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    The Passion
    The Passion
    The Passion
    Ebook188 pages3 hours

    The Passion

    By Jeanette Winterson

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The New York Times–bestselling author interweaves the destinies of Napoleon’s cook and an enigmatic Venetian woman in this “arresting, elegant novel” (Publishers Weekly).

    A faithful soldier of the Grande Armée, Henri is given the honor of serving meals to Napoleon himself. After all, Henri is short—and no one over five-foot-two ever serves the emperor. But when following his revered leader brings him to near-starvation in Russia’s frozen winter, Henri is disillusioned and desperate for escape.

    The web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, Villanelle has long been acquainted with the advantages of dishonesty. Trust hasn’t been her strong suit since her heart was stolen—literally—by a noblewoman she once loved.

    Soon these two will meet their shared destiny in the chaotic carnival that is early 19th century Venice. In The Passion, Whitbread Award-winning author Jeanette Winterson delivers a “historical novel quite different from any other” (Vanity Fair).

    “Recalls García Márquez . . . Magical touches dance like highlights over the brilliance of this fairy tale about passion, gambling, madness, and androgynous ecstasy.” —Edmund White
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802198716
    The Passion
    Author

    Jeanette Winterson

    Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959. She read English at Oxford University before writing her first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, which was published in 1985.

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    Reviews for The Passion

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      I have strange feelings about this book. The story itself was just okay for me, but I liked the historical details and marveled over the descriptions. What brought this up to a four star rating for me was the writing, the insights. I read this book as a used copy and my copy was heavily underlined. I have never underlined a work of fiction, although I have occasionally been tempted, but this book was crazy. Not only did I "get" why the previous reader underlined so many sentences, I found many more I wanted to underline myself. This author is a veritable "Book Of Quotations"! She just scatters beautiful insights left and right; about love, loss, life, parenthood, friendship, war, heroes, death, the weather, whatever. I almost found it distracting as it I kept pausing to reread stunning phrases, and it kept taking me out of the story. A short book, well worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Set during the Napoleonic Wars, two interesting, yet unforgettable characters (Henri, a simple French soldier and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman) meet and start a very unusual intimate relationship. I am a fan of Magical Realism, however didn't find this book satisfying... left me wanting more!
    • 5/5
      Really lovely, just a touch of magical realism. A lot of space devoted to gender identity and its obscuration. Reminds me of Jean Rhys (who is one of my top ten authors). Everything that seems like a lie is likely real, but much of what seems genuine is deception or self-deception.I had read and liked Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit years ago, but hadn't read anything else of hers till I picked this up in the library book sale. Just looked her up- I hadn't realized she'd been so prolific.
    • 5/5
      This is my favorite Winterson book, and one of my favorite books of all time. She has amazingly found new ways and words with which to describe romantic love, a dubious task at best! Plus the imagery is astounding as always, and the prose is both poetic and concrete.
    • 5/5
      This novel is told from the point of views of two characters -- a young man, Henri, an army cook for a chicken-obsessed Napoleon, and Villanelle, a Venetian web-footed female cross-dresser. Henri falls in a kind of hero-worshiping love with Napoleon but after the invastion of Russia becomes utterly disillusioned. Villanelle falls in love with a mysterious woman who, literally, takes her heart and keeps it hidden in a Venetian house. Later she marries a senior cook who is Henri's archenemy and something of a grotesque, but she later leaves him. Alas, he chases her and when he finds her, sells her off as a prostitute to the French officers. Thus, Henri and Villanelle's stories collide when she meets Henri in Russia, where Henri is trying to survive with an ex-priest. Henri becomes enamored of Villanelle and follows her to Venice, where she hopes to reclaim her heart. Sadly, Villanelle's husband also follows them and things don't work out very well for pour Henri, who looses more than his mind. With THE PASSIONWinterson moves firmly away from the traditional novel form -- she mixes history and myth and fairy tales. The recurring line, "Trust me, I'm telling you stories" becomes Winterson's refrain and leitmotif, not only in this work, but in her the rest of her fiction as well. Indeed, one could say it is the major theme of her work, along with the sexual ambiguity of her characters. All Winterson's work, and this is no exception, are loaded with scriptural references and biblical allusions (which is no surprise to those of us who have read an admired her semi-autobiographical novel, ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT. She also mines the liminal space between passion and obsession, as well as "truth" and "fiction" and sexual identify..A firm post-modernist, Winterson uses authorial interruptions throughout the novel to directly address the reader, and it is this authorial voice that provides two fairy tales that comment on the main story. I must admit, most post-modernists leave me cold, so chilly is the detachment of their prose and perspective (and often so over-clever), but Winterson's desperation to make you understand reminds me, in an odd way, of James Agee's LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. She wants so much to make you understand, and she has so much compassion for her broken, emotionally-battered characters, that I can't help but be swept up in their stories. The fact she's such a brilliant wordsmith doesn't hurt.
    • 3/5
      Magical realism set in wartime, told with a delicate lacing of philosophy, religion and perfectly-flawed romance. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the best books I ever read. History with a touch of magic, a love story, a bit of philosophy, and beautifully written.
    • 5/5
      I devoured this book in just a few days because it was so engaging, but I wish I had read it slower and taken the time to savor it and think about it - there is a lot of food for thought here. Winterson's writing style is very plain, not one unnecessary or out-of-place word, yet very powerful and vivid. The descriptions of Venice, in particular, are amazingly evocative.The book tells the story of a soldier in Napoleon's army and a woman who works in a Venetian casino. Both characters' stories explore how passion shapes their lives: passion for Napoleon, passion for life, passion for home, family, a woman. It also explores how they cope when their passion fails them, or when they can't have their passion.I need to reread this and take the time to savor and ponder it.
    • 3/5
      I have a strange relationship with Jeanette Winterson's writing, really. I think her use of imagery is amazing, and I could get lost in the webs she makes with words, but at the same time, I don't read her work for story or characters -- and when I read, I generally am reading for story or characters, or out of academic interest. Since I'm a medievalist, this doesn't satisfy that latter urge, either.

