Champagne countryside, July 1781
Neither of them had anywhere else to go, which was, Bourrienne pointed out more than once during the packing, the single most convenient thing about their friendship.
"My family's in Sens," he said, folding a spare shirt with more enthusiasm than care, "which is close enough that I could go home if I wanted. Whereas you have an island in the middle of the sea that costs more to reach than the Crown's entire bursary is worth, so we're both, in our own ways, orphans of convenience for the summer."
"That's a bleak way of describing a vacation."
"It's an accurate way. I prefer accurate to comforting, same as you." Bourrienne grinned, tying off his bundle. "Besides, Madame de Ségur's invitation includes both of us, which means I'm not spending six weeks alone with my father's disappointment, and you're not spending it alone with whatever it is you do with silence when nobody's watching you do it. I call that an excellent arrangement for everyone involved."
Madame de Ségur was a distant connection of the Comte de Marbeuf's, a widow of modest but genuine means who kept a country house a day's ride south of Brienne and had, for reasons neither boy fully understood beyond Marbeuf's general habit of doing small favors for the Buonaparte family, offered to host two of the school's scholarship boys for the summer rather than let them sit idle in an emptied dormitory. Napoleone had accepted mostly out of practicality. He suspected, though he never said so aloud, that Bourrienne had accepted mostly because it meant six weeks of Napoleone's company without a mathematics lesson forcing the terms.
They set out on a hired cart at dawn, the Champagne countryside unrolling slowly around them in a way that felt, to Napoleone, both entirely unlike Corsica and strangely familiar in its rhythms, fields instead of sea, but the same patient, working relationship between people and land that he remembered from watching Ajaccio's fishermen mend their nets before first light.
It was somewhere past the second village, the sun already climbing hard into a cloudless sky, that the cart slowed of its own accord, the driver muttering something under his breath and easing the horses to a stop at the edge of a small, dust-choked square.
"What's the delay?" Bourrienne called up.
"Gabelle men," the driver said, jerking his chin toward the square ahead, where a cluster of villagers had gathered in tense, unhappy silence around two officials in the King's livery, a wagon already half-loaded with what looked, from a distance, like sacks of grain and a modest collection of household goods. "Best we wait it out here a moment. No sense driving straight into it."
Napoleone climbed down without being asked, and after a beat, Bourrienne followed.
"What's happening?" Napoleone asked a woman standing nearest the cart, gray-haired, her hands twisted in her apron.
She looked at him for a long moment, taking in his coat, his accent, deciding, apparently, that a foreign-sounding boy asking questions was no particular threat. "Salt tax," she said flatly. "The Mourets fell behind on it. Bad harvest last year, worse this one coming if the wheat keeps drooping the way it has. Now the collectors are here to take what they're owed, and it doesn't much matter to them whether what's owed leaves a family with anything left to eat through winter."
Napoleone watched the scene unfold across the square with the same close, cataloguing attention he gave everything, though something in his chest had gone tight and strange in a way mathematics problems and schoolyard disputes never quite managed. A man, thin, sunburned, perhaps thirty-five though the strain in his face made him look considerably older, stood in the doorway of a low stone house, arguing in a low, exhausted voice with one of the officials while a woman inside, presumably his wife, could be heard trying to soothe a crying child. Two more sacks were carried out and loaded onto the wagon while he watched, his hands opening and closing at his sides, doing nothing, because there was, Napoleone understood with a kind of cold clarity, genuinely nothing left for him to do that wouldn't end considerably worse than simply watching.
"That's not justice," Napoleone said quietly, mostly to himself. "That's cruelty dressed up as law. The Crown decides a number, and it doesn't matter whether the harvest can actually produce that number. The debt exists whether or not the wheat does."
"What would you have them do instead?" Bourrienne asked, not arguing, genuinely curious, watching his friend's face rather than the scene itself. "The Crown needs its taxes. An army doesn't march on good intentions."
"I don't know yet." Napoleone's eyes stayed fixed on the man in the doorway, on the small, useless opening and closing of his hands. "But I know that a law which takes food from a family the same year the harvest fails isn't measuring anything real. It's only measuring whether a man can be made to comply, regardless of whether compliance leaves him anything to survive on afterward. That's not government. That's just a stronger hand deciding a weaker one doesn't matter."
The second official noticed them watching, called out something sharp about idle boys blocking the road, and the driver, muttering another curse, urged them back onto the cart before the exchange could turn toward them at all. They pulled away slowly, the square shrinking behind them, the man still standing in his doorway, the wagon of seized goods creaking off in the opposite direction.
Neither of them spoke for a long while after that.
"You've gone quiet," Bourrienne said eventually, once the village had long since vanished behind a stand of poplars, the road climbing gently now through fields gone gold and heavy with a harvest that, at least here, looked healthier than the one they'd left behind.
"I'm thinking."
"About the gabelle?"
"About all of it. The Corsicans I grew up with lost their whole country to France because France decided its own interests outweighed theirs, and I've spent two years angry about that. But that man back there wasn't Corsican. He was as French as the men who took his grain. And it didn't matter at all, in the end, whether he was French or Corsican or anything else. The law didn't care what he was. It only cared what he owed, and whether he could pay it, and when he couldn't, it took what it wanted anyway." Napoleone stared out at the passing fields, something turning over slowly behind his eyes that felt larger than the moment that had caused it. "I think I've been telling myself, all this time, that what happened to Corsica was a wound specific to being Corsican. I don't think that's true anymore. I think it's simply what power does, wherever it's allowed to go unchecked, to whoever happens to be standing beneath it when it decides to collect."
Bourrienne was quiet a moment, turning that over with the same seriousness Napoleone had learned, over two years, to trust him to give even the ideas he didn't fully share. "That's a rather large thought for a cart ride."
"I have a great many large thoughts I don't know what to do with yet." Napoleone almost smiled, though there was little humor in it. "Perhaps Madame de Ségur's Abbé will have some use for them, if he's half as interesting as everyone claims."
"Abbé Raynal is considerably more than half as interesting, from what I've heard," Bourrienne said. "Madame de Ségur's cook told me he once wrote a book so critical of how France and the other great powers treat their colonies that the Crown had it publicly burned and him nearly arrested for writing it. I can't imagine what a man like that will make of you, honestly, given you've apparently arrived already halfway to writing your own version of it in your head."
"Then perhaps I'll have someone worth arguing with for six weeks, instead of only you."
"I'm wounded." Bourrienne pressed a hand to his chest in mock offense, though something warm and genuine sat underneath the theater of it. "Truly, deeply wounded, Napoleone. And here I thought two years of arguing with me had prepared you for absolutely nothing else."
Despite the tightness still sitting in his chest, despite the man in the doorway he suspected he wouldn't stop thinking about for a long time yet, Napoleone found himself, for a moment, genuinely smiling.
The cart rolled on through the golden afternoon, toward whatever the rest of the summer, and the strange, formidable old Abbé waiting at the end of the road, still had in store for both of them.