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strings and told me that the hotter it is the hotter the liquid you drink.
    'Why do you think they drink all that rum in Martinique?' and he winked broadly, imitating her Highness's walk. Now, here she was before me and I was too shy to announce the melon.
    Talleyrand coughed.
    'I won't miss because you grunt,' she said.
    He coughed again and she looked up, and seeing me standing there put down her cue and moved to take away my tray.
    'I know all the servants, but I don't know you.'
    'I'm from Boulogne, Majesty. I've come to serve the chicken.'
    She laughed and her eyes travelled up and down my person.
    'You don't dress like a soldier.'
    'No, Majesty. My orders were to dress as Court now that I'm at Court.'
    She nodded. 'I think you might dress any way you like. I'll ask him for you. Wouldn't you prefer to wait on me? Melon is so much sweeter than chicken.'
    I was horrified. Had I come all this way just to lose him?
    'No, Majesty. I couldn't do melon. I can only do chicken. I've been trained.'
    (I sound like a street urchin.)
    Her hand rested on my arm for a second, and her eyes were keen.
    'I can see how zealous you are. Go now.'
    Thankfully I bowed out backwards and ran down to the servants' hall, where I had a little room of my own; the privilege of being a special attendant. I kept my few books there, a flute I was hoping to learn and my journal. I wrote about her or tried to. She eluded me the way the tarts in Boulogne had eluded me. I decided to write about Napoleon instead.
    After that, I was kept busy with banquet after banquet as all our conquered territories came to congratulate the Emperor to be. While the guests filled themselves on rare fish and veal in newly invented sauces, he kept to his chicken, eating a whole one every night, usually forgetting about the vegetables. No one ever mentioned it. He only needed to cough and the table fell silent. Now and again I caught her Majesty watching me, but if our eyes met, she smiled in that half way of hers and I dropped my eyes. Even to look at her was to wrong him. She belonged to him. I envied her that.
    In the weeks that followed he grew morbidly afraid of being poisoned or assassinated, not for himself, but because the future of France was at stake. He had me taste all his food before he would touch it and he doubled his guard. Rumour had it that he even checked his bed before he slept. Not that he slept much. He was like a dog, he could close his eyes and snore in a moment, but when his mind was full he was able to stay awake for days while his Generals and friends dropped around him.
    Abrupdy, at the end of November and only two weeks from his Coronation, he ordered me back to Boulogne. He said I lacked a real soldier's training, that I would serve him better when I could handle a musket as well as a carving knife. Perhaps he saw how I blushed, perhaps he knew my feelings, he knew those of most people. He tweaked my ear in his maddening way and promised there was a special job for me in the New Year.
    So I left the city of dreams just as it was about to flower and heard second-hand reports of that gaudy morning when Napoleon had taken the crown from the Pope and placed it on his own head before crowning Josephine. They say that he bought Madame Clicquot's entire stock for the whole year. With her husband lately dead and the whole weight of the business on her shoulders, she can only have blessed the return of a King. She was not alone. Paris threw open every door and lit every chandelier for three days. Only the old and ill bothered to go to bed, for the rest it was drunkenness and madness and joy. (I exclude the aristocrats, but they are not relevant.)
    In Boulogne, in the terrible weather, I trained for ten hours a day and collapsed at night in a damp bivouac with a couple of inadequate blankets. Our supplies and conditions had always been good, but in my absence thousands more men had joined up, believing through the offices of Napoleon's fervent clergy that the