      The Passion has some beautiful imagery, and some fairytale dream-like stories that sparked my interest, and there is a narrative -- perhaps more solid than that of Sexing the Cherry -- but again, it didn't interest me with the story. The character of Villanelle is interesting, and I was reminded for some reason of Catherynne M. Valente's Palimpsest.

      Unlike Sexing the Cherry, though, I don't think it's something I'm going to return to just for the imagery or the language.
    • 5/5
      A friend threw this book at me. I have never heard of Winterson and was weary about wasting my time, but the book is only 150 pages, so I gave it a chance. What a book! A great dive into a fantastically mysterious and thematically soaked world. Winterson's prose are simple, to the point and ponderous.
    • 5/5
      Set in the time of the Napoleon the interlocking stories of a young French soldier and Venetian boatman's. Love and passion, murder and betrayal . Well written magical realism.
    • 5/5
      I thought this book was astonishing. I went in, never having read Winterson before, totally disbelieving the title. And yet, it is a work of passion... not embarrassment, not disavowal, but the kind of passion whose thighs you could bite. It's written with obvious relish. I enjoyed the hell out of this book.
    • 5/5
      What to say about this book . . . it is one of the very few to which I haven given 5 stars. Needless to say, I absolutely loved it.The Passion is an amazingly imaginitive, truly magical, and very thought provoking book. Winterson's writing is fluid, lyrical and sensuous, and the whole story is crafted quite brilliantly. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, it has Napoleon as a minor character only. The two major characters are Henri, one of Napoleon's soldiers and his chicken chef, and Villanelle, the daughter of a Venetian boatman. It begins in France, moves to Venice, then Russia in the heart of winter, and back to Venice. The descriptions of Venice "a living city" are extraordinarily vivid; you can feel yourself gliding down the dark icy canals and tunnels into the hidden interior of the city.It is a book about passion, as the title says. About passion for an ideal, and transferred to an idealised leader. About passion in a sensual as well as a sexual sense, and also in a romantic sense. About the price one may be required to pay for feeling that passion. It is also about love, loving and being in love and "giving your heart away". About what we value and what we are prepared to risk.The quality of this book, and of Winterson's writing is astounding. Having said all that, you will still have no idea what it is actually about and what she is saying until you have read it.Just read it.
    • 3/5
      Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. Grove Press, New York, 1987. First read this book in 1996 while visiting grad schools---I remember finishing the book when I was in Ithaca looking at Cornell. I decided to re-read the book because it mezmerised me so much the first time. I still love Winterson when her writing is at its most mythic and imaginiative, and I think she is in peak form in this book. At its heart, this is a love story of the most unusal kind. Henri, a deserter from Napoleon's army, falls in love with Villanelle. It's an odd, magical love that eventually drives him insane. The story has it all: war, sex, madness, and a beautiful writing style that seems inspired by music with its repeated phrases.
    • 5/5
      My favourite book of all time. I have never read a book as good as this, before or since. Love it!
    • 5/5
      Her best work. Set in Venice in the 17th century. A love story and fantasy.
    • 2/5
      The Passion is very cream puffy - the lines are beautiful, but the plot and character development are not very satisfying. The structure of the story - first Henri's backstory, then Villanelle's, their meeting, and finally the consequences of their meeting - imply a romeo and juliet-like tragedy. Since the tragedy is Henri's, Villanelle almost seems like a side character given too much screen time because the author thought her much more interesting that the main story. She gets her heart back, she drives Henri crazy and seems to go on her merry way with a great big house in her home town. What was the price she paid for passion?
    • 4/5
      Not my favourite by her (that still remains Written on the Body), but an interested read about, of course, passion, but also the masks we wear and the disguises that get us through love and life. Some really stellar lines that made me sit back and think.
    • 3/5
      Well, I guess I am not a fan of magical realism! I had heard raves about Winterson's work, so I picked up this novel to give her a try. While I enjoyed it and agree that it was well written, there was nothing here that left much of an impression on me, aside from the coldness and ugliness of war. I agree with the reviewer who seemed to feel that the merger of Henri's and Villanelle's stories didn't quite work, and that the author seemed much more interested in the latter.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful book. Her best, I think.
    • 3/5
      I picked this up because I'd read Winterson's 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit' years ago, and really liked it. But, while that was an autobiographically-inclined novel, this was quite different. A historical novel, it tells the story of a young French man who becomes Napoleon's cook, and a wild Venetian girl with a penchant for cross-dressing. These two unlikely characters' lives eventually intertwine, with hefty doses of the surreal and magical realism. Winterson is an extremely talented writer, but I found the experience to be a bit uneven at times - perhaps just because I liked the parts featuring Villanelle (the girl) much more than those with Henri. The book is vividly and poetically written; it is also philosophical and sad.
    • 5/5
      Better, and harder, the second time.
    • 4/5
      Napoleon / wore a black hat / ate lots of chicken / and conquered half Europe...
