Augereau, standing to one side, felt a little awkward listening to all this. Fortunately, both he and Lefebvre were strolling and chatting in the quiet back garden of the headquarters building; there was no one else here, and no one would notice a moment of unbecoming loss of composure from a mid- to senior-ranking officer.

  “You’ll have shares in the cigarette company as well. In fact, every officer who becomes part of the Champagne Composite Brigade is entitled to receive this dividend.” The big man, Augereau, lifted the statement in his hand and introduced it with unabashed enthusiasm.

  “But André once said that the obscene profits in cigarettes couldn’t last long, because once the country returned to normal, the government would inevitably levy a massive excise tax on the cigarette company. Besides, there isn’t much technical content in the cigarette trade; competitors will only multiply, and profits will be diluted again and again. André has reminded us that, as things stand, apart from the cigarette company, more investment should go into cotton-spinning mills and textile factories, as well as vineyards and Champagne houses.

  “But I should add this: André does not want—indeed, he is even displeased—to see officers pooling their spare money into land and plantations. He has stressed repeatedly that most plantation land is reserved for soldiers and their families. Officers’ investments, aside from their considerable shares of war booty, must be placed in industry. And don’t worry about any of this; the financial adviser will have everything prepared for you. If he recommends investing in United Steel Company, you can consider accepting it.

  “Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you—your Champagne estate has already been chosen, right near where Hoche and I are. It used to be a beautiful Comte estate, and it is still beautiful now. The interior decorations and furniture are already in place; you can move in at any time. As for the villa’s previous owner, he fled to Koblenz three months ago to join the rebel nobles. Under the laws of the Marne, everything on the Comte estate has been confiscated to the Reims government…”

  Lefebvre listened throughout Hoche’s account and thought that his final decision had been the right one. Compared with that fool Louis XVI, André was a hundred times the man. Although the posts and ranks of his two former comrades had long since risen above Lefebvre’s, Hoche and Augereau still remembered the private kindness Lefebvre had shown them back at the royal palace. After everything Lefebvre had endured, it left him with no sense of distance at all—only warmth.

  As for the quality of the officers under André’s Champagne Composite Brigade, Lefebvre had always praised it highly. The camp military school led by Colonel Berthier could sharpen officers’ combat competence as commanders: every commoner officer could, like a noble officer, read operational briefs, sign combat orders, and even translate codebooks and draw contour maps. With personal and family prospects at stake, all kinds of economic interests had been bound inseparably to André, making the officers’ loyalty to their commanding officer something that came from the heart—beyond reproach.

  In the local National Guard, by contrast, half the officers could not draft paperwork themselves and could not even read the operational orders issued by their superiors; technical officers had to explain them line by line. As for codebooks, contour maps, artillery trajectories, and the like—those were pure fantasy to them. Only the Paris National Guard was somewhat better; most officers there were not illiterate.

  At the Bacourt camp, even a newly enlisted soldier had to receive elementary literacy education. In André’s words, “I am training 6,500 NCOs and officers—there are no soldiers.” To that end, André gave the men exceptional benefits: the newest uniforms, the best weapons, the best rations; and after eight years of service (including the misfortune of death in action or grievous wounds), the soldier himself, or his family, could receive a plot of plantation land free of charge. At the same time, however, everyone had to endure the harshest, strictest, and most frequent military training.

  If one had to name a deficiency in the Champagne Composite Brigade, its only shortcoming was a lack of real combat experience (in fact, since the end of the war in North America, the French army had not fought a national war). Yet if André’s earlier prediction proved correct, the war that was about to begin would offer this young lion a great stage on which to win victories.

  In André’s office, he had just finished drilling the members of the northbound detachment: Colonel Moncey (detachment commander), Colonel Hoche (deputy detachment commander), Lieutenant Colonel Macdonald, and the rest.

  In his closing words, André spoke plainly to them: “By the end of spring 1792—that is, before the war breaks out—each of your units will have expanded to an infantry division and a cavalry brigade. Be ready, my Generals!”

  …

  Because of severe political disagreements, and because most Jacobins opposed Lafayette’s suppression of republican forces, in August 1791 the two major camps of the Monarchistes—the Lafayette faction and the Barnave faction—joined hands temporarily, formally split from the Jacobin Club, and began holding meetings at the Feuillant monastery.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Previously, the right wing in the eyes of revolutionaries—the Royalist Party—had, after the king’s flight, either fled abroad or withdrawn into the provinces. At the suggestion of Marat and others from The Friend of the People, the Feuillants, or the Monarchistes, were now regarded as the right wing (the opposition) of the day. Their principal figures included Sieyès, Lafayette, Bailly, Barnave, Duport, and the Lameth brothers, among others; the latter three were known as “the Triumvirate.”

