Brienne-le-Château, December 1779
The privilege of dining with Father Berton rotated through the pupils by some system none of them had ever fully understood, part merit, part whim, part whatever mood the old principal happened to be in when he drew up the week's list. It was meant to be an honor. Most boys treated it as one, scrubbing their collars, rehearsing polite things to say about their studies, hoping to be remembered favorably when the next report went to Paris.
Napoleone had never much cared for it.
"You look like a man walking to his own execution," Bourrienne observed, falling into step beside him as they crossed toward Father Berton's private dining room, where four other boys already waited by the door in their better coats.
"I dislike small talk."
"It isn't small talk. It's supper with the man who decides whether we stay at this school or get sent home in disgrace."
"That's precisely why I dislike it. Small talk with consequences is worse than small talk without them."
Bourrienne laughed under his breath, and the sound of it, easy and unbothered, did something to loosen the knot that had been sitting in Napoleone's chest since his name had appeared on the list that morning. "Try not to insult anyone's mother tonight. That's my only advice."
"I make no promises."
The dining room was small, warmly lit, a fire going in the hearth despite the season's early chill, and Father Berton presided at the head of the table with the particular contentment of a man who genuinely enjoyed the company of clever boys, whatever else might be said of his teaching. Two of the visiting professors sat at his right hand, Monsieur Dupuis and a younger master named Fesch who taught rhetoric and had, in Napoleone's private assessment, considerably more opinion of his own cleverness than the subject strictly warranted.
The talk moved easily enough through the first courses, boys answering questions about their studies, Father Berton steering the conversation with the practiced hand of a man who had done this a hundred times before. Napoleone said little, ate carefully, and let the evening drift toward its natural conclusion without incident, right up until Monsieur Fesch, apparently bored of asking about Latin declensions, decided to try a different kind of question entirely.
"Buonaparte," Fesch said, setting down his glass with the deliberate slowness of a man who already knew exactly where he intended to steer things, "I understand you hold rather strong opinions about your homeland's recent history."
"I hold accurate opinions about it, Monsieur. Whether they're strong depends on who's listening."
A ripple of quiet amusement went round the table. Father Berton's eyebrow rose fractionally, though whether in warning or interest, Napoleone couldn't yet tell.
"Accurate," Fesch repeated, savoring the word. "Then perhaps you can settle something Monsieur Dupuis and I have been debating. This Corsican general your people are so fond of. Paoli. I understand he styled himself quite the statesman, before France was obliged to remind him whose kingdom he actually governed."
"He governed Corsica because Corsicans chose him to," Napoleone said. "France didn't remind him of anything. France invaded a country that had already built its own constitution, its own courts, its own university, and called the destruction of all of it a correction."
"Strong words for a boy of ten."
"They'd be true words from a boy of any age, Monsieur."
Dupuis, who had so far said nothing, allowed himself a thin smile. "I've heard he was rather a vain man, this Paoli. Fond of his own legend. The sort of general who prefers a glorious defeat to a sensible peace, and drags an entire island down with him for the pleasure of it."
Something tightened behind Napoleone's ribs, old and familiar, the same heat that had once put a boy named Paolo in the dust outside a well in Ajaccio, the same heat Marcus had spent months teaching him to redirect rather than simply swallow. He didn't reach for the old teaching now. He didn't especially want to.
"He was not vain," Napoleone said, quiet and very level. "He was the only man in that entire war who understood what he stood to lose and chose to stand anyway. That isn't vanity, Monsieur. That's the one thing most men in this world are too comfortable to ever actually be asked to prove they have."
"And your own father," Fesch said, leaning forward now, plainly enjoying himself, plainly aware he'd found the thread worth pulling, "was Paoli's adjutant, was he not? I understand he fought at his side through the worst of it. And yet here we all are, dining together under the flag your father eventually agreed to serve. Rather a complicated inheritance for a boy to carry, wouldn't you say?"
The table had gone quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when everyone present has recognized, at roughly the same moment, that something real is about to happen.
Napoleone set down his fork.
"Yes," he said. "My father was his adjutant. He fought at Ponte Novo, where a thousand Corsicans died trying to hold a bridge against twenty times their number, and he survived it, and he carried my mother through the mountains while she was pregnant with me, running from French guns, and he chose, afterward, to make his peace with the flag that had done the killing, because he decided that a living family mattered more than a dead cause."