    • 5/5
      Una hermosa historia; honesta, real, íntima, a pesar de (o gracias a) estar llena de imaginaciones, magia y remembranzas históricas en la voz de tan entrañables personajes.
    • 3/5
      Odd and interesting and magical
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed "Oranges are not the only fruit" better. This book seemed a bit disjointed. Too much emphasis on philosophizing in a poetic style and a shocking awful drop of extreme cruelty , quite gratuitous, since it is only there to justify the supposed seriousnes of "gaming" as a metaphor of the lives of all the characters (Bonaparte included). If you are placing your cards so much on lyrical language and idea twists you'd better become a poet (the riskiest bet). Then, I hate when a novelist, carried on by language, gets enamoured with some of their sentences and repeats them once and again. Here, we have a variety of those (hey, I got it the first time!). My favorite part was the end, there is more sobriety and depth.
      Something else I resent is an absolute lack of humour.
    • 3/5
      OK, Henri reaches Villanelle's city via Boulogne, Paris and Moscow, marching with Napoleon's army, but the real setting of this novel is definitely Venice. Or rather, Jeanette Winterson’s own magical version of Venice, ambiguously squalid and romantic. City, of course, of miracles, disguises, gamblers and passion. I really enjoyed spending time with Henri, village boy, soldier, killer-in-chief of Napoleon’s chickens. And Villanelle, Venetian boatman’s daughter, card dealer, cross-dresser. And Venice which, as is its wont, becomes a character in its own right, dangerous, glamorous, resistant to rationalisation and order.
    • 4/5
      The story is set in the time of Napoleon and features Henri, a young man who loves Napoleon and cooks for him and a young woman Villanelle, from Venice who loses her heart to another woman. Henri and Villanelle meet up in the snows of Russia. It is a story of passion. Passions of Napoleon, passions of Villanelle and passions of Henri. The writing is beautiful written and of a style, magical realism. First words: It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy.Quotes: “I'm telling you stories. Trust me.”“I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.” "the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else." Last words: I'm telling you stories. Trust me.
    • 4/5
      Several years ago, I read Jeanette Winterson's “Written On The Body,” which made a tremendous impression on me, and unfortunately I haven't found my way to another Winterson novel until now. What struck me most about her writing then and still what attracts me the most is her command of an innovative, unique style that reminds me of a melange of the best of Robertson Davies, Angela Carter, and Borges. It has a fantastical quality all its own that seems quite separate from magical realism, and in my opinion is much more engaging.The novel comes in a tiny package, but there's plenty to think about. One of the leitmotifs is the idea of passion in all its forms – war, human love, gambling, the epicurean passions of the sybarite. The character of Villanelle, the daughter of a Venetian boatman who at night masquerades as a man in the Felliniesque casinos of her city, allows the novel just as openly to play with themes of identity and gender – a continuing them in Winterson's fiction.Henri is a professional soldier in Napoleon's army, fatefully chosen to be the tender of the Emperor's larders as he makes the monomaniacal decision to invade Russia – in the winter, which the characters call “a zero winter.” Villanelle is a fascinating character: married to a vile man, she ends up getting sold into Napoleon's army as a prostitute for community use. Villanelle and Henry meet as Napoleon's army is finally collapsing under its own weight, and Henri has made the decision to desert, along with Patrick, an eccentric priest with a history all his own. During their journey back to Italy, Henri and Villanelle fall in love.After they finally make it back home, he rescues her beating heart from a Venetian palace, places it back into her body, goes stark raving mad (like Emperor, like soldier), and is committed to a prison where he is forced to see his beloved row by in her gondola every single day. Just like the end of every other love story you've ever read, right?Villanelle is also a body of paradoxes – a whore and a savior, a man and a woman, a warrior and a lover. Winterson uses religious imagery to highlight her, and successfully manages to make her dialogue with the character of Henri almost kerygmatic. (The passion of the gospels is possibly still another that Winterson is trying to unearth as the story develops.)While I may very well go back to my old ways and not read her again for another several years, Jeanette Winterson's fiction deserves some serious attention. You can always expect her to be concerned with the mercurial nature of human love (and especially lesbian love), but beyond that, you will never know the set of tropes she will use to explore it – fantastic historical fiction here, physics in “Gut Symmetries,” a post-apocalyptic hellscape in “The Stone Gods,” or memoir in “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” But I hope I’ve learned my lesson and don’t neglect her again for nearly as long.
    • 2/5
      For me, I felt the writing was trying to be quotable and thus felt a touch try-hard - the writing also made me feel quite removed from the characters and thus I felt detached from the story overall.The first third of the book with Henri was tough to get through - I didnt care for it.Villanelle had great promise for a character - but the way this story was set up and the writing just didn't do her justice.There were so many heavy themes in the book but it just felt glossed over.The "passion" also wasnt there for me. The closest it came was the married woman Villanelle had an affair with - but once againt there wasn't really any set up or substance.and then the ending??? like wtf henri?