  Through the joint efforts of the Triumvirate in the Assembly, together with Lafayette and their allies, on September 15 Louis XVI finally agreed to sign the French Constitution of 1791. And as one of the levers in bargaining with the Crown, the Constitutionalists declared that the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was not part of the French Constitution of 1791 at all, but merely an ordinary law—one that the Legislative Assembly, half a month later, could amend.

  Not only that: the Constituent Assembly, nearing its end, imposed certain restrictions on the freedom of political clubs; granted the king a veto and the right to appoint judges; and a proposal by Deputy Prieur also passed with four-fifths support—namely, a set of rules defining the powers of the Assembly’s internal working committees.

  The executive secretary of each working committee (the committee’s de facto leader) held a term equal to the member’s mandate. In other words, so long as he was not impeached by a majority of deputies, André could remain as executive secretary of the Foreign Affairs Committee all the way to the end of his term in the Legislative Assembly.

  Moreover, at joint meetings held with the government cabinet, the executive secretaries of the various committees held speaking rights and a measure of voting rights. It must be explained that the secretary-general of the Foreign Affairs Committee could, at such a joint meeting, veto the foreign policy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the minister), but could not veto the policies of other cabinet ministers; he was only allowed to speak and have his dissent entered into the record.

  There was also another item: a public open letter that André, as a deputy-elect for the next National Legislative Assembly, addressed to the outgoing Constituent Assembly. He first thanked all representatives of the National Constituent Assembly for their long, diligent labors, undertaken without complaint and without regret; he then described the younger deputies’ boundless admiration for the older generation; and he enclosed 635 gifts—lapel pins made from the Bastille’s foundation stone, engraved with “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

  André publicly claimed that the raw material cost of each pin was no more than a 1-sou copper coin, so no one treated it as a bribe. Yet he deliberately ignored the fact that the engraver charged a processing fee of 30 livres for every single pin. Decades later, the auction price of one such deputy’s pin had risen as high as 80,000 francs.

  André’s open letter was, of course, not about sending pins, gathering connections, or buying goodwill; it was meant to introduce the next proposal: a request that the Constituent Assembly grant a full amnesty to those listed as state fugitives during June and July of this year. This was a request from Lafayette, Barnave, and their circle, and it was equally the hope of Danton and others exiled in England; André readily agreed to take on a task that would please both sides.

  On September 11, after a round of impassioned declarations, the Assembly passed the amnesty proposal for the next legislature. Louis XVI clenched his teeth in fury, but he signed it all the same. Thus the fleeing royalists members and the exiled republicans alike were restored to freedom (for the time being). From September onward, celebrations sprang up across France to mark the completion of the great constitution. The Constitutionalists among the nobility fully believed the Revolution had ended; they rejoiced that the dangers of civil war and foreign war seemed to have passed…

  On September 28, André set out from the Reims camp for Paris. The other eight representatives of the Marne arrived in Reims a day earlier and followed General André to the capital, preparing to take part in the formation of the Legislative Assembly. His teacher Thuriot was among them.

  As early as July, the small estrangement between Thuriot and André had already dissolved into smoke. Whatever the former might deny, in most people’s eyes Thuriot belonged to André’s camp among the republicans. Yet to certain watchful minds, the relationship between student and teacher was not as simple as it seemed.

  On several occasions, Thuriot’s private conversations with André had not been amicable; some even claimed to have heard them shouting abuse at each other, followed by a long stretch of loud crashing from overturned tables and chairs. Even so, afterward the two former chief prosecutors of the Marne both categorically denied it, emphasizing their unity and fraternity.

  On the night before departure, Thuriot, at André’s invitation, met him in the Reims gendarmerie headquarters building. If there had been conspirators at that moment, the harmonious scene in the office would have disappointed them utterly.

  Thuriot took the Champagne André handed him, sipped once, and said with a smile, “It’s going far better than you thought, André. It’s been almost three months now, and no conspirator has come to contact me at all—nothing like what you said. Honestly, aren’t you being a bit too suspicious? Didn’t the clerics at the church school teach you to love your fellow man?”

  André smiled. Having lived two lives, he had long since seen through the dangers of human nature. So at all times André reminded himself to keep his mind clear: he knew he could not buy off or eradicate every hostile force that opposed him, and so there remained another way—to lure the snake from its hole, and to create a target that could be tempted.

  “The conspirators can watch everything that happens in the Marne from Paris, my teacher,” André said calmly.

  “The Tuileries? The Feuillants? Or Roland and his people?” Thuriot asked, naming factions that had all clashed with André before. Up to this point, André had never given Thuriot a clear hint.