling to credit the young colleague’s professional ethics. In some respects André’s style was more autocratic than the “Sun King” Louis XIV, and more hypocritical than Charles VII, the dauphin crowned at Reims under Joan of Arc’s escort.

  Summoning his courage, Prosecutor Hubert whispered, “Will Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor André keep to the terms we agreed?” The rest said nothing. They merely traded glances and held their silence. At such a moment, there was no point in debating it; one could only await the verdict of fate. Cazalès reached for the pistol hidden at his breast—only to find it gone. Reims’s three grandees had judged the risk needless; they would not stake their own lives.

  “But of course, my dear friends,” came André’s bright, confident laugh from outside the door.

  …

  In July 1790, on the eve of André’s departure from Paris—and in view of the Reims municipality’s refusal to submit to the Marne Commune—the National Constituent Assembly entrusted Deputy Prieur to authorize André to organize, in secret, the Champagne Composite Regiment.

  In September, the regiment began forming at the camp north of Bordeaux, and soon afterward, the regimental commander, André, was promoted colonel.

  In early November, André led the regiment north; two weeks later, they reached the Versailles camp and refitted.

  At the end of November, the regiment pushed on to Reims, 150 kilometers farther.

  In early January, the regiment marched to Fismes, a little over twenty kilometers northwest of Reims, to take up quarters.

  The next day—December 4, 1790—the mayor of Reims, the local prosecutor, and the National Guard commander, among others, came to the regiment’s temporary station in Fismes to welcome the Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor. Plainly, this was capitulation before war: the great city of Reims would yield without a fight.

  On the morning of the fifth, the Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor set out for Reims escorted by the gendarmerie (Captain Chassé). The regiment, meanwhile, began evacuating Fismes, shifting to Bazancourt some fifteen kilometers northeast of Reims, on the road to the Ardennes.

  …

  The ground across Reims is flat, averaging seventy-five–one hundred meters above sea level. To the south lies Montagne de Reims, famed for its vineyards; to the northwest, gentle hills; to the east, the fore-plains of the Argonne. None of these heights is great—Mont Sinai, the highest, rises only to 286 meters. The Vesle, a tributary of the Seine, divides the city north and south. Like most rivers in France, it runs quietly—laden with the refuse of life and work—its quality poor.

  At one of the ancient gates, still standing, Mayor Basile, Prosecutor Hubert, and Colonel Brice led the officers of Reims City Hall and the National Guard in greeting the Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor of the Marne. Mayor Basile presented Colonel André with the symbolic keys of Reims. That same night, December 4, Cazalès slipped away from Reims back to Paris. Once more, André declared he would keep his word.

  Reims looked much as it had when André left two years before. The streets were not wide; trees, sparse; most buildings, two-story timber. Stone structures were largely churches and civic offices. Yet compared with crowded, grimy Paris, the streets here were far cleaner. Designated dumping spots lined both sides of the streets, maintained in turn by shopkeepers and nearby residents.

  All along the route, the people of Reims lined the ways of their own accord—waving tricolors, tossing colored streamers, shouting, “Long live Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor André!” “Long live the Champagne Composite Regiment!” “Long live Colonel André!” Riding in an open carriage, André was in high spirits: a son returning in triumph and enjoying a near-royal welcome.

  In truth, Reims, unlike capacious Paris, was fiercely insular—and that insularity gave City Hall the nerve to defy the Marne Commune. Yet André was born and raised here, and had studied and lived in Reims for over twenty years; and now, with a peaceful entry that spared the city from war and slaughter, he naturally won the people’s cheers.

  The officers of Reims City Hall, however, could have wept. André’s arrival meant that they would lose their old powers entirely. Henceforth, great and small matters in and around Reims must bend to the will of the Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor—who was also Colonel of the Champagne Composite Regiment. In a word, André was about to become the city’s dictator—the “king” of Reims.

  “No, gentlemen,” André said, to calm their fear in the grand hall of Reims City Hall. In a black lawyer’s dress once again, he planted his left hand on his hip, swept his right in a confident arc, and declared, “As it was before, so it shall be again. The dance goes on, and the horses run.”

  Indeed, in private, André even promised to keep the smuggling channels open—down to every sou owed the Marquis de Bouillé. Since the scouts still could not pinpoint the bandits’ lairs in the Ardennes, there could be no talk of massing and annihilating them. Better, until opportunity offered, to keep the peace and do business—no need for killing when profit might be shared.

  Before long, André’s gaze turned to Colonel Brice, the National Guard commander, standing in a corner. Under André’s eye, he grew uneasy, shuffled forward, and tremulously tendered his resignation on grounds of ill health.

  André would not hear of it; he urged him to remain and continue the honorable duty of guarding Reims. Only when the commander asked a third time did André soften, agreeing—grudgingly—that Captain Chassé of the gendarmerie would act as Colonel Brice’s special assistant and, while the commander “convalesced,” would administer public order in Reims and the surrounding district.

  André could be extraordinarily liberal with administrative power; but the leadership of the National Guard he would not relinquish. Fortunately, Colonel Brice knew the score, and André would not strip him of the office by force. During the latter’s “sick leave,” however, the Reims National Guard would be placed under the gendarmerie’s direct control. In exchange, André promised the Brice family a church property at a favorable price.

  “Hypocrite,” Prosecutor Hubert grumbled inwardly again. Yet thereafter, he, like many civic and judicial colleagues, would sing Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor André’s praises. For the most part, André kept faith: after entering the city, he did not order any crude interference with City Hall or the courts.

  Moderate and reasonable “fine-tuning” was unavoidable. The northern and southern district police chiefs and mounted police would take orders from Captain Chassé and Second Lieutenant Penduvas of the gendarmerie; André recommended his private agent, Ouvrard, to Mayor Basile, hoping to seat him in Reims City Hall as an administrative commissioner to handle legacy church-property issues; and in the name of the Deputy Chief Provincial Prosecutor, André proposed to the Marne Commune that Barreau, his law colleague at the University of Reims, aged forty-three, be appointed presiding judge of the Reims misdemeanors court.

  On church affairs, Bishop de Talleyrand was a fat prize, and André struck hard. The newly arrived receiver of church assets, Ouvrard, was named by André as chief of a thirty-six-person professional team—brokers, appraisers, notaries, accountants, and lawyers among them.

  Their charge, in line with the “guidance” issued by the National Constituent Assembly and under André’s orders, was to re-register, value, and record all assets held by the Catholic Church in Reims; in future, these would be used to repay the nation’s immense debts (assignats). In Bordeaux, André had been a participant and beneficiary of this work; in Reims, he had become the arbiter of the local Church’s fate.

  By Ouvrard’s preliminary estimate, the Church’s real property in Reims—monasteries, churches, shops and warehouses, vineyards, champagne houses, meadows and pastures, forests and lakes—exceeded six hundred million livres in market value. Of this, prime assets convertible to cash amounted to some two hundred million. The frozen liquid assets of the Reims Church were likewise substantial—nearly twenty million livres in all.

  Confronted with such riches, André naturally coveted them. But clear-headed, he had no thought of cutting down the Church single-handed; instead he would proceed with preparation and care.

  From the peaceful entry into Reims through the carols of Christmas in the cathedral, André and his agents focused on “friendly consultations” with Paris, with the Marne Commune, and with local stakeholders in Reims—so as to dispose, in an orderly fashion, of the “treasure God left to the world.”