    Book preview

    The Passion - Jeanette Winterson

    THE PASSION

    ALSO BY JEANETTE WINTERSON

    Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

    Sexing the Cherry

    Written on the Body

    Art and Lies

    Art Objects

    Gut Symmetries

    THE PASSION

    JEANETTE

    WINTERSON

    Copyright © 1987 by Jeanette Winterson

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

    First published in Great Britain in 1987 by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.

    Printed in the United States of America

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Winterson, Jeanette, 1959–

    The passion.

         I. Title.

    PR6073.I558P36 1988 823’.914 88-3427

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-3522-3

    Grove Press

    an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

    841 Broadway

    New York, NY 10003

    Distributed by Publishers Group West

    www.groveatlantic.com

    09 10 11 12 15 14 13 12

    For Pat Kavanagh

    My thanks are due to Don and Ruth Rendell whose hospitality gave me the space to work. To everyone at Bloomsbury, especially Liz Calder. To Philippa Brewster for her patience.

    You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the seas’ double rocks and now you inhabit a foreign land.

    Medea

    CONTENTS

    One The Emperor

    Two The Queen of Spades

    Three The Zero Winter

    Four The Rock

    THE PASSION

    One

    the

    EMPEROR

    It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy.

    Odd to be so governed by an appetite.

    It was my first commission. I started as a neck wringer and before long I was the one who carried the platter through inches of mud to his tent. He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Joséphine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.