He looked around the table, at Fesch's smug, waiting expression, at Dupuis's thin amusement, at Father Berton's careful, unreadable stillness, at Bourrienne, who alone among them wasn't smiling at all.
"I understand why he did it," Napoleone said. "I understand it the way a man understands arithmetic, coldly, correctly, without needing to like the answer. But I will never forgive him for it. Paoli was a great man. He loved his country more than he loved his own survival, and my father was his adjutant, and I think he ought to have followed Paoli's fortune to the end, and fallen with him, rather than live long enough to raise a son at a French table being asked to smile about it."
The silence that followed was total.
"That," Fesch said finally, into the quiet, "is a rather treasonous sentiment to voice at a school funded by His Majesty's own bursary, Buonaparte."
"It's an honest one, Monsieur. I've found the two aren't always the same thing, but I'd rather be honest and inconvenient than comfortable and false. You asked what I thought. I've told you. I won't apologize for the answer simply because it didn't flatter the company."
Father Berton set down his own glass, slow and deliberate, and for a long moment said nothing at all, studying Napoleone with an expression that gave away considerably less than Fesch's had.
"Monsieur Fesch," he said finally, mild as milk, "I believe you asked a question expecting a polite evasion, and received instead a genuine answer. I'm not entirely certain that's the boy's failing."
Fesch's mouth thinned, but he said nothing further, and the conversation, awkwardly, moved on to safer ground, the weather, the coming winter, whether the roads to Troyes would hold once the frost properly set in. Napoleone ate the rest of the meal in a silence that wasn't quite comfortable but wasn't quite hostile either, aware of Bourrienne's occasional glance from across the table, aware of Fesch's cooler attention lingering on him for the remainder of the evening like a held grudge waiting for a better moment to spend itself.
"You could have simply said you found the whole matter too complicated to discuss at supper," Bourrienne said, once they were walking back across the frost-hard courtyard afterward, breath fogging in the cold. "Berton would have accepted that. Fesch would have had nothing to sharpen his teeth on."
"I know."
"Then why didn't you?"
Napoleone was quiet a moment, watching his own breath rise pale against the dark sky, the same sky, more or less, that hung over Ajaccio too, though it never seemed to hold the sea's particular restlessness here the way it did at home.
"Because he asked me to be ashamed of my father in front of five strangers for the price of a comfortable evening," he said finally, "and I decided a long time ago that there are certain prices I'm simply not willing to pay, however small the audience or however easy the lie would have been."
"Even when the lie would have cost you nothing real?"
"It would have cost me something. Just not something Fesch would have been able to see." Napoleone glanced sideways at him. "You didn't laugh, back there. Everyone else at that table found some way to enjoy it, even Berton, in his own quiet fashion. You didn't."
"No." Bourrienne's voice was steadier than usual, stripped of its usual easy humor. "I've heard you talk about Corsica in the dark, in a storeroom, when there was nobody to perform it for. What you said tonight was the same thing, only louder, and in front of people who'd already decided to find it funny before you'd said a word. I don't find that funny. I find it the truest thing I've heard anyone say at that table in three months of dining there."
Napoleone didn't answer right away. Something in his chest, tight since Fesch's first needling question, eased slightly at that, more than he'd expected it to.
"Fesch won't forget tonight," he said instead, practical again, already turning the evening over the way he turned over everything, looking for what it would cost him later. "Men like him don't. I've made an enemy of a professor with influence over reports that go to Paris, over a dinner I didn't even want to attend in the first place."
"Probably." Bourrienne shrugged, unbothered. "But you've also made Berton wonder whether Fesch is the kind of man who baits children for sport, which I suspect matters rather more to your future here than one professor's wounded pride. Berton runs this school. Fesch only teaches in it."
"That's a generous way of reading tonight."
"I'm told I'm an excellent judge of character." Bourrienne bumped his shoulder against Napoleone's, light and easy, some of the warmth returning to his voice. "Besides, someone has to be optimistic about how tonight goes for you. You certainly weren't going to manage it yourself."
Napoleone almost smiled, the tightness in his chest finally easing all the way, and for a while neither of them said anything further, walking together through the cold toward the dormitory's dim lamplight, footsteps crunching in the frost, the whole strange, dangerous, oddly satisfying evening settling slowly into something he suspected, even then, he was going to remember for a very long time.