    No one over five foot two ever waited on the Emperor. He kept small servants and large horses. The horse he loved was seventeen hands high with a tail that could wrap round a man three times and still make a wig for his mistress. That horse had the evil eye and there’s been almost as many dead grooms in the stable as chickens on the table. The ones the beast didn’t kill itself with an easy kick, its master had disposed of because its coat didn’t shine or the bit was green.

    ‘A new government must dazzle and amaze,’ he said. Bread and circuses I think he said. Not surprising then that when we did find a groom, he came from a circus himself and stood as high as the horse’s flank. When he brushed the beast he used a ladder with a stout bottom and a triangle top, but when he rode him for exercise he took a great leap and landed square on the glossy back while the horse reared and snorted and couldn’t throw him, not even with its nose in the dirt and its back legs towards God. Then they’d vanish in a curtain of dust and travel for miles, the midget clinging to the mane and whooping in his funny language that none of us could understand.

    But he understood everything.

    He made the Emperor laugh and the horse couldn’t better him, so he stayed. And I stayed. And we became friends.

    We were in the kitchen tent one night when the bell starts ringing like the Devil himself is on the other end. We all jumped up and one rushed to the spit while another spat on the silver and I had to get my boots back on ready for that tramp across the frozen ruts. The midget laughed and said he’d rather take a chance with the horse than the master, but we don’t laugh.

    Here it comes surrounded by parsley the cook cherishes in a dead man’s helmet. Outside the flakes are so dense that I feel like the little figure in a child’s snowstorm. I have to screw up my eyes to follow the yellow stain that lights up Napoleon’s tent. No one else can have a light at this time of night.

    Fuel’s scarce. Not all of this army have tents.

    When I go in, he’s sitting alone with a globe in front of him. He doesn’t notice me, he goes on turning the globe round and round, holding it tenderly with both hands as if it were a breast. I give a short cough and he looks up suddenly with fear in his face.

    ‘Put it here and go.’

    ‘Don’t you want me to carve it, Sir?’

    ‘I can manage. Goodnight.’

    I know what he means. He hardly ever asks me to carve now. As soon as I’m gone he’ll lift the lid and pick it up and push it into his mouth. He wishes his whole face were mouth to cram a whole bird.

    In the morning I’ll be lucky to find the wishbone.

    There is no heat, only degrees of cold. I don’t remember the feeling of a fire against my knees. Even in the kitchen, the warmest place on any camp, the heat is too thin to spread and the copper pans cloud over. I take off my socks once a week to cut my toe-nails and the others call me a dandy. We’re white with red noses and blue fingers.

    The tricolour.

    He does it to keep his chickens fresh.

    He uses winter like a larder.

    But that was a long time ago. In Russia.

    Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.

    It was a mess.

    Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.

    I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

    I wanted to be a drummer.

    The recruiting officer gave me a walnut and asked if I could crack it between finger and thumb. I could not and he laughed and said a drummer must have strong hands. I stretched out my palm, the walnut resting there, and offered him the same challenge. He coloured up and had a Lieutenant take me to the kitchen tents. The cook sized up my skinny frame and reckoned I was not a cleaver man. Not for me the mess of unnamed meat that had to be chopped for the daily stew. He said I was lucky, that I would be working for Bonaparte himself, and for one brief, bright moment I imagined a training as a pastry cook building delicate towers of sugar and cream. We walked towards a small tent with two impassive guards by the flaps.

    ‘Bonaparte’s own storeroom,’ said the cook.

    The space from the ground to the dome of the canvas was racked with rough wooden cages about a foot square with tiny corridors running in between, hardly the width of a man. In each cage there were two or three birds, beaks and claws cut off, staring through the slats with dumb identical eyes. I am no coward and I’ve seen plenty of convenient mutilation on our farms but I was not prepared for the silence. Not even a rustle. They could have been dead, should have been dead, but for the eyes. The cook turned to go. ‘Your job is to clear them out and wring their necks.’

    I slipped away to the docks, and because the stone was warm in that early April and because I had been travelling for days I fell asleep dreaming of drums and a red uniform. It was a boot that woke me, hard and shiny with a familiar saddle smell. I raised my head and saw it resting on my belly the way I had rested the walnut in my palm. The officer didn’t look at me, but said, ‘You’re a soldier now and you’ll get plenty of opportunity to sleep in the open air. On your feet.’

    He lifted his foot and, as I scrambled up, kicked me hard and still looking straight ahead said, ‘Firm buttocks, that’s something.’

    I heard of his reputation soon enough but he never bothered me. I think the chicken smell kept him away.

    I was homesick from the start. I missed my mother. I missed the hill where the sun slants across the valley. I missed all the everyday things I had hated. In spring at home the dandelions streak the fields and the river runs idle again after months of rain. When the army recruitment came it was a brave band of us who laughed and said it was time we saw more than the red barn and the cows we had birthed. We signed up straight away and those of us who couldn’t write made an optimistic smear on the page.

    Our village holds a bonfire every year at the end of winter. We had been building it for weeks, tall as a cathedral with a blasphemous spire of broken snares and infested pallets. There would be plenty of wine and dancing and a sweetheart in the dark and because we were leaving we were allowed to light it. As the sun went down we plunged our five burning brands into the heart of the pyre. My mouth went dry as I heard the wood take and splinter until the first flame pushed its way out. I wished I were a holy man then with an angel to protect me so I could jump inside the fire and see my sins burned away. I go to confession but there’s no fervour there. Do it from the heart or not at all.

    We’re a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.

    Last time we had this bonfire, a neighbour tried to pull down the boards of his house. He said it was nothing but a stinking pile of dung, dried meat and lice. He said he was going to burn the lot. His wife was tugging at his arms. She was a big woman, used to the churn and the field, but she couldn’t stop him. He smashed his fist into the seasoned wood until his hand looked like a skinned lamb’s head. Then he lay by the fire all night until the early wind covered him in cooling ash. He never spoke of it. We never spoke of it. He doesn’t come to the bonfire any more.

    I sometimes wonder why none of us tried to stop him. I think we wanted him to do it, to do it for us. To tear down our long-houred lives and let us start again. Clean and simple with open hands. It wouldn’t be like that, no more than it could have been like that when Bonaparte set fire to half of Europe.

    But what other chance had we?

    Morning came and we marched away with our parcels of bread and ripe cheese. There were tears from the women and the men slapped us on the back and said soldiering is a fine life for a boy. One little girl who always followed me around pulled at my hand, her eyebrows close together with worry.

    ‘Will you kill people, Henri?’

    I dropped down beside her. ‘Not people, Louise, just the enemy’.

    ‘What is enemy?’

    ‘Someone who’s not on your side.’

    We were on our way to join the Army of England at Boulogne. Boulogne, a sleepy nothing port with a handful of whorehouses, suddenly became the springboard of Empire. Only twenty miles away, easy to see on a clear day, was England and her arrogance. We knew about the English; how they ate their children and ignored the Blessed Virgin. How they committed suicide with unseemly cheerfulness. The English have the highest suicide rate in Europe. I got that straight from a priest The English with their John Bull beef and frothing beer. The English who are even now waist-high in the waters off Kent practising to drown the best army in the world.

    We are to invade England.

    All France will be recruited if necessary. Bonaparte will snatch up his country like a sponge and wring out every last drop.

    We are in love with him.

    At Boulogne, though my hopes of drumming head high at the front of a proud column are dashed, I’m still head high enough because I know I’ll see Bonaparte himself. He comes regularly rattling from the Tuileries and scanning the seas like an ordinary man checks his rain barrel. Domino the midget says that being near him is like having a great wind rush about your ears. He says that’s how Madame de Stäel put it and she’s famous enough to be right. She doesn’t live in France now. Bonaparte had her exiled because she complained about him censoring the theatre and suppressing the newspapers. I once bought a book of hers from a travelling pedlar who’d had it from a ragged nobleman. I didn’t understand much but I learned the word ‘intellectual’ which I would like to apply to myself.

    Domino laughs at me.

    At night I dream of dandelions.

    The cook grabbed a chicken from the hook above his head and scooped a handful of stuffing from the copper bowl.

    He was smiling.

    ‘Out on the town tonight, lads, and a night to remember, I swear it.’ He rammed the stuffing inside the bird, twisting his hand to get an even coating.

    ‘You’ve all had a woman before I suppose?’

    Most of us blushed and some of us giggled.

    ‘If you haven’t then there’s nothing sweeter and if you have, well, Bonaparte himself doesn’t tire of the same taste day after day.’

    He held up the chicken for our inspection.

    I had hoped to stay in with the pocket Bible given to me by my mother as I left. My mother loved God, she said that God and the Virgin were all she needed though she was thankful for her family. I’ve seen her kneeling before

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